Welsh Wonders

Looking to explore Welsh legend and storytelling, Caroline Mills tours the Snowdonia National Park and the spectacular North Wales coast

- Caroline Mills

Roaming through the jungle of sessile oaks, azalea bushes and sky-high pines with burly trunks, I stepped back, camera poised, and almost stumbled over a crocodile. Jaws agape, the timber sculpture in Portmeirion’s woodland momentarily caught | me unawares as I focused on the brilliant carmine of a flourishing rhododendron. Beneath a sultry sun and the startling floral pinks and striking reds, the environment felt more Mediterranean, or even tropical, than North Wales Coast.

My trip to Wales would, I had hoped, be the stuff of storybooks. It had begun the previous day, at one of Wales’ most significant ‘legends’, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. The work of Thomas Telford, and a masterpiece of the Industrial Revolution, the aqueduct is the longest in Britain and the highest in the world. Together with an 11-mile stretch of the Llangollen Canal, it is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I followed the four-and-a-half miles of canal towpath towards the monochrome world of Llangollen.

If the houses of the town are black and white, the countryside of the Dee Valley, in which the canal runs, is anything but – it’s a pastoral idyll of verdant hills topped by ruined castles, gentle pastures with dozing sheep and an extravagant catalogue of wildflowers, crowned by canalside bluebells and showy ramsons. The canal journey, punctuated by bridges in multiple architectural styles, is a particularly attractive and gentle walk. With a hard standing towpath all the way to the Horseshoe Falls (Telford’s engineering masterpiece west of Llangollen, and a water source for the canal), the route is also suitable for pushchairs and wheelchairs.