Tredegar

The Clock and the Old Inns

The Town Clock stands 72 feet of cast iron on The Circle, the largest freestanding iron clock in the country. It went up in 1858, the idea of Mrs R. P. Davis, wife of the ironworks manager, who raised most of the cost by holding a bazaar; her husband pledged £400 if she found the rest. She died before it was finished. Its four dials were once lit by gas, and four plaques around the base carry quotations by Aneurin Bevan, which is a fair summary of what Tredegar chooses to remember about itself.

The Cambrian sits close by at the foot of Castle Street, built around 1809 and the best-survived of the many inns the town once had. It served as a meeting place for Chartists, a spot for army recruitment and the place election results were read out. Today it has six en-suite rooms and serves food from eight in the morning to nine at night on weekdays, running to breakfasts, curries, pizzas and meals to share. There is a real fire, a quiz on Wednesdays and live music at the weekend. Cask ale is not currently on. Out at Tafarnaubach, the Nags Head is a smaller, older sort of pub, described by one visitor as having "a very cosy feel."

Parkland and the Northern Hills

For walking, Parc Bryn Bach is the obvious start. It is 340 acres of reclaimed mining land wrapped around a 26-acre lake that was dug in 1818 to feed the ironworks and now holds carp, pike, roach and rudd. There is a visitor centre with a café, a circular lakeside path, a mountain-bike trail, and enough on offer — kayaking, archery, a climbing wall, open-water swimming — to fill a wet afternoon. Its Park Run is the highest above sea level in the UK, which tells you something about where you are standing. Bedwellty House and Park is gentler: 26 acres of Victorian garden, free to enter, with a bandstand, duck ponds and a 15-ton block of coal hewn by South Wales miners for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

North of the town the ground climbs toward Trefil, the highest village in Wales, and the Bannau Brycheiniog escarpment. The Sirhowy Valley Walk begins at the Aneurin Bevan Memorial Stones on the mountain, where one large stone stands for Bevan and three smaller ones for the towns he represented.

Bevan and the Medical Aid Society

Bevan was born at 32 Charles Street in 1897, the son of a miner, and started at Ty-Trist Colliery at thirteen. The Tredegar Medical Aid Society, which gave subscribing workers free medical and dental care and covered some 20,000 people by the 1930s, was the model he used for the National Health Service in 1948.

A Planned Industrial Town

Tredegar was Britain's first industrial planned town, raised from open moorland after the ironworks arrived. Iron-making stopped in 1891, the collieries have all closed, and the spoil has become parkland. The A465 Heads of the Valleys road runs just north, with Abergavenny east and Merthyr west; there is no station, the line having closed in 1963.

The Band Plays On

The brass band, founded in 1849, is still one of the country's best, and on a still evening you can sometimes hear it practising.