Busy Months

The past three months have been extremely busy at A Place to Write. A bit like the proverbial swan: floating serenely on the surface but so much going on behind the scenes! Even without our son's wedding at the start of June, with all that such an event entails in terms of planning and stress, we would have had enough on our hands to keep us extremely busy.

Our 2025 Brochure, available to download from the website

While I have been working hard to finally finish my thesis, with a July deadline looming, Wendy and I have also been looking at the business strategically, including beginning the rebrand of Bron Y Graig as a Retreat Centre offering a range of personalised retreats in our stunning location. As part of that development we have engaged Abbie at Visualise Marketing to oversee our social media content, explored connections with WeTravel that could help increase awareness of our retreat offer, begun to build a closer relationship with MsLexia and other writing publications and organisations, contacted libraries across the UK to promote our reading and writing retreats to their members, and continued our extensive work programme on the grounds and buildings.

New Logo for BYG Retreat Centre - home of A Place to Write

Looking ahead, our summer programme has sold extremely well - just a few rooms remain available at time of writing - and we are filling our autumn programme too. Dates for 2026 will be published imminently too - well ahead of when we finally published them for this year! The new programme includes more specialised retreats - for writers of different genres and at different stages of their writing journey - alongside our standard offering, and we intend to add more of these as we move forward.

Bron Y Graig, viewed from the quarry

Alongside these developments, we have also been delighted to receive more reviews and feedback and general communications (including re-bookings) from many guests over the past few months. Several have written poems and short stories directly inspired by their stay with us, and our latest newsletter - available via the website - includes contributions from several past retreaters. Our writers WhatsApp community is beginning to take root, and we have recently welcomed guests from as far afield as Germany, Italy, America and even the Galapagos Islands! And in the midst of all this we just welcomed our youngest son back from Australia in time for his brother's wedding - another joyful reunion at Bron Y Graig.

We're welcoming guests from across the world!

Despite the enormous challenges caused by the cost of living crisis and persistently high bills, we are still managing to offer concession prices and compete favourably on price with other retreats of a similar nature. All told, it's been a very successful 2025 so far, and we are looking forward to a very enjoyable summer with a wedding to boot!

See you soon!

Nic