Hafod Hotel, Devil’s Bridge
As you stand outside the Hafod Hotel, look up at the generous overhang of the eaves. If it reminds you of an Alpine chalet, you’re on the right track!
Local landowner Thomas Johnes of Hafod built a “little public cottage” for visitors at Devil’s Bridge in the early 1790s. This was soon enlarged as The Hafod Arms, which became stables and offices when the inn moved into a new building in 1815.
The Napoleonic wars had given Welsh tourism a shot in the arm by preventing wealthy people from taking the traditional “Grand Tour” of Europe. Craggy areas of Wales provided a ready alternative in a century when Romantic art was fashionable.
The following extract from a verse written by a couple of visitors in the visitors’ “album” at the Hafod Arms Inn (as the hotel was then known) in 1829 should give you an idea of what excited tourists. “Rhydiol” and “Mynach” refer to the rivers Rheidol and Mynach.
O’er the cleft rock where foaming torrents pour,
And Rhydiol answers Mynach’s solemn roar,
Thro' horrid caves where serpent surges hiss,
And rush appalling down the dark abyss
To fearful pool where deep deep chasms flow.
In 1807 a Colonel Bedingfield had to pay £1,000 in damages (around £80,000 today) for having stayed with a Mrs Railton on three occasions at the hotel, where they “lived together as man and wife”. She and her sister had travelled to Aberystwyth ahead of her husband, who arrived earlier than planned and found that she was out in an open carriage with the colonel, who was married and had “many children”.
The hotel was enlarged by the Duke of Newcastle in the 1830s, when the Alpine roof was fitted. The drawing, courtesy of the National Library of Wales, shows the hotel c.1860, with the Devil’s Bridge waterfall on the left.
Further alterations were made in 1905, perhaps in response to an influx of tourists after the opening in 1902 of the scenic Vale of Rheidol Railway from Aberystwyth.
The hotel was a venue for livestock auctions for many years. At one sale in 1910, almost 2,000 animals changed hands. A tourist on a cycling holiday noted that the hotel was “crowded with farmers and shepherds, and sheep dogs were everywhere”.
In the 21st century the hotel has been a filming location for the TV detective programme Hinterland, also filmed in Welsh as “Y Gwyll”.
Postcode: SY23 3JL View Location Map
More Hafod Arms history – Early Tourists in Wales website