Cardiff B&Bs

More About B&Bs in Cardiff and the Vale

On the western edge of the city, St Fagans is a village with a hundred acres of museum parkland beside it, free to enter. 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 are rarely busy. From any of these the middle of Cardiff is still close, though the Cardiff B&Bs round Cathedral Road and Pontcanna are the ones you can walk to the castle from.

Penarth, the Garden by the Sea

Penarth was sold to the Victorians as the Garden by the Sea, for people who had had enough of Cardiff’s air. Trains brought them for the day from the valleys and for a fortnight from the Midlands. Merchants and dock officials built big villas on the cliff to live above the smoke. Built in 1895, the pier had steamers calling from the first week.

The pier 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.

The pier is still standing. The Art Deco pavilion at the landward end is a cinema and gallery now, and there is a café at the far end. It is free to walk the length of the boards, and the Waverley paddle steamer still calls in summer. From Cardiff B&Bs in the centre, Penarth is fifteen minutes away by train.

Behind the pier the Esplanade curves round to Penarth Head, where you can see the whole of Cardiff Bay laid out. From there the barrage walk takes about forty minutes into the city.

Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, between Penarth and Sully, has two lakes with a level path round them and a medieval village rebuilt on its original foundations. The walls turned up under the brambles while the park was being laid out. The village is free to walk round and open seven days a week.

St Fagans and Llandaff

St Fagans National Museum of History 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, and it costs nothing to get in. From B&Bs in Cardiff it is a short drive west of the city.

One row there has six front doors, and each house is furnished as a different decade, gardens and all. You can walk into Bryn Eryr, an Iron Age farmstead rebuilt in 2016, with two round houses inside an earth bank and a fire in the middle. Go on a weekday if you would rather have the place to yourself.

Llandaff Cathedral, in the suburb of Llandaff a short way from Pontcanna, is free to enter and open daily. A bare concrete arch runs right across the nave with a sixteen-foot aluminium figure of Christ hung on it, put there after a wartime landmine wrecked the old roof.