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THE PUSH

A minister from Bala with a dream of a new Wales

By the mid 1800s, plenty of Welsh speakers felt under siege. An 1847 government report on Welsh education, known as the Treachery of the Blue Books, dismissed Welsh speakers in openly contemptuous terms and helped justify things like the Welsh Not, which was a piece of wood hung round a child’s neck for the crime of speaking Welsh in school.

Michael D. Jones, a Nonconformist minister and principal of Coleg y Bala, the Independents’ theological college in Bala, had spent time in Ohio and saw how quickly Welsh emigrants there stopped speaking Welsh within a generation.

His answer was radical: found an entirely new Wales somewhere remote enough that English influence couldn’t reach it, Welsh in language, Nonconformist in religion and self-governing.

Patagonia, at the southern tip of Argentina, fit the brief because almost nobody else wanted it. Sparse, remote, and available on generous terms from an Argentine government keen to populate land it was disputing with Chile.

Jones himself never actually emigrated; he stayed in Bala, raising money and support and later taught a young David Lloyd George, among others, in the values that had driven the whole scheme.

THE MIMOSA

Eight weeks at sea to a coastline nobody had properly seen

On 28 May 1865, 153 settlers, gathered mostly from north and mid-Wales, boarded a converted tea-clipper called the Mimosa at Liverpool. Adults paid £12 for the crossing, children £6, and anyone who couldn’t afford it was taken anyway. Eight weeks later, on 27 or 28 July depending on the account, they landed at a bay a scouting party had named Porth Madryn after a Welsh estate back home, a name that survives today as Puerto Madryn, now a city of 100,000 people.

What greeted them bore almost no resemblance to what they’d been promised. There was no shelter, next to no fresh water and nothing like the fertile land the colony’s promotional handbook, Llawlyfr y Wladfa, had described.

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THE HARD YEARS

Floods, failed crops, and an idea that nearly died in its first winter

The first houses, built from earth, were washed away by flash flooding within months of arrival, taking the season’s potato and maize crops with them. Rainfall turned out to be far lower than the settlers had been led to expect and for the first year the colony survived on considerably less than anyone had planned for.

Contact with the local Tehuelche people didn’t come until nearly a year after landing and the first encounter was understandably nervous on both sides given the language barrier, but what followed is one of the more remarkable parts of the whole story: a relationship that stayed peaceful from that first meeting onward, built on trade and mutual help rather than conflict, at a time and in a region where relations between indigenous peoples and European settlers were rarely anything but violent.

The Tehuelche taught the Welsh settlers how to hunt guanaco and survive the Patagonian winter; without that help, the colony’s earliest years might well have ended in failure rather than endurance. It stands in sharp contrast to the far more brutal treatment indigenous Patagonians later faced at the hands of the Argentine military during the Conquest of the Desert campaigns.

It was Rachel Jenkins, wife of the settlement’s early leader Aaron Jenkins, who is credited with proposing the irrigation canals that eventually turned the Chubut Valley’s dry ground into workable farmland, the innovation that arguably saved the entire colony.

WHAT SURVIVED

A Welsh valley, still there, a century and a half later

It worked, eventually, towns grew along the Chubut Valley: Trelew, Rawson (now the provincial capital, built on the site of the original earthen fort the settlers called Yr Hen Amddiffynfa), Gaiman and later Trevelin further inland. Around 30 Welsh Protestant chapels once dotted the region, some of which still stand and Trelew still hosts its own annual Eisteddfod.

Gaiman’s old railway station now houses a regional history museum dedicated to the Welsh settlement and Chubut province today estimates somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 people still speak Welsh, learned at home, in chapel or through Welsh-Spanish bilingual schools that continue to operate. It remains, remarkably, the only natural community of Welsh speakers anywhere outside Wales itself.

WHERE TO GO IN WALES

Bala, where the whole idea started

You don’t need the eight week crossing to find the Welsh end of this story. Michael D. Jones’s house still stands in Bala, directly across the road from the old Coleg y Bala building where he served as principal and the town’s own heritage trail, Tro Trefol Y Bala, weaves his story in alongside Bala’s other claim to fame, Betsi Cadwaladr, the Crimean War nurse, was from here too.

Llyn Tegid, Wales’s largest natural lake, sits right at the edge of town. For the deeper archive, the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth holds an extensive collection of original letters and manuscripts from the Patagonian settlers, including correspondence from Eluned Morgan, one of the colony’s most celebrated Welsh-language writers, alongside a digital exhibition on the whole story that’s freely accessible to the public.

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It’s a strange thing to sit with, a piece of Wales that’s existed on the far side of the world for longer than most of the buildings in this newsletter have stood, kept alive not by the government or the church but by a few thousand families who simply kept speaking the language their grandparents brought with them on a leaking tea-clipper in 1865. Bala is where it began. It’s still, in its own quiet way, where it continues.

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick — Discover Wales · wales.org

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THE SCALE OF IT · Half a mile of horns and noise

The scale of it is hard to picture now. A single drove might contain four hundred cattle and a dozen men, known as porthmyn in Welsh, calling and bellowing the whole way to keep the herd moving and the local farmers warned to get their own stock out of the road. By the early 1800s, something like 25,000 cattle a year were leaving Wales this way, headed for fattening pastures in the Midlands and eventually, the meat markets of London. Smithfield, mostly, though the trade fed towns and fairs the whole length of the route. A journey to London could take a fortnight on foot, animals losing condition the whole way, which is exactly why the system relied on English graziers to fatten them back up before the final sale.

THE SHOEING FIELDS · Iron boots for the walk

Getting an animal that far took real engineering, of a sort. Cattle were shod, properly, with small iron shoes hammered on in fields set aside at the start of each route specifically for the job. Geese, which also travelled this way in enormous numbers, couldn’t take a shoe, so their feet were walked through a mixture of tar and sand instead, left to set into a hard protective pad before the birds set off. It sounds almost too strange to be true, but it’s very well documented.

THE MONEY · How cattle built a bank

Then there’s the money, which is where this story gets important rather than just picturesque. A drover coming home from London with the proceeds of an entire herd’s sale was carrying a small fortune through open country, an obvious target for highwaymen. The solution, worked out gradually through the 1700s, was one of the more overlooked contributions Wales made to British finance: drovers began using letters of credit instead of cash, and some went further and started actual banks.

The most famous, the Bank of the Black Ox, was founded in Llandovery in 1799 by a drover named David Jones specifically to serve the droving trade. It survived, under various names, until Lloyds Bank bought it out in 1909, a century of continuous business built entirely on the back of walking cattle across Wales.

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THE ROADS AND INNS · Still there, if you know where to look

The roads themselves were deliberately wide, sometimes forty to ninety feet across, narrowing to fifteen or twenty yards on open moorland where the terrain gave them no choice, built broad enough for a large herd to move without straying into neighbouring farmland, and lined with grass verges the animals could graze as they went.

Inns grew up at the natural stopping points, offering beer, food and a shoeing field in one stop and some are still standing and still serving drinks today. Y Talbot at Tregaron, gathering point for droves coming out of Cardiganshire, is one of them. So is the old droving route over the Cambrian Mountains between Tregaron and Abergwesyn, fourteen brutal miles across the Elenydd that drovers themselves nicknamed the Welsh Desert, still walkable in full today and now part of a marked long-distance trail.

THE DOGS · The ones who found their own way home

And then there are the dogs, once a drove reached its destination and the drover had sold up, sometimes selling his pony too and taking the coach home if business had gone well, the dog was simply sent back to Wales alone. It would retrace the exact route on its own, stopping at the same inns the drove had used on the way out, where the innkeeper would feed it on credit, settling up with the drover the following year when the next drove came through. It happened often enough to be considered unremarkable at the time.

Documented photographs from the era mostly show collie-type dogs doing this work, though a persistent Welsh tradition credits the corgi too, small enough to duck a kicking hoof and vicious enough to nip a bullock into line and the breed’s whole shape and temperament are often said to trace back to exactly this job, even if the historical record for it is more folklore than photograph.

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The railways ended all of it within a couple of decades once they arrived, cattle trucks doing in hours what used to take weeks on foot. The roads themselves mostly didn’t disappear, plenty survive as farm tracks, footpaths, even sections of modern road that still follow the exact line the drovers wore into the hills two and three hundred years ago, watched the whole way by dogs that already knew how to get themselves home.

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick — Discover Wales · wales.org

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SOUTH STACK

Anglesey

Talk of a lighthouse here goes back to 1665 when a petition for one landed on the desk of Charles II. It actually took until 1809 to actually get built on a tiny islet called Ynys Lawd separated from Holy Island by thirty metres of open water. Before there was a bridge, the only way across was a wooden box on a hemp rope, swung out over the chasm on a pulley. An iron suspension bridge finally arrived in 1828 and what you get today is 400 steps cut straight into the granite cliff face which you have to climb back up afterwards which leads to a crossing that still feels like an event rather than a formality. The light was automated in 1984 and the last keepers, Stanley Booth, Norman Grindle, Dermot Cronin and Peter Halil, left for good that September.

STRUMBLE HEAD

Pembrokeshire

This was one of the last lighthouses built anywhere in Britain, it wasn’t lit until 1908 and is on its own small island called Ynys Meicel. It replaced a full lightship that had been anchored out in Cardigan Bay and it needed to as over sixty vessels went down on this stretch of coast during the nineteenth century alone, the lighthouse could easily have come decades sooner than it did. The original lens weighed four and a half tons and turned in a bath of mercury to cut the friction. Today, the water below is one of the best places in Wales to watch for dolphins, porpoises and grey seals which haul out to pup on the rocks every autumn.

NASH POINT

Vale of Glamorgan

Nash Point isn’t one lighthouse, it’s two built 300 metres apart on the same clifftop in under a year, they were finished in September 1832. If you lined the two towers up then a ship knew it was on the safe course through the Bristol Channel, if you see them side by side instead it needed to change direction fast. It took the wreck of the steam packet Frolic in 1831, when more than fifty people drowned to finally push Trinity House into building them. The shorter tower was decommissioned in the 1920s but the taller one kept working and kept its keepers longer than anywhere else in Wales, the last two left in August 1998. You can still hear the foghorn today, which is a enormous double-horned diaphone and is sounded for visitors at 2pm on the first Saturday and third Sunday of every month.

POINT OF AYR

Talacre, Flintshire

This one’s been out of action for longer than it was ever in it. Built in 1776 to warn ships heading into the mouth of the Dee, it’s the oldest lighthouse in Wales, it was built for a brutal reason. Two Dublin ferries were lost near here with more than 200 people between them. It stopped working as a light in 1844, replaced first by a newer tower and then in 1883 by a lightship anchored out in the estuary instead. What’s left stands on Talacre beach rather than on any rock or headland, leaning slightly from decades of subsidence, privately owned since it sold for £90,000 in 2012. At low tide you can walk right out to its base across the open sand. Locals will tell you it’s haunted by a former keeper named Raymond.

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WHITEFORD POINT

Gower

Save this one for a good low tide, because it’s the only way you’ll ever reach it. Built in 1865 by John Bowen of Llanelli to mark the shifting shoals of the Loughor Estuary, it’s the only large wave swept cast iron lighthouse left standing anywhere in Britain and one of just two left in the world. Eighty eight wooden piles were driven into glacial moraine at low water, which was the only window builders had to work in and the cast iron plates were bolted together on the outside rather than the inside, an unusual choice but it made the construction go faster in a place where the sea only ever gave you a few hours at a time. It went dark in 1920, then local yachtsmen clubbed together in the 1980s to have it relit as they were worried that boats kept finding the shoals the hard way. Getting there today means a walk of several miles across Whiteford Sands, past wild ponies and saltmarsh, timed carefully around the tide.

What strikes you going through all five is how differently “danger” got answered each time. South Stack needed cliffs and steps and nerve, while Strumble Head needed sheer size and reach. Nash Point needed two towers instead of one and Point of Ayr got built, then abandoned, then left to lean quietly into the sand. Whiteford just needed to survive being hit by the sea, over and over, for over a century and a half and it has.

Five different problems, five completely different solutions, all still standing on the same coastline.

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick — Discover Wales · wales.org

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CAERPHILLY: The one with its own weather system:

Caerphilly Castle covers thirty acres and is the largest castle in Wales and it’s the second largest in the whole of Britain, only Windsor castle is bigger. It’s three times the size of the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, which is seven and a half miles down the road.

Gilbert de Clare built it from 1268 as he was worried about the rising power of the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, which meant he needed something truly formidable and what he ended up with was the first fully concentric castle in Britain, with walls within walls and the whole thing ringed by artificial lakes that took as much engineering as the fortress itself.

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In 1270, Llywelyn attacked the still unfinished castle and burned its defences to the ground, forcing de Clare to start the work over again from 1271. By the eighteenth century the water defences had dried up and the whole place had slid into disrepair, it took until 1950 for the castle to be gifted to the nation and the lakes to be deliberately re-flooded.

Its best loved feature today is the leaning south east tower which are tilted further than Pisa’s and nobody’s 100% sure why. Ground subsidence from the water defences is the most cited explanation but plenty of historians point instead to Parliamentary forces deliberately undermining it during the Civil War in the 1640s, which was part of a wider effort to “slight” the castle and make it useless to any future royalist garrison.

CAERNARFON: The one built to be looked at

Edward I built Caernarfon when he wanted Wales to know who was in charge and eight hundred years later it still radiates that intention. It was raised on the site of an old Roman fort and modelled on the walls of Constantinople, with it’s banded, polygonal towers unlike anything else in the Edward I “Iron Ring,” it was designed to not just be a fortress but also a seat of government. The Eagle Tower has walls eighteen feet thick and three separate turrets and was built for the royalty who slept there in a level of comfort the rest of the castle was never meant to offer.

The first English Prince of Wales was born here in 1284 and it’s where both the 1911 and 1969 investitures of the Prince of Wales took place, the 1969 ceremony was broadcast to millions of people and is now part of the castle’s own exhibition. It’s part of the same UNESCO World Heritage Site as Conwy, Beaumaris and Harlech and is one of the most recognisable skylines in Wales.

PEMBROKE: The one with a cave underneath it.

Arnulf de Montgomery built the first fortification here in 1093 and successive builders expanded it into the vast Norman stronghold that survives today, its keep rises seventy five feet with walls up to twenty feet thick at the base. It’s the only castle in Britain built directly over a natural cavern, which is called Wogan’s Cavern and is cut into the limestone beneath the castle and was used for centuries as a boat store and a last line of defence, it’s now home to a small colony of pipistrelle bats and is open to visitors who don’t mind ducking.

Henry VII was born here in 1457 and while Pembroke likes to claim the “birthplace of the Tudor dynasty” title outright, he wasn’t the only English king born on Welsh soil, Edward II arrived at Caernarfon in 1284 and Henry V was born at Monmouth Castle around 1386. What makes Pembroke’s claim to fame stand up is that Henry VII is the only one of the three who founded a royal dynasty. It fell to Oliver Cromwell in 1648 after a seven week siege and was one of the last strongholds in Britain to hold out for the king. It stood in ruins for two and a half centuries before restoration work began in the early 1900s to bring it back from collapse.

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Caerphilly is big in area, an engineering feat spread across thirty flooded acres. Caernarfon is big in intent, a castle built to be a statement as much as a stronghold. Pembroke is big in time, nine hundred years of continuous use stacked on top of a cave that’s older than all of it.

Three completely different reasons to feel small standing at the gate.

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick — Discover Wales · wales.org

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Five of them below, one in each corner of the country.

CARN INGLI · Mountain of Angels

In the Preseli Hills above Newport, there’s a mountain called Carn Ingli, the Mountain of Angels, named for a sixth century saint who is supposed to have climbed it to sit and talk with them. It’s an extinct volcano and the whole summit is ringed with the tumbled walls of an Iron Age hillfort, with hut circles still pressed into the grass where a community lived and worked. The climb is short and steep, but the reward when you get to the the top is the entire Preseli range laid out around you, the same hills the Stonehenge bluestones came from and on a clear day the whole sweep of Newport Bay below.

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KENFIG · The town the sand took

Down on the coast near Bridgend, Kenfig looks at first glance like nothing much, it has dunes, a lake and the Port Talbot steelworks smoking away on the horizon. There was a town here once called Kenfig, with its own castle and its own borough charter and over about two centuries the sand simply took it, grain by grain, until the whole place was gone and everyone who’d lived there had to leave. What’s left is one of the best dune systems in Europe and more of Britain’s fen orchids than anywhere else in the country.

LOGGERHEADS · A gorge that used to ring with lead

Loggerheads in Denbighshire sits in a wooded gorge below limestone cliffs that used to ring with lead mining. You can still trace the old leats through the trees if you look. At the centre of it all stands Pentre Mill, an eighteenth century corn mill that worked right up until the 1940s and is currently being carefully brought back from the edge of ruin. Two trails lead out from there, one easy and level along the river and one that climbs to the top of the cliffs above Devil’s Gorge where on a summer weekend you’ll likely find climbers picking their way up the rock face while everyone else eats sandwiches below.

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NANT GWRTHEYRN · The village the quarry left behind

Nant Gwrtheyrn is a village at the bottom of a valley so steep the road down does it in hairpin bends at a gradient that makes you check your brakes twice before committing to it. Quarrymen built it in the 1860s to cut granite, the quarry closed at the start of the Second World War, the families left and for a while in the sixties it sat empty and half wild until a hippy commune moved in and then moved out again. It’s now home to the Wales’s National Welsh Language and Heritage Centre and the free exhibition inside walks you through all of it, the quarrying, the abandonment and one cottage kept exactly as it would have looked in 1910. Walk out the other side and the coast path carries on to a twelfth century pilgrims church at Pistyll.

THE PRECIPICE WALK · A view you didn’t earn the hard way

The last one is the Precipice Walk, just north of Dolgellau, which despite the name involves no precipice climbing. It’s a three mile loop across the Nannau estate, opened to the public back in 1890 and never closed since, it circles a small reservoir called Llyn Cynwch before curling along the hillside to a view that takes in the entire Mawddach Estuary, Cadair Idris to the south, the Rhinogydd to the west, Eryri itself away to the north. It has a two hour walk that leaves you feeling like you’ve earned something.

A few of the car parks charge a modest £1 to £4 depending how long you stay, but Carn Ingli genuinely costs nothing. Worth knowing before you go, every one of them is a better use of a day than most things with a price tag on them.

If you’ve got a favourite free corner of Wales that never makes the lists, hit reply. I’m already collecting for the next one.

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick — Discover Wales · wales.org

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Wales has four islands like this open to visitors by boat: places with their own weather, their own rules and often their own centuries of history that the mainland never quite absorbed. None of them require more than a short crossing. None of them are as well known as they should be.

Fifteen minutes from Martin’s Haven, Pembrokeshire.

Skomer holds one of the most important seabird colonies in Britain, including more than 40,000 Atlantic puffins at peak season and over 300,000 breeding pairs of Manx shearwater, more than half the world’s population. Visitor numbers are capped at 250 a day to protect the ground nesting birds and bookings for the following season open every 1st December, with the popular months routinely selling out within days.

Puffins begin arriving in mid April and are gone by the end of July, so this is very much a spring visit rather than a late summer one. There is no cafe on the island itself, only a small kiosk at the mainland lodge and the only toilets are compost ones at the old farmhouse.

RAMSEY

Twenty minutes from St Justinian’s, near St Davids.

Ramsey is an RSPB reserve a mile off the St Davids peninsula and is separated from the mainland by Ramsey Sound, where the tidal race known locally as the Bitches runs fast enough to draw its own audience of watchers from the cliff path above. Cliffs here rise to 120 metres and hold breeding peregrines and one of the largest chough populations in Wales, a red-billed, red-legged crow found almost nowhere else in Britain.

Late summer is the strongest time to visit. Grey seals haul out on Ramsey’s beaches from late August through October to give birth and the island holds one of the UK’s largest colonies, harbour porpoise are a regular sighting in the Sound itself.

CALDEY

Twenty minutes from Tenby harbour.

Caldey has been continuously inhabited since the Stone Age and has held a monastic community in one order or another since Celtic times. The current residents are Cistercian monks, who farm the island and produce the chocolate, shortbread and lavender perfume sold in the village shop. No pre-booking is needed and boats run every fifteen to twenty minutes through the season, tickets can be bought on the day at the harbour kiosk.

Beyond the monastery there is a sandy beach, a lighthouse walk with views to the Gower and on a clear day the Preseli Hills. There is a chanted daily office in the abbey church that visitors can attend if they check the time at the gift shop.

BARDSEY (YNYS ENLLI)

Twenty to thirty minutes from Porth Meudwy, near Aberdaron.

This is the island the sixth century pilgrims were headed for and it is still the hardest of the four to reach on your own terms. The crossing runs through Bardsey Sound, which can turn quickly and the boat, run by Colin Evans of Mordaith Llŷn, doesn’t always go. There is no online booking system as such, a recorded phone message the evening before confirms whether the following day’s crossings are running.

Bardsey was designated Europe’s first International Dark Sky Sanctuary in 2023. Visitors get around four hours ashore among grey seals, Manx shearwaters and the ruins of a 13th-century abbey tower, with a landing fee of £7.50 per adult payable directly to the Bardsey Island Trust on arrival. No dogs are permitted, to protect the nesting birds.

THE ONES MOST PEOPLE MISS

Beyond the four above, Wales has a second tier of islands that rarely make it into a guidebook, mostly because you don’t land on them or you only reach them for a few hours a day or nobody’s quite got round to running a proper ferry. They’re stil worth knowing about.

Puffin Island (Ynys Seiriol) sits off the eastern tip of Anglesey at the mouth of the Menai Strait. Landing isn’t permitted (it’s privately owned, and holds the ruins of a monastery founded by Saint Seiriol) but boat trips circle it from Beaumaris and Menai Bridge between April and August, past one of the largest nesting cormorant colonies in the UK, a resident grey seal colony and yes, puffins.

Worm’s Head, at the western tip of the Gower is a tidal island rather than a boat trip, a rocky spine that the Vikings thought looked like a sleeping dragon (the name comes from the Old English for sea serpent). It’s reached on foot across a causeway that’s only safe to cross for two and a half hours either side of low tide and the outer section closes every year from 1 February to 31 July to protect nesting seabirds. Dylan Thomas got caught out by the tide here and had to spend the night. Check tide times before you go.

Grassholm is eleven miles off the Pembrokeshire coast and holds one of the largest gannet colonies in the world, around 30,000 to 40,000 breeding pairs packed onto an island so thick with birds it looks snow covered from the water. No landing is allowed. The boat trip out from Pembrokeshire Islands or Falcon Boats is a half day affair through open water, with a decent chance of dolphins, porpoise and in recent seasons, the odd whale.

Flat Holm, out in the Bristol Channel from Cardiff Bay has been a monastery, a Victorian fort and a cholera hospital in its time and is now a nature reserve with its own grey seal colony and one of the largest lesser black-backed gull colonies in Britain. Cardiff Cruises run day trips from Penarth through the barrage, the landing fee payable in cash to the warden on arrival.

BEFORE YOU BOOK

All four crossings are weather dependent and all four operators mean it when they say so. Build a spare day into the itinerary if the island is the point of the trip, particularly for Bardsey and Skomer and on Skomer and Ramsey, keep bags sealed for the crossing, it’s part of the biosecurity work that keeps rats off islands that have spent decades getting rid of them.

QUICK REFERENCE

Skomer: Martin’s Haven SA62 3BH · pembrokeshire-islands.co.uk · Apr-Sep, puffins Apr-Jul

Ramsey: St Justinian’s, St Davids · ramseyisland.co.uk · Apr-Oct, seal pups Aug-Oct

Caldey: Tenby Harbour · caldeyislandwales.com · Apr-Oct, Mon-Sat

Bardsey (Ynys Enlli): Porth Meudwy, near Aberdaron LL53 8DA · enlli.org · Apr-Sep

Puffin Island (Ynys Seiriol): boat trips from Beaumaris/Menai Bridge · no landing · Apr-Aug

Worm’s Head: Rhossili, Gower · causeway walk, 2.5hrs either side of low tide · outer head closed Feb-Jul

Grassholm: boat trips from Pembrokeshire · no landing · gannet colony, half-day trip

Flat Holm: Cardiff Cruises from Penarth · cash landing fee on arrival · seasonal sailings

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick - Discover Wales · wales.org

Wales has 870 miles of continuous coastline on the Wales Coast Path and a tidal boundary of around 1,680 miles when you include Anglesey. Most of it’s accessible by road. A big portion of it is acces…

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None of this is a reason not to climb it. But Wales has dozens of mountains that match or exceed Snowdon for the quality of the experience, and most of them are almost empty by comparison.

The five walks below cover north Wales, mid Wales and the south. Each one is a full day out. Each one has something Snowdon cannot offer, either solitude, a more dramatic approach, or a view that encompasses Snowdon itself.

CADAIR IDRIS VIA THE MINFFORDD PATH

Circular route from Dôl Idris · 9.6km · 900m ascent · 5–6 hours

Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park, Gwynedd

Parking: Dôl Idris car park, LL36 9AJ

Cadair Idris is the mountain that belongs to Welsh mythology in a way Snowdon does not. The name means Chair of Idris - Idris being a giant whose chair is the summit ridge, and whose cauldron is the glacial lake of Llyn Cau cupped below the cliffs. The legend holds that anyone who sleeps on the summit overnight wakes either a poet or a madman.

The Minffordd Path is the finest route up. It begins in mixed woodland at the Dôl Idris car park, rises steeply through a gorge beside a stream, and emerges dramatically above the treeline onto the ridge above Llyn Cau. The lake sits in a natural amphitheatre on three sides, with steep cliffs above, the dark water below, the path contouring above it. It is one of the best moments on any mountain walk in Wales.

From the lake the path climbs to the summit at Penygadair (893 metres), then descends via the subsidiary peak of Mynydd Moel on the circular return. The full circular route is 9.6km with around 900 metres of ascent. Allow five to six hours. The path is well marked but the final section to the summit can be tricky to follow in low cloud, cairns guide the way.

The view from the summit, on a clear day, takes in the Llŷn Peninsula, Cardigan Bay, the Preseli Hills, the Cambrian Mountains and Snowdon itself to the north.

Practical: Dôl Idris car park LL36 9AJ, pay-and-display. Seasonal toilets and visitor centre at the car park. Dogs allowed on leads. The T2 bus between Aberystwyth and Bangor stops at Minfford, so a car-free day is possible.

MOEL SIABOD VIA DAEAR DDU RIDGE

Circular from Pont Cyfyng · 11km · 700m ascent · 5–7 hours

Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park, Gwynedd

Parking: Layby on A5 at Pont Cyfyng, SH735571

Moel Siabod stands alone at the eastern edge of the Snowdonia massif, separated from the main range and offering something no other mountain in north Wales can quite match: a view that takes in thirteen of the fourteen highest peaks in Wales without turning your head.

The route from Pont Cyfyng, just outside Capel Curig, is the best approach. It begins with a track through an old slate quarry, passes the mountain lake of Llyn y Foel, and then climbs the Daear Ddu Ridge which is a Grade 1 scramble, meaning hands are needed on rock for a short section, but nothing technical enough to require climbing experience. The scramble is entirely optional; a path around it exists for those who prefer not to use their hands.

The summit stands at 872 metres. The descent via the north-east ridge is a long, satisfying walk back down to Capel Curig, with the valley and the A5 coming gradually into view below.

Moel Siabod’s relative isolation is the point. The path sees a fraction of the traffic of the main Snowdon routes. On weekdays in summer it is possible to reach the summit and find nobody else there.

Practical: Park in the layby on the A5 at Pont Cyfyng (grid ref SH735571). No facilities at the start — Capel Curig has a café and pub a short walk west. Dogs welcome. Allow six to seven hours for the full circular.

PEN Y FAN VIA THE BRECON BEACONS HORSESHOE

Circular from Neuadd · 15km · 800m ascent · 6–7 hours

Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park, Powys

Parking: Neuadd car park, CF48 2UT

Pen y Fan is the highest mountain in southern Britain at 886 metres. Most people reach it via the Pont ar Daf car park on the A470 via a route locally known as the Motorway, for reasons that become self-evident in July.

The Horseshoe is what the mountain deserves. Starting from the Neuadd car park in the Taf Fechan forest, a long drive from the A470 through single-track lanes, which is exactly why it is quiet. The route climbs to Craig Fan Ddu ridge, traverses west along the escarpment edge to Corn Du and Pen y Fan, then crosses to Cribyn and Fan y Big before descending back to the valley.

The four summits in a horseshoe arc around the Taf Fechan glacial valley. The north-facing cliffs of Pen y Fan drop vertically below the summit trig point. The Lower Neuadd Reservoir sits in the valley floor below. On a clear day the Bristol Channel is visible to the south. The Brecon town and the hills of mid-Wales fill the north.

The Neuadd car park is free. The car park on the A470 is frequently full by 9am in summer. This alone is a good reason to take the longer approach.

Practical: Neuadd car park CF48 2UT — free. No facilities at the car park. Follow the single-track road past Pontsticill Reservoir. Allow six to seven hours for the full horseshoe. Take a map — the Ordnance Survey OL12 covers the central Beacons.

THE ARANS: ARAN FAWDDWY FROM LLANUWCHLLYN

Out and back · 16km · 850m ascent · 6–7 hours

Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park, Gwynedd and Powys border

Parking: Llanuwchllyn village, LL23 7UB

Aran Fawddwy stands at 905 metres and is the highest mountain in Wales south of Snowdon, and one of the least visited peaks in Eryri. It sits on the Gwynedd-Powys border above the Dyfi Valley, at the southern end of a ridge that culminates at Aran Benllyn above Bala Lake to the north.

The walk from Llanuwchllyn, the small village at the southern end of Bala Lake climbs steadily through farmland before gaining the ridge and following it south to the summit. The approach is long and the path is less well-defined in places than on more popular mountains. This is not the walk for first-time mountain walkers. For experienced walkers, it is one of the quietest and most rewarding summit days in Wales.

The view from Aran Fawddwy is a revelation. The Dyfi Valley spreads below to the south. Cadair Idris stands to the south-west. Snowdon and the main Eryri peaks fill the northern horizon. Bala Lake is directly below to the east. The pass of Bwlch y Groes — the second highest road pass in Wales is visible in the valley between the ridges.

Practical: Park in Llanuwchllyn village, LL23 7UB. The Bala Lake Railway stops at Llanuwchllyn — a car-free approach is possible from Bala. Check access notices at the start of the path, which passes through private farmland on agreed permissive routes. A compass and OS map are strongly recommended — OS Explorer OL23 covers the area.

MYNYDD DU (THE BLACK MOUNTAIN): FAN BRYCHEINIOG

Out and back from Llyn y Fan Fach · 12km · 600m ascent · 4–5 hours

Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park, Powys and Carmarthenshire

Parking: Llyn y Fan Fach car park, SA19 9UN

The Black Mountain is the western massif of the Brecon Beacons National Park, is a broad, flat-topped plateau edged by dramatic north-facing escarpment cliffs. It is entirely different in character from Pen y Fan, fifteen miles to the east. Where Pen y Fan is steep, pointed and crowded, the Black Mountain is wild, trackless and almost always quiet.

The approach from the Llyn y Fan Fach car park is the finest route. The path climbs gently to the lake, itself the setting for one of the great Welsh legends, the Lady of the Lake and then rises steeply up the escarpment to the plateau above. The summit of Fan Brycheiniog stands at 802 metres. The rim of the escarpment, running east and west from the summit, gives one of the longest and most open ridge walks in the south of Wales.

The plateau above the lake is peat bog and grassland, pathless in places, and navigation requires map and compass in mist. This is not a mountain for an inexperienced walker in poor visibility. In clear weather, with the escarpment edge to follow and the view south across Carmarthenshire laid out below, it is one of the finest half-days on any mountain in south Wales.

Practical: Llyn y Fan Fach car park SA19 9UN — small, fills quickly on weekends. Alternative parking at Llanddeusant village. Allow four to five hours. OS Explorer OL12 covers this area.

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QUICK REFERENCE

Cadair Idris (Minffordd): LL36 9AJ · 9.6km · 900m ascent · 5–6hrs · Pay-and-display

Moel Siabod (Pont Cyfyng): SH735571 · 11km · 700m ascent · 5–7hrs · Free layby

Pen y Fan (Horseshoe): CF48 2UT · 15km · 800m ascent · 6–7hrs · Free car park

Aran Fawddwy (Llanuwchllyn): LL23 7UB · 16km · 850m ascent · 6–7hrs · Village parking

Fan Brycheiniog (Llyn y Fan Fach): SA19 9UN · 12km · 600m ascent · 4–5hrs · Small car park

OS Maps: OL23 (Cadair Idris/Arans) · OL17 (Snowdonia) · OL12 (Brecon Beacons)

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For more walking inspiration, including family walks, waterfall trails, accessible routes and the full Wales Coast Path, I’ve put together the Ultimate Guide to Walking in Wales on the website.

It covers everything from a ten-minute stroll to Swallow Falls to the 870-mile Wales Coast Path, with specific start points, distances, parking and accessibility notes throughout.

Read it at: wales.org/things-to-do-in-wales/adventures-and-activities/walking/

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick — Discover Wales · wales.org

P.S. If you are planning a trip to Wales this summer, Sykes Cottages are running a summer sale with up to 40% off holiday cottages and some of them are right here in Wales. Availability runs through to the end of August.

Browse the sale here: Sykes Summer Sale

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Wales is a country that takes its mythology seriously. Not in the way that heritage centres take things seriously, like leaflets, laminated signs or gift shop dragons. But in the way that places and names carry stories that have been told and retold for a thousand years and more, so that you cannot walk past a lake or a hillfort or a churchyard without knowing there is something underneath the surface.

The five stories below are all tied to real places you can visit. Some of the stories are ancient. Some are older than ancient. One is a beautiful fraud, perpetrated by a hotel owner in 1793, that succeeded so well it is now impossible to untangle from the landscape it invented itself into.

MAEN LLIA

Fforest Fawr, Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons), Powys, LD3 8SU

OS Grid: SN924192 · Roughly 60 metres from the road · Free

Maen Llia is a standing stone on open moorland above the Llia Valley, a few miles north of Ystradfellte in the heart of the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park. It is 3.7 metres high, 2.8 metres wide, and roughly diamond-shaped, it’s a single slab of Old Red Sandstone conglomerate that probably dates from the Bronze Age, somewhere between 2500 and 1800 BC. A quarter to a third of the stone is below ground. Whatever moved the people who built it to haul it up a hillside and stand it upright, the answer is not recorded.

The legend is simple. Whenever a cock crows, Maen Llia walks down to the River Nedd to drink. A second version says the stone visits the River Mellte on Midsummer morning. A third says it walks to the Afon Llia, the stream that runs through the valley immediately below. One explanation for the story, offered without much conviction is that when the sun is low on the horizon, the stone casts a shadow long enough to reach the river. Which is not really an explanation at all.

The stone does not stand alone. A low heather-covered henge sits 240 metres to the south-west. A recumbent stone row lies 60 metres to the south. A cairn stands 300 metres to the south-east. Together they form a precise geometric arrangement on the moorland, a pattern that suggests this was not a casual choice of location. What the pattern meant, or what happened here, nobody knows.

Maen Llia sits just off the Sarn Helen road, the ancient trackway that the Romans later surfaced and used to move troops across Wales. It is around 60 metres from a roadside layby. You can be standing next to it in two minutes. The moorland around it, and the silence, take longer to absorb.

Practical: LD3 8SU for the approach road. Take the minor road north from Ystradfellte toward Heol Senni. Stone is on the right, 75 metres from the layby. No facilities. Boggy in wet weather. Free, open access.

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GELERT AND THE FAITHFUL HOUND

Beddgelert, Gwynedd, LL55 4YD

Gelert’s Grave: 10-minute walk from the village car park · Free

The name Beddgelert means Gelert’s Grave.

The story goes that Llywelyn the Great, Prince of Gwynedd, went hunting one day and left his baby son in the care of his favourite hound, Gelert, a gift from King John of England. He returned to find the nursery overturned, blood everywhere, and Gelert standing over the wreckage with a blood-soaked muzzle. Llywelyn drew his sword and killed the dog. As Gelert fell, a baby cried. The child was unharmed, beneath the overturned cradle. Beside him was a dead wolf, killed by Gelert defending the boy. Llywelyn buried his dog with great ceremony, and was said never to smile again.

There is a grave. There are two slate memorial stones beside the River Glaslyn, telling the story in Welsh and English. Thousands of people visit each year. It is a beautiful, mournful walk along the river to reach it.

The story is almost certainly invented. The most widely accepted account is that David Pritchard, the landlord of the Royal Goat Inn in Beddgelert, created the grave in 1793 to attract visitors, by merging a local legend about a dog called Cilhart with the historical figure of Llywelyn, and then raising a cairn he presented as ancient. He also invented the name Gelert. It worked beyond anything he could have hoped. The village name almost certainly refers to Saint Celert, an early Celtic Christian, not to any dog.

There are similar stories from India, from France, from Hungary. The tale of the faithful hound who saves a child and is killed before his master understands what happened exists in dozens of cultures.

None of this diminishes the walk, or the place, or the fact that Beddgelert is one of the most beautiful villages in Wales. The grave is peaceful. The river is clear. The mountains above are as real as they ever were.

Practical: LL55 4YD. Park in the village. Follow signs to Gelert’s Grave — ten minutes on a flat path along the River Glaslyn. The Welsh Highland Railway stops at Beddgelert.

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BRANWEN, DAUGHTER OF LLYR

Bedd Branwen, Llanddeusant, Ynys Môn (Anglesey), LL65 4LD area

Near the village of Llanddeusant · Free, open access

From the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, which is the oldest prose literature in Britain, passed down orally for centuries before being written down in the eleventh century comes one of the most affecting stories in Welsh mythology.

Branwen is the daughter of Llŷr, King of Britain, and sister of Bendigeidfran, a giant. She is given in marriage to Matholwch, King of Ireland, in an attempt to forge peace between the two islands. The marriage goes wrong almost immediately: her half-brother Efnisien mutilates the Irish horses in a fury at not being consulted, and the Irish king, to satisfy his nobles, sends Branwen to work in the kitchens, the queen reduced to a servant, beaten by the butcher, forbidden from sending letters home.

Branwen befriends a starling. She teaches it to recognise her brother and, after three years, attaches a letter to its wing and sends it across the Irish Sea to Bendigeidfran. The giant king wades across the sea as he is too large for any ship and lays himself across the River Shannon for his army to cross on his back. The war that follows kills almost everyone. The Irish dead are revived by a magic cauldron. Efnisien destroys the cauldron by throwing himself inside it and bursting it, killing himself. Bendigeidfran is mortally wounded. His severed head is carried back to Britain, still alive, still speaking, for eighty years. Branwen returns to Wales. She stands on the shore of Anglesey, looks at the destruction caused on her account, and dies of a broken heart.

She was buried beside the River Alaw. The site is a Bronze Age ring cairn called Bedd Branwen — Branwen’s Grave on the banks of the Afon Alaw near the village of Llanddeusant. When it was excavated in 1813, a funeral urn containing human remains was found inside. A second excavation in the 1960s found more urns. Whether Branwen existed or not, someone was buried there, a very long time ago.

The cairn is in a field near Llanddeusant, it’s modest, quiet, and almost entirely unmarked. Most visitors to Anglesey have never heard of it. It is worth finding.

OWAIN LAWGOCH AND THE SLEEPING SOLDIERS

Ogof Owain Lawgoch (Owain of the Red Hand’s Cave)

Tradition holds the location in mid-Wales, various sites

Not all Welsh legends have a fixed location. Some drift through the landscape, attaching themselves to different hills and caves in different centuries, which is a kind of survival in itself.

Owain Lawgoch was real. He was Owain ap Thomas ap Rhodri and was the last legitimate male-line descendant of the native Welsh princes who spent his life in France in the service of the French Crown, fighting in wars across Europe, and promising repeatedly to return to Wales and reclaim it from English rule. The Welsh called him Owain Lawgoch: Owain of the Red Hand. His red-handed coat of arms became a symbol of hope for those who still believed Welsh sovereignty could be restored.

He never came back. He was assassinated in 1378 by a Scottish spy in the pay of the English Crown, stabbed while besieging a castle in France. His campaigns in support of Welsh independence were over.

The legend that grew around him is older than Owain himself and was later attached to others, most famously to Arthur but in Wales it has Owain at its centre. He and his soldiers are not dead, the story says. They are sleeping in a cave somewhere in the Welsh hills, waiting to be woken when Wales needs them most. A bell hangs at the entrance to the cave. When someone finds it and rings it, the soldiers will stir. If the finder enters the cave, the soldiers will ask: Is it time? If the answer is no, they will fall back to sleep. If the answer is yes, they will rise.

The cave has not been found. The bell has not been rung. The question has not been asked.

KING LLUDD AND THE FIRST DRAGONS

Llyn Dinas (Dinas Lake), Nant Gwynant, Gwynedd

Walk from the A498 layby · SH 627 493 · Free

Lludd ab Beli Mawr was, according to the Mabinogion tale of Lludd and Llefelys, a king of all Britain, the same king who gave his name to Ludgate Hill in London. He was troubled by three plagues that were destroying his kingdom. The second plague was a hideous scream heard every May Eve across the whole island, causing such terror that men lost their strength, women their children, and the land its fertility.

His brother Llefelys, King of Gaul, told him what was causing it: two dragons fighting underground, the native red dragon of Britain struggling against a white dragon from overseas. Their screams, when the red dragon was losing, shook the whole island.

Llefelys told Lludd how to capture them. He was to measure the island, find its exact centre, dig a pit there, place a cauldron of mead in the pit, and wait. The dragons, exhausted by their fight, would fall into the mead, drink, and sleep. Lludd did this. The dragons drank. They slept. He wrapped them in silk, buried them in a stone chest, and sealed them in the ground at the safest place in all Britain, a hill in Snowdonia that would later be called Dinas Emrys.

This is the older story. Centuries later, Vortigern came to build his fortress on the same hill and found the dragons still sleeping beneath it. Merlin released them. The red dragon won.

Llyn Dinas lies directly below Dinas Emrys, at the floor of Nant Gwynant. The hill where the dragons were buried rises above its southern shore. The lake is dark and still and perfectly positioned to make you understand why King Lludd chose this valley as the safest place in Britain to hide something he needed to keep quiet for a very long time.

The path around the lake takes about forty minutes. On a clear evening, when the mountains reflect in the still water and the light fades off the summit of Dinas Emrys above you, it is a place where old stories feel entirely reasonable.

Practical: Layby on A498, Nant Gwynant. Free. Grid ref SH 627 493. 40-min lakeside path. No facilities.

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Wales is not a country that keeps its stories in museums. They are in the fields, the lakes, the hillsides and the riverbeds. In a stone that walks to the water at dawn. In a grave that was never ancient. In a princess who died on a shoreline having crossed the Irish Sea twice and lost everything both times. In a cave somewhere in the Welsh hills where soldiers have been sleeping for six hundred years, waiting to be asked if it is time.

It is always worth going to look.

Hwyl am y tro.

Nick — Discover Wales · wales.org

P.S. If you prefer your Welsh legends in short form, I cover them on TikTok too, including a video on Castell Dinas Brân that has had over 58,000 views.

Make sure to follow so you never miss one.

Find us at https://www.tiktok.com/@wales_org

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