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The quayside has changed the most. Warehouses that once loaded slate for export now hold places to eat and drink, and boats run downriver from here to look for dolphins and seals. Above the quay the town climbs one long High Street to the Guildhall Market, a covered Victorian market hall built in the 1850s.

Two miles upstream the Teifi narrows into a steep wooded gorge at Cilgerran, with a ruined castle standing on the cliff above it. The Cardigan River and Food Festival takes over the quayside on 15 August 2026.

It is hard to credit standing on the quay now, but Cardigan was once one of the busiest ports in Wales.

In 1815 the town had 314 ships on its register, totalling 12,554 tons. That was seven times as many vessels as Cardiff and three times as many as Swansea, at a point when both were still modest places.

Five yards on the Teifi built the ships, and more than two hundred were launched here and downriver at St Dogmaels. The main cargo out was slate from the quarries at Cilgerran, a few miles upstream, and the main cargo in was everything the county could not make for itself.

The other traffic was people. Emigrant ships left this quay for North America through the middle of the century.

What finished it was silt. The bar across the river mouth built up towards the end of the nineteenth century until only small vessels could get in. The railway took the slate trade, and by the early 1900s the port had all but stopped.

The warehouses are still standing, and most of them now hold somewhere to eat or drink. Boats go downriver from the quay through the season to look for bottlenose dolphins, seals and porpoises.

Above the quay the town runs up one long High Street to the Guildhall Market, a covered Victorian market hall from the 1850s that still trades. Cardigan Castle stands over the old bridge at the bottom of it.

For a base, Cardigan has the advantage of being a working town rather than a resort. It has a supermarket, banks and a bus station. The Mwldan arts centre runs a cinema, which matters if the weather turns and a beach day is off.

The coast is close on both sides. Gwbert and Mwnt are a few miles north along the Ceredigion cliffs, and Poppit Sands is across the river at the start of the Pembrokeshire path.

Poppit Sands, across the river at the start of the Pembrokeshire path, has lifeguards from late June to early September. The advice there is to stay on the main beach and out of the river mouth to the south, where the currents run fast.