Medievalist Daryl Hendley Rooney from Trinity College Dublin talks about the famous churchman, scholar and historian Gerald of Wales (c.1146–1223) and his upbringing at Manorbier Castle in Pembrokeshire. He discusses Gerald's mixed Norman and Welsh…

Folk music in this part of Pembrokeshire has a distincly Irish sound and local phone registers contain many Irish family names. Gary Jones sat down with Ports, Past and Present to explain how the advantagous geography of Fishguard harbour had an…

Virginia Woolf travelled widely in Britain and Europe throughout her life, but visited Ireland only once. On 27 April 1934, she sailed out from Fishguard to Cork for a motoring tour with her husband Leonard, visiting the novelist Elizabeth Bowen at…

‘What dreadful weather!’ Dorothy Wordsworth exclaimed on 28 August 1829. She had ‘a hundred fears’ because her brother William was going to cross the Irish Sea from Holyhead the following night.As they would soon find out, ‘three vessels had been…

When Mary Wollstonecraft crossed from Holyhead to Dublin – ‘the best and shortest passage’, she noted – in October 1786, she was lucky. ‘[T]he weather was fine the prospects delightful’, she wrote in a letter to Eliza Bishop, looking back on the…