Bwlch

The New Inn, from fire to kitchen

The New Inn sits on the A40 with armchairs pulled around a large fireplace and a bunkhouse upstairs for walkers who would rather not drive home. It was called The Star until 1845, when it was a single-storey house you reached by steps up from the road, and it is now the only pub left in a village that once kept several. In 2024 it was named Brecknockshire CAMRA Pub of the Year. The regular cask ale is Wye Valley Butty Bach, with changing beers from Grey Trees, Oakham and Salopian, and real cider alongside. Dogs are welcome; the pub dog is Rocky.

The kitchen runs to venison in red wine, beef and chorizo lasagne, haddock and spinach gratin, Welsh beef pie and mushroom pot pie, with red Thai vegetable curry and a mushroom-and-lentil lasagne for anyone off the meat. The salted caramel cheesecake is the pudding to watch for. Neil, Amy and Maddy are among the people who will serve you.

Provisions at the mountain pass

For provisions you have two options. The Gate Shop and Post Office, which began life as a toll house, covers milk, bread and the day-to-day. Just off the A40 at Middlewood Farm, the Beacons Farm Shop and Welsh Venison Centre sells its own venison, beef and lamb, sausages made on site, and locally baked bread, with a small café doing cakes, tea and local ice cream at outdoor tables that look over deer, cattle and sheep.

The village sits on a low col around 223 metres up, on the watershed between the Usk and the Wye, between Buckland Hill and Cefn Moel. Arrive on the A40 and you climb to a compact roadside cluster at the pass, from where paths reach open grassy ridges quickly. Look out and you have the central Beacons, the Black Mountains and Llangorse Lake laid out below.

Ridge walks and turnpike history

Walkers are well served. A seven-mile circular links Bwlch, Cwmdu and Cefn Moel, taking field paths through Felindre, passing St Michael and All Angels Church and Thomas Price's grave, then returning on the Beacons Way over Cefn Moel with Pen y Fan in the distance. Expect mud, stiles and livestock. For a longer day, a thirteen-mile route crosses Mynydd Llangorse and circles Llangorse Lake, the largest natural lake in South Wales, before returning over the Iron Age fort of Allt yr Esgair.

The reason for all those vanished inns is the road. In the 18th and 19th centuries Bwlch stood on the London to Carmarthen and Fishguard turnpike, and stagecoaches stopped to change horses, which is why the present shop was once a toll house. The writer John Ogilby, passing through in 1675, called it a "disunited village seated on an eminence." Above the village to the north-west, the fragments of Blaenllynfi Castle sit on a moated platform, probably raised between 1208 and 1215.

All Saints and onward connections

All Saints Church, built between 1897 and 1902 by public subscription, is a plain thing under a green Welsh-slate roof, with a stone pulpit and Celtic Studios stained glass. Abergavenny is the practical railhead, about nineteen kilometres down the A40, connected to Bwlch by the X43 bus, which calls at All Saints in both directions.

The fireside final word

If you go into the New Inn, sit by the fire. Rocky may already have the best spot.