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More About Holiday Cottages in the Wye Valley

At Symonds Yat, a village on a great bend of the river, the loop comes so far round that it almost meets its own back. A limestone rock stands above it, and the walk up from the car park takes about ten minutes.

Peregrines nest within sight of it, and the RSPB sets telescopes up on the rock from April to August. Below, the Wye runs green and slow between the trees, and the woods carry on for miles in both directions.

Get up to the rock early, because the morning is when the birds hunt over the gorge. A pair of peregrines has nested within sight of the outcrop year after year, and it costs nothing to stand and watch them.

Two hand ferries cross the river below, one from the inn on the west bank and one from the Saracens Head on the east. They run in season and in reasonable conditions rather than to a timetable. A member of the bar staff pulls you over on a rope, and people have been crossing at this spot since Roman times.

A mile or so upstream is the Biblins suspension bridge. The Forestry Commission built it in 1957 out of local oak and steel cable, and it still bounces when you walk across. You can come down off the rock, take a ferry over and climb back through the woods before lunch.

The gorge was not always this quiet. Ironworks stood at New Weir just below the rock, and the sightseeing boats that came down the Wye in the seventeen hundreds pulled in so that passengers could look at them. The furnaces are long gone and the trees have taken the site back.

The woods survived because nobody could plough them. The sides of the gorge are limestone and far too steep to farm, so they were cut for charcoal and timber instead of being cleared for fields.

All of it has been protected since 1971, when 126 square miles either side of the border were made an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Since November 2023 the official name has been the Wye Valley National Landscape. Nothing on the ground changed, only the signs.

The canoe trip everybody does is Ross-on-Wye down to Symonds Yat. It is about fifteen miles and takes five or six hours, and the firms at Symonds Yat, Ross and Monmouth will run you back to your car.

You do not need any experience for it. The Wye is slow and shallow for most of that stretch, and the only real decision is whether to stop at a riverside pub halfway or press on.

One thing worth knowing before you set off: Symonds Yat and Ross-on-Wye are both in England. The border runs down the middle of the river here, and you cross it without noticing.