THE CENTRE OF FISHGUARD

SEPTEMBER 25, 2026

GOODWICK  MOOR NATURE PRESERVE

Wales is a strange and beautiful place. It is so rural that even it’s towns are sort of rural, and resemble hamlets despite their real size. Fishguard is a market town on the Pembrokeshire coast path, with an industrial area and a real fishing harbor with ferry service to some nearby islands and Ireland, weather permitting. Fishguard is a delightful place, with short-term stays much cheaper than its more glamorous and smaller competitors on the nearby coast. We stayed for a week in a croft house about five miles out of town from this location.

When I call this the centre of town I am not exaggerating by that much. While there is a small grid of streets with a few shops and pubs, after a few days we joined dozens and dozens of residents for their afternoon constitutional at Goodwick Moor Nature Reserve, a remnant of the moor that divides the town near the harbor. Often in Wales it appears that there are many more dogs than there are people. Most families include more than one dog, and the resulting packs patrol the open spaces in town, when they are not hanging out with their owners in the pub.

This area is part of the largest dog park in Fishguard, and “the hounds” patrol the moorland every afternoon rain, rain, rain, or shine. There are well-used outdoor showers at each entrance of the park where owners can attempt to clean up their dogs before allowing them to get back into the Land Rover on the way home. Depending on your ambitions and knowledge of the area, you can stretch a short hike past the local rugby ground into a hike of a few miles into deep woodland.

Another reason this area is so central to Fishguard is that the town, like most in Wales, grew organically over a series of roads that led to the harbor, the church, or the railroad station. The tiny terrace houses lined up along a road, no matter how steep, and everyone had access, or at least a view of the common land or wilderness that started just behind the back door. Imagine Baltimore with the countryside surrounding every street of row houses. Fishguard has grown into a town of nearly 10,000 people on probably half a dozen of these hills leading down to the harbor. Each trip to town required Fran to run a gauntlet of almost totally illegal parking along the hilly streets with near misses a constant highlight on a simple trip to the Co-op grocery store. The “town planning” that created Fishguard resulted in a state of anarchy that almost reached Italian levels. Any trip across town required going up and down at least several of these hills. This moorland is literally across the street from a grocery store, and down the block from one of the largest hotels in town. The train station is only a short walk up the hill.

Since our cottage was beyond telephone, internet, and cell phone coverage, Fran  deserved many huzzahs for the shortest jaunt away from the cottage. The fact that seemingly every route we tried, no matter in any direction, seemed to travel along the same road, Celtic Way, only increased our level of confusion. Most of the time we somehow arrived at this beautiful scene without any real idea of how we got there. I had to rely on Siri to get us back home, no matter how convoluted her chosen route, knowing that she would abandon us miles from our cottage before we got home.