The Wye Valley, whose sinuous border divides southeast Wales from England, was where the very concept of walking to viewpoints was invented. In 1782, the Reverend William Gilpin, originator of the term “picturesque”, published his Observations of the River Wye to help those in search of the “beautiful” and “sublime” locate the most sketch-able spots in the valley. It became Britain’s first mass-selling guide book – at a time when restrictions imposed by the Napoleonic wars were forcing monied, educated travellers to seek inspiration closer to home rather than amid the classical ruins and must-see cities of the continental “Grand Tour”.
Armed with Gilpin’s guide, the likes of Coleridge, Turner, Thackeray and Wordsworth all came to the Wye, leaving in their wake a glut of aquatints and engravings of Tintern Abbey, and poems eulogizing the forests and cliffs. These served to cement the image of the valley in the popular imagination as a wild, fabulously romantic place. But it wasn’t until the completion in 1874 of the railway line between Chepstow and Monmouth that the Wye became the object of Britain’s first proper tourist boom.
Visitors still pour through in droves, but with the railway line from Chepstow long uprooted they tend to do so via the A466, which looks down on the river from an angle Gilpin would have dismissed as decidedly “un-picturesque”. To really understand what all the fuss was about, you have to experience the Wye Valley as the early Victorians would have done: from the footpaths winding through it. Viewed at river level, the Wye’s imestone escarpments and hanging forests can seem in places less like a Welsh border landscape than one transplanted from the Amazon basin – a hidden landscape as exotic and wild as any in the country.
It may be a beauty spot today, but the Wye Valley was also one of the major crucibles of the industrial revolution, its woodlands shrouded for centuries in smoke and soot. Iron was mined in Roman times, and the forests were heavily coppiced to provide charcoal for the smelting works that blazed through the medieval era. Britain’s first blast furnaces roared to life here in the 1500s, churning out the world’s first brass, along with fine-quality tin plate, copper wire and paper. The trade boom went into overdrive once the old salmon weirs were pulled up in 1662, which rendered the river navigable all the way to Monmouth. Produce poured down in flat-bottomed “trows” to be shipped out of Chepstow, which until the rise of Cardiff and Swansea was Wales’ busiest port.
It was the strategic importance of the Wye, flowing into the Severn at the main crossing point between England and Wales, which inspired William the Conqueror to erect a castle overlooking the river mouth in 1067 – only a year after the Battle of Hastings. Known to the Normans as “Stringuil” (from the Welsh for “bend in the river”), Chepstow flourished for nearly a thousand years until the closure of its boat building yards in the 1900s.
These days, despite having preserved a wonderful crop of early Georgian houses, the town feels like it’s fallen on hard times, barely spared a passing glance by the traffic streaming over the nearby Severn Bridge. It deserves a couple of hours of anyone’s time, though – not least to visit the splendid castle, built by William the Conqueror’s master builder, William FitzOsbern, as a launchpad from which to subdue the troublesome Welsh princes. The oldest surviving stone fortress in Britain, it still strikes an imposing silhouette, and provides superb views up the Wye through its tracery windows.
Beginning at Chepstow Castle, our walk heads north up the river to explore one of the most dramatic, but least visited, corners of the valley, where the Wye performs one of its spectacular horseshoe meanders, creating a lush, narrow-necked peninsula enfolded by wooded cliffs. The name of this isolated spit of land – Lancaut – derives from that of an early Welsh saint, Cewydd, to whom a chapel was dedicated on the riverbanks during the Saxon era of the early seventh century AD. The monks who staffed it farmed the rich fields and traded salmon caught in weirs nearby. Made from wicker, the funnelled baskets they used, known as “putchers”, were still a common sight on the Wye until three decades ago, since when salmon stocks have been wiped out.
[1] Leaving the car park in front of Chepstow Castle, turn left past the Tourist Information Centre onto Bridge Street, and cross the Victorian iron bridge over the Wye. A lane cuts straight uphill from the end of it: follow this (steep), ignoring the right turn half-way up for the Offa’s Dyke Path (ODP) (sign broken off as at May 2013), and cross the main road again at the top to enter another lane (Mopla Road). Continue for 140m/150yards to a metal kissing gate on your left where the road bends. Go through the gate, and head uphill past the remains of a medieval windmill (marked “Lookout Tower” on OS maps). As the field narrows towards the top of the rise you arrive at another metal kissing gate on the right. Go through this and keep the stone garden wall on your left for 140m/150yards to reach another taller wall where you turn left along a short narrow passage between a wall and fence. At the end, turn right for a few yards along a driveway to another kissing gate on the left, and pass through this into a field. Cross to the far side of the field, where you’ll find another kissing gate.
[2] The trail divides here. One path goes straight ahead, under a small bridge into the entrance to the Lancaut Nature Reserve. However, you need to turn right, passing in front of Pen Moel house, along the base of the ha ha and through the trees on to the main road (B4228), where you should turn left. After a minute, a sign points the way sharply left up Old School Lane, continue up, past the school (now a private house and not identifiable), just beyond which a metal gate marks the entrance to Woodcroft Quarry (long abandoned). Once past the quarry gates, the path passes dramatically along the top of the quarry walls with fine views across the Wye and Wintour's Leap, eventually emerging at the B4228. There is a viewpoint on the left.
(A) The great viewpoint over Lancaut is Wintour’s Leap, the lip of a vertical limestone rock face surging 91m/300ft from the water’s edge. It takes its name from a Civil War general called Sir John Wintour, who is said to have galloped over the escarpment and swum the river to escape his roundhead pursuers in 1645. Now all but forgotten and overgrown, this dramatically beautiful, deserted stretch of the Wye was until the end of the nineteenth century busy with traffic ferrying limestone blocks down to Chepstow from Lancaut’s quarries. Stone from here was used to clad Avonmouth Docks, built as a rival for Liverpool in the 1870s; it was also burned for use as fertiliser in the little lime kilns passed later by our route.
[3] Follow the main road (take care) for 2 mins until you reach a junction with Lancaut Lane, cutting back to the left . Three mins’ walk along this brings you to the remains of Offa’s Dyke (to the right of road in Spital Meend field, opposite the Lancaut parking area), Carry on until another panel (Number 2) on the left marks the entrance to Lancaut Nature Reserve.
(B) Conflict between the English and Welsh has always been a feature of life on the Lancaut bend, and a shaping force on the landscape. Spread over the fields above, the iron-age fort of Spital Meend was the focus of major earth works ordered by the Mercian King Offa (757–796AD) as part of his bid to construct a ditch along his western border. Stretching from the Dee to the Severn, Offa’s Dyke is today considered one of the most remarkable structures to have survived from the Dark Ages in Britain. It made use of natural features – rivers, cliffs and mountains – as well as 130km/81miles of hand-dug trenches. Many thousands of men would have been employed in this excavation work – a testament both to the great power Offa must have wielded, and to his loathing of the Welsh. The nineteenth-century travel writer, George Henry Borrow, noted that, “it was customary for the English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east of the dyke, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman whom they found to the west of it.” The story is probably apocryphal, but it underlines the potency of the dyke as a symbol of enduring national differences – and mutual antipathy.
(C) The Lancaut Nature Reserve is an impenetrable jungle of oak, ash, maple, yew, small-leaved limes, whitebeams and wild service trees, overshadowed by some of the most grandiose crags in lowland Britain. From their feet, the forest falls to a strip of tidal banks and salt marsh where you might be lucky enough to spot an otter or porpoise sloshing through the muddy water.
Turn left down the path as it drops steadily downhill. A short way beyond the lime kilns on your right, the path forks:left. Keep left at the next junction to reach a stone stile leading onwards to St James’ Chapel.
(D) St James Chapel is the one of the Wye’s hidden treasures, and the perfect spot from which to savour views of the river’s wild lower reaches before tackling the path back to Chepstow. It was built by the Normans in 1120, possibly as an infirmary – a theory to which the presence in the surrounding fields of an unusual number medicinal herbs lends weight. Services were held here until 1865, when the chapel’s Norman font was removed to Gloucester. It has since fallen into ruins.
[4] From the ruined chapel descend along the side of a barbed-wire fence to the riverbank, and turn left along the Wye across another metal stile. Keep to this winding path for the next 30 mins or so, staying as close to the water’s edge as possible (ie don’t be tempted uphill by misleading climbers’ and quarrymen’s trails). Take great care here. Our path doesn’t start to rise until after it has crossed a scree stonefall (waymarked with yellow paint arrows). (The checker followed orange markers just as the scree is reached, and ascended too soon on a very steep scramble, ending up in the wrong place!). After crossing the scree the correct path climbs to Pen Moel house (2), reaching the little bridge and the corner of the ha ha passed earlier.
Follow the route described in paragraph 1 in reverse to return to Chepstow.