thrift in flower to the cliff edge, six walking days
Reserve a Pembrokeshire coast path walking week, seven nights
This office reserves seven consecutive nights of beds along the northern half of the Pembrokeshire coast path, from St Dogmaels down to Solva, with one bag per person carried by road every walking morning, from $2,485 per person on two sharing. You cover about 75 miles across six days. In the third week of May the exposed turf on top of those cliffs is solid pink with thrift for the whole of it, and by the second week of June that is finished.
Seven nights, from $2,485 per person.
This is a reservation for seven nights of beds strung along the northern half of the Pembrokeshire coast path, and for the van that carries your bag between them. You walk from St Dogmaels down to Solva over six days, about 75 miles, sleeping in a different village nearly every night. A walk leader from the operating company goes out with you on day one; after that the route is yours, with the acorn waymark on a wooden post at every stile and a set of maps in the room.
Six starts sit inside one named week in May and the operating company will not run it outside that window, because the beds at Trefasser and Trefin are rooms in houses that take one party at a time and they are held for this week only. Tell this office which of the six starts you want. Putting a firm figure on those exact dates takes two to four working days, because the answer comes back from the company running the week and not from a screen in Kansas City.
Nothing here belongs to Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC. The rooms belong to the families who own them, the van belongs to the company running the week, and the boat some people take on the last afternoon belongs to somebody else again. That operating company holds the contract with you and sends its bill straight to you, under its own terms. This office takes no money at any stage, and the flight over is yours to arrange, since no airfare is sold from this office.
When it goes
Six starts inside a single named week in May
a week of dates: several starts inside one named week
What is reserved
A Pembrokeshire coast path walking week
Seven nights, from $2,485 per person. Send a booking request
Seven rooms held on consecutive nights in seven different places, one bag per person carried by road on each of the six walking days, and a walk leader held for the first day only.
North Pembrokeshire is where this trail gets its height. Cemaes Head stands about 574 feet above the water on the first morning, and the path falls to sea level and climbs back out of it four separate times before Newport. Between the cove at Ceibwr and the Nevern estuary there are seven miles with no road, no house and no way off. The rock at the Witches Cauldron is folded into S shapes you can read from the path, and the round hole in the cliff top beside it is a sea cave whose roof came down. Further south the trail runs along the lip of a slate quarry at Abereiddi that the sea broke into in 1910, leaving a flooded pit roughly 80 feet deep and the color of a green bottle. Choughs work the fields behind the cliff all week, red beaked and loud, and about sixty pairs of them live in this county.
seven nights of rooms in small hotels, inns and farm guesthouses, every room with its own bathroom, priced per person on two sharing; a cooked breakfast on all seven mornings; one bag per person up to 44 pounds carried by road between beds on each of the six walking days; a walk leader for day one, which is the 15.8 mile stretch with no road exit; an evening briefing before that first day with all six days written out by the hour; 1:25,000 maps covering the whole stretch and printed route notes, one set per room; a packed lunch on the two days that pass nothing open; the road transfer at the end of day five from Whitesands to the bed in St Davids and back to the same spot the next morning; the car from Solva to the station at Haverfordwest on the last morning; a Welsh phone number answered through the week if a room or a bag goes wrong.
the flight to Britain, which is your own arrangement and is not sold here, $860 to $1,420 round trip from the middle of the country in May; the train and bus on from the airport to Cardigan, $95 to $175 each way; dinner on all seven nights, $24 to $40 a head, and the village kitchens stop serving at half past eight; lunch on the four days that pass somewhere open, $11 to $19; drinks, $6 to $9 a pint; a boat out around the island off St Davids on the last afternoon, which the company operating it holds under its own license and bills you for directly, $48 to $70; the donation asked at the cathedral door, $6 to $12; a room to yourself for the week, $385 on top; an extra night at either end, $115 to $185 a room; laundry, about $12 a load and possible at only two of the beds; insurance of any kind, which this office does not advise on and does not arrange.
Day one is 15.8 miles with 3,300 feet of climb and no road off it for seven of those miles, so anybody who has not walked twelve hilly miles inside the last month should not reserve this week. For long stretches the path runs three to six feet from an unfenced drop of two hundred feet or more, which rules out letting a dog off a lead or a child run ahead. The wind here is usually out of the southwest, and walking this direction puts it in your face for most of six days without a break. Four of the six evenings end in a village with one kitchen and nothing open after five, so if you like choosing where to eat at eight o'clock, choose a different week.
The seven miles between Ceibwr and the Nevern
The first day is the reason people reserve the northern half rather than the southern. You leave the estuary at St Dogmaels on the tarmac and are on grass within twenty minutes, climbing to Cemaes Head, which puts 574 feet of air under you before nine in the morning. From there to Newport is 15.8 miles with 3,300 feet of ascent in it, taken in four separate descents to sea level and four climbs back out, and the profile looks like a saw blade because that is what it is.
The middle of it has nothing. After the little cove at Ceibwr, where the folded rock in the cliff face bends back on itself in visible S curves, the trail runs seven miles without a road, a farmhouse or a way out. There is no water, no bench and no phone signal for most of it. That is why a leader walks it with you and why the packed lunch is in the price: the alternative is turning around.
You come off it into Newport at the Parrog, on the Nevern estuary, with Carningli standing 1,138 feet up behind the town. North of here Welsh is the working language of the villages and the shop, and the road signs put it first.
What May does to the top of the cliff
Thrift covers the exposed turf on the seaward edge in the second and third weeks of May, so thick that from a distance the last ten feet before the drop reads as a pink band. Sea campion goes with it, white and lower. Bluebells flower out in the open here rather than under trees, in the bracken on the landward slopes, and they are mostly over by the twentieth. Come in the last week of June and the same ground is brown and dry.
Daylight is the other reason for May. By the middle of the month it is light from about a quarter past five in the morning until nine at night, which means a twelve mile day can start at ten and still finish with three hours to spare. Afternoon highs sit around 57 to 61 degrees, mornings around 46, and the sea is roughly 52 degrees in the first week and 55 by the end of the month, which is cold enough that a swim at Whitesands is a short one. Rain falls on about twelve days of the month and totals two and a half inches, and it usually arrives as bands of half an hour rather than a whole grey day.
a bed at St Dogmaels above the estuary, briefing at seven, and the last shop shuts at six
St Dogmaels to Newport, 15.8 miles, 3,300 feet of climb, leader with you, no road off it for seven of them
Newport to Fishguard, 11.5 miles, out around Dinas Head with guillemots packed on the stack below the path
Fishguard to Trefasser, 12.2 miles, past a lighthouse standing on its own islet at the far end of a footbridge
Trefasser to Trefin, 10.6 miles, the short day, down into Abercastle beneath a burial chamber with a capstone fifteen feet across
Trefin to Whitesands, 12.4 miles, the stone hoppers at Porthgain and the flooded quarry at Abereiddi, then a car on to St Davids
Whitesands to Solva, 12.9 miles, over St Davids Head and above the sound, where the tide runs through at up to eight knots
breakfast at Solva, car at half past nine, forty minutes to the station at Haverfordwest
Beds in villages that shut at five
The standard is small hotels, inns and farm guesthouses, every room with its own bathroom, and it changes character as the week goes on. St Dogmaels, Newport and Fishguard are towns with a choice of kitchens. Trefasser is a farmhouse on a lane with four rooms and a field of ewes, and dinner there is at seven or it is not at all, because the cook is also the owner and she goes to bed early. Trefin has one kitchen serving in the evening and a bakery that opens at eight. St Davids is a city of about 1,600 people with a cathedral sitting in a hollow below the street, and it has four or five places to eat. Solva at the end is a drowned valley whose harbor empties completely at low water, so the boats sit on mud twice a day.
Two things follow from that shape. The first is that you tell the guesthouse at breakfast whether you want dinner, not at six in the evening when you arrive. The second is that on the two nights with a single kitchen, the reservation is made for you when the week is confirmed, and the time is fixed rather than chosen.
Reserving one of the six starts in May
Say which start you want, how many are walking, and whether you want one room or two. If you would rather not commit to a date yet, name the week and this office will come back with what is actually free across all six starts, which is often not the same answer for a party of two and a party of four. Write to bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com or call +1 (816) 525-2846; this office is at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302, Lee's Summit, MO 64063, and requests arriving overnight are worked in the morning.
Third Coast Dispatch is the name used by Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC, registered in Missouri and working from a single office in the Kansas City metro. It is an independent booking office. It is not the walking company, it is not a carrier of any kind, it owns no vehicle, no vessel and no bed, and it holds no agency appointment from anybody whose trip appears on this page. It arranges nothing on entry requirements, health matters or insurance, and it will say so plainly if you ask. If a figure or a distance on this page is wrong, write to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com and it gets fixed.
Put a departure in front of the office
Open 24/7, this form will take a booking request whenever you write it. Nowhere on it is a card number requested and nothing is charged, because no money is ever owed to this office. Whatever reaches the form is opened in the order it landed, and an answer goes back inside one working day.
Nowhere on this page is a card number requested, and none is kept by this office anywhere. Writing costs you nothing and ties you to nothing. Asking is not the same as holding: your date belongs to whoever asks next until the operating company has confirmed it on paper and you have read what it requires of you.