Your Travel City Guide

Take things easy with one of the most relaxing holidays possible, a canal boat cruise where you drift at walking pace along some of Britain’s most luscious countryside. There is nothing more peaceful than sitting back on a modern canal boat and cruising along the Monmouth and Breconshire Canal.

If you fall into the category of people whose perfect holiday is to get away from it all and just simply relax then a barge cruise is ideal. Travelling at a peaceful four miles an hour you can easily appreciate the green Welsh landscape as it slips past.

Two hundred years ago these canals were the M25 of their day, transporting the product of industry to the world. The Monmouth and Breconshire Canal starts in Newport, near Cardiff and travels 33 miles north, delicately skirting the Brecon Mountains until it reaches the market town of Brecon. It was in this area that much of the industrial revolution was born, in towns like Ebbw Vale, Tredegar, Abergavenny and Blaenavon.

Gone are the days of the noisy blast furnaces, the grimy pitheads and the endless parade of warehouses that fringed the canal. The landscape has been returned to Mother Nature and she has quickly reclaimed it. Cruises travel gently through a gorgeous countryside of old over grown buildings, wooded hills and ancient monuments. Within the shadows of the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons you will rediscover a rural Wales not far from the hustle and bustle of Newport and Cardiff but in a tranquil, other world, a place where nature once more has control.