Tenby

Whilst we’d explored Tenby on foot on Saturday, we decided we wanted to know more about it; so we booked ourselves onto the Historic Tenby walking tour for Monday morning. Us, two more from our house, and six other people met our guide, Marion, at 1030 by the church, and the tour began.

It wasn’t a huge amount of walking (cf. our tour of Seville) but was so arranged that the historical timeline was followed, and dated from the first mention of Tenby in the Dark Ages, medieval times, visitations from the great and the good and not-so-good; we started in the church and found the memorial to Robert Recorde, inventor of the = sign and writer of The Urinal Of Physick. 

We talked about the building of the fort and city wall, its strategic position and natural harbour, and how the wall was modified and defended. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the town, decimated by plague, went into decline. It wasn’t until the rise of sea-bathing as a fashionable pastime at the beginning of the 19th century that the town’s fortunes were revived, and the seafront quickly became built-up with large houses which remain to this day. At some point it became fashionable to paint in pastel shades and this remains the style of the seafront: 

The introduction of a railway line further enhanced the town’s tourist trade, and nowadays Tenby is completely reliant on tourism.

One of the many features of the housing our guide pointed out is the Hanging Toilets of Tenby. In the days before indoor plumbing was the norm, a type of garderobe was attached to the side or back of some buildings, similar to those found on castle walls. Unlike the ones on castles, which simply had a hole directly over a cesspit, these hanging toilets had a pipe to take waste down. Later, they were fully plumbed in. Nowadays of course all the buildings have indoor toilets, but because of their historical importance, if there is one on the side of your building you must maintain it and cannot remove it – it has listed protection. Here’s a hanging toilet: 

So far as I can find, no-one else came up with this solution, so the Hanging Toilets of Tenby are the eighth wonder of the world.

We finished the tour conveniently close to lunchtime, so decided to try one of the many local restaurants and cafés for lunch, and settled on Plantagenet, where I had some Pembroke oysters followed by scallops.

We met up with Jonathan and Kathryn, our hosts, back at the car and then returned to Waterwynch for an evening of unbridled debauchery.