Brecon

Markets, Makers and Pubs

Under one Victorian roof in the middle of Brecon, four food shops trade a few steps apart. P. F. Sweeney's has been a family butcher since Paddy Sweeney opened it in 1975, selling Welsh meat off local pastures. Beside it are S. J. Matthews the greengrocer and MacDonald's the fishmonger, who has sold Welsh fish and seafood here for more than twenty years, and M&G Confectionery, whose Welsh cakes, scones, tarts and biscuits are homemade. This is the Market Arcade, the covered heart of a town that keeps its independent shops within a few streets of one another, and it is the right place to understand Brecon before you walk anywhere else. The scale here is a town's, not a village's: a market quarter, a cathedral on the hill, a garrison and a canal that stops in the middle of it all.

A short walk turns up more of the same. Brecon Chocolates is run by Charlotte Roskill, who hand-dips and hand-rolls her own pralines and truffles; her whisky-and-pecan praline took three stars at the 2023 Great Taste Awards. Country Kitchen sells Welsh cheeses alongside homemade pasties and pies, and Morgans Family Butchers cures its own sausages next to Welsh beef and lamb. Back in the arcade, the Brecon Wool Shop carries yarn, patterns and haberdashery under Natalie and Chris; it continues a forty-five-year business that used to trade as Knatty Knitters. On the High Street, Ardent Gallery runs across two floors with framing, art materials and a coffee counter with homemade cakes, showing work by Dawn Harries, Gigi Jones, Louise Collis and Susan Barber and ceramics by Madeleine Vale.

The pubs are easiest to sort by what you want from an evening. The Brecon Tap at 6 Bulwark is a small, light room describing itself as an ale and pie house, with three or four changing guest beers, usually Welsh, and the house Tap Pie. Hop In, at 37 Watton, opened in 2020 and packs two floors and a rear courtyard with two changing cask ales, five craft taps and something like forty gins; it also does small plates, Welsh-rarebit croquettes and patatas bravas among them, though the room is small enough that booking a table for food is sensible. The George Hotel on the corner is the Wetherspoon, a former inn that was the George Inn by the 1860s and the George Hotel by 1888, and it carries up to six real ales. The George admits only guide and assistance dogs; the Tap and Hop In, by contrast, both welcome them.

Inns with Long Memories

The Clarence Inn at 25 Watton is the two-room local, run by Kate, Roger and their family, with a front bar for regulars, a rear room for diners, a log fire and steaks cooked on a Black Rock Grill. Its garden is large and, during the jazz festival, very full. An 1834 map of the town names the building the Barley Mow, one of a great many former pub names still legible here: the same map recorded forty-seven pubs in Brecon. The Drovers Arms, over the river in Llanfaes on Newgate Street, reopened under new management in February 2024 after a long closure and now pours two or three changing ales, often from Grey Trees and Wye Valley, with a patio out the back. The Markets Tavern is a nine-room hotel with darts, pool, quoits and a Sunday carvery in a family-oriented garden. Brecon Rugby Club at 63 Watton welcomes non-members into a big main bar and lounge, with three changing beers, a patio and a pétanque terrain; the club was a founder member of the Welsh Rugby Football Union, which gives the clubhouse a longer memory than most sports bars.

The Wellington faces the Duke of Wellington's statue across a Georgian frontage, with a fireplace, dining rooms and a garden, and a kitchen that runs from tomato-and-basil soup and halloumi fries to classic fish and chips and a sticky karaage chicken thigh finished with hot honey and truffle mayonnaise. Dogs are welcome in its bar and garden. A few doors along the town's pub names carry their history plainly. Rorke's Drift, at 4 Wheat Street, was the Wheatsheaf before it took the name of the 1879 battle fought by the locally based 24th Regiment. The Sarah Siddons at 47 High Street, now a drinks-led Craft Union pub, was the Shoulder of Mutton, where the actor Sarah Siddons was born on 5 July 1755 to the theatre manager Roger Kemble and his wife Sarah Ward. For food with a view, the Castle of Brecon Hotel sits on the old castle site with a terrace and a large garden looking across the Usk towards the mountains; its daytime menu runs to Caerphilly-rarebit crumpets, braised-beef croquettes, smoked-haddock brandade, mushroom arancini, calf's liver, wild-mushroom pappardelle and trout with a pea-and-spinach risotto, with Butty Bach usually on the bar. Its garden tables take dogs; a hotel was operating there by 1814, and George IV visited in 1821.

Along the Usk and Canal

The river is never far. The Promenade is a level, six-hundred-metre riverside path along the Usk on tarmac, with seats and no gates, and it passes the seven-arch Llanfaes Bridge, which has origins in 1563. This is a Special Area of Conservation, and the water carries Atlantic salmon, otters, lampreys and shad; the park authority notes kingfishers, cormorants and ducks along the bank, which is worth remembering when the surface looks merely ornamental. For a proper circuit, the Back of Brecon is a two-mile loop of roughly an hour to ninety minutes that threads the back streets, crosses the Honddu by an iron bridge and follows the line of the old town wall, which local tradition says the townspeople partly pulled down in 1649 to keep Cromwell's troops from using it.

Then there is the canal, which arrives improbably in the centre and simply stops. It reached Brecon on Christmas Eve in 1800, and the basin now holds still water, moored boats and towpath greenery a few minutes' walk from the shops. From here a level path runs about two and a quarter miles to Brynich Lock, past the Gasworks Bridge and the Brynich Aqueduct, and the Taff Trail offers a slightly longer three-mile version that also suits a bicycle. Dragonfly Day Boats hires self-drive boats for up to eight from the basin, with tuition and rain covers thrown in, and points people towards the lock as a gentle afternoon out. At Groesffordd, about ten minutes' walk from Brynich Lock, the Three Horseshoes has outdoor seating front and back, changing ales and a food-led kitchen, which makes it a natural turning point.

Mountains and Medieval Brecon

The mountains are the reason many people come, and they are close without being on top of the town. Approaching by the A40 or A470, the view is the green Usk basin with the main Bannau Brycheiniog mass to the south, the Black Mountains to the east and Mynydd Epynt to the north-west. Pont ar Daf, the National Trust's usual start for Pen y Fan and Corn Du, is about eight miles out; the circuit is four miles, takes around three and a half hours, and climbs steep steps to Bronze Age summit cairns and, at 886 metres, the highest ground in southern Britain. Dogs should be kept on close leads up there. Brecon has had no passenger railway since December 1962, so most visitors arrive by road, the A40 running east to west and the A470 north to south, both now bypassing the old core; buses connect the town to Cardiff and Newtown on the T4, to Swansea on the T6 and to Abergavenny on the X43.

The history is worth an afternoon rather than a paragraph, but it can wait until you have walked the streets. Brecon began as a Norman town after Bernard de Neufmarché took the district in the late eleventh century and raised a castle above the meeting of the Honddu and the Usk; the Welsh name, Aberhonddu, marks that confluence. A borough charter followed under Humphrey de Bohun in 1276 and a royal one under Henry IV in 1411, and the town grew rich on wool before becoming one of four regional administrative capitals under the 1536 Act of Union. Tudor and Stuart buildings survive along the streets, among them Havard House of 1556, Newton House of 1582 and the 1624 Guildhall, which began life as a butter market. Christ College keeps a thirteenth-century chapel from a Dominican friary founded around 1250, on a site where Henry VIII established a school in 1541.

Cathedral, Regiment and Festival

The cathedral stands above it all, begun in 1093 as a Benedictine priory church and raised to cathedral status in 1923. Its Norman font of about 1190 is the largest in Wales, carved by the Hereford school with a tree, a scorpion, an eagle, a fish and a green man, and its cresset stone, pierced with thirty oil hollows, is described as the largest in Britain. The Havard Chapel serves as the regimental chapel and holds memorials to the 24th Regiment's dead at Rorke's Drift, tying the building to the Royal Welsh Regimental Museum down the hill, whose thirty-three thousand objects lean heavily on the Zulu War. Pevsner called the cathedral "pre-eminently the most splendid and dignified Church in Mid-Wales." The walled Close around it keeps its old monastic buildings, a tithe barn, a café and a bookshop, and St Mary's, with its fine early-sixteenth-century tower, gives the market quarter a second medieval landmark of its own.

Brecon still parades. The Gurkha Wing exercises an honorary right to march through the town, Brecon Jazz has run since 1984, when George Melly answered the idea with "Jazz in the Welsh hills, go for it!", and the county show descends from an agricultural society sixteen men founded over a table at the Golden Lion in 1755, said to be the United Kingdom's oldest surviving agricultural society. It is the sort of town where the fishmonger, the eleventh-century font and the finish of a mountain walk all sit within the same short streets, and where, on a Saturday, the queue at Sweeney's counter is as good a measure of the place as any of it.