A comprehensive and authoritative gazetteer of Wales’s 1000 best heritage sites. Fabulously illustrated with over 100 colour photographs. Includes castles, churches, chapels, houses, archaeological sites, gardens, battlefields, libraries, historic industrial sites and landscapes. From today’s most prolific writer upon the heritage of Wales, we have his selection of the places that symbolise the history and culture of the nation. From the oldest mineral mines in Europe, prehistoric megaliths, Iron Age hill forts, through the Roman occupation, sixth-century holy wells to the greatest density of medieval castle-building in the world, we arrive at today’s industrial heritage. Wales has a history unknown to the rest of the world, for instance the longest unbroken period of Christianity in Europe; a thousand saints from the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ of the fifth to seventh centuries whose names are still imprinted on the landscape; the highest density of castles and Iron Age hill forts in the world; the greatest density of places of worship in the world; and it was the veritable cradle of the global Industrial Revolution. The 1000 best sites to understand Welsh history and culture have been chosen for this book from Elizabethan gardens, the oldest monastery in the British Isles to a human treadmill.