Llangollen Accommodation

More About Llangollen

It is a walkable town of grey stone and steep side streets. The ruins of Castell Dinas Brân stand on a cone of a hill above it, a thousand feet up, and the Berwyn moors rise behind that.

The steam railway runs ten miles west up the valley from the station beside the bridge. East of the town the canal goes the other way, flat and quiet, out towards Telford’s aqueduct four miles along.

The town takes its name from St Collen, whose church still stands at its centre, and it grew up around the crossing of the Dee. Llan is the Welsh word for the ground enclosed around a church, and it begins a great many Welsh place names once you start noticing it.

A mile up the valley are the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey, founded in 1201 by Madog ap Gruffydd, prince of Powys Fadog. It was the last Cistercian house established in Wales, and it stood for three hundred years until the dissolution swept it away in 1537.

The name means valley of the cross. The cross it refers to still stands in the next field: the Pillar of Eliseg, a broken stone column raised in the ninth century by a king of Powys. The inscription on it named his great-grandfather and it is now almost entirely worn away.

Llangollen’s wider fame arrived twice, a century and a half apart. In 1778 two Irishwomen set up house on the edge of the town and half of literary Britain came to call on them. Then in 1947 the town invited the world to come and sing, and the world came.

The river is the middle of everything today. You can watch canoeists work the rapids from the bridge, or walk the towpath east towards the aqueduct on the flat. Horse-drawn boats still run along the canal from the wharf above the town.

The steam railway runs west up the valley towards Corwen and it is the reason a good many people come at all. Valle Crucis stands a mile out and you can see a good deal of it from the lane, and Plas Newydd sits on the southern edge of the town.

Above it all, the path up to Castell Dinas Brân is steep, open and worth the effort. Most people are up and back inside two hours. The Dee valley lies one way from the top and the Berwyns the other, and there is no shelter anywhere on it.

The second week of July is the one to plan around. The music festival fills every room in the town and a good many for miles beyond it. Book early, or come another week and you can have the valley more or less to yourself.