Boars Head Hotel

Four Hundred Years on Lammas Street, Still in the Family

The Boar’s Head has been trading on Lammas Street since the early sixteen-hundreds, and it is run today by a family rather than a head office. Nearly two thousand guests have passed judgement on it — a larger verdict than any other hotel in Carmarthen has collected — and they put it at 8.1 out of ten. Rooms start around £79. Set that price against the history, the three stars and the sheer weight of evidence, and it begins to look like one of the quieter bargains in west Wales.

Ground-floor rooms, and why that sentence matters

Every bedroom is non-smoking with a bathroom of its own, a television and a kettle with the usual tray beside it; several are family rooms. But here is the detail worth lifting out of the list: a limited number of ground-floor rooms have been fitted out for guests with disabilities.

In a seventeenth-century coaching inn that is no small feat of retrofitting, and for anybody who has ever tried to find a genuinely accessible room in a historic Welsh market town it may be the single most useful line on this page. There are only a few of them. Ask early, and ask specifically.

The Olde Worlde Restaurant

Oak-panelled, open every day of the week, and entirely unembarrassed about the name over the door. The menu is a long one — steaks, fish, vegetarian plates, something for children — and the bar beside it pours real ales, lagers, ciders, wines and spirits. Live music and evening entertainment appear on the calendar with some regularity. Guests rate the breakfast “very good”, and room service will bring it up if coming down feels like too much.

Arriving by train

Carmarthen station stands less than half a mile off. That makes the Boar’s Head one of a very small number of hotels anywhere in the county that you can reach on foot, suitcase in hand, having never sat behind a wheel. Should you drive, there is limited free private parking, and an airport transfer can be arranged. The A40 is five minutes off; the M4 sixteen miles away, with Swansea, Cardiff and the west of England beyond.

The oldest town in Wales

So Carmarthen says, and the Roman amphitheatre on the edge of the centre argues its corner well. The castle looks down over the Tywi, the covered market is among the best you will find this side of the country, and Lammas Street — where this hotel stands — is the broad old coaching road in from the west. That is precisely why an inn was raised on this spot in the first place, and why it has never stopped being one.

Head south-west and the land runs out into the Tywi estuary, under seven miles away, and then into Carmarthen Bay and its enormous tidal sands. Laugharne sits on that shore — the boathouse where Dylan Thomas wrote, the shed above it, the churchyard where he lies under a plain white cross. It is half an hour by car and worth every minute of it.

What four hundred years does to a building

It makes it uneven, and honesty requires saying so. Floors slope, ceilings vary, and no two bedrooms in a coaching inn of this age are the same shape. Some guests find that charming and some find it inconvenient, and both are reasonable positions. What the age also gives you is a building with genuine character in the middle of a town that has been welcoming travellers off the western road since the Romans laid it — and a bar that has been pouring drinks for people arriving cold and late for longer than most countries have existed.

In summary

Free parking and WiFi, a restaurant, a bar, family rooms, step-free bedrooms down at street level, and four centuries of practice, from roughly £79 a night. For the historic heart of Carmarthen, in a building that has been part of it since before the streets were lit, this is the address.