Saturday 18 March 2017

Talgarth Mill and The Baker's Table, Brecon Beacons cafe review


It can hardly be surprising that my favourite tourist trips of my youth all involved food.

Beamish open air museum with its Victorian sweetshop and coal-powered fish and chip shop.

Cadbury World with its ridiculous amount of free chocolate; I made serious inroads into a 1kg bag of misshapes on the journey home.

Lindisfarne island and its nectar-like honey mead.

Talgarth Mill in Wales's Brecon Beacons (in between Brecon and Hay-on-Wye) also ticks all of my boxes when it comes to food tourism.


This historic watermill was restored using lottery funding and featured on the BBC’s Village SOS. A community enterprise, it’s staffed almost completely by volunteers and produces its own award-winning, additive-free flour. It also happens to have a frigging awesome café where you can sample their wares.

A guided tour (£4) from Jez, one of the volunteer millers, was a fascinating experience. We saw the whole process from winnowing the grain to bagging up the flour.

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The big pay-off was lunch in the Baker’s Table Café where almost every dish involves some of the stonkingly good fresh bread. 


Mrs G’s salad (£6.75) came topped with a whopping piece of grilled goat’s cheese and was flecked with pieces of sweet butternut squash. 


Crisp crusted slices of seeded bread were slathered with thick butter. 


My Miller’s lunch (£9) was exemplary. The groaning board was laden with locally baked ham, thick pieces of nutty Hafod cheddar and creamy Cenarth brie, a lightly vinegary carrot and cabbage slaw, chilli-laced piccalilli, well-dressed leaves, miscellaneous salad and a crisp apple. And of course, there were a couple of slices of the excellent bread. 


Talgarth Bakery is my kind of tourist spot. You learn something, you eat something – what’s not to love?

The Details:

Address - Talgarth Mill, The Mill House, The Square, Talgarth, Powys LD3 0BW
Web - http://talgarthmill.com/
Telephone - 01874 711125

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