Yes, it really is called Wales, and no, it is nowhere near the Welsh border. This village sits in South Yorkshire, a few miles south-east of Sheffield, next to Kiveton Park, and the name probably comes from an Old English word for foreigners or Britons, the same root that gave the country its name. The joke never gets old for travellers, and the village sign is a favourite photo.
This was coal-mining country until the pits closed in the 1980s and 1990s, and the villages around grew up around the collieries, with rows of terraced houses for the miners. The landscape has since healed, with old spoil heaps turned into parks and woodland.
Rother Valley Country Park, to the west, is a large area of lakes and meadows created from old opencast mines, with watersports, walking paths and a café. Roche Abbey, to the north-east, is a ruined Cistercian monastery in a wooded valley, its grounds landscaped by Capability Brown in the eighteenth century. The ruins are atmospheric, with a stream running through them.
The M1 is close, at junction 31, and the A57 runs towards Worksop and the Dukeries, where Clumber Park and Sherwood Forest offer quiet roads through woodland. The riding around Wales is mostly about getting from one place to another, but the lanes to the south and east are pleasant.
As a food stop it is honest and unpretentious: a pub, a chippy or two, a café that does a proper breakfast. Eat well, take the photo by the sign, and head off knowing you have already been to Wales once today.