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More About Camping and Caravan Parks in the Brecon Beacons

Llanthony Priory stands halfway up the Vale of Ewyas, a long dead-end valley in the Black Mountains, and the ruins are free to walk into from ten until four. A single lane carries on past them and climbs to Gospel Pass at 549 metres, the highest road in Wales. Two hills stand over the top of the pass, Hay Bluff on one side and Twmpa on the other.

West of the Black Mountains, which are the eastern ridges of the park, the ground opens out into the valley of the River Usk. Crickhowell and Brecon are strung along the river, and Talgarth sits a few miles north under the hills. Bronllys has a round stone keep on a mound in the middle of the village, and the door at the bottom is open to anyone.

A Norman knight called William de Lacy came across a ruined chapel in the Vale of Ewyas while out hunting, or so the story goes, and never left. By 1118 a community of canons was living on the spot, monks who followed the rule of Saint Augustine, and the priory they raised is the ruin standing there now.

Henry VIII shut the monasteries down, and Llanthony went with them in 1539. The buildings passed into farm use, and the prior's own cellar became a bar. You can still drink in it. The Cellar Bar at the Llanthony Priory Hotel is a vaulted room inside the priory walls, and it serves food and drink from Tuesday to Sunday. The ruins themselves are open every day.

Bronllys Castle started as an earth mound with a wooden tower, thrown up not long after the Norman conquest of 1066. The stone tower that stands on it now dates from the thirteenth century. The tower was strengthened around 1400, when Owain Glyndŵr's revolt against English rule put every castle on this border on edge.

Talgarth Mill grinds wholemeal flour on French burr stones, a hard quarried stone that millers have always preferred, and you can watch the wheel turn while it does. Trigg's at the Mill serves food from nine until four, Wednesday to Saturday, and until two on a Sunday. The Pobl bakery beside it sells bread and croissants, still warm if you get there before ten.

The Green Man music festival takes over the Glanusk estate outside Crickhowell for four days every August, and the lanes round Crickhowell are busy with it. The rest of the year the town is quiet, with the River Usk running past the bottom of it.

The stairs inside the Bronllys keep run up three floors, and they are steep and narrow, so it is not one for a pushchair. Gospel Pass is single track with passing places, so go early or go late on a fine Sunday. From the top of the pass a path climbs Hay Bluff to the east and another goes up Twmpa to the west, both of them short and steep, with open ground the whole way.