Richard Burton's Wales

Richard Burton left Wales for the film sets of the world, but he came home whenever he could, and his heart never really left at all. Here are the places in South Wales that shaped him, and that you can still visit today: his village, his hills, his theatres, his archive, and the hotels he loved and loathed.

Richard Burton went wherever the work took him, which was everywhere, but Wales was the place he measured everything else against. Home was a village called Pontrhydyfen, in the Afan Valley, and no amount of fame or distance loosened its hold on him. Borrowing a line from James Joyce, he said there is only one place a man truly belongs to, and that his was here. You can follow him around it. This is how.

Sensing a centenary in 2025, Neath Port Talbot Council opened the Richard Burton Trails: a free, self-guided wander through Pontrhydyfen and the neighbouring Port Talbot suburb of Taibach, studded with QR codes so you can stand in the Welsh drizzle and watch clips of him on your phone. The route's spiritual centre is the Miners Arms, where Burton's parents met and where, on his visits home as a film star, he would throw open the bar and stand drinks for the entire village. It is a rugby clubhouse now, its front wall wearing a mural of him the size of a house, his line about belonging painted across it.

He was, for the record, both unimpressed by how little the place had changed and delighted by it in the same breath. "Pontrhydyfen is, stick for stick and stone for stone, blade of grass for blade of grass, virtually the same, exactly as it was when I was a child," he told the BBC's Vincent Kane in February 1977. Getting there unnoticed was the difficult part. "I disguised myself heavily to go to the village," he said, "because... I'm infinitely more recognisable in here, because they all know the family face apart from mine."

Down the valley sits Port Talbot, where the schoolteacher Philip Burton took the young Richard Jenkins in hand, lent him his surname, and marched him up the surrounding hills to hurl Shakespeare into the wind until his voice could fill a valley, and later a cinema. The Port Talbot YMCA where he first performed still stands, as does his old school, and in Talbot Memorial Park there is a monument inscribed with a poem he wrote about those same hills. When he and Taylor returned in their pomp, they are said to have landed their helicopters on the three-mile golden sweep of Aberavon beach, which remains the single most Burton-and-Taylor way to arrive anywhere.

Swansea was the nearest city, and Burton trod the boards of the Victorian Swansea Grand Theatre, still going strong. The waterfront university now holds the Richard Burton Archives, where, by appointment, you can read his diaries: the driest, most self-lacerating showbusiness memoir he never got round to publishing, and the reason this article has a tone at all. Afterwards, drive out to Mumbles and take lunch by the sea, as penance.

A word on the drinking, since you cannot honestly follow Burton around Wales without it. This was a man who could see off a couple of bottles of spirits in a day and still hit his marks, and Wales was where the habit was formed and fondly maintained. The Miners Arms open bar was the grand gesture; the everyday version played out in places like The Brit in Cwmavon, which has long celebrated its most famous drinker, and the Prince of Wales in Cardiff, where Burton once acted when the building was still a theatre and which now, with a certain inevitability, pours pints instead. Raise one to him by all means. Just do not try to match him, a contest nobody has ever won, Burton included.

Burton and Taylor needed beds on these homecomings, and at the Coed-y-Mwstwr Hotel near Bridgend, a Victorian country house buried in seventeen acres of whispering woodland (which is roughly what its name means), they got a good one. It still takes guests, and still keeps a suite named in their honour.

Elsewhere his standards went unmet, and his diary kept the receipts. On 19 November 1975 he wrote: "Drove to Neath Castle Hotel. Terrible. Moved to 'Executive' Hotel Aberavon. Pretty bad too but had a bath to go with it. Tonight a suite... Weather wild and Welsh. Had beer and felt very ill." The Castle Hotel Neath bears this no grudge, and indeed lists Burton and Taylor among its distinguished former guests, alongside an even racier pairing: Lord Nelson and his mistress Emma, Lady Hamilton, reputed to have conducted part of their notorious affair on the premises. Two of history's more scandalous couples under one Neath roof, and the hotel tactfully declines to reprint Burton's review. As for the "Executive" he fled to, built in 1973, it is now the Best Western Aberavon Beach Hotel, a cheerful three-star on the seafront with wide views over Swansea Bay: a sound budget base and, provided you secure the bath, demonstrably better than terrible.

In 1971 Burton came home to film Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, reunited with Taylor and his friend Peter O'Toole, in the harbour town of Fishguard in Pembrokeshire. Its winding quayside stood in for Thomas's fictional Llareggub, a village whose name, spelled backwards, is "bugger all", which remains one of Thomas's better jokes. The drive west earns its keep on the literary pilgrimage alone, and rather more so on Pembrokeshire's beaches, which are among the finest in Britain.

Burton spent his last years abroad and was buried in Switzerland, reportedly in a red suit with a book of Dylan Thomas to hand. But it was always Wales he belonged to, and the valleys have claimed him right back, in the murals and the monuments and the open-bar legends, in a rugby clubhouse that used to be his father's local. He was right about the one place a man belongs to. Go and see it for yourself.