Ruthin

The Stone and the Square

On St Peter's Square there is a weathered limestone boulder about four feet long, sitting on a plinth by the roadside. This is Maen Huail, and tradition holds that King Arthur beheaded a man on it. The story goes that Arthur and Huail had quarrelled over a woman, Huail wounded Arthur's knee, and then made the mistake of taunting him about the resulting limp. The legend was first written down around 1550. The stone was more probably a market or preaching stone, but the plaque records the beheading anyway.

The square is the crown of the town, ringed by black-and-white half-timbered and Georgian buildings. Ruthin reputedly has more listed buildings than any other market town in North Wales, and most of the ones worth seeing are here. The specialist independent shops and cafes cluster around the same few hundred yards.

Cafés and the Castle Hotel

The Nest Coffee Shop looks out over the square, doing tea and cake with books and board games and a view of the medieval buildings opposite. Te yn y Grug is a deli stocking local cheese, honey, hampers, wine from Gwinllan Conwy Vineyard, Pant y Foel gin and beer from Bragdy Mona.

The pub of note is the Castle Hotel, a fine Georgian building of around 1730 that started life as the White Lion. Two maltsters and a master brewer once worked here supplying ale to the Myddelton family's other inns. The seven dormer windows set at different levels in the steep roof are known locally as the eyes of Ruthin. It is now a Wetherspoon, which North Wales Live called "the poshest Wetherspoon in Wales", and it is in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide. Charles Darwin is reputed to have stayed the night.

Local Pints and St Peter's

For a more local pint, the Wine Vaults is a free house with a verandah over the square and a games room with darts and pool. The Feathers keeps its old beams under a modern makeover. In its droving heyday Ruthin reputedly had a pub for every week of the year; by 2007 only eleven remained.

The church of St Peter dominates the skyline. Founded in 1310, it is one of the very rare collegiate parish churches in Wales, and it is double-naved — two rectangles of equal length side by side, divided by a row of pillars. The northern nave roof carries over 400 carved panels of flowers, badges and family heraldry, dated to between 1485 and 1508.

Rebellion, Gaol and Arrival

History here runs dark in places. Owain Glyndŵr burned the whole town to the ground on 16 September 1400 at the start of his rebellion. The Old Courthouse of 1401 still has the remains of a gibbet beam projecting from its north-west wall. Ruthin Gaol, which began as a bridewell in 1654, is now a museum; only one man was ever executed there, William Hughes, hanged in 1903.

There is no railway — the line to Denbigh closed in 1962, and its old station is now a roundabout and the Craft Centre. The A525 and A494 converge on the town, and the TrawsCymru T8 runs hourly through to Chester.

Nantclwyd y Dre and the Batcam

In the attic of Nantclwyd y Dre, one of the oldest timber-framed houses in Wales, there is a maternity roost of lesser horseshoe bats, with a live batcam so you can watch them.