Beddgelert

River, Ice Cream and Stone

The river runs shallow through the middle of Beddgelert, clear enough to see the stones on the bottom. An old two-arch stone bridge carries you across the point where the Afon Colwyn joins the Afon Glaslyn. On the far bank is Glaslyn Ices, which is where most people end up.

Glaslyn Ices makes its ice cream on site — around twenty flavours, plus dairy-free sorbets — and has done for three generations. The same family turns out sourdough pizzas, eat-in or takeaway, and has offset the parlour's carbon footprint since 2021. Dogs are allowed. It is the kind of place that could coast on its position by the bridge and instead keeps winning awards for the ice cream.

The village itself is a cluster of grey stone buildings in a valley, with Moel Hebog rising 782 metres to the west and the Snowdon horseshoe to the north. It wins flower competitions — Britain in Bloom and Wales in Bloom, repeatedly — and Visit Wales calls it "Snowdonia's prettiest village." The floral displays are a local project pursued with some seriousness.

For a proper meal, Bistro Hebog is generally reckoned to have the best food in the village: a riverside garden for lunch, a contemporary menu in the evening. Beyond that there are three pubs, all of them tenanted by the Frederic Robinson brewery, which gives the village the slightly unusual feature of a single-brewery drinking scene spread across three doors.

Pubs and Provisions

The Prince Llewelyn sits in the centre and is the one most reviewers name as their favourite — "best pub in Beddgelert," one of them writes, flatly. Eleven bedrooms, a log fire, and large portions of pub food: Welsh four-cheese pizza with stilton, chips, soup, a full Welsh breakfast, with vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options. Dogs are very welcome. Some reviewers note the menu is limited and the food occasionally inconsistent, which tends to be the qualification people add when they otherwise want to give a place full marks. It is named after Prince Llywelyn, of the Gelert legend, which we will get to.

The Saracen's Head is on the riverside and takes a similar approach — traditional pub classics alongside a few more contemporary dishes, small plates that turn out to be large. One reviewer records that two small plates, three meats each, could feed two people. Muddy boots, dogs and children are all welcome. Up to four real ales.

The Tanronnen Inn stands close to the confluence of the two rivers, about 370 metres from the Welsh Highland Railway station. Robinsons acquired the building in 1963. There are three or four rotating real ales across two bars, a plushly furnished lounge with an open fire, and seven en-suite rooms. There is one house rule worth knowing before you arrive thirsty: during evening meal service, drinks are not served to non-diners.

Provisions come from Emrys House, the village shop, which stocks groceries and the things you forget to pack. Walkers heading for the mountains can equip themselves first at the Crib Goch outdoor shop. The outdoor brand Gelert actually started nearby, moved to Beddgelert, and later decamped to Porthmadog, which is roughly the trajectory of a good many things around here.

Gorge, Mine and Priory

The walking is the main reason people come. South of the village the Fisherman's Path runs through the Aberglaslyn Pass, a narrow rocky gorge with the Afon Glaslyn crashing along beside it — the old fishermen's route to the coast, back when the estuary was tidal all the way to Pont Aberglaslyn. It is National Trust land, and the path borrows the old Welsh Highland Railway trackbed and its tunnels in places. When storms washed out a hundred-metre section, it was rebuilt with stone the railway itself delivered, which is the sort of arrangement that only makes sense once you have been here a while. The gorge is one of Snowdonia's most photographed.

From the Aberglaslyn Pass you can make a circuit taking in Llyn Dinas and the disused Cwm Bychan copper mine, whose old cableway pylons still stand on the hillside. Llyn Dinas has a lakeside path, recently improved, and a tenuous but persistent link to Arthur. Just up the Nant Gwynant valley is Dinas Emrys, a wooded hill-fort reached by a National Trust trail — the legendary site where Vortigern's castle kept collapsing until Myrddin Emrys, Merlin, revealed two dragons buried beneath it. The red one is the dragon on the Welsh flag. Moel Hebog, the mountain that dominates the village to the west, is reached from a car park in the centre and rewards the climb with sea views back down the valley.

A mile out of the village is Sygun Copper Mine, where you can take a self-guided underground tour of about thirty minutes past stalactites, copper-ore veins carrying traces of silver and gold, and dioramas of Victorian miners. The mine was worked from Roman times and industrially from 1836 — by 1862 some two to three thousand tonnes of copper had come out of it — before closing in 1903. It sat derelict until the Amies family reopened it as an attraction in 1986.

St Mary's Church, in the village, is older than it looks. Most of the surviving stone dates from around 1220, with some twelfth-century masonry in the north-west corner, but it began as an Augustinian priory — one of the oldest religious foundations in Wales, endowed by Welsh nobles including the Llywelyns. There was an early Christian community here as far back as the sixth century, mentioned by Gerald of Wales. The priory and most of its records burned in 1283, and the house was dissolved in 1535, after which it settled into being a parish church. A goldsmith named John Williams, who worked for King James I, donated a silver cup to it in 1610.

Railway, Grave and Hoax

The railway is a story of loss and reversal. The Welsh Highland Railway opened in 1922, closed in 1937, and had its rails torn up for the War Department in 1941. The trackbed became a walking route for decades. Then it was rebuilt, piece by piece, over fourteen years — one of the largest railway construction projects in Britain since the Channel Tunnel — and in 2009 the station reopened, unveiled by Lord Elis-Thomas. Today the narrow-gauge steam trains run 25 miles between Caernarfon and Porthmadog, through the village and the Aberglaslyn Pass. The nearest mainline station is Porthmadog, eight miles south. The A4085 links Caernarfon, thirteen miles north, with Porthmadog; the A498 runs through the village toward Nant Gwynant. A local bus connects Porthmadog and Beddgelert roughly every two hours.

Which brings us, finally, to the dog. Beddgelert means "the grave of Gelert," and there is indeed a grave, with two slate memorials — one English, one Welsh — and a nearby standing stone. The English slate tells the story: Prince Llywelyn went hunting without his faithful hound Gelert, returned to find the baby's cradle overturned and the dog's mouth bloody, ran it through with his sword, and only then found the child alive and a dead wolf beside it. "The Prince is said never to have smiled again."

None of it is true. The village is genuinely named after Saint Gelert, a Celtic holy man of the sixth to eighth century who settled here. The legend of the wrongly slain hound is a folk-tale that turns up all over Europe and Asia, and it was grafted onto the village around 1802 by David Pritchard, an innkeeper from south Wales who had come to Beddgelert to marry a local woman and was managing the hotel now called the Royal Goat. He noticed the name meant "grave of Gelert," borrowed a good story to match it, and when tourists began arriving wanting an actual grave to look at, he and two accomplices — William Prichard, the parish clerk, and Richard Edwards of Pen y Bont Fach — hauled a stone to a convenient spot within walking distance of his hotel. A poet named it in verse, visitors came, and locals profited. In 1899 a writer named D. E. Jenkins published the whole confession in a book about the village's folklore, noting that the tourists loved the tale regardless. They still do. The grave is one of the most visited spots in the village.

Meteorite, Ospreys and Rupert

The other things that have happened here are almost as improbable and entirely real. On 21 September 1949 a five-pound lump of metal fell through the roof of the Prince Llewelyn Hotel and into a bedroom — a meteorite, one of only two ever verified to have landed in Wales. The proprietor, Mr Tillotson, sold half of it to the British Museum and half to Durham University. Marged ferch Ifan, born here in 1696, was a harpist, a blacksmith and a champion wrestler, and lived to ninety-seven. The surrounding scenery has stood in for China, for a Lara Croft film, and for Carry On Up the Khyber, whose cast stayed at the Royal Goat.

A short drive or bus ride toward Porthmadog, at Pont Croesor, ospreys have bred in the Glaslyn Valley since 2004 — the first officially recorded osprey breeding in Wales. There is a staffed viewing centre and hide open daily from March to September, with telescopes and live screens from a camera on the nest. The RSPB ran it until 2012, when a local wildlife group took over.

And for thirty years, in a cottage at the foot of Mynydd Sygun, Alfred Bestall drew Rupert Bear. He took over the Daily Express strip in 1935 and moved to the village in 1956, and the woods and mountains he could see from his door found their way into the illustrations. There is a small Rupert Garden now, tucked into the village, which is a modest thing to leave behind for a man who spent his afternoons drawing a bear in a scarf. It suits the place.