Standing at 2,907ft (886 meters) Pen Y Fan has attracted the attention of writers painters and walkers for hundreds of years in not thousands of years.


A.G.Bradley 1903 wrote

          "gradually the clouds lightened and lifted ;the peak of Pen y Fan or Arthurs Chair showed but a few hundred yards off and two or three hundred feet higher and Lost no time in getting on the top of the highest point in South Wales"

Alfred Russell Wallace 1846 wrote
           "We then walked along the ridge to the second and higher triangular summit, peeped with nervous dread on my part over the most perpendicular precipice towards Brecon, noted the exact correspondence in slope of the two summits,and then back to the ridge and a little way down the southern slope to where a tiny spring trickles out-the highest source of the river Taff - and there lying on the soft mountain turf enjoyed our lunch and the distant view over valley and mountain to the faint haze of the bristol Channel"