Violet Cottage - Pembroke

Violet Cottage in Kingston

Pembroke (Wales)

HISTORY:

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south west of Wales. It borders Carmarthenshire to the east and Ceredigion to the north east. The county town is Haverfordwest where Pembrokeshire County Council is headquartered.

The county is home to Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, the only coastal national park of its kind in the United Kingdom and one of three national parks in Wales, the others being Snowdonia and Brecon Beacons national parks. Over the years Pembrokeshire's beaches have been awarded 41 Blue Flag Awards (13 in 2011), 47 Green Coast Awards (15 in 2011) and 106 Seaside Awards (31 in 2011). In 2011 it also had 39 beaches recommended by the Marine Conservation Society.

Much of Pembrokeshire, especially the south, has been English in
language and culture for many centuries. The boundary between the
English and Welsh speakers is known as the Landsker Line. South Pembrokeshire is known as Little England Beyond Wales.

Pembroke is an historic settlement and former county town of Pembrokeshire in west Wales. The town and the county derive their name from that of the cantref of Penfro: Pen = "head" or "end", and bro = "region", "country", "land", and so it means essentially "Land's End".

The main point of interest in the town is the magnificent Pembroke Castle, the remains of a stone mediæval castle which was the birthplace of King Henry VII of England. Gerald de Windsor was Constable of Pembroke Pembroke town and castle and its surroundings are linked with the early Christian church. Later this was the site of the Knights of St John in the UK.

Monkton Priory
has very early foundations and was renovated by the Knights in the last
century. The first stone building was a defensive tower, now known as
the Medieval Chapel, 69a Main Street, built on a cliff edge between 950 AD and 1000 AD. There are the remains of a great hall
to the north and recently filled-in arched cellars. The building was
used as an early church. The layout is the same as St. Govan's Chapel
and it was used by John Wesley from 1764 to preach Methodism.
After Westgate Chapel was built we do not know what it was used for
after 1810. In 1866 it became the Brewery for the York Tavern which was Oliver Cromwell's headquarters at the siege of Pembroke during the English Civil War.

On both banks of Pembroke River to the west of the castle are many
remains of early activities. The buildings of Catshole Quarry and the
rare vegetation with the irreplaceable foreshore have recently been
buried by dumped materials. The North Shore Quarries are relatively
complete as are the remains of medieval and Elizabethan slipways where
wooden vessels were built before the industrial Dockyard and Admiralty
town was built on the grid pattern of Pembroke Dock.

There is a very early graving dock complete in what was Hancocks
Yard, about to be buried by a massive infill of the mud flats to the
North. The reclaimed land will be used to build high rise flats. The
bridge which crosses and constrains the millpond was constructed to house a tide mill, originally granted to the Knight's Templars in 1199 which survived until it was burnt down in 1956.

SITUATION: