Plas Coch Hotel

The Cheapest Bed in Bala, and Not the Worst One

Fifty-four pounds. That is where rooms at Plas Coch begin, and no other hotel we list in this town comes near it. What follows ought to be a plain account of what that money buys, because a page that oversells a budget hotel does nobody any favours.

It buys a room in a historic building at number fifty-two on Bala’s High Street, with a bar downstairs, traditional Welsh cooking coming out of the kitchen, and WiFi you are not billed for. It does not buy a spa, a country estate, or a view of anything in particular. Three hundred and fifteen guests have scored the place 7.1 — a middling figure, honestly earned, describing a hotel that feeds people, beds them and asks no more of the occasion than that.

Who should book it

Anyone intending to spend the daylight outdoors. The overwhelming majority of Bala’s visitors have come for the water or the hills, and to that sort of guest a hotel room is somewhere to sleep and dry your boots, not somewhere to spend the afternoon. If a kayak, a bike, a rod or a pair of walking boots is coming with you, the money saved on the room will do considerably more good out in the hills than it would spent on a four-poster you are barely going to see.

The building

Plas Coch is one of the older properties on the High Street, and its position among the shops and pubs of the centre means that nothing in Bala obliges you to get back behind the wheel. The kitchen keeps to traditional Welsh dishes. There is a bar. That is the honest sum of it, and at this price it is a fair one.

The lake at the end of the street

Llyn Tegid stretches four miles south-west from the edge of town, the biggest natural sheet of water anywhere in the country, and Bala’s modern existence follows directly from it. Through the season it carries dinghies, kayaks, paddleboards and a good many swimmers, and its shore is public land that costs nothing to walk along. A narrow-gauge railway runs down the far bank towards Llanuwchllyn.

There is a curiosity in the water, too. The gwyniad is a whitefish stranded in Llyn Tegid at the close of the last ice age, and it exists nowhere else on the planet — a small, cold-water relic swimming about in a lake you can see from the end of the High Street.

The Tryweryn

Two miles up the valley, a river emerges from beneath the Llyn Celyn dam. Because its flow is released by engineers rather than delivered by weather, it runs to a timetable — which makes it one of the very few stretches of British white water that can be booked weeks ahead with any confidence. Britain’s rafting community has been coming here for decades on precisely that basis.

Getting to Bala without a car

It is not the easiest town to reach by public transport, and it is better to know that in advance. There is no railway station in Bala — the nearest main-line stops are at Wrexham and Barmouth, both a fair distance off — so most visitors arrive by road up the A494 from Corwen or over the hills from Dolgellau. Buses do run, but they run to a rural timetable. If you are coming without a car, check the connections properly before you book, and bear in mind that once you are here, the whole of the town is walkable in about ten minutes.

The bottom line

A bar, home cooking, WiFi at no cost, and a central High Street address, from around £54 a night. Judge Plas Coch against its price rather than against the country houses up the valley and it does exactly what it promises: the least expensive way to sleep in the middle of Bala, with the largest lake in Wales a short walk from the front door.