Discover... Wales

Wales is a country of mountains, lakes and legends that has kept its Celtic culture and language alive for over 2,000 years, despite repeated incursions by foreign invaders.

Yet until King Edward I of England led an invasion of it in the 13th century, Wales was divided into small kingdoms, part of a chain of Celtic communities that stretched across western Britain from Cornwall to southern Scotland during the Dark Ages.

For most of their history it was language that united the Welsh, not politics. Today the country is still in many ways a collection of different areas, from the valleys of South Wales’ coalfields to the cliffs and hills of the Pembrokeshire coast or the mountainous terrain of Snowdonia.

Wales has long attracted, and fought fiercely to repel, unwanted visitors. This is a land of castles, many built by invaders to control the local population.

Near Newport in south-east Wales are the remains of Isca, now called Caerleon, built by the Romans in the first century AD. The highlight is the grassed-over amphitheatre, which once seated 6,000.

But there are also monuments to those who made their fortunes through more peaceful means, albeit exploitation of the land and its people. In the Middle Ages the Church generated huge wealth through extensive agricultural interests, and you can visit some highly evocative monastic ruins at Tintern Abbey near the English border in the south, or Valle Crucis Abbey in the north, near Llangollen.

Cardiff Castle owes its appearance to the 3rd Marquis of Bute, a member of the Herbert family whose wealth derived in part from the coalfields within their estates. With the architect William Burges, the Marquis carried out rebuilding works within the medieval castle walls in the 19th century, creating a sumptuous, somewhat kitsch Victorian palace.

At nearby Castell Coch, just outside the city, the pair turned a medieval fortress into a fairytale castle with lavish interiors and rounded turrets that looks as if it should house a Sleeping Beauty.

But the coal industry had a much more widespread impact on the landscape north of Cardiff, where the coal-mining towns of terraced houses and tiny chapels that spread up the steep slopes of the Rhondda Valley developed their own unique culture during the 19th and 20th centuries. This disappearing way of life is celebrated at one of Britain’s best museums, the Big Pit, near Blaenafon, where you can tour some of the old workings 300 feet underground.

To the west, beyond Swansea, are the sandy beaches and craggy limestone cliffs of the Gower Peninsula. People have been coming here for a long time: the sweeping coastal path passes Paviland Cave, where a 28,000 year old ceremonial grave was discovered in 1822. Inland, on Cefn Bryn, the peninsula’s central ridge, stands King Arthur’s Stone, a huge prehistoric burial chamber dating from about 2500 BC.

West of Gower, on the wide estuary of the River Taff, is the village of Laugharne. Here you can visit Dylan Thomas’s boathouse, where the poet lived with his wife and family until his death in 1953. The peaceful village inspired the depiction of Llareggub in Under Milk  Wood. 

The county of Pembrokeshire fills out the south-west corner of Wales. At its westernmost tip is the tiny city of St David’s, site of the beautiful St David’s Cathedral, founded, according to legend, by Wales’s patron saint in the 6th century. Most of the present building dates from after the 1100s, and lies in a hollow, its rich exterior hidden from the sea. The lovely ruins of the Bishop’s Palace lie alongside.

Further north, in the hills above the Dee Valley in north-east Wales, is the town of Llangollen, overlooked by the fragmentary remains of Castell Dinas Bran, “stronghold of ravens”, or, more prosaically, Crow Castle. A 13th century Welsh castle, it is set inside an Iron Age hillfort that crowns a steep hill. It is a tough walk up, but the views from the top are sensational.

Llangollen is also home to an excellent, ever-growing steam railway, which now runs to the west along more than seven miles of a disused branch line. If you head back down the valley towards England you can admire, or even walk across, Britain’s most famous piece of canal engineering, Thomas Telford’s dizzyingly high cast-iron Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, built between 1795 and 1805 to carry the Llangollen Canal over the Dee valley, 126 feet below.

There are less aesthetically pleasing relics of the past around the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in north-west Wales, which shelters below steep piles of dark, splintered slate, remnants of an industry that produced half a million tons of the stuff each year during the 19th century to roof buildings across Britain and Europe.

You can learn more about the mines and the hardships the miners endured at the Llechwedd Slate Caverns, where you can tour a reconstructed Victorian miners’ village and part of the mine. Away from the pits you can also enjoy some beautiful mountain and woodland scenery, on foot or from the carriages of the Ffestiniog Railway, a narrow gauge steam line that climbs through the hills to the quarries and mines from Porthmadog on the west coast.

This area around Snowdonia proved a hotbed of Welsh resistance in the 13th century. Here Edward I built a formidable ring of castles and new towns, at Conwy, Rhuddlan, Caernarfon and Harlech, and at Beaumaris on the island of Anglesey.

Caernarfon and Harlech are particularly enjoyable. The former is in a good state of repair after a 19th century overhaul, and from the hexagonal-walled turrets you can take in the views across the sea to Anglesey and south-east to Snowdonia.

At Harlech, on the western coast, the castle stands high on a clifftop above sand- dunes that have formed since it was built, and the sea beyond. It is easy, looking out from the ramparts, to imagine some of the dramatic moments in the castle’s history, like the seven year siege of a Lancastrian garrison during the Wars of the Roses, and the Civil War in the 17th century, when this was the last Royalist fortress to fall.

It is no coincidence that one of the best loved songs of this proud, defiant nation is Rhyfelgyrch gwyr Harlech (Men of Harlech), commemorating wars against invading Saxons: “His lance is long but yours is longer/Strong his sword but yours is stronger!/One stroke more and then your wronger/At your feet lies low!” 

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