Lakeside View Campsite

In Merthyr Tydfil (15 minutes’ drive), the Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery looks like a medieval fortress but was built in the 1820s by a local industrialist. Its collections cover the area’s Roman heritage, the years of the Industrial Revolution and much of what happened in between, while the vast area of parkland has a lake and a model railway. The Big Pit National Coal Museum (25 minutes) occupies a mine that operated until 1980. Today, visitors can take a tour of its underground locations, which include a reconstructed coal face and the machines used to extract coal. There are also exhibition spaces detailing life as a miner from the Victorian era to the present. Caerphilly (half an hour) has developed around its 13th-century castle, a moated structure surrounded by the lush Dafydd Williams Gardens. On the outskirts of town, Van Road Trails is a dirt jump park where the kids can practise aerial tricks.