Standing proud on a sloping hillside with its windows looking like ever-open eyes gazing out over St Brides Bay, stands a sandstone built house, a magnificent house, a house with stories to tell.
And on one ordinary day some while ago, a watcher standing at one of those windows just might have spotted an actor called Jeremy Irons struggling up from a remote haven with a large and rusting metal float.
It is one of two that can still be found in the sheltered sea-facing gardens of the Druidstone Hotel, just a short and scenic walk along the coast from Broad Haven in Pembrokeshire.
All the walls and banks surrounding the hotel, which has a commanding view overlooking Druidston Haven, are made from rocks embedded into layers of turf and are known as Clawed Walls.
They are a typical feature of this often wild, quite remote, and always wonderful Pembrokeshire coast and make the perfect habitat for wild flowers including sea thrift and campion.
And talking of habitats, the house on the hill, built by the Rev Amos Grimes in the 1840s was eventually opened as an hotel by Rod and Jane Bell back in 1972 and is now run by their son Angus and his wife Beth.
It had been acquired originally by Angus’s maternal grandfather and renowned local surgeon John Gillam.
Stepping inside the hotel’s long and polished wooded floored entrance hall with old church pews on either side and large collection of locally inspired original paintings, one is immediately struck by a feeling of homely informality.
And it’s probably this nebulous quality with its relaxed and almost hippy vibe that has attracted the occasional celebrity visitor and many others of a more alternative nature who often return year after year.
Besides being an eleven-bedroom hotel with four adjoining holiday cottages and an off grid Roundhouse close by, it is also Angus and Beth’s quite quirky and almost bohemian family home.
And it seemed perfectly natural for no one to bat an eyelid when a visiting family’s daughter did a series of impressive cartwheels along the length of the dining room while we were having tea shortly after arriving,
Angus knows the old house better than anyone else and why shouldn’t he seeing he was born there and has lived there all his life, beginning to help out in the kitchen from quite an early age and then taking over the catering operation.
“Keeping the hotel open all the year around does have its challenges for Beth and I, being rushed off our feet and working up to seventeen hours a day during the summer and then finding it quite hard to keep going during the winter,” he admitted.
“But we do feel a responsibility for our mostly younger team and strive to be year-round employers with everyone mucking in and happy to carry out painting and other refurbishment jobs when there are no guests or coast path walkers to serve,” he said.
My wife Jenny and I arrived early on a grey February afternoon to stay in one of the cottages for three nights to do some coast path walking and were soon making our way down the private path outside the hotel to the mostly secluded beach set amid towering cliffs.
Just above the beach with its vast expanse of sand at low tide, we found the now customary little pile of plastic together with a vicious tangle of orange netting which visitors had collected up.
Bizarrely, we soon came upon a large grey container with a handle that looked as if someone had just put it down and gone away and left it so, needless to say, we carried it back and added it to the pile.
Setting out from the hotel the following morning, it was an easy and scenic stroll along the coast path to Broad Haven with the way ablaze with now coconut scented and bright yellow gorse flowers set against the backdrop of a turquoise and white capped sea.
With it now being low tide, we were able to continue our walk along the beach and around its high sea cliffs to the aptly named Little Haven, a truly delightful spot with its collection of weathered houses clustered around its small harbour.
Luckily, we soon found a shop selling fresh crab sandwiches which we munched while sitting on the rocks and then, as if right on cue, the coastal hopper bus appeared to take us back again.
By the following morning the weather had completely cleared and sitting below towering cliffs back down on the beach in the sunshine, we watched a family flying a kite.
We returned to the hotel for a bowl of soup and then set out again for a glorious out and back walk in the opposite direction to nearby Nolton Haven with more stunning sea views along the way.
That evening we were just finishing dinner with one other family in the now quiet dining room, when a lady in a raincoat, whom we’d spotted earlier on the beach, wandered in and began going through the sheet music on the piano.
“Play us a tune then,” I called out, whereupon she sat down and began a short classical piece and then, to our surprise, our host Beth appeared with her cello and they performed an impromptu duet!
No wonder the occasional film star drifts in for some chill out time and that film star Dominic West is reported to have told Conde Nast Traveller magazine that the Druidstone Hotel was one of his two most favourite in the world!
