Wales
Strata Florida and Cors Caron
An abbey doorway in the hills, a poet under a yew, a bog crossed by boardwalk.
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.
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Solo
The abbey when it opens, the churchyard yew, then the boardwalk to the hide and a whole afternoon to watch the bog.
Couple
A night at the drovers' inn in Tregaron, the doorway at golden hour, and the boardwalk at dawn for the mist over the peat.
Family
A flat boardwalk over a bog with a hide at the end, tiles to find on the abbey floor, and a story about princes and a poet under a tree.
- The richly carved west doorway of Strata Florida is the abbey's best-preserved feature, framing a view down the nave to where the high altar stood, and decorated floor tiles survive around it.
- Generations of medieval Welsh princes are buried here, and the monks wrote or copied the first history of Wales in Welsh, the Brut y Tywysogion, along with tales of the Mabinogion.
- The medieval poet Dafydd ap Gwilym is said to lie under a yew in the churchyard beside the abbey.
- Nearby Cors Caron holds three raised bogs built up over 12,000 years, more than 800 hectares in all, crossed by an accessible boardwalk to a hide over the peat.
Supper at Y Talbot in Tregaron, a seventeenth-century drovers' inn where the herders gathered before the long walk over the Cambrian Mountains to English markets.
A flask and sandwiches in the bog hide where the Cors Caron boardwalk ends; the abbey's visitor centre runs to tea and snacks, the bog to nothing at all, and quiet is the point.
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