The story begins....

How often have I had this conversation?

"I'm off to Wales soon." I say to distant acquaintance in London.
"Where in Wales?"
"I doubt you'll know it," I reply. "It's a very small place in Pembrokeshire called Newport..."
"Newport!" the answer comes. "But I spent all my summers there when I was little!"

Soon we're swapping stories of The Parrog, the seawall, the sands, crab fishing and the striped Beach Cafe. Newport is that kind of place, the memories are strong.

The town is situated on the North Pembrokeshire coast at the mouth of the Nevern estuary. It's Welsh name is Trefdraeth, locals call it Tydrath and it huddles in the shadow of a small mountain called Carn Ingli.

The place is in my blood. My grandmother's ancestors, the Laugharne family, farmed at Pant on the borders of Newport and Dinas in the early 1800's. Later my own branch of the family moved over the boundary into Dinas and the extended family is now scattered widely far beyond Pembrokeshire but the connection with the area still runs deep.

In the mid fifties, my mother decided it was time to catch up with this particular slice of our family history. She found us a room in a guest house, Craig y Mor, on the seawall on The Parrog.

















We drove all the way from Colchester in our Standard Vanguard. I was squashed in beside my mother on the long bench seat in the front of the car, fighting off car sickness all the way. By the time we reached Newport, rain was teeming down. We took a wrong turning, ending up at the iron bridge further up the estuary. We peered out through the crescents our windscreen wipers had cleared. The tide was out. There was nothing but grey mud, grey sky and a trickle of grey river and that was my first view of Newport. My father was close to driving straight back to Colchester. I'm glad he didn't. I've been coming back ever since.

As a child I started to collect postcards of the area. Now I've added to this collection, fascinated by these frozen moments of Newport's more recent history. Although the place has changed, there is still a timeless quality and the traces of the past are not that hard to find.

I found that there's quite an interest in old photos of Newport and decided that it was time to share some of my collection with a wider audience and to add what I remember, or can discover, of the stories behind them. I hear so many stories of the place told to me by people who unlike me, have lived in the town all their lives and there's a danger that if these are not written down, they'll soon be forgotten. Already, since this blog has started, a few people have emailed me interesting images of their own and I hope this will grow and that we can create a small, online archive here, a celebration of this place which is Newport Pembrokeshire.