North Wales
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The last Cistercian abbey ever founded in Wales, named after a cross-topped pillar that was already four centuries old when the monks arrived — and once legendary for ale that reportedly flowed like a river.
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A castle built right on the seashore in 1274 now looks out over a mile of dunes and open sand — the coastline has actually retreated 1,000 metres since, and the beach that’s grown in its place is one of the most striking in Wales.
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The oldest independent railway company still operating anywhere in the world, built to carry slate downhill by gravity in 1836, closed for eight years in the 1940s, and rebuilt by volunteers one station at a time until it finally reached its original destination again in 1982.
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Two glacial lakes on the shoulder of Cadair Idris, quiet enough that you can drive right up to the water’s edge and still have the view mostly to yourself — though not, as it turns out, to swim in it.
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A former Royal Marine turned a derelict slate quarry into the world’s fastest zip line in 2013, then kept going — today Zip World runs three genuinely different adventure sites across Eryri, built almost entirely into the region’s old slate industry.
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A village founded around a 6th-century monastery, transformed by a Telford bridge and a colony of Victorian painters into what’s still called the gateway to Snowdonia — waterfalls, ancient forest and a medieval bridge with a wild swimming spot all within walking distance of the station.
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The most important collection of slate quarrying heritage in Britain, housed in the actual Victorian workshops of the world’s second-largest slate quarry — currently mid-way through a major redevelopment, so here’s what’s actually open right now.
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An Italianate fantasy village on a Welsh estuary, built over 50 years by one architect and made famous by a 1960s spy series — here’s exactly where to find it, and what to know before you go.
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A quiet Anglesey village with 58 letters in its name, a Victorian publicity stunt behind it, and a railway station sign that draws around 200,000 visitors a year purely to have their photo taken next to it.
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Where a king’s son was born, and two future kings were made Prince of Wales six centuries apart — Caernarfon is the grandest of Edward I’s Welsh fortresses.