Book Direct | Hotels & Inns in South Wales

More About Hotels and Inns in South Wales

Tredegar, Ebbw Vale, Blackwood and Abertillery run along the top of the eastern valleys. Bedwellty House at Tredegar is a Regency house in twenty-six acres of park, with a fifteen-ton block of coal standing under a shelter above its duck ponds.

Newport is at the bottom end, where the Usk meets the Severn. The two Severn bridges land within a few minutes of it, putting Bristol half an hour east and Cardiff twenty minutes west.

The men who owned the pits and the furnaces built to be looked at. Samuel Homfray, the Merthyr ironmaster, bought Bedwellty House at Tredegar in 1800 and rebuilt it in 1825, and his family kept adding to it until 1842.

In the garden they set up a block of coal, cut whole out of a seam above the town called the Yard Level, for the Great Exhibition of 1851. It came out at twenty tons. Five tons broke off on the road, and rather than risk the rest they never sent it.

The block is still there, under its shelter, protected in its own right. Bedwellty House opens every day from half past nine until half past four, and none of it costs anything. The park gates open at half past eight and the tea room in the old glasshouse at half past ten.

Bedwellty never became a hotel, and most of them did not. Llanwern House at Newport, home of the coal owner David Alfred Thomas, is gone altogether. Tredegar House, which is also at Newport and nothing to do with the town of Tredegar, went to nuns as a girls’ school after the Morgans left in 1951.

The National Trust has run Tredegar House since 2012 and you can walk into the mansion and its gardens for nothing. A few of these houses did become hotels: Cadw, the Welsh Government’s heritage arm, lists Maes Manor at Blackwood as a house representative of the mining industry’s prosperity here.

From Tredegar you can be at Big Pit in twenty minutes and at Caerphilly Castle in half an hour, with Cardiff about an hour off. Abergavenny and the eastern edge of Bannau Brycheiniog are about the same distance the other way.

Rooms up here start lower than almost anywhere else we list in Wales, and the middle of the range sits well below what the same room costs on the coast.

There is still no tourist tax on top. Cardiff is the only council in Wales committed to a visitor levy, and it starts in April 2027. No valleys council has announced one, and Caerphilly and Rhondda Cynon Taf have both said they will not.

The valley towns are small, so a bar and a dining room under the same roof count for more here than they would in a city. On a wet February evening you can walk downstairs instead of driving.