Book Direct | Self Catering & Holiday Cottages in Pembrokeshire

More About Cottages and Self-Catering in Pembrokeshire

Inland the Preseli Hills rise behind it all, the source of the bluestones that stand at Stonehenge. Between the two, the middle of the county is quiet farming land, with Narberth and Haverfordwest set back from the coast.

The coast is where the days go. Nine of the twenty Blue Flags awarded in Wales for 2026 fly on Pembrokeshire beaches, more than any other county, and most are a short walk from the Coast Path.

Almost none of the cottages here were built for holidays, but for the quarrymen, limeburners and fishermen of the 1800s. Solva shows why: by the mid-nineteenth century its harbour ran some ten limekilns, burning coal and limestone brought in by sea. The lime workers’ cottages at Solva are the whitewashed ones let by the week now.

Porthgain, up the coast, shipped roadstone and slate until the nineteen-thirties. The terrace built for its quarrymen is plainly called The Street, and it takes visitors now. At Llangwm, on the Cleddau estuary, the herring and oyster fishery died out altogether.

The county emptied as the work dried up. Pembrokeshire held 97,266 people in 1861 and fewer for the ninety years after. Cottages that housed a fishing or farming family now stand empty out of season across villages like Little Haven and Dale.

The national park now keeps a tight rein on it. It allows a new holiday let only where the building suits nothing else, and the registered stock is falling anyway. There were 2,648 lets in April 2023 and 2,003 by June 2025, a drop of 645 in two years.

Owners weigh the tax rules on top. To trade as a business a cottage must be available 252 days a year and let for 182 of them. From April 2026 that test was eased for places that just miss the mark.

For a visitor none of that shows today. A week in your own place still buys the beaches early and the Coast Path from the door, with Carew Castle and its tidal mill an easy afternoon inland. Most cottages take dogs, and a good few have sea views.

A self-catered week suits Pembrokeshire’s 186-mile coast especially well. You can be on the sand at Newgale before the car parks fill, and walk a stretch of the Coast Path each day. In the evening you cook the crab you bought that morning off the boats at Solva or Porthgain, the two working harbours on the north coast.

The cottages still gather where the old villages stood, thickest around St Davids, Tenby and Narberth. More sit at Solva, Saundersfoot and Newport, and the quiet north keeps its prices down when the coast fills in August.