Cowbridge

Walls, High Street and Old Inns

The South Gate still stands at the edge of town, the one surviving piece of walls that once ringed Cowbridge by about 1300, with two angle towers beside it. The walls were built to protect the Lord of Glamorgan's burgage plots and to collect tolls from a twice-weekly market. The market is long gone, but the High Street it shaped is still lined with independent shops, and you can walk the length of it in Georgian and Victorian company.

Start at the Bear. It has been an inn on the High Street since at least 1736, when it was noted as The Bear, though the building is far older — put up around the 12th century as a town house for the Llanmihangel Place manor. The hall fireplace carries two carved shields, a reversed lion rampant and a trefoil, and the ceiling beams date to the late 16th century. The Glamorganshire Agricultural Society was founded here in 1772. Today two bars either side of the entrance corridor both pour real ale, generally with up to three guest beers, and the kitchen runs Welsh menus around a log fire. Dogs are allowed in the bar and in the rooms, and get sausages at breakfast.

Real Ale and Independent Food

For drinking rather than dining, the Vale of Glamorgan Inn is a single-roomed real-ale pub in the centre, wooden-floored with a range fire and a flagstone rear section warmed by another stove. It is, in one description, "a popular single roomed pub in the centre of town where conversation is the usual entertainment." An archway off the street survives from its coaching-inn days.

The food shopping is unusually good. Forage Farm Shop has an on-site butcher and a deli of cheese, cakes and bread, much of the meat and veg grown on the Penllyn Estate around it, plus pick-your-own flower fields. Cowbridge Farm Shop stocks home-grown produce; the Elephant & Bun deli handles speciality ingredients; the Penny Farthing does coffee, breakfast and lunch. There is a florist, Gail Armytage, and a vintage homestore called Happy Days for fashion and furniture.

Garden and Watchtower

Behind high stone walls, some of them 13th century, sits the Physic Garden — half an acre laid out by the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust on the footprint of an earlier 1700s garden, growing only plants found in Britain before 1800. Camilla, its patron, opened it in 2008. The Church of the Holy Cross nearby has a squat, semi-fortified tower from around 1300, broad enough that it may have been meant as a watchtower or refuge if the town were attacked.

Iolo, Attack and Grammar School

It was attacked, in the Glyndŵr rising, and rebuilt. Iolo Morganwg, the antiquary who invented the modern Eisteddfod's rituals, kept a bookshop on the High Street; a plaque marks it with his motto, "Truth against the world." The Grammar School counted Anthony Hopkins among its pupils before it closed in 1974.

River Walks and Arrival

Walks follow the River Thaw south to Llanblethian, along the old town walls and across the water to the ruins of St Quentin's Castle. There is no railway now — it closed in 1951 — so you arrive off the A48, Cardiff twelve miles east. The Sunday Times once called this the best place to live in Wales, and the people who buy their Sunday joint at Forage seem to have quietly agreed.