Wiseman's Bridge

Wiseman's Bridge sits between Amroth and Saundersfoot, and most people meet it halfway along the old tramway path that links the three. It's a low-key place — a row of houses, a car park, an inn facing the sea — with a beach that's steep shingle at high water and opens into a long, flat, firm sand at low tide that joins up with Amroth's in one direction and Coppet Hall's through the tunnels in the other.

That tramway path is the reason to base a day here. It's flat, surfaced, and runs on the bed of the old colliery tramroad through lit tunnels cut in the cliff — the best easy walk in south Pembrokeshire and fine with a pushchair or a bike. Amroth is fifteen minutes east, Coppet Hall and Saundersfoot twenty-odd minutes west. Doing it as a pub-to-pub walk on a falling tide, with the sand as the return route, is a properly good afternoon.

In 1943 this beach was used for large-scale D-Day landing rehearsals, and Churchill is generally said to have watched them from here; a plaque on the sea front records it. Swimming is unguarded and the shingle shelves quite steeply near high water, so families with small children are better off timing the visit for the bottom of the tide when there's an acre of flat sand and shallow water. Parking is limited and fills up on hot days.