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More About Hotels and Inns in Ceredigion

Aberaeron is the one people remember. It was laid out from nothing after an Act of Parliament in 1807, on a grid of wide streets around a square, and the terraces are painted in blocks of colour.

Aberystwyth is bigger and busier, with a promenade curving for most of a mile between a castle ruin and Constitution Hill. Inland the Teifi valley runs back through Llandysul and Lampeter into quiet farming country, and the Cambrian Mountains rise behind that. The sun here goes down into the sea rather than behind a hill.

Long before anyone came to Ceredigion for a holiday, the inns here existed to feed and bed men walking cattle to London.

Droving was the county's biggest trade. Ceredigion was called Cardiganshire until 1974, and Welsh Black cattle were bought right across the south of it, and across Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire too. The herds were gathered at Tregaron, then walked east over the Cambrian Mountains and on into England.

The herds went on the hoof the whole way, hundreds of miles, to be fattened in the Midlands and the counties around London before slaughter. The cattle were shod for it, like horses.

An inn on that road was not a bedroom with a view. What mattered was the field behind it, big enough to hold the herd overnight, and the drovers stopped where there was grass as much as where there was beer.

They carried a great deal of money home, which is why one of the first Welsh banks grew out of the trade. The Black Ox Bank was founded at Llandovery, over the hills in Carmarthenshire, to hold drovers' takings, and it took its name from the cattle.

The railways finished it. Once the cattle could go east by train, from the 1850s onward, the walking stopped and the road inns lost their trade inside a generation.

What saved them was a different kind of traveller arriving on the same railways, and that is broadly the business they are in now.

The Tregaron to Abergwesyn road is still there and still spectacular, a single-track climb over empty hill country with hairpins near the top. It follows the first stage of the old route almost exactly. Go in daylight and in decent weather. It runs fifteen miles on passing places, with no fuel, no shop and very little phone signal, and it is no road for a caravan.

Down on the coast the buildings are grander and later. The Harbourmaster Hotel in Aberaeron is a Georgian building on the quayside, and its kitchen still runs on Cardigan Bay shellfish and Welsh beef and lamb.

Aberystwyth stays the busiest place outside high summer, because the university keeps it going in term time. That means kitchens, bars and music through the winter, when much of the Welsh coast closes down.

Aberystwyth Beer Festival runs across eight venues in the town centre from 21 to 23 August 2026, free to get in, with more than sixty casks on.