White Lion Royal Hotel

Four Centuries on Bala High Street

Bala amounts to one long street with a great sheet of water at the end of it, and the White Lion Royal has occupied a stretch of that street since the fifteen-hundreds. The arithmetic of staying here is simple. Every shop, pub and cafe in town is within a two-minute walk; the path down to the water is barely longer; and the car sits in the hotel’s own car park at no charge instead of hunting for a space on the High Street. In a town of this size, that is the entire case, and it is a strong one.

Four stars. Seven point nine out of ten, from very nearly fifteen hundred guests. Eighty-one pounds to start. For a four-star hotel inside a national park, those three numbers sit together rather comfortably.

Sleeping

The bedrooms are furnished traditionally, which suits a building of this vintage far better than anything fashionable would. Each has a writing desk, a television, tea and coffee to hand, and a bathroom of its own with either a tub or a shower in it. A handful carry four-poster beds — request one explicitly if that is what has drawn you, because they are not allocated by chance. Families are catered for. Breakfast appears downstairs each morning, and will be carried up to the room if you ask, a small civility that costs the kitchen something and is offered anyway.

The bar and the dining room

Regional cooking is served at midday and in the evening, and the bar runs a working selection of ales, wines and spirits from opening until late. Dogs are made welcome throughout. Nothing here is trying to be clever; it is a country-town inn behaving as country-town inns have behaved for four hundred years, and the review scores suggest it keeps that up reliably. Come in soaked from the lake and it is exactly the right building to walk into.

Llyn Tegid

The water at the end of the street is four miles long, and no natural lake in the country is bigger. That single geographical fact has shaped everything about Bala. Dinghies, canoes, kayaks and paddleboards go out from a shore that begins a few minutes from the hotel door, and the foreshore is public and costs nothing to walk. Along the southern edge runs the Bala Lake Railway, a narrow-gauge line that potters down to Llanuwchllyn and back.

Wilder water, and the hills

Up the valley, the Afon Tryweryn comes out of a dam rather than a cloud, which means it can be relied upon to run when the rafting centre on its bank says it will — a rarity among British rivers, and the reason serious paddlers keep coming back to this corner of Gwynedd whatever the summer has been doing.

On land, there is fishing, golf, riding, cycling and a great deal of walking. The Gwydyr Forest Park lies some fifteen kilometres away, the peaks of Eryri around an hour by road, and Liverpool eighty-five kilometres off if you are heading home that way.

Bala in the evening

The town does not have a great deal of nightlife, and that is largely the point of it. What it has is a handful of pubs within a few doors of the hotel, a chip shop, and a walk down to the water where, on a still evening in summer, the Aran and Arenig hills sit upside down in the lake. People come to Bala to be tired in a good way. The White Lion, standing in the middle of it with a bar and a fire, is well set up for the end of that kind of day.

Making the call

Parking and WiFi cost nothing, there is a restaurant and a bar, family rooms can be had, dogs are fine, and the tariff opens at roughly £81. If your idea of Bala is the town itself — the street, the water, the hills standing over both — rather than a country estate held at a polite distance from it, this puts you squarely in the middle of everything.