Llangollen

The Aqueduct

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it doesn’t look like one. From the road below it looks like a viaduct, nineteen thin cast-iron arches supporting a trough of water 307 metres long and 38 metres above the River Dee. From on the aqueduct itself — either on foot along the towpath or on the canal via narrowboat — it looks like an act of optimism by people who hadn’t thought carefully enough about risk.

Thomas Telford built it between 1795 and 1805, which means he did it without reinforced concrete, without computer modelling, and without apparently worrying too much about whether the thing would work. It has worked for over two hundred years. The cast-iron trough leaks slightly, which Telford apparently decided was within acceptable parameters. The towpath on the north side has a railing; the channel edge on the south side does not. If your horse shied on the towpath in 1810, the subsequent events were terminal.

I walked across it twice — once from each end — and on the return crossing the height resolved from conceptual to physical somewhere around the middle, where the valley is deepest and the Dee is a grey thread two hundred feet down. The sensation is somewhere between exhilarating and quietly terrifying, and the bridge’s casual indifference to this is part of what makes it remarkable.

You can also take a narrowboat trip from the wharf at Trevor, which is the saner option and probably more enjoyable. The boats move at walking pace, which means the crossing takes about ten minutes of slow aerial progress above the valley.

The Town and the Ruins

Llangollen sits in the Dee Valley below the aqueduct, a small market town of stone buildings and a packhorse bridge that has crossed the river here since the fourteenth century. The water runs fast and brown below the bridge, and in late summer after rain the Dee is loud enough to hear from the main street.

Above the town, Dinas Bran — the ruined castle on the hilltop — is forty minutes of steep walking from the centre. The ruined keep dates to the thirteenth century and the hilltop itself to an Iron Age hillfort before that. The view from the top on a clear day takes in the entire Vale of Llangollen, the aqueduct visible to the east, Snowdonia on the northern horizon. The climb is direct and the path doesn’t pretend to be anything other than steep.

The Ladies and the Bone Collections

Llangollen is also known for the Ladies of Llangollen — Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, two Irish women who ran away together in 1778 and settled here in a cottage they expanded into a Gothic house called Plas Newydd. For fifty years they lived as one of the most celebrated partnerships in Europe, receiving visitors including Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and the Duke of Wellington, who came to see them as a curiosity and stayed because they were interesting.

Plas Newydd is now open as a museum. The house is covered inside in carved oak — they collected it obsessively, adding carved panels to walls and ceilings over decades until the interior became a kind of three-dimensional scrapbook. The garden is small and well-maintained, and the story, once you understand it, is more radical than the domestic scene suggests.

The International Eisteddfod

Every July, Llangollen hosts the International Eisteddfod — a music and dance festival that has been running since 1947, when it was conceived as a peace-building initiative after the Second World War. Choirs, folk dancers, and musicians from dozens of countries perform in a big tent on the meadow by the river, and the town fills with colour and sound and an atmosphere of organised celebration that feels unlike anything else in Wales.

Lia heard about it from a friend who’d performed there with a choir and spent months planning the visit. The evening concerts — the main competitive choirs, the pavilion lights, the Dee flowing outside — were the best live music experience of our Welsh trip.

When to go: July for the International Eisteddfod — book accommodation months in advance. May through September for the aqueduct boat trips running on regular schedules. Autumn is fine for the castle climb and the valley in colour; the town is quieter and the Dee is high and impressive.