Book Direct | B&Bs & Guest Houses in the Brecon Beacons

More About B&Bs in the Brecon Beacons

Two miles out it crosses the River Usk on a stone aqueduct at Brynich. Four wide arches carry the canal over the top of the river, and boats have been going across since 1800.

Four miles east of the town is Llangorse Lake, a mile long and the largest natural lake in south Wales. Crickhowell and Talybont-on-Usk sit further down the valley, under the ridges.

Walk south out of Brecon along the towpath and you leave the town behind almost straight away. You can do two miles or ten and turn back whenever you like.

Most people walk as far as Talybont-on-Usk. The Taff Trail comes through the village, a walking and cycling route that runs fifty-five miles from Cardiff Bay to Brecon. From there you can carry on up the side valley to Talybont reservoir.

The canal runs thirty-five miles in all, on down through Gilwern and Govilon towards Pontypool. Llangynidr is where the twenty-three lock-free miles end and the first five locks drop it out of the top valley. Everything above them is level, which is why the towpath out of Brecon suits a pushchair as well as a pair of boots.

The canal was cut for coal and limestone, not for holidays. The first boatload of coal reached the basin at Brecon on Christmas Eve in 1800.

Out in Llangorse Lake, about forty yards from the northern shore, there is a small island that was made by hand. Oak planks were driven into the lake bed and packed with stone and brushwood, and a house went on top.

It was built about eleven hundred years ago and it is the only man-made island of its kind anybody has found in Wales. Archaeologists excavated it in the early nineties. They found a piece of very fine cloth, and a bronze hinge from the kind of box made to hold a saint's bones.

Gerald of Wales, a churchman who rode round the country in 1188 setting down what he saw, wrote about the birds on this lake. Time Team filmed the dig on the island in 1993.

You can see the island from the shore path. People still fish here for pike, and the southern side at Llangasty is a nature reserve. Bring binoculars; the birds Gerald noticed are the reason most people walk down there now.