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The valleys run north to south, one after another, each with a river at the bottom and a road and a railway squeezed in beside it. You are always looking up at something. Between the valleys the ground is open mountain, and the Bannau Brycheiniog rise along the top of the whole region.

South of the valleys the land flattens into coast and city, and the M4 runs the whole way along it. You can spend a morning in a coal museum and be on the sand at Porthcawl by mid-afternoon. The last stretch of the Heads of the Valleys road opened as dual carriageway in June 2025.

Start underground. Big Pit at Blaenavon takes you three hundred feet down a real colliery, and the guides are people who worked below ground themselves. Entry costs nothing. It opens daily from half past nine, with the underground tours running from ten until half past three.

Twenty-five minutes south is a castle most people outside Wales have never heard of. Caerphilly stands in the middle of its own lake, and its south-east tower leans further out of true than the one at Pisa. Cadw, the Welsh Government’s heritage arm, has just spent eight million pounds on its Great Hall.

Then go up to Hirwaun, at the head of the Cynon valley, and fly down a mountain. Zip World Tower sends its line down the side of the old Tower Colliery at up to seventy miles an hour. It opens every day except Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

Iron and coal built all of this, and the moment it turned on came in 1804. An engine made by the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick hauled ten tons of iron from Merthyr Tydfil down to Abercynon, with seventy men who climbed on for the ride.

That was the first time anywhere a steam locomotive pulled a load along rails. It covered nine miles of the Taff valley at not quite five miles an hour, and it settled a five-hundred-guinea wager between two ironmasters.

The rails were not up to it and the engine broke them repeatedly, so it ended its working life driving a hammer in a forge. The Stockton and Darlington Railway in north-east England opened in 1825, twenty-one years later, and took the credit.

You can still walk those nine miles, and the lower stretch along the valley floor is flat and easy. The Taff Trail runs the same ground and keeps going, fifty-five miles in all from Cardiff up to Brecon, climbing over a thousand feet on the way. A working replica of the engine stands in the National Waterfront Museum at Swansea.