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The coast here faces west, which sounds like a small thing and is not. It means the sun goes down into the sea rather than behind a hill. The bay itself is far bigger than the county. It runs from Bardsey Island off the north-west tip of Wales down to Strumble Head in Pembrokeshire, and Ceredigion holds the middle of it.

Aberystwyth is the town on it: a university, a promenade, a pier and a working harbour, all inside the same half mile. South of there the coast runs into small harbours at Aberaeron, New Quay and Cardigan. The A487 threads them together, and inland the roads climb quickly into empty hill country.

Aberystwyth is a seaside town at the far end of a very long road, and it holds a copy of very nearly every book published in Britain and Ireland.

When Wales was granted a national library and a national museum by royal charter in 1907, a fierce contest broke out over where the library should go. Aberystwyth beat Cardiff. It won because the university here had already started gathering up important Welsh texts, and because a local landowner offered the ground to build it on. Cardiff got the museum instead.

Then comes the part that is easy to walk past. The building on Penglais Hill was paid for, in part, by ordinary people putting in what they could afford. The Library's first librarian later put the number of contributors at close to a hundred and ten thousand. This was not one rich man's gift to a nation. It was subscriptions.

Work started in 1911 and the first books moved in during 1916.

It is a legal deposit library, and that is the part that matters: it has the right to a copy of everything published in Britain and Ireland. Six and a half million books and periodicals are up that hill, along with the national collection of Welsh manuscripts and the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales.

You can walk in, and it costs nothing. To use the reading rooms you need a reader’s ticket, which is also free — sign up online or at the desk when you arrive. It opens Monday to Saturday and shuts on Sundays. It stands on Penglais Hill above the town, which is a pull on foot but not a long one.

The rest of the county reads as a quiet run of harbour towns and beaches. Then you climb the hill behind Aberystwyth and find the national collection sitting on top of it.

The sea does its share too. Around 250 bottlenose dolphins live in Cardigan Bay, and the Cardigan Bay Marine Wildlife Centre at New Quay records what has been seen each week through the season.

Mwnt, the National Trust cove near Cardigan, holds a Green Coast Award again in 2026. Cilborth, Llanrhystud and Penbryn have one too.