Pembrokeshire occupies the south-western extremity of Wales, taking its name from Pembroke, its county town, and bounded by Carmarthenshire to the east, Cardiganshire to the north-east, and the Irish Sea on every other side. Eighteenth-century surveys measured it at twenty-six miles long and twenty broad, some 420,000 acres divided into seven hundreds, with one city, eight market towns and 145 parishes, lying within the diocese of St David's. Comparatively low-lying by Welsh standards, with few significant mountains, the county's air was reckoned unusually healthy and its soil fertile, its coastal land given over to rich meadow and cornfield and its interior supporting large numbers of cattle and sheep.
Pembrokeshire's coastline was, and remains, extraordinary for its seabird colonies: antiquarian writers described in vivid detail the vast spring gatherings of guillemots, razorbills, puffins and Manx shearwaters — known locally as the 'harry-bird' — that arrived by night on the island of Ramsey and the rocks called the Bishop and his Clerks in numbers that seemed scarcely credible to those who had not witnessed them. Along the shore near St David's, the county's inhabitants gathered a type of edible seaweed called laver, prepared into a paste eaten raw or fried with oatmeal, prized as a remedy for ailments of the liver and spleen and still made in the region today as laverbread.
St David's Cathedral, seat of the senior bishopric of Wales and, according to tradition, built on the site of the sixth-century monastery of Wales's patron saint, was the county's most venerated building, while the castles of Pembroke, birthplace of Henry VII, and Manorbier, Tenby and Carew recalled the deep Anglo-Norman settlement of this part of Wales, sometimes called 'Little England beyond Wales' for its long history of English and Flemish colonisation distinct from the rest of the Welsh-speaking principality.