St Asaph ROC Post

Buried beneath a St Asaph hillside sits a relic of Cold War paranoia that still feels oddly tense even now. This Regional Operations Centre, or ROC Post, was built to coordinate Britain's response if nuclear war kicked off - basically a bunker where military personnel would have directed civil defence operations across North Wales. You descend into the thing and suddenly the 1960s feels very real: cramped communications rooms, banks of switchboards, maps on the walls. It's the sort of place that makes you grateful the phones never had to light up for real.

The post itself is small but absorbing, proper claustrophobic in places. Families with older kids find it genuinely interesting - teenagers especially seem gripped by the fact that real people trained here to manage the unmanageable. Younger children might find thirty minutes enough. Rhyl's just a few miles west, so it works as a morning detour if you're staying near the coast.

If you're camping at Parkdean Resorts Ty Mawr Holiday Park or Golden Sands, this is worth an hour's drive inland. The nearby Conwy area has enough history to justify the trip anyway - Conwy Castle dominates that town centre and you could easily combine the two. Access details and opening hours can be sketchy, so ring ahead before making the journey. It's not flashy or polished, but that's rather the point. Real Cold War infrastructure, not a theme park version of it.