Llantwit Major Accommodation

More About Llantwit Major

Wander the medieval streets below it, where the lanes still follow their old lines. The bakeries and tearooms sell bara brith, a dark fruit loaf, and laverbread, which is boiled seaweed and better than it sounds. At lunchtime walk down the valley to Col-huw beach, which takes about fifteen minutes and ends in cliffs, rock pools and a view across to Somerset.

Afternoons bring coastal path walks: head west along the cliffs to Nash Point Lighthouse, where whitewashed towers guard treacherous reefs, and on to Southerndown’s limestone cliffs and wave-cut platforms. Birdwatchers track seabirds and migrating waders along the shore; photographers capture golden sunsets over the Bristol Channel. As dusk falls, the village pub’s garden offers sea breezes and seafood platters beneath twinkling lights.

Llantwit Major’s story begins in the 6th century, when St Illtud founded a monastic college here. It became a centre of Celtic learning, and students came from across Britain and Ireland to study scripture, art and astronomy.

Carved stones in the church recall that scholarship, some in Latin and some in ogham, an early Irish alphabet cut as notches along the edge of a stone. By the Norman conquest Llantwit had grown into a market town.

What the town calls the castle is Old Place, the ruin of an Elizabethan house standing among the lanes. The medieval street plan survives around it, in narrow lanes that open onto the triangular High Street, where merchants’ houses date to the 15th century. There was a small port at the valley mouth until storms finished it.

In the 19th century drovers’ inns flourished as cattle were driven to Cardiff markets, and the stuccoed fronts from that boom still line West Street. The railway arrived in 1897 and brought Victorian holidaymakers with it.

The stones are the reason to go inside. They stand in the Galilee Chapel at the west end of St Illtud’s, restored and reopened to hold them. It is the finest collection of Celtic crosses and inscribed stones in Wales outside the National Museum, and you can walk straight in. There is no charge to go in.

Col-huw beach is fifteen minutes down the valley and it is worth the walk. It is pebble and rock rather than sand. There are fossils in the cliffs either side, and the RNLI still put lifeguards on it through the summer. You can pick up the Wales Coast Path in both directions from the car park.

St Illtud’s still holds choral evensong and concerts in its Norman nave, and there is a heritage centre in the old school building nearby. Both are a short walk from the triangular High Street, where the pubs and the bakery are.

What is round about is worth a day each. Ogmore Castle is twenty minutes up the coast and has a line of ancient stepping stones crossing the river beside it. Cowbridge and its high street are fifteen minutes inland.