Freshwater West — Attraction in Angle

Love this beach. This sand and rocky beach is the hunting ground of the surfer always on the look out for that perfect wave; a surfers paradise. This south westerly facing beach has the best waves in the county BUT it’s only for the experienced and strong swimming surfer. Strong rip currents occur off this beach. It’s the best place to go to watch the surfing. The beach is wide, sandy and backed by an extensive system of dunes. The dunes are fragile so no camping or barbeques are allowed. There’s a rocky reef at the southern end and some quiet bays at the other. The beach to the south is Frainslake sands but it's inside the Castlemartin ranges so is out of bounds. The thatched shack on the foreshore is a rebuilt shelter that was used for drying a certain type of seaweed, used for making Lavabread, a Welsh speciality that’s very good for adding flavour to recipes. Freshwater West has featured in two recent films - Ridley Scott's Robin Hood and also Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows where it was used as the back drop for Dobby's Shell Cottage, which was built on site down to the smallest detail including the seaweed. Although the cottage was taken down after filming you can still walk in the footsteps of Harry, Hermione and Ron. In 2015 Hollywood returned to the beach to film Their Finest starring Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin. The beach was used as a double for Dunkirk. If you’re planning to visit, check out the tide times to make sure you’ve plenty of beach to play on and that you don’t get cut off by the...

Disappointingly Pembrokeshire’s finest rum - Barti Ddu - not on sale at Cafe Mor in the car park (same owner) as no alcohol license on site. Beach is fairly rocky with plenty of pebbles. There was a minefield of small jelly fish to circumnavigate on our way down to the sea but we managed to survive with our feet intact. The surfing spots look like they could get political with so many surfers circling like gannets for the best waves. The impressively fast water was a bit too extreme for my young son, especially with live pysgod wibbly wobblies being thrown out of the waves regularly - eagerly reaching towards our vulnerable feeble naked legs. My favourite thing about this beach is just marvelling at the raw power of nature from the road. The vista is spectacular and the waves intense. Throw in a few ethneogens and I imagine one would have a rather significant numinous experience. However if you turn around you can see overgrazed fields and heavy industry. Allowing trees to grow up through the fields would hide much of this eyesore and provide a more interesting habitat for both visitors and local wildlife (and yes trees are perfectly capable of growing close to a beach if not regularly grazed upon). A good beach to visit just to marvel at the harsh power of nature, but personally we feel that there are better overall beaches in Wales and...

The author of the review before this one deserves to be institutionalized if they think Freshwater West is better than Freshwater East.

This beach was used as a training ground in WWII, to practice the storm on Normandy, so there is rusted barbed wire laying everywhere. I've read elsewhere that some people enjoy this aspect because it gives the beach a rich backstory, but they are wrong. That barbed wire is a slippery slope to a tetanus fuelled trip to the hospital, which I might add is 2 hours away.

Go to this beach if you like tetanus.

Freshwater East is better because it doesn't have any onshore wind pushing all the litter onto the beach, which F.W. West has, therefore, freshwater east is cleaner.

The review before the previous one by the gentleman 'MAX' with the rather fancy cat as the avatar, is completely correct by mentioning the dunes, which is the only reason this is getting 3 stars, instead of none. from an ecological aspect, this beach is okay, the dunes are a perfect example of the ideal sand dune ecosystem.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, freshwater east will win this...