Visit the Gwaun Valley in Pembrokeshire

An almost secret spot, the secluded and wooded Gwaun Valley (Cwm Gwaun) is in north Pembrokeshire and offers many historical attractions. It is easy to access via road or footpath but is steeped in legend, myth, and tradition.

For most of its 10 miles, it runs from Lower Town Fishguard towards the Preseli Hills, where the Gwaun River rises to the east of Pontfaen .This steep-sided valley was formed by an epic geological convulsion, carved in a V-shape by the rushing waters of melting glaciers and geologists consider it one of the most important meltwater channels in Britain from the last Ice Age. It is a pure rural idyll, thick with beech, hazel, ash and oak, and with birdwatchers reporting sightings of pied flycatcher, wood warbler, redstarts, marsh tit, nuthatch and treecreeper.

Just above the Gwaun Valley andhalfway between Llanychaer and Garn Fawr,Parc Y Meirw (Field of the Dead) contains four ancient stones, and this stone row may have been constructed to commemorate the passage of the bluestones to Stonehenge. One of the most colourful stones derives from the impressive Stones of the Sons of Arthur on the edge of the Foel Cwmcerwyn, the highest mountain in the Preseli Hills. According to the Mabinogion, the earliest Welsh prose stories, the enchanted giant boar Twrch Trwyth kills four of King Arthur’s champions in a battle at this spot.

At Llanychaer, there is the site of an Iron Age defensive enclosure behind the village pub, the Bridgend Inn. In the circular churchyard at St Brynach’s in Pontfaen, there's another relic from the deep past with two pillar stones with inscribed Latin crosses, thought to date from between the 6th and 9th centuries.

Once a year, the villagers of Pontfaen and Llanychaer still mark the old Julian calendar, which operated before 1752, by celebrating New Year’s Day or Hen Galan on January 13th. Many children tour the villages and sing old songs with locals, giving them a traditional tribute or a Calennig (New Year gift).

The Dyffryn Arms at Pontfaen, or Bessie’s as it’s known locally, has been in the same family since 1840. This pub is of great historic importance, and it's likely someone will pour you a pint from a jug and hand it through a hole in the wall.

In recent history, the RAF bombed the tunnel at Castell Forlan in 1943 on a disused railway line into the Preseli foothills in a successful test for Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb as recreated in the 1955 film The Dam Busters.

Waldo Williams, one of the finest 20th-century Welsh language poets, is commemorated with a 10ft memorial stone next to the Gors Fawr stone circle after hesettled in Mynachlog-dduon the edge of the Preseli Hills.