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The attractions of North Wales range from the Isle of Anglesey with its 125-mile coastline of sandy bays and cliffs, to the rugged national park of Snowdonia and great grey Caernarfon Castle, built by Edward I after defeating Llywelyn ap Gryffydd, the last native-born Welsh prince. Since 1301, the British monarch's eldest son is titled Prince of Wales. Prince Charles is current holder of the title - his investiture in 1969 was in Caernarfon Castle. Click on the headings to find out more:

Llangollen is known for its International Musical Eisteddfod, a six-day festival of music and dance held each July. Over 12,000 people attend and the numbers are growing each year. The rest of the year it's a quiet little place. Perhaps walk to ruined Valle Crucis Abbey or stroll by the River Dee and consider a horse-drawn canal boat trip.

Llandudno (many Welsh place names start with a double L) is a fine example of a Victorian seaside town, strung along a sweep of beach between Great Orme's Head and Little Orme's Head. You can ascend the summit of Great Orme's Head on the Great Orme Tramway - a cable car - or walk up and pause at Happy Valley, famed for its rare plants and trees. Author, vicar and Oxford mathematics don Lewis Carroll (the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in real life) used to stay in the town with the Liddells, parents of Alice, the girl for whom Carroll wrote his most famous stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. A true English eccentric, Carroll was fascinated by mirrors. He wrote letters and poems backwards and used mirrors for various conjuring tricks, perfecting a method of writing on mirrors with invisible ink, so that when the sun shone the writing was projected on the wall. As you stroll the great expanse of beach between Great Orme's Head and Little Orme's Head, you might recall Lewis Carroll's poem The Walrus and The Carpenter.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

Conwy is a medieval town with excellently preserved walls, fortified with 21 towers and entered by three gateways. Now that the noisy passing traffic, which used to spoil the town, has been re-routed through an underground tunnel, it's a delight to walk around in.

Conwy Castle is simply enormous. Its 15-feet-thick walls were built in the shape of a Welsh harp and run half a mile. The castle was begun in the 13th century for Edward I. Telford's Bridge across the mouth of the Conwy estuary was built by gifted Scottish engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834) and is designed to complement the castle.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is a tiny village with the longest name of any place in Britain (58 letters). You can buy a large platform ticket at the local station as a souvenir. The name means "St Mary's Church in the hollow of the white Hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St Tysilio near the Red Cave". The name seems no older than the 19th century and it has been attracting tourists ever since. It just pips: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu, a New Zealand place-name with similar tourist-attracting properties, which means "where Tamatea of the big knees, the man who slid down, climbed and consumed mountains and is known as the landeater, played the flute to his beloved". Phew!

Beaumaris is known mainly for its great castle begun in the 13th century on a commanding site overlooking the Menai Strait. Beaumaris Castle was not finished according to plan because the money ran out and compromise was required (as always when money runs out), but many centuries later it achieved a World Heritage listing. Swans still swim in the moat, descendants of those introduced by King Edward I to grace the last and most elegant of his Welsh castles. In Beaumaris town, the restored 1879 jail is worth a look - they've even restored the treadmill, bless them. The town's Museum of Childhood preserves toys and games from the 19th and 20th centuries. Remember the 20th century? Ah, nostalgia

Snowdonia National Park is Britain's second-largest national park after the Lake District. It's dominated by the rugged Snowdonia mountain range, overshadowed by Mt Snowdon, which at 3560 feet (1085m) is the highest mountain in Wales and England. The countryside around is a patchwork of forests, open moorland, wooded valleys and gentle hills. Old market towns add to the character.

Beddgelert on the banks of the River Gwynant is a pretty village named after a dead dog. Its unusual name means Gelert's Grave. According to local legend, 13th century chieftain Llywelyn the Great left his favourite dog Gelert to guard his infant son. Returning from hunting, Llywelyn was aghast to find the cradle overturned and Gelert covered in blood. In a frenzy of grief and rage, Llywelyn seized his sword and slew his faithful hound, only to find his little son unharmed under the cradle. It turned out a marauding wolf had attempted to snatch the baby and Gelert, faithful to the last, had killed the attacker. The dead wolf was found not far away. A dog is man's best friend but the converse doesn't always apply.

Harlech is hard to visit without at least humming the unofficial Welsh national anthem, Men of Harlech. If you ever saw the 1964 movie Zulu (narrated by Welshman Richard Burton), in which Michael Caine got his first big break, you may remember the song. The movie told the true story of how 120 British soldiers successfully fended off repeated attacks by an armed force of between 15,000 and 16,000 Zulus at Rorke's Drift in Natal, Africa, in 1879 - possibly history's greatest military stand against overwhelming odds. At one point in the action, facing what seemed certain death, a Welsh soldier burst into a rendition of Men of Harlech to drum up courage. He was soon joined by all the troops. All together now!

Men of Harlech! In the Hollow,
Do ye hear like rushing billow
Wave on wave that surging follow
Battle's distant sound?
Tis the tramp of Saxon foemen,
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen,
Be they knights or hinds or yeomen,
They shall bite the ground!

Men of Harlech was composed to commemorate the bravery of Dafydd ap Einion, who held Harlech Castle during a siege in the 15th century Wars of the Roses. There are many versions. Harlech itself, a town on Cardigan Bay (Tremadog Bay in Welsh), is dominated by the imposing castle, built around 1283 by Edward I, and now a World Heritage site. It was the last castle to fall in the Wars of the Roses - and you can see why. The castle is almost impossible to take by assault. In 1294, 37 men (the original Men of Harlech) held it against the entire Welsh army. From its battlements you can enjoy sweeping views of the Lleyn Peninsula, Tremadog Bay and the Snowdon Range.

Bala Lake (known in Welsh as Llyn Tegid) is the biggest natural lake in Wales, about four miles long. In its waters swim gwyniad, native Welsh fish related to the salmon. The little town of Bala, about 2000, is a Welsh-speaking community. Perhaps take a scenic ride on the narrow-gauge Bala Lake Railway.

Dolgellau (pronounced doll-geth-lie) is a bastion of Welsh customs and language. The mountain above it, Calder Idris, has a strange legend attached. They say if you climb it (2927 feet or 892 metres) and spend a night there, you will awake either a poet or a lunatic. Wales has produced fine examples of both (not necessarily with the help of the mountain). Just don't try to sleep up there in winter - you could freeze to death and no one would ever know if you became the poet or the looney.

Blaenau Ffestiniog is excluded from Snowdonia National Park because the big grey slate waste tips that surround it were considered not in keeping with the national park concept. Blaenau lies just outside the park area. It was once known as "the Slate Capital of North Wales" - a distinction if ever there was one! Slate for roofs was exported all round the world. The Llechwedd Slate Caverns, overlooking Blaenau, opened in the 1970s and give an idea of the slate quarryman's life. "Exciting underground sightseeing tours into the heart of a slate mine", the brochure says. A pleasant diversion is the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog Railway, which makes a 14-mile scenic run from Blaenau to Porthmadog Harbour. Originally designed to carry slate, it now carries tourists.

Author's note: My first visit to Blaenau Ffestiniog was in the 1980s. Unfortunately, I happened to visit in the bleakness of late November. Grey is the predominant colour of Welsh slate country - particularly when viewed at dusk through sleet. My journey there in deteriorating weather was marred by a navigational error, which led my rental car through the gates of a deserted quarry. Great slagheaps of slate, dripping with rain, pressed in from all sides - the greyest landscape I have ever seen. After nearly backing into a slate crater and disappearing forever into grey oblivion, I drove past eerie towers of slate to Llechwedd in time for the day's final sightseeing tour. The only other person on the tour, an elderly, deaf German, asked persistent slate-related questions in a bellowing voice as we descended by cable railway into the caverns to view Victorian mine workings.

"But vot did zey DO with ze slate?" he kept asking.

When I emerged, it was night and snow was falling. To my dismay I discovered the "recreated 19th-century pub" on site had closed (it observed 19th-century hours), but I soon reached the little agricultural town of Tref-y-Clawdd, where two hot faggots renewed my energies. (Faggots, I'll have you know, are Welsh meatballs compounded of minced pig liver, chopped hearts, lungs and other things offal. Served hot, they are just what you need after an afternoon in a slate cavern.)

Lleyn Peninsula is a 24-mile finger of land jutting southwest into the Irish Sea from Snowdonia. The area was once notorious for smugglers, and a local bay known as Porth Neigwl (Hell's Mouth in English) has seen many shipwrecks. Castel March House on the south side of the peninsula was run in the 17th century by a knight called Sir William Jones. The family butler was so overbearing and manipulative that Sir William determined to sack him. This proved impossible, as the butler treated all attempts to fire him as a joke. Finally, Sir William paid a gang of local smugglers to kidnap the infuriating butler and sail him as far away as possible. The plot misfired. The butler made himself so indispensable to the smugglers they ended up voting him captain of their boat. Butler and crew sailed back to Castel March, seized Sir William and marooned him on a distant shore. Revenge indeed!

Portmeirion is one of the strangest villages in Europe. It's like nothing else in Wales or in the rest of Britain. The village, with its oddly Mediterranean feel, is a tribute to the imagination and enterprise of one man, Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. Between 1925 and 1927, five miles from his ancestral home, Williams-Ellis set out to create a showpiece sort of village that would evoke an atmosphere similar to Portofino in Italy, but without being too derivative. About 50 buildings surround a central piazza, with styles varying widely from Gothic to Oriental. The 1960s cult TV series The Prisoner was shot near here. Also shot near here was romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. A local story recounts how peasants fired on Shelley because they were angered at his habit of putting sick sheep out of their misery without first determining whether the animals could be cured. Long before Portmeirion, Shelley is believed to have written part of Queen Mab nearby. "Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality," Shelley remarked in his notes to Queen Mab.

Anglesey is the biggest island in Wales and England, connected to the mainland since 1826 by the Menai Bridge, built by Thomas Telford.

Mighty Caernarfon Castle was where Edward I made his son Prince of Wales in 1301. The monarch's eldest son has been Prince of Wales ever since - the current Prince Charles was invested with the title there in 1969. Diehard Welsh nationalists tried, in vain, to blow up his train. Dr Samuel Johnson visited Caernarfon Castle, describing it as "an edifice of stupendous majesty and strength". The castle's Eagle Tower soars over 120 feet and was equipped even with its own water-gate and dock, so the inhabitants could escape by sea even if the rest of the castle fell. Students of indoor plumbing will be interested to learn that the Eagle Tower (competed in 1317) also boasted one of Britain's first flushing toilets, operated from a stone water-channel lined with lead.





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