Last visit: July 2026

The team behind the rescue is Llys Meddyg, the well-regarded small hotel up the road in Newport — itself a homecoming story, built by a family who returned to their Welsh roots after years away to create something properly good. They've now brought the same instinct and confidence to bear on the Sailors' Safety, and the balancing act shows real judgement: a new dining room, all light and window and local art, sits alongside a bar that's barely changed at all — low ceilings, nooks and crannies, and the same accumulated nautical clutter that's always been there.

Outside, there's now generous, thoughtfully done seating and a fire pit right above the beach, fleece blankets provided for the evenings that need them. It was packed on my visit, and rightly so.

They describe themselves, on their own Facebook page, as simply "a little restaurant by the sea" — and the food, by every account I've read since sounds genuinely excellent, built around the same local seafood and foraged ingredients Llys Meddyg is known for.

As you might expect from a little restaurant by the sea, there's a real enhancement to the dining area, but it hasn't tipped the balance entirely towards restaurant over pub — there's still real room to simply drink, or to eat informally in the bar rather than book a table in the more formal dining room. It's what gives the place its all-round atmosphere: as much a proper pub as it is somewhere to eat well.

There's a real tension sitting underneath a project like this, worth naming plainly: the very things that make a pub like the Sailors' Safety worth finding — remote, unpolished, seemingly untouched by time — are also what leave it with no natural defence against financial challenges and closure. Yet keeping a place like this alive requires exactly the kind of investment and imagination that can risk sanding off the things people loved in the first place. On the evidence of my visit, Llys Meddyg have found the recipe. If they've bottled it, I'd genuinely like a case.

The building itself has stood for some five hundred years, though it closed for a period in the 90's. Its name has drifted back and forth too: originally the Sailors' Safety, referring to a light the pub itself once kept burning as a guide to ships offshore, it became the Old Sailors for a time before reverting to the original. I remember it as the Sailors' Safety from before I left the area in the '80s, and returning years later to find it going by the other name was one of those small, disorienting jolts that tells you how long you've actually been away.

It's kept genuinely good company across that long life, too.

Dylan Thomas is recorded as having made the trip specifically to eat here — not passing through on his way to somewhere else, but travelling the best part of fifty miles up the coast from his own home at Laugharne, deliberately, for this pub.

And the connection to this stretch of water runs deeper than one man's appetite: Lower Fishguard, the old harbour visible right across the bay from where you'd be sitting, stood in as Llareggub itself for the 1971 screen version of Under Milk Wood. Which makes Thomas, in his own way, an early example of exactly what the Sailors' Safety is becoming again now — a destination in its own right, worth the drive, rather than somewhere you happen to end up. People are once again travelling specifically for this pub. He just got there about seventy years early.

The one practical note worth passing on: this is a genuinely popular spot now, down a narrow lane with limited parking, so booking ahead — and arriving a little before your table time — will save you the disappointment of a wasted trip. It's the kind of problem a pub only has because it's doing something right.

The ruins above Cwm-yr-Eglwys beach are what's left of St Brynach's Church — another St Brynach, as at Pontfaen — a 12th-century Celtic-type church of which only the belfry and part of the west wall now survive.

It was destroyed in the same storm of October 1859 that wrecked the Royal Charter, the most famous of the ships lost, and by the church's own memorial plaque, one of 113 other ships lost along the coast of Wales in the storm.

It was severe enough, nationally, that it directly led to the Met Office establishing the world's first gale warning service, the ancestor of today's Shipping Forecast.

The church didn't get to rest after that, either: a further storm in March 1979 brought severe additional damage to the churchyard. A model ship known as the Cwm Trader stands there today as a memorial — a scale model, built by local blacksmith James Eifion Thomas of Dinas Cross, of the kind of shallow-draft, flat-bottomed coastal trading brig that once worked this coast, sailing into bays at high water to be unloaded onto horse and cart at low tide. Many such vessels were lost in the same 1859 storm.

The geography linking the two coves is worth understanding properly, rather than treating Pwllgwaelod and Cwm-yr-Eglwys as simply two separate beaches either side of a headland. Depending on which way the wind was blowing, one or the other offered shelter: an easterly made Pwllgwaelod the safer water, a northerly or westerly would have favoured Cwm-yr-Eglwys instead.

Pwllgwaelod served a wider purpose too, as a genuine overflow shelter for shipping when strong easterly winds made Fishguard's own harbour too dangerous to use. The level path across the neck of the headland — the same stretch the walk finishes on — meant goods and people could move easily between the two, whichever cove the weather had put out of use that day. It's a reminder that this landscape wasn't just scenery to the people who worked it; it was a choice of two doors, and you used whichever one the wind had left open.