Tywyn Accommodation

More About Tywyn

The Talyllyn climbs inland to Nant Gwernol, calling at Dolgoch for the waterfalls and Abergynolwyn for the café. Up the Dysynni valley, Craig yr Aderyn (Bird Rock) is the only place in Wales where cormorants nest inland. Castell y Bere, a Welsh castle begun by Llywelyn the Great in 1221, is free to walk round all year.

The town has a cinema, the Magic Lantern, that has been showing films since 1901 and was named the UK's Cinema of the Year in 2025. The promenade runs flat for a mile, and the beach goes on far beyond it, north towards the mouth of the Dysynni.

In St Cadfan’s church in the middle of the town there is a stone pillar carrying the earliest known writing in the Welsh language — actual Welsh sentences, not just names on a memorial. One fragment is thought to mean “dear wife of Celyn; pain and loss remain”. It commemorates two women, and it has been standing here for something like twelve hundred years.

The town’s other claim is more recent and quite precise. In 1951 the Talyllyn became the first railway anywhere in the world to be preserved and run by volunteers. Among the early volunteers was a clergyman called Wilbert Awdry, who wrote the Thomas the Tank Engine books. He came on holiday in August 1952 and spent the second week of it working as a guard.

He was not a faultless one — on one trip he forgot to pick up the refreshment lady at Abergynolwyn, an incident he later wrote into his books. The Talyllyn became the Skarloey Railway in his Railway Series, and its engines went with it: Talyllyn became Skarloey and Dolgoch became Rheneas. There is a rowan tree opposite Brynglas signal box in his memory.

You can still ride it. The line runs seven and a quarter miles from Wharf Station up to Nant Gwernol, about fifty-five minutes each way. Wharf is three hundred yards from the main-line station, so you can arrive by train and change straight onto a Victorian one. The Narrow Gauge Railway Museum at Wharf is free, with Awdry’s study reconstructed inside it.

The church is open through the day and free, and the stone stands where it has always stood rather than behind glass in a museum. Between them — a twelve-hundred-year-old sentence and a railway saved by volunteers — Tywyn holds on to more than a town this size has any business keeping.