As a schoolboy raised in Pembrokeshire, the beaches were my playground.  My life started in Milford Haven.   In the late 1940’s before cars and televisions became common, families on hot summer days would walk to the towns two beaches (Milford Beach and Scotch Bay)  to picnic and swim while the children would amuse themselves.   Surprisingly at the time, a suntan was not looked at with favour.   This was because in those days the towns unemployed would go potato picking (‘spud bashing’ in the local vernacular) on the surrounding farms where one could earn £1 per sack filled. The potato pickers were very distinct amongst the townspeople as they were deeply sunburned.   The ‘townies’ would refer to somebody with a suntan as ‘looking like a potato picker’ and it was not at all desirable. 

      Both of the towns beaches are stony – Milford Beach with shingle, and Scotch Bay with large stones. The people of the Rath (the grassed steep slope in front of the town used for recreation) would clear a footpath down the beach at Scotch Bay, so they could get in and out of the sea at any state of the tide.  In those days the back of the beach was a wall of wooden baulks that held back the bank (today these have rotted away and the bank is eroding untidily onto the beach).  There were some very snug spots at the top of the beach leaning back against timbers on the narrow band of shingle there, out of any wind.  Of course there was no heavy industry in the port in those days, as the oil industry did not arrive until 1960 with the Esso refinery.   At the eastern end of Scotch Bay was Ward’s ship breaking industry, which provided endless interest as a succession of ships of all types arrived and were cut up for scrap.  This was taken away in rail trucks.  At the west end of Milford beach, the Docks was a busy fishing centre with the fish catch rushed to London by rail.   Behind the beach were the smoke houses, where the kippers were cured.  Surprisingly one of these has survived today by conversion to flats.  

         So by the age of five years, Milford Beach was a favourite place.   Now the shingle of Milford beach provided great interest first because there were water worn fragments of colored glass.   Most sought after were the deep red and green fragments from broken navigation lights from the trawlers of the fishing industry.  In addition there was a great variety of different colored pebbles.   My collection grew but all had to be carried up the steep slope into the town.

      Later I found that the great variety of pebbles was because many did not originate in Pembrokeshire but had been carried by the Irish Sea glaciers of the Ice Age during the last 2 million years.  The Preseli Mountains of north Pembrokeshire are smoothly rounded because the great ice sheets flowed over them. In contrast the peaks of north Wales are jagged because they are higher and stood through the ice sheets to be frost shattered.  At least 10% of Pembrokeshire’s beach pebbles were carried into Pembrokeshire by the ice sheets and deposited there when the ice melted.   Famous foreign exotic rocks are the ‘salt and pepper textured’ Ailsa Craig granite from the island off the west coast of Scotland.   Others are the flint nodules and vesicular basalt fragments from the chalk and basalt cliffs of Antrim. When the ice sheets melted the stones they carried were deposited and many worked as beach pebbles. Even today to look at the beach pebbles as a retired geologist it’s a puzzle to identify the sources of many that come from outside Pembrokeshire.

                By the time I was taking my A-Level exams, I had a bicycle and was riding to the different beaches where the rocks in the sea cliffs were different.  There are red rocks of the Old Red Sandstone around Milford.  On Marloes Sands, the cliffs are yellow-weathering Silurian sediments with steeply-inclined beds showing fossil ripple marks.  On Musslewick, the rocks are black Ordovician shales. At Broad Haven and Little Haven the rocks are grey Coal Measures with ironstone nodules.  I was lucky enough to be able to take geology in the grammar school and made a big collection of rocks and fossils from these rocks. Today that collection is preserved by the school in case geology will be taught there again.

         My geology interest was awakened at the age of 5 years with my pebble collection. So for visitors to The Anchorage I have made a collection of some of Pembrokeshire’s rocks and put them in the garden along the wall of the house. The identification and a description of each rock is listed below.  When facing the collection, they are described from left to right.

1. PRECAMBRIAN DIORITE. This is a coarse grained rock consisting of white albite feldspar, quartz and black hornblende amphibole.  It formed when magma equivalent to andesite lava (common in the huge volcanoes of the Andes mountains) crystallised slowly in chambers deep beneath the Earth’s surface.   This is one of the oldest rocks in Pembrokeshire and belongs to the Proterozoic Eon of the PreCambrian  SuperEon, that preceded the formation of common fossils with hard parts that characterise the Cambrian period at the start of the Paleozoic Era at 542 million years.   Tiny crystals of zircon from the diorite have been dated using the radioactive decay of elements to an age of around 643 million years.    This is very near the end of the Proterozoic Eon.  The rock occurs near Johnston (between Milford Haven and Haverfordwest) where it is quarried and widely used in the county.  This specimen was recovered from a beach where sea defences of quarried rock had been destroyed by the sea.
2. BLACK ORDOVICIAN SHALE. This is the common rock that makes up much of the north part of the county.   It is a soft black fissile shale formed by mud sinking to the sea bed.  It records the local history of the area during the Ordovician Period of the Paleozoic era between 488 and 444 million years ago.  There was much volcanism at this time and yellowish layers of altered volcanic ash are interlayered as is well seen in the cliffs at Musselwick Sands.  A large basaltic paleovolcano composed of pillowed basalt lavas lies within these rocks and forms Strumble Head near Fishguard.   The sample is from Abereiddy Bay. 
3. PRESELI BLUESTONE   The heavy blue-green rock is a dolerite or fine grained gabbro with conspicuous feldspar crystals from the north of the county.  It is the coarse grained equivalent of basalt lava that formed an intrusive sill into the Ordovician shales of North Pembrokeshire.  Thick sheets of this rock are very common and are a part of the Ordovician history of basaltic magmatism (488 to 444 million years).  The sheets stand out in north Pembrokeshire as ridges such as Carn Llidi near St. Davids and Carn Meini near Maenclochog and have been called ‘Pembrokeshire bluestones’. Some were used to build the inner ring of Stonehenge on Salisbury plain.  Geologists believe that these stones were transported there by ice sheets in the last glaciations that finished about 10,000 years ago.  In Nature this is only a brief time – a mere blink of the eye on a planet that is over 4,000 million years old.   For example the baby seals on the coast of Pembrokeshire have white fur just like their relations in the Arctic.  The white coat is to protect them and hide them on snow and ice surfaces from preditors.  In Pembrokeshire the sea ice has been gone for 10,000 years now but that is insufficient time for the baby seals to adapt and develop less conspicuous coats for the ice free rocky coast.  Many do not believe the Preseli bluestones  were transported by ice to Salisbury Plain.  Most summers some people come to Pembrokeshire to drag a single stone to the coast for shipping by sea towards Stonehenge.  So far they have not succeeded as they have found it necessary to put the stone on a plastic sheet to drag it or usually to get a helicopter to sling it.  To me they are proving that man could not have moved them so far in the Bronze Age.  The specimen was dropped by a glacier in a field at Sandy Haven.
4. PORPHYRITIC DACITE LAVA.  This is a pretty rock composed of fine-grained hard siliceous lava carrying an abundance of white feldspar phenocrysts.  It formed part of an ancient volcano in North Pembrokeshire. These rocks were until very recently thought to be of Precambrian age but recent work by the British Geological Survey (assessing their gold content) has shown them to belong to the Ordovician period (488 to 444 million years).  The sample is from Newgale beach.
5. RHYOLITIC AGGLOMERATE.  This boulder, also from Newgale beach, is composed of angular orange colored fragments of rhyolite. It is from the Ordovician Roch Rhyolite formation that extends from Roch to Treffgarne Gorge in the north of the county.  It is a volcanic rock formed by the explosion of a rhyolite dome to produce a deposit of angular fragments of identical rhyolite.  This contrasts with the more rounded fragments and the wide variety of rock types found in a rock called conglomerate that owes its origin to erosion.  The rhyolite agglomerate  was a part of one of the Ordovician paleovolcanoes of north Pembrokeshire formed between 488 and 444 million years ago (but was previously thought to be PreCambrian).
6. DEVONIAN QUARTZ CONGLOMERATE.  The low sea cliffs at Sandy Haven beach contain impressive layers of white quartz conglomerate contained in the red mudstones and shales.   These layers of conglomerate formed in stream channels in an estuary with red mud banks in the Devonian period from 416 to 359 million years ago. This was the Age of Fishes and the headshields of primitive Pteraspid fish are sometimes found in these conglomerates and sandstones.  There are some fragments of volcanic rocks also within the conglomerate giving some idea of the land that was being eroded to form these channel deposits.  The volcanic fragments are probably derived from the older Ordovician paleovolcanoes.
7. DEVONIAN RED MUDSTONE. The red boulder is also from Sandy Haven and shows the red mudstone that in the Devonian period formed as mud banks in an estuary.  The age of this rock is between 416 and 359 million years.
8. FOSSILIFEROUS GREY LIMESTONE.   From the south of Pembrokeshire this fine-grained hard grey limestone with white calcite shell and coral fossils has been an important building stone in Pembrokeshire.  The late 19^th century Victorian forts of Lord Palmerston around the Milford Haven Waterway and at Tenby are built of shaped blocks of this rock. The limestone formed in the sea during the early part of the Carboniferous Period between 359 and 325 million years ago.
9. COAL.   South Wales has long been famous for its coalfields and the coal seams extend right across South Wales.   The coal belt has a north-south width of about 30 miles but in Pembrokeshire it has been compressed into tight folds and is much faulted to a width of only 6 miles. Coal is fossil peaty humus that formed in swamps and marshes that supported a luxuriant vegetation.  The Coal Measures were deposited under estuarine and fresh-water conditions as alluvial muds and sands, swamp clays and delta fans and aprons through which large rivers meandered.  This coastal environment records a shallowing of the sea where the Carboniferous Limestone formed.  Both the Limestone and Coal Measures formed during the Carboniferous period between 359 and 299 million years ago. Much coal is said to outcrop on the sea bed of St. Brides Bay. 
10. WHITE VEIN  QUARTZ.  In the black Ordovician shales of the north of the county are many veins of white quartz.  These formed in a major period of mountain building when the then continents of Laurentia and Gondwana collided to form the super continent of Pangaea.   During the collision in upper Paleozoic times, folding and faulting occurred in what is known as the Hercynian mountain building episode sometime between 480 and 290 million years ago.  It was this episode that produced the folding and faulting visible in the Paleozoic rocks of the sea cliffs of Pembrokeshire.   One of the main structures formed is the major east-west syncline of the South Wales Coal Field.  Some of the quartz veins are mineralized with lead, copper and zinc.  At one place at Dolacothi in Carmarthenshire, quartz veins contain gold that was mined by the Romans and more recently.  The mine is today open for tourism.  
11. QUARTZ SANDSTONE.    A cream colored coarse sandstone with internal laminations.  This is a very rare rock in Pembrokeshire but it once formed a cover over the county.  It formed during the Permian Period (299 to 251 million years).   The cover has been entirely eroded from Pembrokeshire but can be found on the sea floor around Pembrokeshire and is known on the seafloor close to Dinas Head.  Specimens can be obtained on the south side of Freshwater West beach where they have an interesting origin.  In the south of Pembrokeshire, the Permian sandstones overlay the grey Carboniferous Limestone.  Some time in the past caves and sinkholes formed in the limestone.  Some of the sink holes were filled with Permian Sandstone debris that collapsed into them.  Today it is the erosion by the sea of the grey Carboniferous limestone that is releasing these fragments of the former Permian cover onto the south coast beaches. Pembrokeshire is renowned for its golden quartz sand beaches.  But today there is no source rock to supply golden quartz sand.  It is the golden beach sands that represent all that is left of the lost Permian cover.  A visit to Barafundle Bay and the adjacent Broad Haven beach in south Pembrokeshire will show a lot of golden quartz sand and cliffs of grey Carboniferous limestone without any present day source for the sand.
12. GLACIAL ERRATIC BLOCK OF AILSA CRAIG GRANITE.   The small island of Ailsa Craig off the west coast of Scotland is a microgranite formed around 60 million years ago.   It has a very distinct appearance known as ‘salt and pepper’ and is famous for making curling stones.   Early geologists mapping Pembrokeshire in the 19^th century were surprised to find blocks of it scattered about the county.  They used its presence to help reconstruct the paths of great ice sheets during the Great Ice Age.  Ice sheets plucked up pieces of Ailsa Craig microgranite and carried it south down the Irish Sea and into Pembrokeshire where it was deposited when the ice melted and surface glacial debris deposits formed during the last two million years.  The specimen was collected on Freshwater West beach.
13. Garnet gneiss.  An exotic rock arriving in Pembrokeshire probably as ships ballast.  This is a high grade metamorphic rock (meaning that the rock was once deeply buried in the earth’s crust and recrystallized).  The rock is composed of glassy quartz, white feldspar and black mica and amphibole but shows a scattering of small deep red garnets.  Such rocks occur in Scotland and Norway. The specimen was found on Scotch Bay, Milford Haven.   No other fragments have been found which suggests it is probably not a glacial erratic but  more likely a piece of ships ballast stone.

 THE FACING STONE ON THE HOUSE.   It was the owners intention to use Red Devonian sandstone derived from the garden and adjacent fields to face the house.  The rock was collected over a number of years. However these stones have very irregular shapes (see the many boulders facing the terraces).  Shortly before the house was built a Welsh farmer discovered a very fine slabby sandstone that is now sold as Swansea Stone.  These are grey sandstones with thin black coal laminae and come from the Carboniferous South Wales Coal Field.  They were used superbly for Haverfordwest Railway station and the owner decided to switch to these as they can be laid in courses showing grey and golden surfaces and hiding the black laminae.  Work started on facing the walls this way following the Roman style of stonework and bringing the wall up to level every three feet.  However as soon as the first course was completed Pembrokeshire Coast National Parks Inspector Arwell Williams arrived on site and stopped the work insisting that stonework in the National Park had to be random without courses.  This was done and the nice slabs placed vertically so that their irregular shape showed.   This was a great disappointment for the owner as the original local red sandstone could have achieved the same end result without the expense of buying the Swansea stone.  By placing the slabs of Swansea Stone vertically, many black carbonaceous surfaces show.  To brighten this the builders included some slabs of pink Devonian sandstone derived from the garden. Lately to hide the black surfaces of some of the stones, two tubs with Virginia creeper have been place against the end wall amongst the rock collection.