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More About Hotels and Inns in Cardiff and the Vale

The stadium sits in among the shops rather than out by a motorway. That is why the city has a particular noise about it on an international day, and why the singing starts a long way from the ground.

North of the centre the ground rises at Thornhill. Llantwit Major sits above the Glamorgan cliffs, and Laleston is in farm country beyond Bridgend.

The castle in the middle of the city belonged to the Bute family, who owned the docks that shipped the coal out. In the 1860s the third Marquess was said to be the richest man in the world.

His father had started it. The second Marquess cut the first dock out of the mud in the 1830s, when Cardiff was a town of ten thousand people. By the time he died in 1848 the coal was coming down the valleys faster than the port could load it.

The son was six months old when he inherited, and came of age in his twenties with more money than he could spend. He found an architect called William Burges who would take him at his word, and between 1868 and Burges’s death in 1881 they held nothing back.

The walls are thick enough to have tunnels running through them, and Cardiff used those as air-raid shelters. Eighteen hundred people could get in at once, and there were bunks and a kitchen down there.

You can walk through them now. The names people scratched on the stone while they waited are still there, and it comes with the ordinary ticket.

Upstairs, one room still has a ceiling of gilded and mirrored glass. There is a roof garden with a tiled fountain, and a room at the top of a tower with a map of the world set into the floor.

The Norman keep is a separate climb up its own mound, and the view from the top takes in the whole city and the hills behind it. Allow two hours for the lot, and more if the house tour is running.

The pair did it again ten minutes north at Castell Coch, where Burges raised a round-towered fantasy on the stump of a medieval ruin in the trees above Tongwynlais. The painted drawing room there is worth the trip on its own, and it is open to visitors.

On a match day you can leave the car where it is. The ground is in among the shops, so you join the crowd at the end of your own street and walk in with them.

The rest of the time the centre is a twenty-minute walk end to end. Trains from Cardiff Central reach the coast, the Valleys and the Vale, which is why a car is optional here in a way it is nowhere else in Wales.