Which Pembrokeshire Beaches Have the Cleanest Water? Eleven Years of Data

Pembrokeshire's bathing water is, on the whole, excellent — and we mean that in the technical sense. Of the 29 designated bathing waters in the county, 21 have been classified Excellent every single year since 2015, and not one has ever been classified Poor in that time.

That is the part you would expect a Pembrokeshire website to tell you. Here is the part nobody publishes: four beaches are currently rated below their own best, one of them has been stuck two grades down for three years running, and the direction of travel is not the same everywhere.

Every figure on this page comes from Natural Resources Wales's own open data, retrieved on 27 September 2026, and the full eleven-year table is downloadable at the bottom.

Where things stand in 2025

The most recent classifications published are for the 2025 season. The 2026 season was still being sampled when we pulled this.

Classification	Beaches
Excellent	25
Good	3
Sufficient	1
Poor	0

Twenty-five Excellent out of twenty-nine is a genuinely good result, and worth holding on to while you read the rest.

The eight that have ever moved

Twenty-one beaches have held Excellent for eleven straight years. The other eight are the interesting ones. E = Excellent, G = Good, S = Sufficient.

Beach	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
Wiseman's Bridge	G	G	G	E	E	E	E	G	S	S	S
Amroth Central	E	E	E	E	E	E	E	E	G	G	G
Newport North	G	E	G	G	G	G	E	E	E	E	G
Tenby North	E	E	E	E	E	E	G	G	E	E	G
Broad Haven (Central)	E	E	G	G	E	E	E	E	E	E	E
Little Haven	G	G	G	G	E	E	E	E	E	E	E
Nolton Haven	G	S	S	G	G	G	G	E	E	E	E
Sandy Haven	G	S	S	G	G	E	E	E	E	E	E

The four going the wrong way

Wiseman's Bridge is the one to look at. It climbed to Excellent in 2018 and held it for four years, dropped to Good in 2022, and has been Sufficient in 2023, 2024 and 2025 — the only bathing water in Pembrokeshire currently below Good, and it has been there three years. Sufficient still passes; it is the lowest grade that does.

Amroth, the next beach along, was Excellent for eight consecutive years and has been Good since 2023 — slipping in the same year its neighbour hit Sufficient.

Tenby North has wobbled: Good in 2021 and 2022, back to Excellent in 2023 and 2024, and Good again in 2025.

Newport North on the north coast was Excellent from 2021 to 2024 and dropped to Good in 2025.

We are not going to tell you why, because the classification data does not say. What we can tell you is what NRW's own site records as the standing pollution risks at the two beaches that fell together.

For Wiseman's Bridge, its profile says: "In the upper catchment there are pollution risks from land management in the agricultural sector… The storage and spreading of slurries on land that has been compacted through poor management or during poor soil / weather conditions are likely to be the highest risks here."

For Amroth, the profile records a DNA tracer investigation carried out in 2008 "to assess the bacteria levels of the three rivers (Colby River, Castle Stream and New Inn Stream)".

Both are beaches with freshwater running onto them, and both of NRW's risk statements are about what comes down those streams. Coppet Hall and Saundersfoot, sitting between Wiseman's Bridge and Tenby, have been Excellent every year without exception.

That is a pattern consistent with the risks NRW has already identified. It is not proof of what caused these particular drops, and we are not claiming it is. Those risk statements describe conditions identified years ago; the classification data records outcomes. Nobody has published a finding linking the two.

The three that fixed themselves

The better half of the story, and the one that shows these things are not fixed forever.

Sandy Haven was Sufficient in 2016 and 2017. It has been Excellent every year since 2020.

Nolton Haven was Sufficient in 2016 and 2017 too, spent five years at Good, and has been Excellent since 2022.

Little Haven sat at Good for four years and has been Excellent since 2019.

Three beaches that were the county's weakest a decade ago are now among its best, and have stayed there.

Why a single bad day is not the story

This is the bit most coverage skips, and it changes how you should read everything above.

A classification is not a water test. In NRW's words: "A classification for each bathing water is calculated annually, based on samples from the previous four years." And: "The classifications are based on a detailed statistical analysis of the sample measurements taken over a four year period unless a step change in quality has occurred because of an improvement action such as new sewerage infrastructure."

Two consequences follow, and both matter.

A bad week does not show up. Samples are taken weekly from early May to the end of September, and up to 15% of them can be discounted if they were collected during a short-term pollution event. One grim afternoon after a storm will not move a classification.

And neither does a good one. Because the window is four years, a beach that slipped carries that history for years after the cause is dealt with. Wiseman's Bridge dropping in 2023 reflects seasons going back to 2020. If something improved there in 2025, you would not expect to see it in the classification until the late 2020s.

NRW put the practical version well themselves: "A sample tells us the quality of the water at that specific time, but water quality can fluctuate considerably even over the course of one day."

What this actually means if you are choosing a beach

Honestly? For most of Pembrokeshire, nothing. Twenty-one beaches have an unbroken Excellent record and there is no water-quality reason to pick between them.

If you are swimming daily for a week with small children, the four below their best are worth knowing about — not to avoid, but to check the live status before you go in, particularly after heavy rain. NRW publish in-season sample results and pollution risk forecasts for every designated beach.

And if you are the sort of person who would rather know than not: Wiseman's Bridge has been Sufficient for three years, and that is a real thing the brochures do not mention.

Method and source

All classifications are official annual classifications for the 29 designated bathing waters in the Pembrokeshire local authority area, retrieved from the Natural Resources Wales bathing water open data API on 27 September 2026, covering the 2015 to 2025 seasons.

Three things we deliberately left out. NRW also publish projected classifications for 2010–2014, which their own documentation describes as "approximations of what the actual classifications would have been" using different laboratory methods — so they are not comparable and are not used here. We have not computed any ranking beyond what the classifications themselves say. And we have not attributed any cause to any change.

Contains data from Natural Resources Wales, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Download the full table: Pembrokeshire bathing water classifications, 2015–2025 (CSV)

If you are writing about this and want the workings, or spot something we have got wrong, tell us — we would rather be corrected than repeated.