Pembroke to West Angle Bay

Nobody pretends this is the prettiest day on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, and this site is not going to start. It is, however, a genuinely interesting one if you take it for what it is — the day the path threads between one of Europe's great energy harbours and some of the loneliest farmland in the county, and comes out at the sea again changed.

From Pembroke the route follows the south side of the Pembroke River through Monkton and out along quiet shores and lanes. The middle miles pass inland of the refinery and power-station land at Pwllcrochan — the path is well kept and waymarked through here, and the honest description is: pylons on one side, oystercatchers on the other, and hardly another walker all day.

Things soften at Angle Bay, a huge shallow horseshoe of mud and eelgrass that empties at low tide and fills with birds — curlew, wigeon and shelduck in their hundreds in the colder months. Angle village sits at its neck, one long street with a church, a shop of variable hours and the Old Point House out on the point, a pub that floods off its access track at spring tides and is all the better for it.

The finale earns the day: around Angle Point past the lifeboat station, along the low cliffs of Chapel Bay — whose restored Victorian fort is now a museum — with Thorn Island and its own fort standing offshore, guarding the harbour mouth as it has since the 1850s. The stage ends at West Angle Bay, looking straight across the Haven entrance to St Ann's Head, with the open Atlantic coast waiting round the corner.