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More About the Brecon Beacons

Pen y Fan stands in the middle of it, and at just under three thousand feet it is the highest ground in southern Britain. Most people who come here climb it.

There is more here than the one mountain. A canal runs flat out of Brecon for twenty-three miles, and Llangorse Lake is four miles east of the town. The far end of the park is all wooded gorges and waterfalls.

The towns sit close together and one base covers the lot. Brecon to Crickhowell is fourteen miles along the A40, and Crickhowell to Abergavenny another six, so you can reach any of them quickly.

Abergavenny is the only one of the three with a railway station, which matters if you would rather not drive down.

There is a granite obelisk on the ridge below Corn Du, the summit next to Pen y Fan. Most people walking up still go straight past it.

On 4 August 1900 a miner from Maerdy, a mining village thirty miles south, brought his five-year-old son Tommy to his grandparents' farm under Pen y Fan. Tommy ran on ahead and never arrived.

His family and the soldiers camped nearby searched for twenty-nine days. Then a woman living north of Brecon dreamed of the spot, and she and her husband went up and found the boy's body. He had climbed thirteen hundred feet, and nobody has ever explained how.

Every juror at the inquest handed over his fee to a memorial fund, and the obelisk went up the following year, in 1901.

It is still up there, and it is worth knowing why. Pen y Fan looks like an afternoon out on a clear morning, and that is how the weather catches people out.

Not everything here needs boots. The Brecon Mountain Railway runs a steam train out of Pant, three miles north of Merthyr Tydfil, up the side of the reservoir at Pontsticill. It runs from spring to the start of November, and there is a café and a play area at the Pontsticill stop.

Llangorse Lake is four miles east of Brecon and you can sail or paddle on it. Each of the three towns is worth a morning on its own: the market hall at Abergavenny, the high street at Crickhowell, and the cathedral above the streets at Brecon.

The nights here are worth staying up for. The whole park is an International Dark Sky Reserve. The lighting round it is controlled to keep the sky black, and you can see more stars than you get at home.