Carmarthen Accommodation

More About Carmarthen

Walk out to the Roman amphitheatre on the edge of the centre, a grassy bowl that once held thousands. It is one of only seven left in Britain. What remains of Merlin’s Oak is at Carmarthenshire Museum, two miles east at Abergwili: the rhyme ran that when it fell, Carmarthen would fall too. It came out of the ground in 1978 and the town is still here.

Everything else is within reach from here. The National Botanic Garden of Wales is fifteen minutes east at Llanarthne. Laugharne is twenty minutes west. The Gower is about an hour, and the trains run west into Pembrokeshire and east to Swansea and Cardiff.

Two things made this town: the Romans and the river. Moridunum was the most westerly regional capital the Romans built in Britain. When they left, the Normans came and raised a castle on the bluff above the Tywi, and the town grew up around it.

Carmarthen became one of the most important boroughs in Wales. In 1353 Edward III made it the sole wool staple for the entire country, which meant that every fleece sold out of Wales had to pass through here first. The town grew rich on other people’s sheep.

Then the river silted and the ships stopped coming. What the Tywi kept was the coracle, a one-man boat of hide stretched over hazel, paddled with one hand while the other works the net. Families along these banks lived off them through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A handful of licensed men still fish the Tywi from coracles every year between March and July, and there are fewer than a dozen licences left in the whole county. It is one of only two coracle fisheries left in Wales. The other is on the Teifi, and the boat has barely changed shape in two thousand years.

The market is the other survivor, and it still fills the covered hall six days a week. Wednesday is the day the county comes in. You can buy cockles gathered off the estuary, cheese made up the Tywi valley, and second-hand books by the yard.

Everything else worth seeing is within twenty minutes of the old bridge over the Tywi at the bottom of the town. The gardens are east up the valley, Laugharne and its estuary are west, and the sands at Llansteffan are straight down the river and rarely busy.