Narberth Accommodation

More About Narberth

It is also the best-fed town in Pembrokeshire. Annwn, on Market Square, holds a Michelin Green Star, and the Queen’s Hall fills with a food and craft market every Friday. Come at the end of September and the whole town turns out for the Food Festival.

Stay here rather than on the coast and you get the best of both. The sea is half an hour away in either direction. But Narberth keeps rooms in August when the seaside towns are full, and they cost less. You get your beach days and a proper town to come back to.

The name carries a long story. In the Mabinogion, the oldest prose stories in Britain, Pwyll holds his court at Arberth. Above it stood a mound where whoever sat would take wounds and blows, or else see a wonder. Scholars argue whether that Arberth is this one; at the top of the town on a clear evening you will not much care.

Its best-known kitchen, Annwn, won a Michelin Green Star for sustainability as much as for the cooking. One seasonal menu runs to ten courses, much of it local or foraged.

Narberth Museum has the best building in town, though it was put up to keep people out. The old Bonded Stores held kegs of duty-free whisky, brandy and rum behind a double lock, which is why the museum takes two keys as its emblem.

The cell under the town hall is called Rebecca’s Cell, and the name takes some explaining. Between 1839 and 1844 the farmers here were bled by toll gates. You paid to pass, and the gates had multiplied until a trip to market could cost more than the trip was worth.

So men began breaking the gates at night, dressed in women’s clothes and calling themselves Rebecca, after a verse in Genesis about possessing the gates of those that hate you. They saw the new workhouse, where the destitute were sent to live and labour, as one more injustice. Narberth’s was attacked twice, and the men caught in 1839 were locked in that cell.

The castle is a separate story and a much older one. It is thirteenth-century, mostly low walling now, though the barrel-vaulted kitchen cellars survive intact underneath.

Folly Farm is ten minutes down the road, with a zoo, a funfair of restored vintage rides and a working dairy farm. Oakwood, the theme park beside it, closed for good in March 2025 after thirty-eight years, so do not set out for that one.