Wales is just a few hours by road and rail from most of the UK’s main centres. From London, for example, you can be driving across the Severn Bridge in less than three hours – and it’s even quicker by train. From the rest of Britain and beyond, there’s an excellent choice of roads, flights and ferries. Castles are an inescapable part of the Welsh landscape. They’re absolutely everywhere. You could visit a different one every day for a year and still not see them all. Some watch over mountain passes, while others keep an eye on the city traffic whizzing by; some lie in enigmatic ruins, while others still have families living in them.
There’s also an altogether more inscrutable and far older set of stones to discover – the stone circles, dolmens and standing stones erected long before castles were ever dreamt up, before even histories were written. Sure, the climate’s not exactly tropical, but regardless of the weather’s vagaries, Wales is a superb beach-holiday destination. The beauty of the British coast is cruelly underrated, and Wales has some of the very best bits. When the sun is shining, the beaches fill up with kids building sandcastles and splashing about in the shallows. And when it’s not, how about a bracing walk instead? The Wales Coast Path traces the country’s entire length, so you’re unlikely to run out of track.