George Borrow Hotel

A Mountain Inn — and It Is Not in Aberystwyth

Let us be straight about this before anything else, because the booking sites are not. The George Borrow is listed under Aberystwyth, and its postcode is an Aberystwyth one, but the hotel itself stands at Ponterwyd, on the A44, roughly twelve miles inland and a good deal higher up. If you are looking for a bed near the promenade, this is not it, and you would be annoyed to discover that on arrival.

What it is instead is a proper mountain inn, set among the Cambrian Mountains, with the best value on this page — rooms from about £75 — and a guest score of 8.6 out of 10 from 452 people. That is a better rating than any hotel in Aberystwyth town except two.

What you are coming for

The views, principally. The hotel sits in open upland country where the Rheidol and the Castell rivers cut down off the mountains, and the windows make the most of it. Cooked breakfasts are the other thing guests write about. It is two-star graded, which is an honest reflection of what it offers: a comfortable room, a good breakfast, a bar, and no pretence whatsoever of being anything grander.

Devil’s Bridge

This is the reason to stay out here. Devil’s Bridge is a few minutes down the road, and it is one of the strangest and best sights in Wales: three bridges stacked directly on top of one another across a gorge, the oldest of them medieval, the youngest Edwardian. Below them the Mynach river drops three hundred feet through a wooded chasm in a series of falls, and a set of steep steps — the Jacob’s Ladder — takes you down among them.

The Vale of Rheidol Railway, a narrow-gauge steam line, climbs all the way up here from Aberystwyth. Staying at Ponterwyd means you can be at the falls before the first train arrives and still there after the last one leaves.

The Cambrian Mountains

This is the empty middle of Wales — the “green desert”, as it is sometimes called, though that does it an injustice. It is walking country, cycling country and red-kite country: Bwlch Nant yr Arian, a short drive west along the same road, puts food out for red kites every afternoon, and they come down in their dozens to take it, and it is a genuinely extraordinary thing to stand under. Nant-y-moch reservoir and the flanks of Plynlimon — the source of both the Severn and the Wye — lie north of the hotel.

And Aberystwyth, when you want it

The town is around twenty-five minutes away down the A44, and it is an easy run: the seafront, the castle, the pier, the Cliff Railway, the National Library. You get the coast when you want it and the mountains when you do not, which is the argument for staying up here rather than down there.

Who George Borrow was

The hotel is named after the Victorian traveller and writer who walked across Wales in 1854 and produced Wild Wales, a book still in print and still argued about. He came through Ponterwyd, stayed nearby, and wrote about the landscape you can see from the windows. It is a small thing, but it tells you what kind of place this is: an inn on a mountain road which has been taking in travellers for a great many years, and has never seen much reason to reinvent itself.

Being straight with you

Cooked breakfasts, good views, a bar, and rooms from about £75 — the cheapest we list in the Aberystwyth area. Book it if you want the mountains, Devil’s Bridge and the red kites. Do not book it expecting to walk to the beach; that is twelve miles of the A44 away, and you will need the car.