Britain’s most scenic drives: The Black Mountain Pass, Brecon Beacons

On a quest to find the country's most glorious roads, Annunciata Elwes explores The Black Mountain Pass on the Brecon Beacons.

Gospel Pass, Black Mountains, Powys, Wales, United Kingdom
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

Turner identified the clifftop ruins of Carreg Cennen Castle with the Sublime — that 18th-century philosophical notion of beauty, Nature and a higher power — and it can still be felt here today.

Aerial vista by drone of Carreg Cennen Castle,

This Marcher Lords’ stronghold was probably built following the death of the last native Prince of Wales in 1282 (that tradition runs deep; our current Prince bought a house nearby in 2006). Together with the equally sublime Tywi Valley, shaped by Wales’s longest river, is among the thrilling sights along the Black Mountain Pass, and it's seen perfectly from what is one of Britain's most scenic drives.

View from Foel Fawr to North Brecon Beacons

Twisting and climbing with aerobatic elegance through the sheep-speckled moors of the eastern Brecon Beacons like some ancient roller coaster to a height of 1,624ft at Foel Fawr, the route, between Llandovery and Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen, is only about 21 miles, but it certainly packs in the gasp-factor, with the landscape’s otherworldly glory only tempered by occasional warnings to take it araf (slow) inscribed on the tarmac.

The Afon Clydach river in the Black Mountain in South Wales UK as it passes under a bridge on the A4069


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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.