Two go wild in Wales

GREY-SLATE ruins rose up on the hillside across the valley, the arches like spectacles sitting on the bridge of the hill’s nose. Against the blue sky and the hubs of the hills, Castell Dinas Brân was a dramatic welcome to an expedition based on George Borrow’s classic book Wild Wales . My father and I may not be Victorian gentleman explorers quite like Borrow, who literally walked the talk, but we decided to be the 21st-century, driving version of him. Travelling from Scotland home to Herefordshire, down the traffic-choked M6, we branched off on the ultimate scenic detour—Wales from north to south, in Borrow’s footsteps of 145 years ago. Is Wales, we wondered, still wild?

‘Few places have such untouched natural beauty and power as the Devil’s Bridge’

The castle rules North Wales’s Dee Valley and the artisan town of Llangollen below, home to the International Eisteddfod and, also, the best gluten-free pork