St Brides Haven to Dale

This stage packs more incident per mile than anywhere south of St Davids. From the quiet cove and Norman church at St Brides Haven the path runs west above Musselwick Sands — a superb sandy beach at low water and literally no beach at all at high, which is worth knowing before you scramble down to it.

Martin's Haven is next: the pebble cove where the Skomer boats load, with the Deer Park headland beyond it — no deer, magnificent views of the island and, in summer, puffins fishing in the sound below. Around the corner the path opens onto the full sweep of Marloes Sands, close to a mile of it, with Gateholm Island at the far end (an Iron Age settlement site you can reach at low tide, and be trapped on carelessly) and the famous Three Chimneys — three beds of rock folded to vertical, standing out of the beach like flues.

The peninsula then narrows past Westdale Bay and turns down to St Ann's Head, where the lighthouse and coastguard cottages watch the entrance to the Milford Haven waterway. It was here in 1996 that the Sea Empress grounded, and here — at little Mill Bay, tucked under the head — that Henry Tudor came ashore on 7 August 1485 with two thousand men, fourteen days before Bosworth made him Henry VII. The most consequential beach landing in British history happened on a cove most people walk past without noticing.

The last two miles swing round the sheltered eastern side into Dale, a village that lives for sailing and watersports, with a pub, a pontoon café in season and, mercifully, buses.