The Cliff Railway climbs Constitution Hill at four miles an hour, which is roughly walking pace, except you are sitting down. It has been doing this since 1896, and at 778 feet it is the longest electric funicular in Britain. At the top there is a café, panoramic views of Cardigan Bay, and a camera obscura that projects a live image of about a thousand square miles onto a table, so you can watch the town from above without the effort of looking at it directly.
Constitution Hill rises straight out of the sea at the north end of the promenade, 430 feet of it, and on a clear day you can count 26 Welsh mountain peaks from the summit. The prom curves along the front below, shingle and sand between the headlands, with the Royal Pier — the first pleasure pier in Wales, opened 1865 — partway along.
For a town its size, the drinking is taken seriously. CAMRA lists around 31 real ale pubs, bars and inns in and around Aberystwyth. The Ship & Castle is the one the local branch keeps naming as the leading cask venue, a free house that serves a "five pump platter" of five third-pint measures for people who can't decide. Rummers Wine Bar sits in a Grade II listed building down by the Rheidol harbour, with four hand pulls of rotating local craft ale and seating out over the water.
The Starling Cloud, a newer gastropub with rooms attached, does baked flatbreads and pub classics and takes the phrase "Muddy paws and boots welcome" at face value — dogs are fine in the bar and the sunny beer garden. The Bottle and Barrel runs fourteen keg lines and three real ale pumps for those keeping score.
You eat well here too. Ultracomida on Pier Street is a Spanish deli with floor-to-ceiling dry goods and a back-room tapas restaurant seating ten at a counter; the vinoteca pours vermut flights and cava alongside fresh bacalao, and it has made The Good Food Guide. Medina works the Mediterranean the other way, with tapas, wood-fired pizzas and seafood.
The town owes its shape to a run of ambitious projects that didn't quite go to plan. Edward I began the castle in 1277; it fell to Owain Glyndŵr in 1404 and was retaken by cannon in 1408. In 1637 Charles I put a royal mint inside it, striking coins in eight denominations from Cardiganshire silver. Later, the entrepreneur Thomas Savin spent past £80,000 turning a seaside villa into a grand gothic hotel and went bankrupt on 5 February 1866. A London committee bought the shell for £10,000 and opened it as a university instead, with about 25 students. The National Library of Wales followed in 1907 and now holds over six million books.
Trains run from the in-town station up the Cambrian Line to Shrewsbury and through to Birmingham; the A487 and A44 meet in the middle of town.
At the north end of the prom, people tap a foot on the metal railing before turning back — kicking the bar. Nobody quite agrees why, which hasn't stopped anyone doing it.