I set off from Narberth on a drizzly Thursday afternoon, the SatNav insisting Erisa was a mere ten minutes away, which turned out to be perfectly true until I took the wrong turning at the Spar and ended up on a farm track that led nowhere except a rather bemused sheep. By the time I reversed out and found the right lane, the cottage’s little wooden sign had come into view, tucked behind a low stone wall with a view straight over the rooftops to the sea.

The key was in a fake stone by the back door, exactly as promised, and I stepped inside to the smell of fresh bread and the faint trace of woodsmoke. I’d barely dropped my bag when there was a polite knock. Standing on the step was Mair, the owner’s sister, who’d come to drop off a pint of milk and a handwritten note about bin collection. She was wearing a bright yellow anorak and a look of cheerful curiosity. “You’re the one from Cardiff, then?” she asked, and before I’d even answered she was explaining that her brother usually stayed in the spare room when he wasn’t letting the place out. We ended up chatting on the doorstep for ten minutes about the best time to catch the tide on Castle Beach and whether the chip shop still did proper curry sauce.

That evening I wandered down to the harbour for fish and chips, and the man behind the counter—Dai, he introduced himself—recognised the cottage name on my reusable bag. “Erisa, is it? My cousin whitewashed the ceilings last spring. Lovely job, though he nearly fell off the ladder trying to reach the beam.” We spent a good while discussing the merits of different local ales while my chips cooled, and he slipped an extra sachet of vinegar into the bag “for the walk back up the hill.”

The next morning the sun had decided to appear, so I took my coffee outside and sat on the low wall. Within minutes an elderly chap called Glyn wandered past with a Jack Russell called Biscuit. Biscuit made straight for my ankles, and Glyn followed, leaning on his stick. “You’re the new one at Erisa,” he observed, as if he’d been expecting me. We talked about the changes in Tenby over the years—how the old lifeboat station had become a café, how the summer crowds used to arrive by train rather than car—and he told me, quite seriously, that the seagulls had grown bolder since the pandemic because people kept feeding them chips. I found myself nodding along, promising to keep my portion covered.

By lunchtime I needed bread, so I popped into the little bakery on Upper Park Road. The woman behind the counter, Bethan, was busy explaining to another customer why their sourdough was better than the supermarket stuff. When it was my turn she asked where I was staying and immediately launched into a story about the time Erisa’s previous guests had left the garden gate open and Biscuit had wandered in looking for crumbs. “We found him asleep under the hydrangea,” she laughed. I bought a loaf and a couple of Welsh cakes, and she threw in an extra one “for the seagulls—not that they need encouragement.”

That afternoon I sat on the little bench outside the cottage with a book, and Mair reappeared, this time with a handful of runner beans from her garden. “Thought you might like something fresh,” she said, and we ended up talking about her late husband’s vegetable patch and how he used to swear the soil at Erisa was better than anywhere else on the street. She stayed for nearly half an hour, telling me about the time the council tried to replace the old streetlights and how the whole neighbourhood turned out with placards.

On my final morning I was packing the car when Glyn and Biscuit came past again. “Off already?” he asked, and I admitted I’d only booked three nights because I hadn’t realised how easy it was to lose a whole day just chatting on doorsteps. He chuckled and said that was the real Tenby—people still had time for a natter. I drove away with the windows down, the scent of runner beans and sea air following me out of town, already wondering what Mair, Dai, Bethan and Glyn would be talking about once the next guest arrived.