holiday accommodation wales
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holiday accommodation wales, bed & breakfast, gwynedd, tourist breaks barmouth, guest house, b&b, vacation, accommodation wales
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Wales is rolling moorlands, glaciated mountain areas, mellifluous male-voice choirs, very long place names, Rugby Union, 'Bread of Heaven', romantic castles, people with querying lilts, cheese on toast and old mining towns. Wales is also rampant deforestation, marching power lines and the gradual replacement of 19th-century mining ugliness with late 20th-century industrial playgrounds. The backbone behind this strange mixture of beauty and ugliness, poignancy and affliction is Welshness - a strength of spirit and character which despite centuries of neglect and attempted assimilation remains defiant.
Visas: EU citizens may live and work free of any immigration controls. Citizens of the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand are generally allowed to stay six months without a visa. Health risks: None Time: GMT/UTC Electricity: 240V, 50Hz Weights & measures: Metric (except beer, which is measured in pints)
Spring and autumn are probably the best times to visit Wales if you want to avoid the July and August crowds. It's even less busy in winter, but many attractions close in mid-October and don't reopen until Easter. Some mountain passes can be snowbound in winter.
It wouldn't be Wales without eisteddfodau. The big one is the Royal National Eisteddfodd of Wales, a moveable show held in early August, but you could also try the International Eisteddfod, held in Llangollen every July, or the Urdd (Youth) Eisteddfod held in May. Wales' yearly festival of cows and ploughs, the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show, is on at Llanelwedd in mid-July.
Distances are small, but with the exception of links around the coast, public transport users have to fall back on infrequent and complicated bus timetables. There are no internal flights. Wales has some fantastic train lines, particularly along the Cambrian coast and down the Conwy valley. The country's two main motorways are top-class, but elsewhere the roads are slow, though still good. Snow and ice can make the higher roads treacherous, or close them altogether. Boats travel out to the islands of the Pembrokeshire coast and the Lyn Peninsula.
The fascinating subject of Welsh mythology provides an important background to any travels through Wales. The Mabinogion is a collection of tales dating back to the misty Celtic past. Giraldus Cambrensis was a 12th-century monk who journeyed round the country looking for recruits for the Third Crusade. His medieval travel tales are best digested in the collection A Mirror of Medieval Wales. The Matter of Wales is Jan Morris' entertaining description of her home country's history and present. Facts and figures to round out the picture can be found in John Davies' A History of Wales.
No listing of Welsh literature is complete without Dylan Thomas. His Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog reflects his own experiences growing up in the 'ugly, lovely town' of Swansea, while the play Under Milk Wood is required reading or, better still, listening, for anyone hoping to come to terms with Welshness. Bruce Chatwin's novel On the Black Hill is an excellent read about the life of twin farmers living and working on the English-Welsh border. For a more romanticised view, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley is the first of a set of four novels describing the life of a boy growing up in a South Wales mining community. His novels went a long way to creating the mystique of the tough life they portrayed. For something more quirky, try Elizabeth Mavor's The Ladies of Llangollen, which describes the unusual lives of a lesbian couple in the 18th century, who eloped from Ireland to Wales to settle in Plas Newydd, where they were visited by many well-known figures of the era.