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Whether you’ve squelched over boggy moor as the rain gives the mountains a good thumping, hiked along the blustery, storm-smashed coast, or pootled down hedge-rowed lanes, cursing tailgating tractors and dodging unruly sheep, there’s nothing like the sight of a good pub to make a trek into the Welsh wilds worthwhile. If you’re lucky and it might be the dream: medieval beams so low you knock your head against them, lilting Welsh voices, well-kept beers, inglenook fireplaces and a welcome as warm as a cwtch (that’s Welsh for “a hug”).
Dinky though it may be, Wales has 2,901 pubs, and The Telegraph’s new guide to the Best Pubs in the UK, co-authored by me, features 50 of the finest. While many share the same hallmarks as the best over the border in England, Welsh pubs are forged by unique histories that tie them to the heart of the community.
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The Telegraph's Best Pubs in the UK 2026
For centuries, they were points of rest, shelter and sustenance for drovers on gruelling cross-mountain journeys to distant markets, flocks of shod cattle, bleating sheep and geese in tow. They provided respite to London-bound coachmen and their horses. They offered beer, good cheer and song to thirsty slate, iron and coal miners after a day in the pits. On the coast, they reeled salt-bedraggled smugglers and fishermen into their lantern-lit confines for ales and tall tales by the booming Irish Sea.
History, however, is not the only marker of what makes Welsh pubs special: geography also plays a part. Just look at a map of Wales. It’s a spectacularly buckled and contorted land, riven with valleys, puckered with jagged peaks, rippled with moors and bounded by cliffs. The weather can be wicked, the terrain stark. Pubs are the light at the end of that long single-track lane to who-knows-where. They aren’t just a place for a pint and chinwag, they offer sweet relief in a landscape so remote the GPS gives up.
While there are rumours that some pubs fall silent when blow-ins walk up to the bar in tight-knit, Welsh-speaking strongholds, these are few and far between. In truth, ticking off the memorable Welsh pubs in our guide will mean nothing but warm welcomes.
We’ve showcased treasures across the country, such as The Hand at Llanarmon in North Wales, a pretty, white-washed, 16th-century drovers’ inn, where you can nurse a pint by a roaring fire after hiking in the Berwyn Mountains. Further south, The Star Inn in Dylife is one of Wales’s remotest pubs, perched at 1,300ft in the wild Cambrian Mountains and peering up to some of the country’s starriest night skies. Dip south-west to Pembrokeshire’s steep-sided, thickly wooded Gwaun Valley and you’re in for a treat at the Dyffryn Arms, where draught bass is served through a sliding hatch in a living room eternally stuck in the 1940s.
Some pubs lodge in one-of-a-kind buildings with historic bones, such as the 12th-century Red Lion Penderyn, atop a hill in the Brecon Beacons, a converted Welsh longhouse serving real ales and ciders amid flagstones and beams. The Brewery Inn in Cosheston, Pembrokeshire, is an ivy-swaddled beauty that once provided lodgings for monks. And then there is the oldest and spookiest boozer of the lot, the 900-year-old Skirrid Mountain Inn in the Brecon Beacons, with its hangman’s noose, resident ghost, and connections to Shakespeare, who reputedly dreamt up the character of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream while quaffing ale here.
If you prefer to stumble ruddy-cheeked into a pub after a bracing walk along the wave-bashed Wales Coast Path, there are some corkers. Among them the 18th-century Ship Inn in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, a proper salty sea-dog of a pub plastered with pictures of actors including Gregory Peck, star of Moby Dick, which was filmed here in the 1950s. Just south, the nautical-spirited Sloop Inn, in the former slate-quarrying port of Porthgain, is right on the coast path. On the wild north shores of Anglesey, the Kinmel Arms in Moelfre sits above choppy waters that have wrecked many a ship.
Welsh pubs, like those across the UK, face challenges. Covid dealt a death blow to many rural inns, but the good news is that they are bouncing back. A Britain-wide report published by the British Beer and Pub Association revealed that around two pubs a day closed in the first quarter of 2026, equating to 2,400 job losses. But Wales bucked the trend as the only country to note a small increase, with three new pubs opening, including the Pig & Swill, a modern craft beer bar on the corner of Victoria Park in Cardiff.
Such positive news is partly thanks to communities taking matters into their own hands. In sparsely populated rural Wales, pubs are a lifeline, often doubling as shops, post offices and event venues. There are community-run success stories to make the heart sing: the Cwmdu Inn in Carmarthenshire, with its folk music, food nights and beer festivals, the weird but wonderful Tafarn Sinc among the Bronze Age standing stones in Pembrokeshire’s Preseli Hills, with its sawdust floor, ham flitches and locally brewed ales, and the fire-warmed Tafarn Y Plu on the Llŷn Peninsula.
If the stats are anything to go by, the future is looking brighter for Welsh pubs, which is just as well as they form the backbone of most aspects of Welsh life: celebrations, engagements, funerals, dates, cheering on the rugby. This is where people live, love, laugh, sing and cry (when Wales lose). Join them in saying a heartfelt iechyd da – cheers!
