Excavation of an early medieval cemetery at St Patrick’s Chapel

At Whitesands Bay in Pembrokeshire, coastal erosion has revealed one of Wales’s most remarkable early medieval sites. Excavations between 2014 and 2021 uncovered an eighth-century stone-built enclosure with a carved shrine at its centre, alongside evidence of settlement, craftworking, and food preparation. From the later eighth or ninth century the site developed into a large cemetery, with over 250 burials placed in the sand over several centuries, many of them young children. In the 11th–12th centuries a stone chapel was built over the earlier cemetery, accompanied by distinctive cist graves marked with quartz pebbles or limpet shells. Abandoned by the 16th century, the chapel and burials have since been threatened by coastal erosion. These discoveries shed light on life, death, and belief in early medieval Wales and reveal a site of exceptional importance now at risk from the sea.