Beddgelert

Two rivers meet under a stone bridge and the village is built around the sound of them. Beddgelert, in the heart of Eryri, the national park of North Wales, is grey stone houses, a footbridge, a church and a meadow with a grave in it, and the grave belongs to a dog: Gelert, the hound of Llywelyn the Great, who killed it in a rage believing it had savaged his baby son, then found the boy alive beside a dead wolf. The name means Gelert's grave, and the whole village is the retelling.

The story is one of Eryri's defining tales and the grave in the riverside meadow is where generations have gone to hear it; The Colwyn and the Glaslyn join here, and the riverside path runs south between shelving banks that make a chain of small sandy coves, then squeezes into the Aberglaslyn Pass, where the Glaslyn crashes through a gorge under the trees and the old fisherman's path clings to the rock. A short walk out of the village is Sygun Copper Mine, where you go underground into workings that trace copper mining in these valleys back to the Romans, and the Welsh Highland Railway's steam trains whistle through on the line between Caernarfon and Porthmadog, with the Lôn Gwyrfai path running 4.5 miles beside the track to Rhyd Ddu at the foot of Yr Wyddfa. Nant Gwynant lies to the east and Snowdon to the north, so the village stands at the meeting of three of the park's finest valleys, and it has kept the inns, tea rooms, ice-cream shop and campsites to serve them.