Ruth Seavers offers a guide to the Welsh locations with tragic histories, grisly auras or mysterious origins.
Bedd Arthur, Pembrokeshire
Up in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, this is a small henge-like structure or (hengiform) that is possibly neolithic. Similar to Stonehenge, there are 13 standing stones and two fallen. The stones are all under 13 centimetres and make a horseshoe shape thought to have serve ritualistic purposes. Like many stone monuments that exist throughout Pembrokeshire and Wales, we have little idea of what they were used for, though the local story is that this King Arthur’s resting place.
Beaumaris Gaol
Built in 1829, Beaumaris Gaol was made to accommodate approximately 30 inmates but was closed just 11 years later. Pitched as a tourism destination that is “full of sad memories and secrets”, since becoming a disused prison, there is actually a rich history of what happened to the building up until today. Variously used as a police station, children’s clinic and finally a museum in 1974, the prison also held the town’s air raid siren during the Cold War.
Maindiff Court Hospital
This otherwise unassuming countryside hospital just outside Abergavenny might not look like much, but during WWII it was repurposed as a military hospital and POW centre. Its most famous prisoner, who stayed there for three years from 1942, was one Rudolf Hess, deputy to Adolf Hitler. He was imprisoned there after secretly flying to the UK for an attempt to negotiate peace. The hospital is still in use today, but provides a bizarre link to one of the leading architects of humanity’s darkest hour.
North Wales Hospital (aka Denbigh Mental Asylum)
There are few things more liable to freak you out than an abandoned mental asylum, and this has its. This one, in Denbigh, was in use for 150 years from 1848 until being put out of use in 2002. Whilst only ever partly a mental health facility, at its peak it held about 1500 patients. You can’t actually visit the grade II-listed building, but you can at least get a solid view from the gates, the imposing dilapidation a testament to a building whose walls saw some unpleasant treatment of patients, deviating from its initial good intent.
Cornist Hall
Situated a mile from the town of Flint in north-east Wales, this former luxury mansion, now abandoned, was built in the early 1700s. It was the birthplace of Thomas Totty, a Welsh Naval officer who ended up inheriting the house, before selling it on where it changed hands a number of times until its closure in 2012. Popular amongst urban explorers, the modernity of the building’s features is jarring: there are still chalkboards advertising Sunday carveries for £6.95 and objects with brands we use every day, littered about the place. Other abandoned mansions in Wales, many frozen in time from decades ago, include Hafodunos Hall and Kimmel Hall in Conwy, Caerleon’s Clawdd Manor and the sprawling Carmarthenshire estate Golden Grove.
Littledean Jail
A collection of the darkest, weirdest and most taboo subjects, Littledean Jail actually recommend you avoid visiting if easily offended. Found in Cinderford, in the Forest Of Dean just inside the English border (just close enough and fascinating enough for us to place it here), it houses the UK’s only Baphomet – a devil-like deity which features heavily in occult symbolism – and their Crime Through Time Collection, self-described as a “no holds barred Aladdin’s cave of True Crime.” As a private collection, it is seemingly a personal endeavour and therefore not subject to being made palatable for the more wholesome of the general public, or the family outings which are many tourist attractions’ bread and butter.
Lavernock Battery
This abandoned military bunker, at Lavernock Point in the Vale Of Glamorgan, would make for a surefire horror filming location, although it’s arguably not a dark tourism locale – not so much outright suffering occurred in this place. Still, its gloomy views and military past make for a tense visit.