Tintern Accommodation

More About Tintern

Give the abbey a proper hour rather than a look on the way past. Cadw has been repairing the church since 2024, so there is scaffolding up, some areas are fenced off, and admission is discounted while the work runs. Then climb to the Devil’s Pulpit, a limestone spur on the Offa’s Dyke Path a mile and a half above the village, where the ruin lies below you.

Everything else is a short drive. Chepstow and its castle are fifteen minutes south, Monmouth twenty minutes north, and Symonds Yat and the Forest of Dean beyond that. Bristol and Cardiff are each about an hour, which surprises people standing in a wood listening to nothing.

Walter de Clare, lord of Chepstow, founded the abbey on 9 May 1131. It was the first Cistercian house in Wales and only the second in Britain. The monks farmed the valley for four hundred years until Henry VIII dissolved them in 1536, after which the roof lead was stripped and the buildings left to the weather.

The ruin made Tintern far more famous than the working abbey ever was. By the late 1700s the Wye Tour was bringing travellers down the river specifically to see it. Turner painted it in watercolour in 1794. Four years later the poet William Wordsworth wrote a famous poem while walking the hills above it, and between them they made the ruin famous.

Cadw, the Welsh Government body that looks after historic sites, runs the abbey now and it takes around 70,000 visitors a year. The church is part-way through a long programme of stone repair, so there is scaffolding on it and some ground is fenced off. Admission is discounted while that lasts.

The village is a single street along the river with the ruin in the middle of it. You can walk the old railway line in both directions from here, and the Wye Valley Walk runs north to Monmouth and south to Chepstow.