Llangorse

Pubs, food and the community shop

The Castle Inn stands just south of the churchyard, close enough that its car park and the old village school long ago ate into ground that once curved around St Paulinus's church. Inside are stone walls, a wooden bar and a large fireplace, and the room attracts locals, walkers, boaters and horse riders. Wye Valley's Butty Bach is the regular cask ale, with three changing beers and a real cider alongside it, and the pub runs the occasional beer festival. Dogs are welcome, there is a garden — recently extended with a gazebo and new outdoor seating, paid for by a 2024 business grant — and you can camp. Recent plates from the kitchen have included chicken curry, an Emmental burger, ribs and a Sunday roast, with sticky toffee pudding to finish.

A short walk away is the Red Lion, which reopened in spring 2023 after a long closure, taken on by a farming family from neighbouring Tynewydd. It is the more food-led of the two. The kitchen leans on named local suppliers — Pobl Bakery in Talgarth, Bryn Celyn Veg and Tynewydd Farm in Llangors, Easts Butchers in Brecon — and the menu reads accordingly: ham-and-Hafod-cheddar croquettes with piccalilli aioli, the Bannau Burger with gravy and rosemary fries, bavette steak frites with Café de Paris butter, lamb ragù with pappardelle and Hafod cheese, and scallops with a spiced red-lentil and coconut curry. Puddings run to rhubarb crumble and a chocolate-caramel tart with Kirsch cherries, and there is Shepherds sheep's-milk ice cream. The Sunday roast offers beef topside, lamb or a vegetarian nut roast, with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and cauliflower cheese. Dogs get treats from behind the bar and a water bowl outside; inside there are wood burners, a pool table, a piano and board games, and the pub puts on quizzes, live music and the odd pop-up. Some of the beer comes from Left Bank Brewery in Llangors, which makes it with Llangors spring water.

Between the two pubs, and doing more than either to keep the village a village, is Siop Llangors. The last of the old village shops closed in 2005. What replaced it, sixteen years later, is community-owned: the shop opened its doors in November 2021, built from two donated portable buildings on a former playground beside the school and community centre. Around sixty volunteers and two part-time staff keep it open seven days a week. It is a proper convenience shop — fresh and frozen food, household goods, local milk, bread, eggs and chilled meat — with a café attached that pours bean-to-cup coffee from Black Mountain Roast and sells Pobl Bakery pastries, sandwiches, locally made pasties and pies, cakes, and, in summer, soft-scoop ice cream. Dogs are welcome at the outdoor tables, where there is a water bowl. Niki, who began as a volunteer and later took a paid role, called the place "a gem we all carved together".

The common, water and ways to explore

Everything in Llangorse points sooner or later at the water. The arrival view is the making of the village: Llangors Common, an open, level stretch of picnic ground grazed by horses, sheep and cattle, running down to a reed-fringed lake, with the church tower on one side and mountain ridges closing in the rest. Llyn Syfaddan — Llangorse Lake — is the largest natural lowland water body in South Wales, a shallow sheet lying in an Old Red Sandstone hollow left by the last ice age, with a mean depth of only two or three metres. Much of the western shore is screened by reeds, wet meadow and water lilies rather than open water. Grey herons and great crested grebes work the margins, terns pass through, an osprey turns up occasionally, and otters are about if you are lucky.

The lakeside operation hires rowing boats, pedalos, kayaks, canoes, paddleboards and fishing boats, buoyancy aids included. Hire is seasonal and weather-dependent, and conservation rules and water-quality restrictions can change at short notice, so check immediately before you travel if you have a particular craft in mind. Children under seventeen must be supervised on the water. The lake is known for its pike, along with bream, perch and tench; fishing is from a boat only, by permit, with no bank fishing allowed.

On foot, the easy option is the waymarked Lake Trail, a two-mile out-and-back from the common to the bird hide at Llangasty on the far shore. It is mostly level grass, marked by green-ringed posts and interpretation boards, though it can be boggy after rain and crosses grazed farmland, so keep dogs on leads near the livestock and the water. The hide is worth the walk: a traditionally built structure with a Welsh water-reed thatched roof, opened by the then Prince of Wales in 2012 and reached through wildflower meadows and a run of narrow kissing gates. For more height, a medium circuit climbs Cockit Hill on Mynydd Llangorse past Neolithic and Bronze Age burial cairns, with views over the lake, the Usk valley and the central Beacons. The longer eleven-mile circuit of the whole lake is another matter — rough, overgrown in places and not the family stroll it is sometimes made out to be.

Adventure above ground, royalty offshore

A mile out of the village at The Gilfach, the Llangorse Multi Activity Centre does indoor climbing, bouldering and horse riding, with its Base Camp Café upstairs: thirty seats indoors, a balcony over the riding arena, homemade cakes and "Rita's famous Welshcakes". Bookable activities are for ages six and over, riding enquiries from age four. Back in the village, the community centre has a playground with swings, a slide and a climbing frame, and a hall marked out for badminton, table tennis and short-mat bowls, which covers a wet afternoon.

The reason Llangorse matters to archaeologists sits a little way offshore: a small, tree-grown island that is not natural. The crannog — an artificial island of about forty metres by thirty, built up from timber, brushwood and stone behind an oak palisade, with a causeway to the north shore — was raised in the years around 890 as a royal court of the kings of Brycheiniog, and it is the only one of its kind known in Wales. In 916 an army sent by Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and daughter of Alfred the Great, destroyed it and carried off "the king's wife and thirty-three other persons"; a burnt layer in the ground probably marks the day. Among the finds from the silt outside the palisade was a charred scrap of very fine embroidered linen — twenty-three threads to the centimetre, worked with silk birds, creatures, vines and a border of lions — suggesting an owner of very high status, perhaps a royal tunic or dress. A ninth-century dugout logboat pulled from the lake in 1925 is now displayed at y Gaer in Brecon.

Lake legends and the church by the marsh

The lake gathered stories to match. When Gerald of Wales passed through in 1188 he noted a belief that the water ran green and red before an invasion, and that its birds would sing to order for the rightful prince of Wales. A fifteenth-century poem by Lewys Glyn Cothi gives the lake a monster, an afanc, later nicknamed Gorsey. In the 1890s there was a scheme to raise the whole lake by a hundred feet and flood the surrounding land to supply London with water; it came to nothing, and the lake was made an SSSI in 1954.

The village name is plainer than any of this: Llan-gors, the church by the marsh. St Paulinus is mostly late-medieval red sandstone rubble with an embattled west tower, first recorded in 1152 and enlarged in the fifteenth century. Inside are a wagon roof over the south aisle, an octagonal font of around 1300, a pew dated 1677, seventeenth-century grave slabs reused as flooring, and an ornate organ of 1764, with carved and gilded putti, that came here from St John's in Cardiff in 1894. The church is normally open in daylight, with level access and a welcome for dogs. Roger Glover, bassist of Deep Purple, was born in 1945 on a farm near Pennorth within the Llangors community; the band went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2016.

Arriving, ranging out and returning to the common

Driving is usually the simplest option, though the pre-booked B49 runs on Tuesdays and Fridays. The village sits on the B4560, four miles north of the A40 at Bwlch and about eight miles east of Brecon, and the nearest mainline station is Abergavenny, sixteen miles off, with a taxi for the last leg. A demand-responsive bus, the B49, links Llangorse with Brecon on Tuesdays and Fridays if you book it a couple of hours ahead, and the community centre runs a Post Office two mornings a week. Brecon holds y Gaer, where the logboat lives, along with its cathedral and canal basin. Talgarth, a few minutes north, has a restored working watermill grinding flour you can buy in the bakery beneath it. Tretower Court is a further outing, and Crickhowell, the market town, is about a twenty-minute drive east.

Back on the common at the end of the day, the horses go on grazing between the picnic tables and the reeds, the church tower behind them, and the island that started all of it sits quietly offshore, looking like nothing much at all.