Pontypridd

The Old Bridge and a Brewing Pub

The Old Bridge crosses the Taff in a single stone arch that spans 140 feet and rises about 35, and for a while after William Edwards finished it in 1756 it was reckoned the longest single-span stone arch bridge in the world. Edwards was a minister as well as an architect, and he got there in the end — the three drainage holes pierced through each haunch are there because earlier arches collapsed under their own weight. The rise turned out to be too steep for carts, so the flatter Victoria Bridge went up alongside it in 1857. The old one is still the image the town returns to.

Cross into the centre and the Bunch of Grapes is on Ynysangharad Road, a few minutes from the war memorial park. It has been a pub since 1851 and now brews its own: the Cwrw Otley microbrewery runs off the back of it, feeding nine handpulls and five keg taps, with a craft beer shop attached and a kitchen that leans on Welsh produce. The food is served through the day, later on Fridays and Saturdays, winding down mid-afternoon on Sundays. The Llanover Arms, a more traditional town pub, sits over toward Bridge Street.

Market Life and the Riverside Park

The town's other institution is the covered market, built under an 1877 Act of Parliament and finished in stone in 1885, with an Arcade added in 1890 above an auditorium that once seated around seventeen hundred. The theatre part closed in 1982 and has sat empty since; the market below it keeps trading.

For open air, Ynysangharad War Memorial Park runs along the river with a bandstand, cricket ground, bowls, tennis and playgrounds. The Taff Trail passes straight through it on its way from Cardiff Bay to Brecon. At one edge stands Lido Ponty, an open-air pool from 1927 that was said to take a thousand swimmers a day before fire closed it in 1991; a £6.3m restoration reopened it in 2015. Above the town, Pontypridd Common gives high ground and valley views, and holds the Rocking Stone within its ring of standing stones — the ceremonial spot where Dr William Price, physician, Chartist and self-declared druid, married at 81 and held his rites.

St Catherine's Spire

St Catherine's, John Norton's tall-spired church of 1866–70, is the landmark from the valley floor. In 1937 its organist Doreen Chadwick, then eighteen, became the youngest woman to broadcast recitals from it on BBC radio.

The Anthem in Bronze

It was in Pontypridd, in 1856, that Evan James wrote the words to "Hen Wlad fy Nhadau" and his son James James set them to music — the tune Wales has sung as its anthem ever since. A bronze in the park, a woman for poetry and a harpist for music, honours them both.

Valley Connections

Cardiff is ten miles and about twenty-five minutes down the A470, with something like six trains an hour from the station in peak hours. Up the other way lies the Rhondda and the old collieries. Tom Jones was born just across the river in Treforest, and came back for his sixty-fifth birthday to sing in the same park where the anthem's composers stand in bronze.