Beddgelert Accommodation

More About Beddgelert

The Welsh Highland Railway steams through the village on its route between Caernarfon and Porthmadog. The Aberglaslyn Pass and the Sygun Copper Mine are just outside the village, and Yr Wyddfa itself is close, with the Watkin Path starting nearby. Portmeirion and the coast are a short drive away.

It is a small place with a great deal packed round it. The Aberglaslyn Pass runs south through a wooded gorge with the river at the bottom of it. The forest starts immediately above the village, high ground closes in on every side, and this is one of the nearest villages to the start of the Snowdon paths.

Start with the thing everybody comes to see, because the usual version of it is wrong in both directions. Gelert’s grave is a Georgian invention. David Prichard came to the village around 1793 to run the Goat Hotel, and by 1811 he and two others had raised the stone that visitors are shown today. No traveller writing before 1811 mentions seeing a stone there at all.

But Prichard did not make the story up. A grave with a dog in it was attached to this village long before Prichard was born. A Latin manuscript records the hound Kilhart here around 1590, and further accounts follow through the eighteenth century.

The tale itself is far older still. The faithful hound killed in error turns up right across Europe, with the dog swapped for a mongoose in India.

What Prichard supplied was a destination. William Spencer had written a ballad about Gelert while staying nearby and printed it in August 1800. The stone gave the poem somewhere to point at, and the visitors came.

The one thing everybody gets wrong is the name itself. Beddgelert is not named after a dog. It is almost certainly named for Saint Celert, an early Christian who settled in the valley long before anybody thought to bury a dog in the story.

The village is still very small: four hundred and sixty people at the last census. It still lives on visitors. Tŷ Isaf, the oldest house in the village, belongs to the National Trust and runs as a shop. Glaslyn make their ice cream on the premises and will sell you a Halen Môn salted caramel.

For getting out of the village, the forest above it has free parking and a walk round Llyn Llywelyn. Lôn Gwyrfai runs four and a half miles to Rhyd Ddu on a surface graded for mobility scooters. Sygun Copper Mine is a mile out and has taken visitors underground since 1986. It costs twelve pounds for an adult, and you turn up rather than book.

The Welsh Highland Railway still stops in the village on its run between Caernarfon and Porthmadog, with steam trains scheduled daily through the 2026 season.