Strata Florida and Cors Caron

Where a lane gives out in the Cambrian foothills a single carved doorway stands where a Cistercian abbey church once did, framing grass and sky down the line of the nave. Strata Florida, Ystrad Fflur to the valley, was where the princes of Wales were buried and where monks wrote down the first history of the country in its own language.

The Lord Rhys of Deheubarth was not the abbey's founder, but he took it to heart and put it on the map, and under a line of abbots the monks produced the Brut y Tywysogion, the Chronicle of the Princes, and copied tales that became the Mabinogion. What survives is the west doorway, the best-preserved feature, decorated floor tiles still on the ground, and the graves; in the churchyard next door a yew is said to shade the medieval poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. A few miles away Cors Caron is another kind of monument: three raised bogs of deep peat that have been building for 12,000 years, over 800 hectares of them, with a fully accessible boardwalk running out across the most impressive stretch to a large hide. Tregaron, the little town between the two, keeps Y Talbot, a seventeenth-century drovers' inn, and the statue of the peace campaigner Henry Richard, standing with his back to the pub. This is inland Wales at its emptiest and most literate, a day of stone, peat and quiet.