It’s been said that what south Wales lacks as a destination is a marketable identity: Something appealing and quintessentially Welsh that comes to mind when people think about it, something other than rain and sheep.
It goes without saying that there’s so much more to it than that, and anyone who has been on a tour there will be thinking of castles, mines, coastlines.
Some people say that what makes Wales Wales is its history and heritage; others have said it’s the pride people have in their country.
This year Wales is celebrating its Year of Legends, which celebrates both those facets – a year of iconic people, professions, locations and landscapes that offer visitors a clue as to what Wales is really all about.
We explored the area on a Steve Reed Tourism fam trip, with coach travel provided by Mainline Coaches.
We were guided by Steve Griffin of Griffin Guiding, who is a proud Welshman and enriches any tour with his knowledge and passion.
Wales Millennium Centre
Nowhere is the spirit of the region better embodied than at Wales Millennium Centre, the striking 12-year-old theatre at Cardiff Bay.
Opened in 2004, the brief was for something essentially Welsh but internationally recognisable – and the result is one of the UK’s largest, most impressive theatres, built almost exclusively in Welsh materials, the very fabric of the building nodding to the area’s heritage.
The walls are made of waste slate; the shell is made of local steel; the glass comes from Swansea. In fact, almost the only thing that isn’t Welsh is the carpet – and that’s got a good Cardiff connection, as it comes from Bute territory in Scotland, and the Butes owned Cardiff Castle.
For a brief time after it was built, the stage was the UK’s biggest – until the Royal Opera House in London enlarged its own, using funding from the same gent who’d funded the Millennium Centre.
It’s the largest provider of free performances in the UK, and a lovely venue for a meal, a coffee or just meeting up and enjoying the space, so it’s worth making use of even if you’re not taking your group to a show.
Backstage tours take in the dressing rooms, the loading facilities, and the auditorium – a stunning, thoroughly modern and luxurious space, designed for brilliant acoustics and very few limited-view seats.
It also looks at the theatre’s famous inscription from inside the building – have you ever noticed that the glass on those windows is different colours, or indeed that the message shouting out to the world is, in fact, bilingual? The Welsh “Creu gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen” means “Creating truth like glass from inspiration’s furnace”, and is joined by the English “In these stones horizons sing” – words written by Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis.
Penarth Pier
Five miles from Cardiff is Penarth, a charming seaside town with its own industrial heritage – it was another major coal port as well as a fashionable Victorian resort.
Its pier is simply lovely, and a real heritage success story. While so many piers around Britain have fallen into disrepair and either caught fire or crumbled into the sea, Penarth’s pier and 1930s pavilion, with its unusual Baroque-inspired Art Deco design, have been restored to full glory in the last five years and put to use as more than an amusement arcade.
There’s a modern independent cinema and art gallery in the restored pavilion, which is also used for local events. The seaward-looking café makes a good morning coffee stop, and the rest of the pier has also been refurbished with new furniture. Pleasure boats still call at the pier as they did when it was built at the end of the 19th century – the Waverley, the world’s last sea-going paddle steamer, calls at Penarth on its Bristol Channel tours.
Coaches can drop off and pick up just outside.
Llanchaiach Fawr Manor
Plenty of stately homes and houses invite visitors to experience what life was like for the servants, but few do it quite like Llanchaiach Fawr Manor. It’s not the usual Victorian or Georgian experience, but Stuart – a period that isn’t as well-known as others, so there was lots to learn, and in a fun, interactive way that’s ideal for all ages.
Group tours are welcome in the day, but ours was in the evening – darkness had fallen and the fires were lit. The group was led by torchlight to the house, which was built in the 1550s and is presented today as it would have looked in 1645, when it was lived in by the Pritchard family.
We were met at the door by two servants, a woman and a man, who gave us a tour of the servants’ quarters – including the servants’ hall and kitchen – plus the first floor reception rooms. They brought the house alive, involving the group, answering questions and never breaking character.
It wasn’t a ghost tour, but there’s no doubt the darkness added a lot of atmosphere to the visit, and we highly recommend evening tours so that groups can have the run of the place. We dined in the manor’s modern Conservatory restaurant, but meals can be booked for smaller groups in the servant’s hall itself.
Blaenavon World Heritage Site
The industrial landscape of Wales is absolutely pivotal to its heritage. At one point Wales was exporting a third of the world’s coal. The beautiful landscapes and cities of south Wales are all made of coal, and the people are made of coal too. The mining heritage runs deeply through the hundreds of communities, and the friendship and camaraderie of the men who mined still runs strong today – look how many Welsh male choirs there still are.
But the price of coal – decades of back-breaking labour, hundreds of lives lost – is ultimately the price of comfort and convenience in British homes throughout the last two centuries.
That’s why Blaenavon is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a vastly important monument to the modern age [change] – but its importance to history actually started with its ironworks, which then led to the vast local coal and steel industries.
It comprises several high-quality attractions, most of them free, and all within a five-minute drive of each other, including Big Pit National Coal Mining Museum, Blaenavon Ironworks and Rhymney Brewery.
There are numerous short walks for groups who want to explore the stunning landscape on foot, and the small industrial town is well worth a look too. Then there’s Blaenavon Heritage Railway, now with stations at Big Pit and Blaenavon High Level, giving groups an excellent way to see the whole site.
There’s plenty of coach parking at each attraction, and Heritage Tourism Team Leader Kate Blewitt is very keen to get groups to the area. The whole site is easily worth a two-day visit, she says – Big Pit could make a full day by itself. She invites group tour organisers to contact her for help putting a bespoke itinerary together.
The visit starts at the World Heritage Centre, a small, modern museum detailing the history of the area. It’s an ideal first port of call, offering an understanding of the whole site and the attractions’ relationships with each other. The building used to be a school, and there’s a small exhibition about those days too.
Big Pit is free, but book well in advance; the Ironworks is free; the Brewery charges £2.50pp. It’s probably one of the best-value visitor sites in the UK.
The Guardian
It’s well worth combining a visit to Blaenavon with one to the Guardian in the landscaped Parc Arael Griffin, the site of the old Six Bells colliery. It’s a statue of a man, a monument to the 45 miners who lost their lives in the Six Bells disaster of 1960 – and it’s incredibly moving.
In fact, it moves in both senses. The 20-metre-high statue, erected in 2010, is built from 20,000 horizontal strips of steel and changes as you get close to it. From a distance it is translucent; as you approach it gets more and more solid, and fantastic detail appears, from the belt buckle to the veins on the back of his hands.
It’s a tribute not just to the 45 souls who died at Six Bells, but to all victims of mining disasters across South Wales.
It’s a five-minute walk from the coach drop-off point and the visitor centre Ty Ebbw Fach, a lovely little free museum, well worth a quick browse for the history and context – with a good cafe adjoining it.
Cyfarthfa Castle
Our next stop was Cyfarthfa Castle, not really a castle at all but a castellated mansion, dating from the Regency period and built in the OTT fashion of the time. It was built by the Crawshay family, ironmasters from Yorkshire, who moved to the area to take advantage of an ideal landscape – the coal industry nearby; the rushing water that could power the mills.
The Crawshays were reputed to be pretty nasty employers, who thought themselves far superior to their workers – but they were by accounts a close family who loved children, and at least they paid their workers real money, instead of ‘truck’ tokens that could only be used in the employer’s own stores, which was quite common practice at the time.
The castle today houses an art gallery and museum on its ground floor, and a very interesting museum of Merthyr Tidfil in the cellar, concentrating on the area’s industrial heritage and political history. It adds context around many historical events, from the rise of the Labour party, to the awful Aberfan disaster of 1966, and makes a good addition to a tour. There’s also a tearoom and shop and entry is only £2pp, or £1pp for concessions.
Royal Mint Experience
The Royal Mint Experience opened last year, and we were lucky enough to have already visited (Coach Monthly, December 2016). It’s a fantastic attraction for Wales, a prestigious national museum and factory tour telling the story of coins, “from bank to blank”.
The factory tour, led by fantastically enthusiastic guide Nikki, teaches our group about all the machinery involved with processing the metal and making the coins. Then we see the factory itself through glass; it looks a lot like any other factory, except with the magical sight of glinting piles of coins everywhere.
Visitors can strike their own coin and get a ‘photo with a fortune’ – both lovely, if pricey, mementos to take home – then Nikki gives a history of the Royal Mint, from its origins in the Tower of London, to Tower Hill nearby, to its new home in Llantrisant from the ‘60s (a location chosen specifically to boost the slumped economy in south Wales, fact fans).
The guided tour ends there, then groups are at liberty to explore the excellent exhibition, which gives a deeper history of the Mint, and shows you some of the medals and the foreign coins made by the Mint.
It’s an impressive attraction. The group rate is 12.50pp, which may seem fairly steep, but balanced against other attractions in the area that are either free or very low-price, it’s a good centrepiece for a tour.
South Wales is a vastly rich area for group tourism. It’s welcoming to coaches, it’s got class-leading attractions, and for the most part, it charges hardly anything for them. Its exciting little cities, fascinating waterfronts, and glorious countryside rival anywhere else in the UK, and if only it could guarantee slightly drier weather, it’d probably be our best tourism asset.
Wales has a brilliant story to tell – a brooding industrial past, a deep vein of kinship, and the justifiable pride of its people. Tell it to your groups.
Other attractions…
Cardiff Castle
History spans over 2,000 years at Cardiff Castle, from Roman fort, to Norman castle, to Victorian Gothic fantasy palace. Bespoke visits for groups are available with expert guides on a number of subjects – Victorian interiors, Second World War air raid shelters or film locations, you name it.
Chepstow Racecourse
The home of the Coral Welsh Grand National, the richest horse race in Wales, with 32 race meetings a year in total. Discounts are available for groups and the racecourse is open for conferences, parties and meetings.
Green & Jenks and Shire Hall
Green & Jenks & Shire Hall
The two stars of Monmouth: Green & Jenks is an artisan maker of fine Italian gelato, with a popular café in the town, and Shire Hall is a magnificent historic venue. Both welcome groups.
National Museums Wales
National institution encompassing seven fine national museums, all with free entry: National Museum Cardiff; St Fagans National History Museum, Cardiff; Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenavon; National Roman Legion Museum, Caerleon; National Waterfront Museum, Swansea; National Wool Museum, Drefach; and National Slate Museum, Llanberis.
Newport Ship
A large armed merchant ship found in 2002 in the muddy banks of the River Usk, which dates back to the 15th century and is internationally unique – the only such vessel recovered and undergoing preservation for eventual reassembly and display to the public. While in Newport, the Transporter Bridge is the oldest and largest of the three such bridges remaining in Britain; and the City Museum offers a good overview of the archaeology, social history, art and natural history of this city.
Slade Farm Safari
An unusual ‘experiential travel’ experience for groups – exploring a working family farm on a covered tractor and trailer, including fantastic views over the Glamorgan Heritage Coast, before homemade tea and cake in the farmhouse gardens.
St Donat’s Arts Centre & Castle
Set in the lovely grounds of Atlantic College on the South Wales coast, and once the home of American newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst. The medieval castle looks out to sea and sits atop landscaped Tudor gardens.
Way2go Adventures
Family-run outdoor activity business, offering canoeing, kayaking, raft building, camping, and stand-up paddle boarding, as well as Nordic walking team building.
White Castle Vineyard
White Castle Vineyard has a lovely story – a Welsh couple who finally decided to pursue their dreams of opening a vineyard and making wine. The five-acre vineyard in Monmouthshire was planted in 2009, with the first harvest in 2011. Its aim is to produce quality Welsh wine and become a top local visitor attraction. Groups can see the 16th century restored croft barn and enjoy Welsh cheese platters, tutored tours and tastings.
