POPULAR Welsh naturalist Iolo Williams has urged people to venture further into the Brecon Beacons and experience more of its magic.

His plea comes as his new series for BBC Wales, Iolo’s Brecon Beacons, is broadcast on BBC One Wales. The first in the new series - a not-to-be-missed four-part guide to the national park through each of the seasons - will be shown on Wednesday, January 13 at 7.30pm.

“We as Welsh people tend to ignore or not fully appreciate our own country often enough,” said Iolo, “but with the Beacons, something like 80% of visitors come from south Wales, so at least we know local people appreciate them. What happens of course is that the majority will go to places you’d expect them to visit, places like Pen y Fan and Ystradfellte - and what we hope to do with this series is say ‘well done for coming, but there’s so much more to the place than you’re probably aware of’.

“When you start working on a series like this you hope you’re going to be able to offer people something different. Everyone thinks about the Brecon Beacons as the upland, and of course there are places like Pen y Fan, Corn Du and Fan Gyhirych, they’re very well-known - but the Beacons has so much more to offer - and a lot of them are places people rarely visit.

“There are very special ancient forests there, you’ve got canyons, the Ystradfellte waterfalls - they’re well-known of course, but you also have lowland, you’ve got wetlands, there are rivers and streams - the River Usk is the most well-known - there are dozens of other rivers and streams, so it’s an extremely varied landscape that supports a wide variety of wildlife, and people too - you’ve got some very interesting characters there.”

Iolo has worked with nature and conservation for over 30 years and is a popular member of the Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch teams, and of course he’s fronted many of his own series for BBC Wales.

Stopping at nothing to offer stunning views at every turn, the series starts as it means to go on in Winter - with Iolo facing an un-forecast blizzard in the Black Mountains just a few miles south of Hay on Wye. But Iolo says this time of the year is actually a great time to visit - it’s relatively quiet, the changing weather conditions make it challenging but rewarding, and the wildlife that perseveres can be easier to spot.

The first programme visits a variety of locations such as Sugar Loaf mountain near Abergavenny, some of the highest waterfalls in southern Britain and one of the biggest cave systems in Europe.

The programme also includes one of Iolo’s personal highlights from the whole series, as he visits Kate Mobbs-Morgan working with a horse on the slopes of Mynydd Myddfai near Llandovery.

“We see her working with a horse pulling trees out - and that took me back to when I was a boy of 5 or 6 years old, growing up in Llanwddyn,” said Iolo. “Then there were still some people who still used big, heavy horses for timber extraction from the forest, so the item brings back very fond memories. Nowadays it’s tractors or machines that tend to get the job done but as we see, if you do work with a horse, it’s done in a much more sensitive way to the environment, you don’t break the soil up, you don’t bruise other trees, so it’s much more in keeping how things are in the national park.”

Known very much as an expert on nature, Iolo is keen to emphasise that this series aims to offer a broad guide to the 500-square-mile park.

“We wanted to show the whole of the Beacons - not just the nature, not just the landscape, and not just some of the features such as the mountains and the rivers, but the people as well, some of the characters who live and work there. We’ve tried to make a very comprehensive series.”

A version of the series is due to be broadcast on BBC Four later in the year.