Explore North Wales
LLANGOLLEN, just six miles from the English border, is the embodiment of a Welsh town, clasped tightly in the narrow Dee Valley where the river runs beneath the weighty, Gothic bridge. This was an important town long before the early Romantics arrived at the end of the eighteenth century. Turner came to paint the swollen river and the Cistercian ruin of Valle Crucis; John Ruskin found the town “entirely lovely in its gentle wildness”; and writer George Borrow made Llangollen his base for the early part of his 1854 tour detailed in Wild Wales. The rich and famous also came to visit the “Ladies of Llangollen” at Plas Newydd. But by this stage some of the town’s rural charm had been eaten up by the works of one of the century’s finest engineers, Thomas Telford, who squeezed both his London–Holyhead trunk road and the Llangollen Canal alongside the river.
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The Llangollen International Music Eisteddfod
The Llangollen International Music Eisteddfod
Llangollen is heaving all summer, and never more so than in early July, when for six days the town explodes in a frenzy of music, dance, poetry and colour. Unlike the National Eisteddfod, which is a purely Welsh affair, the International Music Eisteddfod draws amateur performers from fifty countries, all competing for prizes inside the 6000-seat Royal International Pavilion, and at several other venues. The eisteddfod has been held in its present form since 1947 when forty choirs from fourteen countries performed. Today, more than 4000 participants lure up to 150,000 visitors, and there is an irresistible joie de vivre as brightly costumed dancers stroll the streets and fill the restaurants.
The eisteddfod is followed by the less frenetic Llangollen Fringe, with a number of more “alternative” acts – music, dance, comedy and so on – performing over the third week in July.
