Penarth, like Tenby, has one of the finest concentrations in South Wales of Victorian buildings and architectural styles. Many of the terraces and lage detached properties were built of local materials: lias limestone quarried on the site of Cwrt-y-vil playing fields (off Lavernock Road) and brick made of local marl at two sites in Cogan.

  This walk begins at the town centre roundabout. Opposite Windsor Arcade (1898), now a listed building, is the National and Provincial Building Society. A post office on this site was transferred to the other side of Bradenham Place, and, until the late 1950s, it housed Penarth's manual telephone exchange.

  This building, until recently, was occupied by the Job Centre and Social Security, and was once the Grosvenor Restaurant. From its balcony town proclamations were made, including that of the end of the Boer War.

1 Albert Road
Passing Lloyds Bank opposite, now a listed building, begin walking up Albert Road. To the left, on the corner of Ludlow Lane, stands the former Crown Post Office building, which was built in 1936 and which, together with the pillar box, has also been listed as of special architectural or historic importance. The Post Office building has recently been extended over the site of what was the Solomon Andrews Hall, the Hippodrome. From 1887 until 1929, when it was destroyed by fire, it was used for meetings, films, variety shows, and productions by the Penarth Operatic Society. To the rear of the Post Office building lies the yard which originally stabled the horses for the Solomon Andrews buses to Cardiff. Although the Post Office Counters Service has transferred to Windsor Road,the Royal Mail still operates from this site.

  Continue walking up Albert Road. The Methodist Church was opened in 1906. Higher up, on your left, Belle Vue Court is now in residential use, but was the town's first fire station and the offices of the Urban District Council.

  The next building, Albert County Primary School, also a listed building, was the first Board School in the town when it opened in 1876. Its unique murals of schoolchildren were pained ten years later by R. Norton Nance from his wife's design. The couple lived in St Ives, but visited Penarth to stay in Westbourne Road with Mr Nance's brother. On the opposite side of the road stands one of several red telephone boxes that have been listed in Penarth.

  At the top of Belle Vue Park, opened in 1914, turn right. Like the Edwardian terrace on the sea front, Belle Vue Terrace is a unified block with pointed roofs at numbers 1, 7 and 14. The bowling green area of the Park was once a quarry so deep that after heavy rain in 1877 two brothers were drowned in it. Continue walking towards the listed St Augustine's Church.

2 St Augustine's Church
You are now at the highest point in Penarth, about 220 feet above sea level. For centuries this was the site of a religious settlement dating back to a foundation of the Austin Canons. The 90-foot saddle-backed church tower is well known to seamen in the Bristol Channel and is a prominent landmark from many viewpoints far inland.

  Designed by William Butterfield and financed by Baroness Windsor, the church replaced a much smaller building in 1866. The interior is particularly noteworthy  for its organ and use of coloured brick. Three relics of the old church are preserved:
—a long, flat, thirteenth-century stone with an elaborate carved cross.
—the fourteenth-century churchyard cross brought indoors to minimise the ravages of the weather
—a prayer desk made from the former chancel gate
A pillar surmounted by a harp marks the grave of the composer Dr Joseph Parry, Professor Music at Aberystwyth.

  Set into the wall just past the church gate is an ornate cast-iron drinking fountain. Continue along Church Place South, and cross the main road to enter Penarth Head Lane at the side of 57 Clive Place.

3 Penarth Head
At the end of this lane you are standing about 200 feet above sea level, on the headland — the Garth — that allegedly gave Penarth its name. This is probably the most spectacular local viewpoint. On a clear day you can see the towers of the Severn bridges near Chepstow. Ahead are the Penarth Head buoy and the Outer Wrach buoy marking the dredged channel entrance to Penarth and Cardiff. The Cardiff Bay barrage is under construction and there is a good view of the development that is taking place along Cardiff's waterfront.

  In 1984 a sponsored charity football match was played on Cefn-y-wrach sandbank. You can see Penarth sea front, the 1894 pier, and Lavernock Point — the southern limit of Penarth Bay. The tide often goes out beyond the pier as here in the Bristol Channel the range between high and low tide is one of the largest in the world.

  The two islands in the Channel are Flat Holm and Steep Holm. Both had Viking associations at least a thousand years ago. Flat Holm, the larger island, is a nature reserve and gull colony. It has been farmed for at least seven centuries. The lighthouse was established in 1737, and there was a nineteenth-century cholera hospital and a barracks, occupied even during the Second World War. Steep Holm, which unlike its neighbour is an English island, is a bird sanctuary run by the Kenneth Alsop Trust. On the Somerset coastline opposite Penarth are Clevedon and Weston-super-Mare.

  In May 1897 Marconi achieved the first radio transmission over the water. His morse message "Are you ready?" was transmitted from Flat Holm and received by an 110-foot mast in the farm at Lavernock Point. A commemorative plaque can be seen in the front wall of St Lawrence's Church, Lavernock. Return along Penarth Head Lane, turn right into Clive Place, and walk down St Augustine's Crescent.

4 John Street and Penarth Marina
At the bottom of St Augustine's Road the imposing building used to be the Penarth Hotel, opened by the Taff Vale Railway in 1865, for a business and seafaring clientele. It was eventually given to the National Children's Home and Orphanage by the widow of Major  J.A. Gibbs. DSO. Turn left into John Street. This was the first type of terraced house to be built in Penarth. Similar use of lias limestone and local brick can be seen in Queen's Road, Salop Street, and Ludlow Street. The Clive Arms was the first pub of the "new" town that sprang up with the development of Penarth Dock. From this pub William Sadler, the licensee and the town's first baker, operated his daily carrier service to Cardiff.

  Turn right down Maughan Terrace. These three-storeyed properties were seamen's lodging houses, and no. 12 was the Dock Hotel. Cross the main road with North Cliffe Cottage on your right and continue down hill to the second viewpoint of your walk.

5 Penarth Marina and Cardiff Bay
Ahead of you, beyond the muddy waters of the Taff rivermouth, is Cardiff's dockland, now a hive of waterfront regeneration, with a barrage under construction across the mouth of the bay. On your left is the basin of Penarth Dock, now transformed into a marina development that has won a Civic Trust commendation. There used to be a swingbridge to the far side of the dock and to the subway. For 63 years, until it was bricked up in 1963, this subway gave pedestrian access to Ferry Road on the Cardiff bank of the river Ely.

  The first building on your right was the Custom House (1865). Note the Royal coat of arms on the stone clock-tower with its cast-iron weather vane. This was the site of Penarth Head Inn, said to be owned by the eighteenth-century smuggler, Edward Edwards. The next building was the Marine Hotel, another Taff Vale property. Note the unusual mansard roofs and the French windows with the initials TVR on the guard rails of the balconies. Both buildings are listed. The lifeboat station was at the rear from 1883 to 1905. From the far side of the Marine Hotel look up at the wall from the shore to the Northcliffe House cliff-top summer house. This was built for M. Ernest Plisson, whose ship Sainte Addresse traded between Penarth and Le Havre. Retrace your steps up the hill, right along Paget Road, formerly called Dock Road.

6 Ferry Lane and Steep Street
The cobbles and triassic marl steps of Ferry Lane (the first left on the far pavement) are a reminder of the path that used to continue down the fields on your right to the chain ferry. Between Ferry Lane and Hill Street, which is also cobbled, the pavement is on a raised platform. Then, until the aptly named Steep Street, note the housing style with bay windows and short steps to a front door set back above the pavement.

  You are still walking above the curve of land into which Penarth Dock was fitted and which was opened in 1865. A record of 4,660,648 tons of coal were exported in 1913. General cargoes were handled on the far side, but both sides of the dock had coaling staithes and some stone piers remain. There were four moveable steel tips on the far side of the basin, and it was claimed that   they were so fast-loading that a boat could be turned round on one tide.

  Brunel's Great Britain — the first ocean-going propeller driven iron steamship — left from no. 9 tip in February 1886. This proved to be her last voyage. Caught in a hurricane off Cape Horn, she took shelter in the Falklands and lay there until 1970. She was then brought back to Bristol, and is on display in the dock where she was built. After the post-war decline in the coal trade the dock closed in 1936, but re-opened for war service with the Royal Engineers and the United States Navy, being especially busy in advance of D-Day.

  Climb to the end of Paget Road and turn right. Notice the triangular garden between the bow-fronted Royal Hotel and the former St Joseph's Catholic Church and schoolroom. This community project was undertaken by school children, and was visited by Prince Charles in 1982, when it received a Prince of Wales Award.

7 Harbour View Road
Continue walking along Harbour View Road. At the end of the last Harbour View block of flats is the third viewpoint of your walk. After about thirty yards, stand on the highest point of the path leading down to an adventure play area. On your right is the expanse of Cardiff, with the river Ely ahead of you winding its way inland. On the left of the river is the railway to Cardiff, and above it, on the curve, a modern block of flats in two-tone brick (Elizabethan Court) next to the oldest building in the area. Part of Cogan Pill House (now a pub and restaurant called Barons Court) dates from 1554.

  In clear weather you can see the turrets of Castell Coch above the River Taff gap and, in the far distance, towards the hills of the Glamorganshire coalfield. It was this coalfield whose exports were the main reason for the construction of Penarth Dock near Cogan Pill, a tidal creek of the river Ely.

  Less than a mile ahead of you is the village of Llandough. The landmark saddle-backed tower of St Dochdwy's Church is to the left of the former 18th-century farmhouse of Great House Farm, now demolished, the site of a Celtic monastery. The remains of a Roman villa were discovered near there during house-building in 1979. The church is a Grade II listed building and within the grounds stands an ancient monument in the form of a Celtic Cross.

  Towards your left Andrew Road rises from Penarth Leisure Centre in Cogan towards Dinas Powys. Further to your left is the estate built on the sloping fields of Cornerswell Farm. On your extreme left, above the site of two former brickyards in Cogan, are Tennyson Road, Kipling Close and the other "poets corner" streets of Penarth.

8 Windsor Road

Retrace your steps as far as the first gap (after flats 65-68). Turn right and after about sixty yards follow the paved path bearing left. Then, after making two sharp right turns down the steps, enter Hill Terrace. Cross the road to the right of Holy Nativity Church (opened 1894) and walk up Windsor Road. Pass the Police Station (1864) and cross the bottom of High Street. Monty Smith, at the junction with Railway Terrace on your right, has premises adapted from the Windsor Kinema, run by the Willmore brothers. Cross the bottom of Arcot Street (several roads in Penarth commemorate a local link with the Clive of India family: Cawnpore Road, Clive Crescent, Plassey Street, Ludlow Street, Paget Road).

  Windsor Road was originally residential, but towards the turn of the century a "town centre" was created with shop conversions. The use of the houses' front garden space achieved projecting shop fronts without sacrificing a wide pavement. The original 19th-century upper floors remain clearly visible. Notice, for instance, the ornate roofs and embellishements above David Morgan, Olivers and Lo-cost. The Solomon Andrews horse buses left opposite from the side of the St Fagan pub.

  You have now returned to the town centre roundabout where the walk began.

Original trail leaflet published by the Penarth Society and Penarth Town Council. For full acknowledgements see Trail No 1. Illustrated by Diana Mead of the Penarth Society.