Bridgend Accommodation

More About Bridgend

Take the children to the dunes at Merthyr Mawr, where the Big Dipper is one of the highest sand dunes in Europe at about 200 feet. Ogmore and Coity castles are both free and a few minutes out. Then choose your coast: Porthcawl for surf, Southerndown and Dunraven for cliffs and rock pools, Ogmore-by-Sea for the estuary.

The position is the whole case. Cardiff is twenty-five minutes east by road or rail and Swansea half an hour west. The Brecon Beacons are about forty-five minutes north, and the Heritage Coast fifteen minutes south. Trains stop here on the main line, and the M4 is at the end of the road.

Two Norman castles came before the town. Oldcastle stood on one bank by about 1100 and Newcastle on the other by 1106, guarding a ford over the Ogmore, with Ogmore Castle downstream from 1116.

For three centuries travellers crossed at the ford between the two. Then, around 1425, somebody built a stone bridge. A town grew at the end of it and took its name from the fact. Bridgend exists because the river was awkward.

Later it lived on wool, then on coal from the valleys behind. The Ogmore still runs through the middle of it, and Newcastle’s Norman gateway still stands on the hill on the west bank, free to walk up to.

What the town is now is a junction, and a good one. Ogmore Castle downstream has a line of stepping stones across the river that people have been crossing since the Middle Ages, and there is a pub on the far bank.

Bryngarw Country Park is three miles north, a hundred and thirteen acres of woodland and a Japanese garden with a visitor centre and a café. The mountain biking is further out, at Afan twenty miles west and Bike Park Wales about the same to the north-east.