Pembrokeshire, and neighbouring Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire, is home to loads of ancient castles, ranging from ruined walls to full-on visitor attractions. Newport Castle, the closest,  is just down the road, in the middle of Newport. It’s now a private residence so you can’t go in, but it’s lovely to look at as you stand in the main street, and gives a taste of what else is out there. A short drive away is Cilgerran Castle, which is well worth a visit. It’s halfway between a ruin and a full reconstruction and is free to walk around, so a great way to spend an hour or so. 

At the other end of the scale is Pembroke Castle, which is fully refurbished, about an hour’s drive away, costs £10 to enter but it’s easy to spend several hours there, and there’s a café! Alongside these three there are numerous other castles and ruins scattered across the three counties.

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Long before the castles were built the Neolithic people of West Wales made various monuments from stone, many of which are still present. Carreg Coetan, a cromlech right in the heart of Newport, is all that remains of an ancient tomb, and just 10 minutes drive away is Pentre Ifan, Wales' biggest and most impressive cromlech . There are numerous others dotted across the landscape, some of which aren’t even marked on maps.

West Wales is littered with standing stones – there’s even a small one in the garden of Penrhyn, next door! Just up the green lane there are two megaliths framing an ancient entrance on to Carn Ingli, and at the top of the mountain road stands a famous stone, Bedd Morris, which is about 4000 years old. The most famous are the Stonehenge bluestones which were quarried nearby and a modern theory suggests they stood as a circle for at least 500 years before being transported to Salisbury Plain and re-erected as the inner circle at Stonehenge.

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Two minutes walk from Polly’s Barn, the ramparts of an iron age hill fort are clearly visible – Carn Ffoi. This is just one of many ancient structures that pepper the mountain (Carn Ingli). Carn Ffoi is structured around three rocky outcrops and within the still visible ramparts are the remains of stone huts. 

Across the mountain and surrounding landscape there are numerous stone hut remains and ancient settlement sites and several unexplained collections of stones – people have lived in this landscape for thousands of years and although we’ll never fully know exactly how they lived there’s a great reconstruction of an Iron Age village at Castell Henllys, which is about 3 miles up the road towards Cardigan and shows what life in Pembrokeshire was like 2000 years ago.

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