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More About B&Bs in South Wales

The Rhondda is the one everybody has heard of. Two valleys meet at Porth and run sixteen miles up into the hills, and the old railway lines along the floors are flat enough to walk in an afternoon.

Porthcawl is where the valleys have always gone for the sea, forty minutes down from the Rhondda. Rest Bay at the western end is the surfing beach, and the coast path carries on from it towards Sker and Kenfig.

Paid hospitality in the valleys did not begin with gentry or with sea-bathing. It began in the spare rooms of colliers’ houses. Between 1851 and 1911 some 366,000 people moved into the south Wales coalfield, 129,000 of them in the ten years from 1901 alone.

Housing never caught up with them. By 1911 a tenth of the houses in south Wales were sub-let, and in the Rhondda of 1891 plenty of homes held six working miners at once. Taking somebody in was how a household made money.

Then once a year the whole thing turned round. For the last week of July and the first week of August the pits shut for maintenance and the valleys emptied to the coast. They called it the Miners’ Fortnight, and Resolven up the Neath valley emptied so completely it was described as a deserted village.

Nobody was paying them to go. The coal industry only won holidays with pay in 1938, and it did that pit district by pit district. Until then a fortnight at Porthcawl came out of what a family had put by all year. They went anyway.

The habit never stopped, it just changed its reason. Porthcawl still fills for one weekend every September, when the Elvis Festival brings tens of thousands into the town for three days. Visit Wales calls it one of the largest Elvis events in the world.

Rhondda Heritage Park at Trehafod, down at the mouth of the valley, stands on the old Lewis Merthyr colliery. Retired miners lead the tour underground, at £12.50 for an adult and £9 for a child. Come midweek — it opens Tuesday to Saturday and shuts on Sundays and Mondays.

North of Rest Bay the coast runs on to Kenfig, where thirteen hundred acres of dune sit on top of a buried medieval town. Blown sand swallowed the borough and its castle some six hundred years ago. Kenfig Pool lies in the middle of it, seventy acres of open freshwater with birds coming through all year.

September is the month to aim for. The school holidays are over and the coast goes quiet again, apart from that one weekend. The hills do not change, and you can still sit outside in the evening.

Porth, Tonypandy, Treorchy and Treherbert run up the Rhondda in a chain, each a couple of miles from the last. From Treorchy the Bwlch road climbs out of the valley in a series of hairpins. Half an hour on foot from the top of the town takes you to much the same view.