Stackpole and St Govan's

Fifty-odd stone steps drop down a cleft in the limestone to a chapel the size of a room, wedged into the cliff with the sea breaking below its door. St Govan's, on the south Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, is a medieval pilgrimage chapel on the site, the record allows, of an older hermit's cell, and the legend that goes with it involves pirates, a rock that closed around a saint, and a bell sealed inside a boulder by angels.

The story says St Govan, hunted along the cliffs, was hidden when the rock opened for him; the marks of his ribs are still pointed out, and the bell the pirates stole was brought back by angels and sealed inside a stone that rang a thousand times louder when he struck it. Count the steps on the way down and again on the way up, and they are said never to agree; the chapel, single-chambered with a bellcote and a spring flowing beneath a stone seat, is thirteenth or fourteenth century, with a holy well a few yards south. Inland, the Stackpole Estate dammed three narrow limestone valleys across the 1700s and 1800s to make the Bosherston Lily Ponds, now a National Nature Reserve full of coot, heron, kingfisher and more than twenty dragonfly species, where a former ranger says the way to see an otter is to go early and leave the dog at home; June is the month for the lilies. The eight-arch bridge leads on to Broad Haven South, and beyond the headland lies Barafundle, the beach reached over the headland. One caveat is permanent: the lane to the chapel crosses the Castlemartin range and closes on firing days, so check before driving down.