Qualla: West Wales

West Wales: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Ask a hundred Welsh people where West Wales is and you will get at least four answers. The tourism board has one definition. The county councils have another. The old Welsh Development Agency had two over the years, depending on the decade. Historians say West Wales meant Cornwall first, then drifted westward across the Bristol Channel. The medievalists insist it is the old principality of Deheubarth - the three counties of Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire, which together made up the south-western Welsh kingdom of the early Middle Ages. Most of these definitions overlap. None of them is wrong. They are arguments about a place too varied to fit one shape.

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West Wales: Old Words

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The name itself comes from outside. In Old English, the word wealas meant any inhabitant of the old Western Roman Empire - the Romanised Britons who had lived under Rome and who, when the Saxons arrived in the 5th and 6th centuries, were pushed steadily westward into the corners ...

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West Wales: Three Counties

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The most enduring definition of West Wales covers Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire - the three counties that historically made up the principality of Deheubarth, ruled from Dinefwr in the 9th and 10th centuries by the Welsh princes whose names crowd into the older hi...

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West Wales: What It Looks Like

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. From above, this part of Wales is unmistakable - a great curving peninsula of green farmland and dark hill country, with the long Atlantic-fronted coastline of Pembrokeshire on the west, the soft Ceredigion arc of Cardigan Bay on the north, and the broad estuary of the Carmarthen...

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West Wales: Rails and Roads

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. West Wales is reachable, just barely, by train. The West Wales Line runs out of Swansea through Carmarthen and divides - one branch heading south-west to Pembroke Dock, another west to Milford Haven, a third northwest to Fishguard for the ferry to Ireland. The Heart of Wales Line...

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