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More About Cottages and Self-Catering near St Davids

Give the first morning to Solva. The sea flooded a river valley here long ago, so the harbour winds inland between steep sides and the boats sit on mud at low tide. The village runs in two halves, the old lower one by the harbour and the newer upper one on the road.

The best beaches have nothing on them at all. Caerfai, Caerbwdi and Porthclais are close, with Whitesands round the point. In June the light holds until well past nine.

In 1775 a field at the head of Solva harbour, called Y Gamlyn, had a lighthouse built in it. Not a model of one, but the actual lighthouse, put up in full, twenty-five miles from where it was going.

The Smalls reef lies well out to sea off this coast, and nobody had managed to light it. A Liverpool merchant named John Phillips took it on and hired a designer called Henry Whiteside, who made musical instruments for a living.

What he came up with was an octagonal timber house about fifteen feet across, standing on nine legs so the sea could pass underneath it. He assembled the whole thing at Solva first to be sure it fitted, then took it apart and shipped it out.

The first version mixed wooden and cast-iron legs, and it failed, because the iron ones worked loose in the rock. It was abandoned without ever showing a light in the winter of 1775.

He rebuilt it in timber alone, and the lamps were lit by September 1776. The dry run in the field at Solva is what people credited for the speed of it, and the thing then stood on its oak pillars for eighty years.

The best part of the story came in 1777. Whiteside was stranded on the reef for a month by gales, with supplies running low, and put a note in a bottle inside a sealed casket. It asked whoever found it to send it on to Thomas Williams, Esq, of Trelithin near St Davids. It washed up two days later almost outside the addressee’s door.

One more thing came off that reef and changed the whole service. In 1801 one of the two keepers died out there in a storm. The other could not signal for help. He would not put the body over the side either, in case he was accused of murder.

So he lashed it into a box outside and lived beside it for weeks, until a boat got through. After that every British lighthouse had three keepers instead of two. That rule held until the lights were automated in the 1980s.

The peninsula you would be staying on is built from its own stone. It is a purple sandstone quarried at Caerbwdi Bay, used in the cathedral and the Bishop’s Palace beside it. You can pick it out once you know.

The cottages are rubble under lime render and limewash, with slate roofs pitched steeply and set on narrow plots. It is a working landscape that happens to be beautiful, rather than one built to be looked at.

Of the beaches, Whitesands is the one with everything. It holds a Blue Flag for 2026, and it has the longest lifeguard season of any beach we checked. Cover runs from the end of March to the first of November, ten until six. Caerfai holds a Green Coast award for 2026, a different award and a quieter beach. Caerbwdi has no lifeguards at all, and takes dogs in any month.

Two practical things still catch people out. Caerbwdi has no facilities whatever, no shop and no toilets, and the nearest of any of it is back in the city about a mile off. And the car park at Whitesands belongs to the county council, not the National Trust. The Trust car park on this peninsula is the one at Porthclais, which matters if you are counting on your membership.

What all this makes now is a quiet self-catering week at the edge of Wales. You cook what you buy in the city, walk out to a different empty beach each day, and take a boat round Ramsey to see the seals.