Cilgerran Castle sits on a steep promontory above a deep gorge where the River Teifi has cut down through slate for thousands of years. The strategic value is obvious from the first glance: two sides of the castle are protected by sheer cliffs, the river forms a natural moat, and the third side could be cut by a ditch. The Welsh princes held it through the early 12th century, lost it to the Normans, and the Lord Rhys — Rhys ap Gruffydd, the great consolidator of Welsh power in the south — took it back in 1164 or 1165. That is the year the name Cilgerran is first recorded in writing. The Welsh held it until 1223, when the Marshal Earls of Pembroke rebuilt it in stone. The castle that survives today is essentially their work, and it has been a ruin since the 16th century — partly because the slate quarrymen of the surrounding hills helped themselves to its stone.

The principal occupations through Cilgerran's history were farming, salmon fishing and slate quarrying. The fishing was done from coracles — small round one-man boats of leather and wickerwork, the same design that had been used on these rivers since the Iron Age. Salmon weighing 38 pounds and 43 and a half pounds were taken from coracle nets in 1895, the kind of fish that no longer exists in the modern Teifi. The slate quarries clustered around the village from the 1790s onwards, with John Edwards opening the first cuts in the Forest area north of the town. By the 19th century there were two clusters — the Forest quarries north of the village and the Town quarries to the east — supplying roofs across south Wales and beyond. Quarrying stopped in 1936. The market ended around the same time. Coracle fishing carried on, just.

J.M.W. Turner came to Cilgerran in 1798, twenty-three years old and already establishing his reputation. He painted the castle from below, looking up across the gorge — the ruin half-lost in mist, the river dark beneath, the cliffs Welsh and dramatic. The painting is one of his early Romantic masterpieces, and it brought a flood of artists and writers after him. Cilgerran Castle became one of the picturesque tour destinations of late Georgian Britain. The slate that had eaten the castle in the 16th century became, by the late 18th, the reason artists could paint a perfect Romantic ruin: half-overgrown, half-collapsed, framed by industrial scars softening into wilderness. The Teifi gorge below the castle is now a deep, quiet, wooded valley that attracts canoeists and kayakers. The Welsh Wildlife Centre is just downstream. Otters live in the river.

The annual Cilgerran coracle races began in 1950 and have been running ever since. They attract competitors from across Britain and from coracle-using cultures elsewhere — there are coracle traditions in Iraq, in Vietnam, in parts of India, and the Cilgerran races have hosted representatives from several of them. The boats are slow and rotational by nature; the races are more about technique than speed. A Cilgerran man named Bernard Thomas piloted a Welsh coracle across the English Channel in 1974, taking thirteen and a half hours. He did it to demonstrate that the Mandan tribe of North Dakota, whose unusual circular bull-boats had long puzzled American historians, might plausibly have learned the technique from the legendary Welsh prince Madog ab Owain Gwynedd, who is supposed to have sailed for America in the 12th century. Most historians regard the Madog story as legend. The crossing, however, was real.

For a small Welsh village, Cilgerran has produced or held a surprising number of figures of note. Sir Erasmus Gower (1742-1814), born here, became a Royal Navy admiral and a colonial governor. Titus Lewis (1773-1811), Welsh Baptist minister and author of religious works that shaped Welsh nonconformism, was born here. William Edmond Logan (1798-1875), born in Montreal but who chose to be buried in Cilgerran, was the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada — Mount Logan, Canada's highest peak, is named for him. Thomas Frederick Colby, the geographer, grew up at nearby Rhosygilwen. And on the wall of St Llawddog's Church stands an Ogham stone — fifth-century vertical lines incised down its edge in the Irish writing system, recording a name that was already old when the Normans arrived. The same churchyard holds an Ogham stone, an Admiral's memorial, and a Canadian geologist. Cilgerran has been a small place for a long time, and has carried more weight than it looks.