Barry

Café Pilgrimages and Seaside Fun

Marco's Café sits on the Barry Island promenade, a working seafront café where you can still order chips and a mug of tea. It is also where Stacey works in the third series of Gavin & Stacey, and where she and Nessa meet, so a share of the customers are there on pilgrimage rather than for lunch. Nessa's "What's occurring?" has followed the show to the pavement outside, and thousands of fans arrive each year to walk the filming locations. Nessa, in the fiction, turned on the town's Christmas lights.

Whitmore Bay does most of the work of holding your attention. It is a wide crescent of golden sand backed by a promenade, lifeguarded and cleaned daily, and directly behind it stands the Barry Island Pleasure Park — a Ferris wheel, dodgems and candy floss that have been running since 1896, the year the railway station opened. Finnegans Inn faces the fairground across the road and does battered fish and chips, burgers and grills, with a seating area that takes dogs. Below the beach, a flight of steps called the Golden Stairs is named for the pirate treasure that legend hides beneath it.

Coast Paths and Pints

The coast rewards walking. The Wales Coast Path runs straight through, linking Barry Island to Porthkerry and on to East Aberthaw. From the pebbles at Cold Knap you can follow the shore past Watch Tower Bay into Porthkerry Country Park, 220 acres of woodland and meadow with its own pebble beach and a tall Victorian railway viaduct striding across the valley. The tidal range here is about 15 metres, the second highest in the world after the Bay of Fundy, which is why the water retreats so far and returns so fast.

For food and a pint away from the front, the Tynewydd Inn is one of the better-known kitchens, doing burgers and steaks alongside the usual classics, with a beer garden and dogs welcome throughout. The Ship keeps a British menu, ales and cocktails; the Master Mariner takes well-behaved dogs in the bar; Cwm Talwg, the community local, puts out treats and water for them.

Saints, Docks and Steam

The Church of St Cadoc stands at the junction of Coldbrook Road West and Brock Street, a Grade II* building with a saddleback west tower and trefoil windows at belfry level. There has been a church on the site since the twelfth century. The town takes its name from Saint Baruc, a disciple of Cadoc who drowned in the Bristol Channel returning to Flat Holm to fetch a book Cadoc had forgotten; his ruined chapel survives on Friars Road.

Barry Island was a genuine island until the 1870s, joined to the mainland only when the docks arrived. Those docks made Barry the world's largest coal port by 1913, shifting over nine million tons a year. Later, Dai Woodham's scrapyard took in some 300 condemned steam locomotives and, by leaving around 200 of them to rust rather than cut them up, accidentally stocked most of Britain's heritage railways.

Four Stations and a Final Tea

Four rail stations serve the town — Barry, Barry Docks, Barry Island and Cadoxton — on the hourly line from Cardiff, nine miles up the coast. Come back off the sand as the tide turns, and Marco's is still doing tea.