Book Direct | Self Catering & Holiday Cottages in South Wales

More About Holiday Cottages in South Wales

West of it the valleys come one after another down to the coast: Ebbw, Rhymney, Taff and Rhondda. The ridges between them are open ground the whole way, high enough to see the Bristol Channel from.

Further west again the Llynfi valley holds Maesteg, and over the ridge beyond it the Afan is laced with mountain bike track that rides all year. Porthcawl and its beaches are half an hour south.

Nothing here was built to be pretty. The houses went up in rows to hold men next to the pit, out of Pennant sandstone quarried off the hillside behind them. That is why the terraces climb the sides of the Rhondda and the Ebbw in such straight lines.

At Blaenavon the company really did own them: 430 houses by 1833. Stack Square went up with the furnaces in the early 1790s. The same company ran the truck shop, where wages came as tokens that could only be spent across its own counter.

It did not work that way everywhere. In the coal valleys the men mostly clubbed together and financed their own, and most builders in south Wales put up three houses or fewer at a time. At Maesteg the first rows went up in 1831, five years after the furnaces.

Then the people left. The Rhondda fell from 167,900 at its 1924 peak to about 69,500 today. Some 50,000 went between 1924 and 1939 alone, and the houses survived because nothing came along to replace them.

It does not end sadly. British Coal shut Tower Colliery above Hirwaun in April 1994, so 239 of the men put eight thousand pounds each of their redundancy into buying the pit themselves. They marched back through the gates on 2 January 1995, and it made eleven million pounds in three years.

You can go and stand on that mountain above Hirwaun. Zip World Tower still flies a line over the old workings at seventy miles an hour, which is a strange thing to find above a pit the men bought back themselves.

Blaenavon Ironworks opens ten until five from the end of March to the start of November, and ten until four the rest of the year. Through the winter it shuts Monday to Thursday. It is £8.40 for an adult and nothing for under-fives, and the Stack Square cottages stand furnished.

Afan Forest Park still runs six mountain bike trails, from seven kilometres to over forty, across hubs at Afan Argoed, Bryn Bettws and Glyncorrwg. Check the trail status before you set out, because sections get diverted.

For walking, the Penrhys Pilgrimage Way climbs twenty-one miles from Llandaff Cathedral up to Penrhys, a hilltop above the Rhondda. A statue of the Virgin Mary stands at the top, and the route splits neatly into two days.

A group of six or eight does well out of a place like this. You can all go down the mine at Blaenavon for nothing, and the reservoirs and forest tracks above Merthyr Tydfil make an easy afternoon between them.

This is the least expensive self-catering we list anywhere in Wales, from under forty pounds a night, and a kitchen is where most of the saving comes from. Out of season you still get the same hills with almost nobody on them.