At the rear of the Penycae Inn there are meerkats. Also wallabies, pygmy goats, Japanese cranes and a run of ornamental waterfowl, all kept in a licensed micro-zoo that the inn has run since 2015. The building itself is local stone, slate and green oak, and the kitchen's summer menu has featured a Penycae balti-style curry, syrup-roasted ham with leek-and-cider cream sauce, slow-roast belly pork and garlic mushrooms in a Perl Las cheese sauce. Dogs are welcome at pre-booked tables on the ground floor, and there is a children's play area as well as the large garden, which makes for an unusually busy afternoon at a village pub.
The Ancient Briton stands further along the A4067, the Swansea–Brecon road the whole village is strung along. It is stone-built too, does home-cooked food, and keeps three regular beers—Draught Bass, Wye Valley Butty Bach and Gower Gold—beside two that change and a real cider. The large garden has a warm-weather pop-up kitchen and a separate bar, the Little Briton. Dogs are allowed, but not in the restaurant area. Swansea CAMRA, which has made it branch Pub of the Year more than once, calls it "warm & friendly". There is accommodation and a campsite attached.
For groceries there is JBS Stores, a general shop on Brecon Road at the Ynyswen end of the village. For a post office, fuel and a choice of cafés, Ystradgynlais is the nearest town, down the valley.
Penycae is a mostly linear settlement in the Upper Swansea Valley, with the A4067 running broadly parallel to the River Tawe between Abercraf and Craig-y-nos, and wooded slopes and limestone bluffs closing in to the north. The walking begins more or less at the door. An eight-mile circuit from the Penycae Inn climbs towards Nant-y-ffin, drops to Henrhyd Falls and follows the Nant Llech through the Geopark before returning over Graig Llech Bridge. Shorter but steeper, the Cribarth circuit from Craig-y-nos covers under four miles and earns its two to three hours on rough moorland, old tramroads and quarry workings. Cribarth is called the Sleeping Giant, for its outline seen from down the valley.
North of the village, the forty-acre Craig-y-nos Country Park wraps around the Tawe, and above it is the castle that gives the ground its name. It went up in the 1840s as Bryn Melin, built for Rhys Davies Powell at a cost that bankrupted him, and in 1879 it was bought by the opera soprano Adelina Patti. She added reception rooms and a tropical-bird aviary, brought in a railway connection, and travelled with her own piano and a solid-silver bath. In 1890 she built a private 150-seat theatre, opened the next year with excerpts from La Traviata and Faust. It keeps its painted scenery, a stage curtain showing Patti as Semiramide, and working machinery; Cadw lists it Grade I.
Just beyond the castle, the National Showcaves Centre runs tours into Dan-yr-Ogof, first entered in 1912 by two brothers, Ashwell and Jeff Morgan, who crossed a flooded pool by coracle and candlelight and marked their way with arrows in the mud. More than ten miles of passages have since been mapped, and in the Bone Cave over 42 human skeletons have been found, some more than three thousand years old. The centre now adds dinosaur models, Shire horses, an Iron Age village and a farmyard, which is a great deal to hang on a hole in a hillside.
The village sits on the TrawsCymru T6 between Swansea and Brecon, which stops at the Penycae Inn, the castle and the showcaves; the nearest railway stations—Neath, Aberdare and Merthyr Tydfil—are well off, Neath around fifteen miles from Craig-y-nos.
Set back from the road, Ty'n-y-coed chapel keeps a large graveyard of plain nineteenth-century headstones, its 1829 front three bays wide under deep eaves. Inside, a three-sided gallery is edged with cast-iron panels between fluted pilasters. On a wet day the Country Park's short riverside paths fill with families and dogs, amid hillsides marked by old quarry workings and cave exploration.