Llangollen

Watermill and town pubs

Behind the bar at The Corn Mill, a water wheel turns slowly, which it has been doing in one form or another for at least 700 years. The pub is a converted watermill that once ground flour for local farmers, its foundation credited to the Cistercian monks up the valley. The decking is built directly over the mill race, so you drink above the rapids, with the restored railway station visible across the river. Brunning & Price, who run it, describe the interior as "a great jumble of old beams everywhere, and the water wheel turning slowly behind the bar." The kitchen changes its menu daily and the cask ales are a house point of pride.

For ale specifically, the locals point you to the Ponsonby Arms, named for one of the Ladies of Llangollen and holder of a TripAdvisor reviewer's title of "llangollens number 1 real ale pub." It keeps around eight beers on at once — Big Hand, Heavy Industry, Purple Moose and others — with a Friday-evening cask promotion and a garden looking over the Dee. Its sister pub, the Sun Inn on Regent Street, serves no food but does serve music: gigs on Friday and Saturday, jazz on Thursday, open mic on Wednesday. The Bull Inn on Castle Street handles the coaching-inn end of things.

Food shops and valley walks

Food shopping is well covered for a town this size. The Oggie Shop sells Welsh oggies, pork pies, scotch eggs and full-dairy Welsh ice cream; Porter's Delicatessen does the Mediterranean end; and D M Pierson has been butchering here since David Pierson started in 1975, with award-winning sausages and Welsh lamb. There's a Country Market in the Town Hall on Friday mornings and a general market on Tuesdays.

The town sits on the River Dee where it runs fast through a wooded valley, with rapids beside the bridge good enough to host international canoe slalom. Above it all, on a conical hill, sit the ruins of Castell Dinas Brân, built in the 1260s on an Iron Age hillfort and tangled up in Arthurian legend as a possible hiding place of the Holy Grail. The climb is steep. The view over the Dee Valley and the Eglwyseg limestone escarpment is the reward. From there you can join the eight-mile circuit that also takes in Valle Crucis Abbey — once the second-richest abbey in Wales, and home to the only surviving monastic fishpond in the country — and the canal towpath out to Telford's Horseshoe Falls.

Bridge and St Collen's Church

Llangollen Bridge is 16th-century and Grade I listed. St Collen's Church, the only Welsh church dedicated to that saint, keeps a medieval hammerbeam roof carved with Celtic imagery under a 19th-century rebuild.

Road, rail and bus connections

Getting here means the A5, Telford's old London–Holyhead mail route; the nearest station is Ruabon, about fifteen minutes off, with Arriva's service 5 running roughly every half hour from Wrexham.

Horse-drawn canal trips

At the wharf, horse-drawn narrowboats have been carrying passengers along the canal for over a century, at a pace that suits the place. The Wharf Tea Room does Welsh cream teas while you wait.