Carreg Cennen

The castle perches on a limestone cliff nearly 300 feet above the River Cennen, and inside its walls a vaulted passage goes down, not up, into a cave in the rock beneath. Carreg Cennen is the ruin the readers of Countryfile voted the most romantic in Wales, and the cave is the reason to bring a torch.

The crag was probably an Iron Age fort before it was anything else, and the first castle was Welsh, raised by the Lord Rhys, ruler of south Wales. What stands now is a Marcher lord's statement: John Giffard fought for Edward I at Irfon Bridge in 1282, the battle that killed Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and ended Welsh independence, and this crag was his reward, rebuilt with a barbican of bridges over pits, twin-towered gatehouse and a castle-within-a-castle plan that no later owner ever softened. Its end came in 1462, when its Lancastrian garrison fell to Sir Roger Vaughan and 500 men took four months to dismantle it with picks and crowbars. The passage to the cave runs from the inner ward along the cliff, unlit, to a natural chamber beneath the walls; Roman coins and prehistoric skeletons have been found on the site. Below, the castle is reached through a working farm with tea rooms and a pedigree Longhorn herd, and walks lead out over a patchwork of oak and ash woods towards the bare ridge of the Black Mountain, where ravens and crows now hold the ruin.