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In common with just about everyone else who spent a large part of the 1990s tugging on a spliff, I’m a huge fan of the late American comedian Bill Hicks. Pirate videos of his gigs were almost inevitably playing in the dark Birmingham rooms, curtains drawn against the sunlight, in which I wasted happy years. Hicks, whose brand of comedy was brutal yet pierced with the sharp light of truth, was a hero to us all, and we would swap lines with the same nerdy enthusiasm we’d swapped football cards 20 years earlier. Even through the fug of those years, I can remember that there was only ever one routine of his with which I disagreed, the basis of which was the opening line: ‘The beach! The beach – let’s go to the beach! Ah man, what is it about the beach? It’s just where dirt meets water.’ Apparently, he recanted on this view before he died. I only hope that his change of thinking came after some transcendentally magical days by the sea.

As an island nation, we are pulled towards the coast by a centrifugal force beyond our control. For those of us from the grubby middle of the country, for whom the sea was but a distant dream, this force is nothing short of mythic. Every family holiday to the seaside would include a hard-fought battle in the back seat to win the ‘first glimpse of the sea’ competition, one which I, hunched defensively over my OS map, would take as a challenge to my navigational skills. Not that the map was much help: a sudden peek of a distant sea in the nape of two hills could come almost anywhere, and would not be spotted amongst the flat contours and colours of the OS.

Years ago, I climbed Carn Llidi, a rocky outcrop at the western extremity of Wales, just beyond the tiny Pembrokeshire city of St David’s. There’s a stone seat sculpted by nature at the top, which gives you a phenomenal view of the Atlantic shimmering off into the distance, and I was looking forward to settling in it, enjoying a quiet smoke and watching the sun go down. As I neared the top, I saw to my annoyance that a couple had already bagged my spot. Getting nearer, I noticed, as they stared out to sea, their look of hypnotised wonder, like some syrupy image of children at prayer from a Victorian Bible. It was a look I knew well. ‘You’re not from the Midlands, by any chance, are you?’ I called out. ‘’Ow did yow know?’ the bloke hollered back, in a broad Black Country twang. ‘Er, just a hunch,’ I replied.

Carn Llidi sits above one of Britain’s best-loved rights of way, the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, established as one of the first tranche of National Trails in 1970. The idea had dated back to 1951, when local naturalist R. M. Lockley explored the possibility of linking together existing cliff-top and beach paths around the county, and filling in the missing gaps. Lockley was also instrumental in the creation, the following year, of the Pembrokeshire coast as a National Park, still the only one in Britain whose geography and character is almost entirely coastal. This helped cement in the national mind the idea that the coast of Pembrokeshire is uniquely blessed, and somehow the best of all. It isn’t: lovely though it often is, there are finer stretches of seaboard elsewhere in Britain, even in Wales. No matter, though, for this early boost to its credentials still plays out today in the enduring popularity of the county, and of its coast path in particular.

You need a certain frame of mind to want to walk any coast path, but especially the 186 miles (300 km) of the one that skips around the frilly edge of Pembrokeshire. Despite my starry-eyed Midlander’s love of the sea, it’s a frame of mind that escapes me. I honestly cannot think of a more pointless long walk than this one. The county is a peninsula, jutting square-jawed out into the sea from the south-western corner of Wales, but that one peninsula comprises dozens of smaller peninsulas, meaning that often the stark choice is to walk a slippery cliff-top for three or four miles around a windswept headland, or cheat and cut across its neck, sometimes