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On our second morning in South Pembrokeshire we set off to walk to Barafundle beach from the National Trust car park at Stackpole Quay. It was still early, and it looked like it was going to drizzle.

The children lagged behind on the half-hour walk across the headland. They don't relish walking anywhere, and even the car park man's friendly chatter about the return of his favourite robin, now looking much fatter from spending far too long down at the quayside tea-room, hadn't interested them. To make matters worse, Rhena, who is eight, had read the sign at the beginning of the path warning about the presence of Weever Fish in the sand at low tide. The sting of their spines could be very painful, it said, and the best antidote was to stand in a bucket of very hot water for twenty minutes.

"We don't have a bucket of hot water, do we?" she'd pointed out, and I'd had to admit we didn't. It's not normally something that features on our seaside equipment checklist. "Well in that case I won't be going into the sea, and that's final."

All in all, it didn't bode well for a morning on the beach. And yet a walker embarking on the same footpath ten minutes later that morning, on reaching the top of the stairs leading down to Barafundle, would have stopped to watch with amusement as a father and his two children belted up and down the strand like excited puppies. If we'd had tails, we would have been wagging them.

If ever there was a need for evidence of the uplifting power of nature, then Barafundle provided it that morning. The beach itself is not particularly dramatic, but its crescent of sand is squeezed cosily between two protective wooded headlands, with dunes behind and a basin-full of tranquil Bristol Channel in front. When we arrived, the sand was so crisp and clean it could have just come back from the Atlantic laundry. Moreover we had the whole place completely, delightfully, to ourselves.

By the time we left in search of baguettes at the same Stackpole Quay tea-room which had over-fattened the car-park man's robin, we'd swum twice, played kick the can in the dunes, built a sand fortress with a complex canal system to defeat the rising tide, and totally avoided standing on any Weever Fish. In fact the car park man agreed that in all the time he'd been there - seven years - no-one ever had.

The children and I had come to Pembrokeshire for a taste of the Welsh seaside. As the offspring of a travel writer, Thomas and Rhena may have swum in the surf around Sri Lanka and trekked in the foothills of the Himalayas, but they still get all excited about local destinations. They've got to the age where they prefer the familiar; they like to be able to speak the language, to order from the menu, and to communicate with other children they meet on the beach. Furthermore they're still young enough to be able to occupy themselves for hours with sand and rock pools. So Pembrokeshire - Sir Penfro to children and Welsh speakers - was just what the doctor ordered, and a very welcome release from a hot summer in the Big Smoke.

We'd chosen to base ourselves around the resort of Tenby to make the most of the only all-coastal National Park in Britain. The shoreline here is riddled with unspoilt coves and beaches and the pastoral hinterland is full of family attractions, none of them more than a 20 minute drive away. I have low traffic-tolerance at the best of times, but on holiday I hate to waste time in the car.

From the elegant Portclew Country Guesthouse at Freshwater East, complete with a child-loving labrador called Jet, it was a short tootle between wildflowered hedgerows west to the aforementioned Barafundle and east to the cove at Manorbier. The latter got the thumbs up for its 12th century castle on a hill of wild gorse by the car park and the rock pools trapped in the tramlines of purple-red sandstone, forced vertical by the collision of continents 290 million years ago.

It was from Manorbier that I persuaded the children to join me in a walk along a small stretch of Pembrokeshire's 186 mile coastal path, threading between heather, sea pinks and campion along a volley of headlands. Wherever we rounded the corner we'd find that someone had subtly rearranged the scenery. Even this managed to be interesting for the children, because within minutes of leaving the beach we reached King's Quoit, a neolithic burial chamber which as Thomas, who is 10, pointed out looked “just like something out of Asterix”. Having crawled inside, he announced that he wanted to wait here until it rained. Unfortunately, there was not a cloud in the sky.

In fact it didn't rain once in all our time in Pembrokeshire, which was a blessed relief, because the children weren't travelling with the right parent for indoor arts and crafts. They did, though, have the right one for a couple of all-weather highlights, which made a suitable alternative to the beaches. Thomas and I hared around the off-road course in the Ritec Valley on quad bikes, snarling at each other, doing wheelies and getting deliciously dirty. At the multi-activity park at Heatherton all three of us got most entertainment out of the simplest, most sustainable attractions - the maze made out of maize and the giant rabbit warren made from bales of hay.

And then to Tenby, a beguiling town, full of light and hanging flower baskets and with the most startlingly immaculate pair of beaches of any town I've ever seen. The narrow streets are wedged in-between Norman walls up on a headland surrounded by sand, and are wonderfully car-free in the summer months, allowing a continental café culture to flourish. Wherever we walked, lured this way and that by the smell of fresh coffee and the prospect of a knickerbocker glory, we'd end up gazing down over tumbling cliffs to a skirt of beach and a deep blue sea, and wondering whether we'd seen this view before.

In fact, Tenby seemed to be auditioning for several films at once. Down towards the harbour it was an intimate and steep Cornish smuggling village straight out of Daphne du Maurier; climbing up the hill it opened into an expansive Chelsea-on-Sea, where grand houses with black railings were painted neapolitan colours, and at the top it reverted into a walled town of medieval kings. The only thing that didn't really seem to fit was its name, because compared to the limpid Barafundles and exhilarating Freshwaters, 'Tenby' sounds like a factory town in the Midlands. Over haddock and chips at Fecci's we resolved to tell the town fathers that they should do a swap with Milford Haven.

On our last afternoon in town we took a boat trip out to Caldey Island, home to a community of monks, which fills the horizon three miles across the calm waters of the Caldey Sound. When I outlined to the children the Benedictines' 1,500 years of isolation on the island, and how they had to get up at 3.15 every morning for the first of seven daily services, they came over all sympathetic. Rhena pocketed a little packet of custard creams from the tea-making tray in case she met a hungry monk, and Thomas decided to take along his Game Boy in case that same monk, once he'd had his custard creams, needed a break from his heavy prayer schedule.

A beamy old former fishing boat carried us across to Caldey's landing point on a beach that mirrored Tenby's, and was sprinkled with sunbathers. "How can you tell whether any of them are monks?" asked Rhena. “By their tassels,” said Thomas. So we looked, but none of them had their tassels on show.

It's a short walk inland through an avenue of pines to the Caldey village, backed by the turreted, white-washed and ochre-tiled monastery that the monks themselves built, rather in the image of a Rhineland schloss. In the village centre a group of cottages, a tea-room and a post office surround a gentle lawn, complete with a children's playground. We browsed through chocolate, shortbread and perfume made by the monks, settled on some lavender oil for granny and sent a postcard to a working mother, complete with Caldey's own stamps.

In the graveyard of St David's church, up by the abbey, the inscriptions on the rows of plain wooden crosses served to reinforce Rhena's impression that all monks were necessarily very old. And further up the hill behind, in the former priory church of St Illtud - thought to be the oldest church still in use in England and Wales - we read some of the touching handwritten notices lodged around the wall. Most seemed to be the work of children, and varied from 'Dear Lord, please keep grandpa happy up in heaven' to 'thank you Jesus for giving me Jessica as a sister.' For me, the saddest had to be the one which read 'To mom. I hope you are safe, and I'll see you again one day'.

But when the time came to amble back to the boat landing we still hadn't seen a monk. We'd come to the conclusion that they all went undercover during the summer season, so as not to have to spend the whole time signing autographs, when a jolly, Friar Tuck lookalike rode past on a lawnmower. Although he wasn't in a habit, he had a beaming smile that suggested a state of spiritual bliss.

"Quick," I said. "I bet that's the abbot. Now's your chance" But Rhena suddenly came over all shy. And besides, by then she'd already eaten all the custard creams.

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