The Old School on the A40 now sells pinball machines. It has become the Trecastle Antiques Centre, and inside you will find furniture, glassware, tools, militaria, enamel signs, garden ornaments, LPs and jewellery, with a particular leaning towards Art Deco and mid-century stock. It is the kind of place you go in to look at one thing and leave an hour later.
On the A40 in Trecastle is the Castle Coaching Inn, which is the centre of gravity for anyone staying nearby. It is a proper coaching inn with a log fire, a public bar and a restaurant, ten refurbished en-suite rooms above, and a four-star rating from both the AA and Visit Wales. It was named AA Inn of the Year for Wales in 2026. Dogs are welcome in the bar, though not the restaurant, and two of the rooms are set aside for them as well. There is a garden and patio, parking, and EV charging.
The kitchen is more ambitious than the setting suggests. Dishes that come through include 36-hour slow-cooked pork ribs with pickled chillies, spring onions and slaw; a chicken burger with smoked cheese, bacon jam and triple-cooked chips; local lamb with kohlrabi, potato darphin and courgette pesto; and, to finish, a coffee, chocolate, cherry and mascarpone crémeux. Children are welcome, high chairs are on hand, and there is a dartboard in the corner.
The village itself strings out along the A40, a long roadside settlement on gently sloping ground on the north side of the Usk valley, the river a few hundred metres to the south. Nant Logyn runs north to south through the middle of it and has influenced the settlement's form. At the eastern edge, on higher ground immediately beside the road, sits Castle Tump, the medieval motte-and-bailey that gave the place its name. Trecastle means the settlement by the castle, a form recorded as far back as 1298.
There were once two Trecastles, divided by the stream: the castle-side settlement to the east and Bishop's Town to the west, the latter still labelled on maps. In 1290 Edward I granted the bishop of St David's an annual fair and weekly market here. This was a home of Watkin Lloyd, who captained the Welsh archers at Agincourt, and later a wool town of some size before the railway at Sennybridge drew the trade away. In 1833 Samuel Lewis described it more modestly as "a cluster of several houses, among which is a good inn and posting-house."
West of the village the old Roman road climbs onto Mynydd Bach Trecastle, where two Roman marching camps sit one inside the other on the ridge at around 400 metres, their banks, ditches and inturned entrances still legible in the turf. A four-mile walk loops around Y Pigwn; longer options lead toward Usk Reservoir and Glasfynydd Forest. The reservoir is an easy drive with parking and room for a picnic, and after dark it offers exceptionally dark skies, well protected from the light pollution of the South Wales valleys.
A little over a kilometre north-west stands the church of St David at Llywel, Grade I listed and mostly late fifteenth century. Pevsner called its tower the finest in Powys. Inside are medieval barrel roofs, a small twelfth-century font and a set of village stocks dated 1798. Its greatest treasure, the Llywel Stone, was found in 1878 just as it was about to be used as a gatepost; the original now sits in the National Museum of Wales.
Getting here is simple enough: Trecastle is directly on the A40, sixteen kilometres west of Brecon, with the Williams Coaches X80 running Monday to Saturday to Brecon in about half an hour and to Llandovery, the nearest railhead, in about seventeen minutes. Local tradition holds that the Gwynne family once dammed Nant Logyn into a lake and had themselves rowed across the flooded meadows to church, which is a good deal more effort than the walk to Llywel takes today.