The team

Huw, Nia, and the village.

A landlord who grew up two doors down and a hotel manager who married into it, running an inn that has had people sleeping upstairs since 1664. Gwen in the kitchen since 2012, four behind the bar on a Saturday, and a village that lent some of the money to buy the freehold. The licences and the paperwork are below because an inn should be asked for them.

Huw Pritchard

Landlord. The bar, the casks, the walks, the Boxing Day climb

Born two doors down, twenty years in pubs from Brecon to Bristol, and the tenancy of the Harp in 2009 when the brewery was going to turn it into flats. Huw bought the freehold in 2014 with a loan he talks about and a village that lent him some of it. He chooses the four casks, writes the walk sheets, leads the Boxing Day climb, runs the quiz, and is the reason the rugby screen lives in a cupboard. He has never put a room on a booking site and says he never will.

Nia Pritchard

The rooms, the barn, the weddings, the bookings

A hotel manager in Cardiff for twelve years before she married into a pub, Nia runs everything upstairs and across the yard: the six rooms, the barn, the fifteen weddings a year, the Christmas bookings that open on the first of September and the roast sittings. She built the rate table on this website because she was tired of saying "it depends" on the phone, and she takes every wedding enquiry herself, including the ones she talks out of it.

6bedrooms, each with its nightly rate by season and by night on this website
4Welsh casks on the bar, changed when they blow, and a fire lit from October
120roasts most Sundays across five sittings, booked by the sitting with the covers left shown
4.8average rating

The rest of us, and the paperwork

Who else, and what to ask any inn for.

The kitchen

Gwen Lewis has run it since 2012: the roast is hers, the monthly card is hers, and the wedding feasts are written with her at the kitchen table. Two with her on a Saturday and a Sunday, one of them her nephew, who does the Yorkshires.

The bar and the rooms

Four behind the bar at the weekend, two of them from the village, all of them through a cellar afternoon and a tasting of the four casks. Carys does the rooms in the morning and knows which floorboards creak so she can tell you.

The paperwork

Premises licence to midnight with the barn licensed for ceremonies; a food hygiene rating of five on the door; a fire risk assessment for a seventeenth-century building that took a year; £10 million public liability; and the rooms registered with Visit Wales at four stars.

Where the money goes

The bar pays the wages; the rooms paid for the bathrooms in 2019; the barn paid for the roof it sits under; the booking sites would have taken fifteen per cent of every room, so breakfast is in the price instead; and the freehold loan from 2014 is paid off in two years.

The Monmouthshire and Brecon canal towpath beside a whitewashed stone inn, a narrowboat moored below the garden, Table Mountain behind under a clearing sky

The inn

A coaching stop in 1664, a canal pub from 1812, nearly flats in 2009.

The date over the door is from the deeds. It was the stop between Abergavenny and Brecon until the canal came past the garden in 1812 and the boatmen took it over; the stables became a hay store when the coaches stopped, and a barn for weddings in 2016. In 2009 the brewery that owned it applied to turn it into four flats, and Huw, who had been drinking in it since he was old enough and a bit before, took the tenancy instead. The village lent him part of the freehold in 2014. "If people cannot see the pub is still the pub, they will not believe the rooms are worth it."

Finding the inn

A room with the rate on the page, a roast with the covers left, a bar with the village in it.

The rooms page works tonight's rate out from the clock, the roast page shows what is left in each sitting, and one form books either, a table, the barn or Christmas. Nia replies within the hour while the bar is open; nothing is charged until we confirm.

Book a room The roast sittings