Llanwrtyd Wells

Every August bank holiday people from around the world travel to a town in mid Wales to swim sixty metres through a trench cut in a peat bog, wearing a snorkel. Llanwrtyd Wells is the smallest town in Wales and has decided that the way to stay alive is to be the strangest, so it also races runners against horses over the hills.

It began as a spa: a sulphur spring at Dolycoed drew health tourists from across Britain, and the town is still one of three old spa towns in this corner of Powys, on the Heart of Wales railway line with drovers' roads running out into the hills. The World Bogsnorkelling Championships are the headline, the Chapel Bogathlon their sister event, and Lonely Planet put the swim among its top fifty things to do in the world; the Man versus Horse Marathon, runners against riders, is the other fixture, and a can-do community spirit organises the rest. The Neuadd Arms is the town's living room, a pub whose landlord brews the Heart of Wales beers in the derelict stables he found behind it, and the Drovers Rest runs a restaurant and cookery school across the square; a bronze red kite, given by a sculptor who came for the biking events, stands at the town's centre. Walking and cycling routes follow the old drovers' roads used for five centuries by farmers heading for English markets. Llanwrtyd is small, odd and entirely itself, which is the whole reason to go.