The old Beach Cafe on the Parrog

The Beach Cafe was very much a part of my childhood holidays on the Parrog. Painted in bold stripes like a wasp, it was essentially a large wooden shed built on to the front of the old limekeeper's cottage at the edge of the car park. The inside, from what I remember, was simple with a plain wooden floor which could be swept clean of trodden-in sand. It was a place of childhood treats, full of warmth and steam on a rainy day. In the sixties it was run by George and Rose but I'm not sure if they were the original owners. It had been closed for several years by the time I took this photo and, sadly, I don't have any photos of it in it's heyday.





The sign at the top of the building was made from hammered on crown caps, perhaps from some of the bottles of pop which were so much a part of my childhood memories of the place. In those days you paid a deposit on the bottle when you bought a drink and the money was returned when you brought the bottle back. My friends and I could earn a bit of pocket money by picking up the empty bottles people had left lying around on the beach and returning them to the cafe to claim the deposit. We had to be careful that we'd washed all the sand out first, of course.

The cafe was demolished in the nineteen nineties when the limekiln and the adjoining cottage were restored. It was sad to see it go. Even its derelict state it had a certain charm.

Morfan in its former life as The Queen's Hotel, Parrog

I've just been reading Keith Johnson's book "The Pubs of St David's. Fishguard & North Pembrokeshire" which includes a very useful chapter on the pubs of Newport and the Parrog. There were quite a number of them in the area and a thriving Temperance movement too.

Some of the pubs are hard to tie to existing buildings but the former Queen's is easier to trace as it occupied the large house which is now Morfan, the right hand of the pretty row of cottages lining the Parrog Road in the picture below.





















The Edwardian postcard at the top of this blog shows the building when it was the Queen's Hotel and enlarging the card shows what may well be holiday makers outside decked out in their finery.


















I suspect that people in these postcards must have known the photographer was coming and dressed accordingly or did young boys always wear suits for the beach?

The pub was sometimes simply called the Queen's but by the 1891 census, it was listed as the Queen's Hotel and was run by Margaret Williams, a mariner's wife. It was quite common for the pubs in the area to be run by retired sea captains or the wives of serving mariners. Sea captains often spent several months or even whole years ashore when they were not in command of a vessel so an alternative source of income must have been useful. It is interesting that the census does not list anyone except immediate family members in residence on census night (5th April) so there do not seem to have been any paying guests present, perhaps indicating that it was still more of a pub than a guest house. It was certainly listed as a pub in the 1895 Kellys Directory.

A bit of digging around on Reg Davies' Welsh Mariners' website shows that Margaret William's husband, David Williams took his mate's certificate in 1869, moving on to become 1st Mate. He was a Captain by 1874, commanding ships such as the Asiana and the Anglo American and survived a shipwreck in the Azores on the barque Keewaydin (not connected to the trawler Keewaydin which can sometimes be seen moored at the quay in Cardigan). Seafaring was David Williams' blood. His father was Captain Thomas Williams of the Parrog, who held shares in the barque Ondara and named his large sea front house after his vessel.

Before taking on the Queen's Hotel, David Williams and his family were living in St Mary Street in Newport. The pub seems to have been a retirement venture but he died shortly afterwards in 1891. His widow was still running it in 1895 but after that it had a succession of landlords before closing in the 1920's.

Watching the boats come in from the Parrog seawall

The tide is in, so far in, that a small tongue of water to the left of the photo spills out into what is now the car park on the Parrog. A group of people sit on the seawall gazing out to sea and a small rowing boat with three passengers is making it's way to shore, a typical holiday scene from the early 1900's maybe. That's how I first interpreted this image until I read what Martin Lewis had to say in "Newport Pem and Fishguard Revisited". He thinks that a vessel has just come into the harbour and that the crew are being ferried ashore. Looking more closely at the rowing boat, the man in the prow seems to be wearing a seaman's cap and perhaps the other men have caps too:-















A further look at the people on the seawall shows that the man third from the left is also in uniform:-









In the early 1900's, the Parrog would have still been a working harbour. Large vessels would have come in at high tide when they could cross the bar at the mouth of the estuary. They would then be beached on the sands ready to be unloaded at low water when carts could come alongside. It is still possible to see tracks cut through the rocks to allow laden carts to be driven straight up to Feidir Brenin from the waterfront. The arrival of one of these vessels probably attracted the curiosity of locals and visitors alike.

It is always interesting how smartly dressed people are in these early photos. Did people always dress this formally in those days or was it for the benefit of the photgrapher? Pictures like this would have been taken on a plate camera. A long exposure was needed to expose the photographic plate and most of the people in these photos would have been posing, motionless. You can just see the blur of the oars but the people in the boat are sitting very upright and straight as if they too know they will be in the picture.

Looking in detail at the limeburner's cottage it seems to have a hole in it's roof. I wonder if it was still inhabited at the time?

More about the Parrog Limekiln

This is the base of the remaining double limekiln which is adjacent to the car park on the Parrog. As a child I remember it much more run down and overgrown, a place to scramble over, our own miniature castle. Now it has been restored and it is far easier to understand the true function.

The base holds the hearth where the fire would have been lit once the kiln had been loaded with alternating layers of limestone and the clay and anthracite dust mixture called culm, both of which would have been brought to the Parrog by boat from the south of the county.

In the restoration, the lintel has been constructed from timber, which would not have been practical for a functioning kiln as extremely high temperatures are required to turn limestone into quick lime. The kiln would burn for several days before the process was complete and once it had cooled, the finished quick lime would have been raked out and loaded on to carts. This was why a double kiln was useful so that one kiln could be fired up while the other was cooling.

There is a circular opening at the top of the kiln. Limestone and culm would have been unloaded from nearby boats by horse and cart and brought up to this opening to charge the kiln in alternating layers, See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_kiln
for more details of the process. There is a useful list of Pembrokeshire limekilns here


If you look closely at the stones at the top of the kiln you can see the crusted remains of the deposits that the lime burning process left behind on the stones of the kiln. This gives some idea of the pollution which lime burning must have caused. Now it makes a good habitat for small ferns.

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.