The Voice of Independent Accommodation Providers

Visit Cardiff/Caerdydd Cardiff and the surrounding villages and stay in bed and breakfast, hotel or holiday cottage accommodation provided by BedPosts members.

Cardiff has been the capital of Wales since 1955. Until the 19th Century it was a small town but due to the significance of its port for transporting coal it became a major city. The millennium stadium opened in 1999 is the location for many large sporting and music events.

The view of Cardiff is at first dominated by the long main street, where the castle screens its original grim beauty behind a eastellated front invented by one William Burges to make a residence for the Marquess of Bute, who had many such places in Scotland, Wales, London, and Edinburgh, and even in Spain. In 1947, his new Cardiff Castle was handed over to the City Corporation for public use. To enter the grounds is to see one of the finest examples of a Norman keep in Britain. The great walls, awe-inspiring in the exact geometry of their construction, recall the grey eminence of Rochester. In some respects, the workmanship of the 1890s, which surrounds it with its echoes of Victorian Gothic and Scottish Baronial, makes the symmetry of the earlier structure better seen; there are few others that create from such solid strength the sense of an upward-leaping balance from green lawns. The library is outstanding as a reference source for the study of history and architecture. There is also a Chaucer Room, so named from its stained-glass windows depicting, in the style of Burne-Jones, the figures of the Canterbury Tales.There is also a Chaucer Room, so named from its stained-glass windows depicting, in the style of Burne-Jones, the figures of the Canterbury Tales.

This last is a building that, for architecture and content, emphasizes Cardiff's claim to be the repository of Welsh culture. Its most remarkable feature is the collection of Roman and Roman-British standing stones, rescued from their isolation in pasture land and forgotten trackways. Here, for example, you can find the original incised stones of Bryn-celli-ddu in Anglesey and those from around the Harlech district, the Museum being careful to leave on the sites exact replicas. There is considerable advantage in having these monuments of Britain's past assembled for reference in this way. A large number are inscribed in the Ogham script, which appeared suddenly around the coasts of Britain and Ireland immediately after the Roman power handed over its authority to the native cities. Wholly based though it is on the Latin alphabet, this script stands as a sign of the re-emergence of a Celtic culture that had at last found the means of permanent record. The names of rulers and of saints that it preserves are usually difficult to identify with actual men; for, apart from these monuments, there is no other contemporary record. The one to whom we can assign a place in written history is the Uotiporius, or Uotipore, who appears in the list of rulers in Britain denounced by Gildas in the mid-6^th century, and whose inscribed memorial is preserved in the Museum at Carmarthen. No one with an interest in the “Arthurian” period should fail to visit these doubtful evidences of that time, or to make the journey to Carmarthen.