Ceredigion

Ceredigion is a county on the west coast of Wales bordering the whole eastern sweep of Cardigan Bay, its varied coastline of dramatic cliffs, sheltered coves, and small harbour towns making it one of the most scenic stretches of the Welsh coast.

Wildlife

The county’s principal island, Cardigan Island, lies just off the coast near the mouth of the River Teifi close to the town of Cardigan itself, and has long been managed as a nature reserve valued for its seabird colonies and important population of feral Soay sheep, descended from an ancient breed originally introduced from the Hebrides in the 1930s to help manage the island’s vegetation after a serious fire had devastated much of its original grazing stock.

Cardigan Bay as a whole is internationally renowned for its resident population of bottlenose dolphins, one of the largest in Europe, numbering several hundred individuals and studied continuously by researchers based at the nearby Cardigan Bay Marine Wildlife Centre in New Quay, drawing wildlife-watching boat trips from towns including New Quay and Aberystwyth throughout the summer months, when dolphins can often be spotted directly from the harbour walls without even needing to board a boat.

History

Ceredigion’s coastline forms part of the Wales Coast Path, offering walkers dramatic clifftop views across the bay, while inland the county remains one of the strongest Welsh-speaking areas in the country, home to the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, founded in 1872 as the first constituent college of the University of Wales, and a rich tradition of Welsh literature and culture reflected in the county’s many chapels, eisteddfodau, and its status as a stronghold of the modern Welsh-language publishing and broadcasting industry.

Aberystwyth itself, the county’s largest town, combines a Victorian seaside resort character, complete with promenade and pier, with a genuinely significant academic and cultural role, home also to the National Library of Wales, one of the world’s great copyright libraries and custodian of an extraordinary collection of Welsh manuscripts, books, and archives spanning many centuries of the nation’s history.

The combination of marine wildlife, coastal scenery, and strong cultural identity makes Ceredigion one of the most distinctive counties along the entire west coast of Wales, a place where dolphin-watching boat trips and centuries-old Welsh literary tradition sit comfortably side by side within a single, relatively compact stretch of Cardigan Bay coastline.

Further along the coast, the village of Borth is well known for its submerged forest, the preserved stumps of trees that grew here several thousand years ago before rising sea levels drowned the low-lying land, periodically exposed at very low tides and traditionally associated with the Welsh legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod, a mythical low-lying kingdom said to have been lost beneath the waves of Cardigan Bay after its sea defences failed, a story often compared with other flood legends found around the coasts of north-west Europe. Inland, the ruined medieval abbey of Strata Florida, founded by Cistercian monks in the twelfth century, was for centuries an important centre of religious and cultural life in mid Wales and is traditionally held to be the burial place of the celebrated medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym.

Visiting

The Georgian harbour town of Aberaeron, laid out in the early nineteenth century to a planned grid design commissioned by the Reverend Alban Thomas Jones Gwynne, remains one of the most architecturally distinctive small towns on the entire Welsh coast, its brightly painted harbourside houses a popular subject for photographers. Ceredigion’s uplands, rising away from the coast towards the Cambrian Mountains, include dramatic scenery around Devil’s Bridge, where three bridges are stacked one above another spanning a deep wooded gorge, and the narrow-gauge Vale of Rheidol Railway, first built to serve the area’s lead mining industry and now carrying visitors on steam-hauled trains between Aberystwyth and Devil’s Bridge through some of the county’s finest inland scenery.

More about Ceredigion

This inland richness complements the county’s coastal appeal, giving Ceredigion an unusually broad range of landscapes, from dolphin-rich coastal waters to wooded gorges and open moorland, within a single, relatively small administrative area.