Holidays in Wales: Costs, Coast Path & Rain Tips
Three hours into a week in Pembrokeshire, the rain came in sideways off the Irish Sea and the family in the next caravan discovered that their awning had a hole in it the size of a dinner plate. Nobody had checked the forecast properly. Nobody ever does. That's not a warning, just the shape of a normal first afternoon on holidays in Wales.
The country is small enough that people routinely underestimate it. From the Severn Bridge to Anglesey is about 170 miles on the A470 if the traffic behaves. It usually doesn't around Newtown. You can drive the whole length in a day and see three completely different landscapes doing it: border farmland, the bare brown middle, then slate and sea. What you can't do is see it properly in a weekend, whatever the brochures suggest.
Most people start in the north, and with good reason. Snowdonia, or Eryri as it's now officially known, pulls in around half a million visitors a year to Snowdon alone. The mountain railway up Yr Wyddfa is worth booking well in advance; walk-up tickets in summer are a lottery. The walk itself takes most people four to six hours up and down the Llanberis path, longer if they stop as often as they should. Bring actual boots. The top is 1,085 metres and the weather up there bears no relation to the weather in the car park. I've seen people in flip-flops at the summit in August, shivering, and I've been one of them.
What holidays in Wales actually cost
A week in a decent self-catering cottage in Gwynedd will set you back between £600 and £1,200 depending on the season, with August and school half-terms sitting firmly at the top of that range. Camping is cheaper, obviously, though a pitch for a tent and two adults at a farm site near Harlech runs about £28 a night once you've added the electric hook-up and the dog. The dog costs extra almost everywhere. That's a detail the listings tend to bury.
Food is where budgets quietly fall apart. A pub lunch for four with soft drinks lands around £70 now. Fish and chips on the seafront at Tenby, £12 to £15 a portion, and worth it once. The second time, get a pasty from the bakery on the side street instead. Self-catering helps, but the nearest proper supermarket to some of the best coastal cottages is a 25-minute drive, so people shop badly and eat worse. Plan the shop before you arrive, not after.
Then there's the small stuff. Parking at popular trailheads is £5 or £6 for the day and fills up by half nine in summer. Some car parks take cash only. Some take cards but the machine has been broken since Easter. Keep a fiver in the glovebox.
The best beaches in Britain are in Wales, and you'll have half of them to yourself if you're willing to walk twenty minutes from the car park.
Coast path and the beaches nobody mentions
The Wales Coast Path runs 870 miles from Chester to Chepstow, and it's the single best thing the country has done for visitors in the last twenty years. You don't have to walk all of it. A three-mile stretch in either direction from almost any coastal village will give you cliffs, coves, and a pub at the end. The sections around St Davids and the Gower are the famous ones, and rightly so, but the quieter bits between Aberystwyth and Cardigan are just as good and half as busy.
Beaches deserve a separate paragraph because people genuinely don't believe the photographs. Barafundle Bay in Pembrokeshire is a 15-minute walk from the National Trust car park at Stackpole Quay, and the sand there is pale enough that you'd check the map twice; the water is a different matter entirely. Rhossili on the Gower is four miles of flat sand backed by a cliff that takes twenty minutes to climb and rewards you with a view across to Worm's Head. Three Cliffs Bay, same peninsula, is smaller and harder to reach and better for it.
Water quality is generally excellent, which surprises people who assume British seaside equals sewage. It doesn't. The bathing water at most of the big beaches is rated good or excellent by Natural Resources Wales, and there are lifeguards on the main ones from May to September. Swimming is cold, though. Ten to fourteen degrees in August, and that's the honest number. Wetsuits are not optional for children who plan to stay in longer than ten minutes.
Rain, and what to do about it
It rains in Wales. Parts of Snowdonia see more than 3,000mm a year, which is roughly three times what London gets, and it falls in sudden heavy bursts rather than all-day drizzle. This is not a reason to cancel. It's a reason to pack a proper waterproof, two pairs of walking shoes, and a plastic bag for the wet ones. It's also a reason to have a wet-weather plan that doesn't involve driving an hour.
Castles are the obvious answer and there are more than 600 of them, which sounds like an exaggeration. It isn't. Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris, all UNESCO World Heritage sites, will absorb three wet days between them and cost less than £40 for a family ticket that covers several. Cardiff Castle is different, more Victorian fantasy than medieval fortress, and better for a rainy afternoon with small children. The slate museums at Llanberis and Blaenau Ffestiniog are genuinely good, and Blaenau's underground tour is done in a hard hat in a dark mine, which children find thrilling and adults find cold.
The alternative is to accept it. Locals do. A wet morning at Aberystwyth means a coffee in a cafe watching the waves hit the promenade, and nobody in there is complaining. The rain usually passes by two. It's the wind that lingers.
One honest drawback: public transport outside the main towns is patchy. The Heart of Wales line from Swansea to Shrewsbury is a beautiful two-and-a-half-hour journey and a genuine pleasure, but the bus connections from its rural stations are thin, sometimes three a day, sometimes none on Sundays. Without a car, holidays in Wales get harder and more expensive fast. You can do it, and plenty of people do, but you'll be planning around timetables rather than weather.
I didn't get up Cadair Idris. The weather turned on the second morning, the cloud came down to about 300 metres, and the person at the information desk said, quite reasonably, that the views would be nil and the path would be greasy. So that's a mountain still waiting. The café at the base did a decent bowl of soup and a flapjack the size of a hand, so the morning wasn't wasted.
Food, language and the small stuff
Welsh food has moved on from the cliché of lamb and leeks, though both are still excellent. There are small producers doing serious cheese, salt-marsh lamb from the Gower, laverbread fried with bacon for breakfast in the south, and a growing number of bakeries that take sourdough as seriously as anything in Bristol. A decent pub meal is easy to find. A great one is worth asking around for.
The language is visible everywhere and that's part of the pleasure of the place. Road signs are bilingual, road signs are bilingual, and in the north and west you'll hear Welsh spoken in shops and playgrounds as a living language rather than a heritage exhibit. Nobody expects visitors to speak it. A "diolch" at the till goes a long way, though, and "bore da" gets a smile before nine.
The people are dry, funny, and not remotely interested in selling you anything. Ask for directions and you'll get them, plus a story about the last person who asked and got lost. Ask for a recommendation and you'll get an honest one, including the one that begins "don't bother with". Take the advice.
Distances between the highlights are bigger than they look. Conwy to St Davids is a good three and a half hours, longer if you stop, which you should. Trying to do north and south in one week means spending half of it in the car. Better to pick one region properly. Anglesey alone will fill a week: beaches at Rhosneigr, the extraordinary Menai Strait, puffins on the Skerries in summer, and enough small coves that you could find a new one every day and still miss something.
One more unglamorous thing. Midges. Not the Scottish kind, but the coastal and lakeside ones are real from June to August, especially at dusk near standing water. Repellent helps. Long sleeves help more.
Book early. That's the single most useful piece of advice anyone can give. Cottages and campsites on the coast fill up by February for July and August, and the good ones are gone by January. Spring and autumn are quieter, cheaper by about a third, and often better weather than people expect. May in particular is a gift. The bluebells are out on the woodland paths, the beaches are empty, and the sea is still too cold to swim in for more than a minute.
Take a thermos. The cafes on the coast path open at ten, close at four, and don't always open at all in the shoulder season. A flask of tea at a clifftop viewpoint on a clear October morning costs nothing and stands in for a lot of things you might otherwise pay for.
The last ferry across the Menai Strait runs at about half past six on a Sunday, though the timetable changes in winter, so check before you plan around it.
Further reading: Wales on Wikipedia.
