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More About B&Bs in Cardiff and the Vale

On the western edge, St Fagans is a village with a hundred acres of parkland beside it. Radyr sits above the River Taff to the north, and Penarth is south on a cliff with the sea below.

Keep going west and the Heritage Coast starts, with cliff paths that have nobody on them. From any of these the middle of Cardiff is still close.

Penarth was sold to the Victorians as the Garden by the Sea, and it was aimed at people who had had enough of Cardiff air. The trains brought them down for the day and from the Midlands for a fortnight.

That is why a small town has villas of that size. Merchants and dock officials wanted to live above the smoke rather than in it, and the pier went up in 1895 with steamers calling at it from the first week.

It has taken a battering since. The pavilion on the seaward end burned down in 1931. A gale drove a seven-thousand-ton ship into the pier in 1947, and a paddle steamer came out of the fog and hit it in 1966.

All of it is still standing, and the pavilion is a cinema and gallery now with a café at the end of the boards. It is free to walk the length of it, and the Waverley paddle steamer still calls in summer.

Behind it the Esplanade curves round to Penarth Head, where the cliff drops to the mouth of the Ely and you can see the whole of Cardiff Bay laid out. The barrage walk starts from there and takes about forty minutes into the city.

St Fagans, on the western edge, is not a museum with things in cases. It is a hundred acres of parkland with more than forty real buildings standing in it, every one taken down somewhere else in Wales and put back up here.

You walk in through the front doors. The bakehouse sells what comes out of the oven, it costs nothing to get in, and it has been voted the best museum in the United Kingdom.

One row there has six front doors, and each is furnished as a different decade, gardens and all. You step out of one and straight into the next.

The oldest story on the site is told by the newest building on it. Bryn Eryr is an Iron Age farmstead rebuilt from scratch in 2016. It is two round houses inside an earth bank, with a fire in the middle and the smoke finding its own way out.

Around 570,000 people came through the gates in 2025 and none of them paid to get in. Give it a full day if you can, and go on a weekday if you would rather have the place to yourself.