Usk Accommodation

More About Usk

Walk the square and the streets off it for the flowers and the pubs, which are the two things Usk is known for, and look in at the Rural Life Museum in the old malt barn. Fish the Usk if that is your thing, because it is one of the best salmon and trout rivers in Wales.

Then drive ten minutes to Raglan Castle. Cadw, the Welsh Government body that looks after the old buildings here, calls it the grandest castle ever built by Welshmen, and its moated Great Tower went up in 1435.

Usk sits at the western end of the valley, off the main run of it, which is much of its charm. Raglan is ten minutes and Monmouth twenty, with the wooded gorge and Tintern beyond that. Abergavenny and the edge of the Bannau Brycheiniog, the mountains that used to be called the Brecon Beacons, are twenty-five minutes west.

The Romans came first. Burrium was a full legionary fortress, built about AD 55 by the governor Didius Gallus as a base for the conquest of Wales, and it lies under the modern town.

The legion moved on to Caerleon within a generation and Usk shrank to a supply depot. The Normans built a castle above the river, the town got its charter, and it settled into the long quiet life of a Monmouthshire market town.

The flowers are a modern habit and a serious one. Usk in Bloom has taken gold at Wales in Bloom more than forty years running, and in 2018 it won an international award in Canada as well.

It is still winning. The town took gold again in 2025 and was named Wales in Bloom Large Village Champion. That is why every wall and lamp post in the square is loaded from June onwards.

Usk Castle is privately owned and unusual for it. The ramparts have gardens inside them and an open-air chapel, and they open to visitors alongside about twenty private gardens in the town each June.

The rest of the calendar is the agricultural show every September and the Rural Life Museum in the old malt barn, which has a café. A town trail links twenty-eight marked sites if you would rather walk it.