Haverfordwest Accommodation

More About Haverfordwest

It is the county town rather than a resort, and that is the argument for staying here. It is a working place with real shops, at prices the coast does not offer in August. The farmers’ market at Riverside has run every Friday morning for over twenty years.

Down by the river, most people walk straight past the garden of the old priory, dug out and replanted after centuries under the grass. It costs nothing to walk into and is open all year in daylight.

Everything here follows from the river. Ships came up on the tide from ports all round western Europe. They took out wheat, barley and oats. Back came salt, wine, sugar and iron. The street now called Quay Street was Ship Street then, lined with ship-suppliers, pubs and warehouses.

The port’s best years were the 1830s. The first steamship up to the Old Quay was the Frolic, in October 1830. Five months later she struck the Nash Sands on the way back to Bristol and was lost with all aboard. Then the railway came in 1853 and the trade drained away inside a generation.

The priory garden survived all of it, and it is the rarest thing in the town. Founded around 1200 beside the river, just outside the old walls, it has raised beds on one side and a cloister garden on the other. Cadw, the Welsh Government’s heritage body, calls it the only medieval monastery garden left in Britain.

The castle is a different matter, and the honest advice is to leave it a couple of years. It is shut for a seventeen-million-pound rebuild and is due to open in 2028. Several travel sites still list it as though you can walk in; you cannot, and Haverfordwest Town Museum has moved out to a unit in the Riverside shopping centre.

The riverside is where the money is going now, and the digging turned up the town’s own past. In 2022 groundworks at the old Ocky White department store uncovered medieval burials, about half of them children. The building has reopened as Western Quayside, with a food hall, a bar and a roof terrace.