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More About Hotels in the Wye Valley

The Wye is tidal for about fifteen miles inland, up as far as Bigsweir, and on a big spring tide the river can rise fifty feet. That is the height of a five-storey building.

Chepstow sits at the bottom of the valley where the Wye meets the Severn, and Monmouth at the top where the Monnow comes in. Between the two the road runs the length of the gorge with the trees closing over it.

Go and look at the river on a spring tide. At low tide the banks below Chepstow are bare brown mud, and a few hours later it is up level with the fields.

The really big tides come round roughly twice a lunar month, and they run all the way up to Bigsweir. Get the timing wrong and you will look at mud; get it right and the river is level with the fields.

The border was marked on the ground long before anyone drew it on paper. Offa's Dyke is a bank and ditch running eighty-two miles down the English side, up to sixty-five feet across and eight feet high in places. Much of what survives is a scheduled monument, so the ground you walk beside is protected.

It is named for Offa, king of Mercia, the old English kingdom of the midlands, in the 700s. Radiocarbon dating suggests parts of it were already in the ground long before he was born, and that he added to what he found.

A three-mile stretch of the dyke looks down on Tintern and its ruined abbey from the English bank. The path that carries its name runs 177 miles, from the Severn estuary up to the north Wales coast at Prestatyn.

You do not have to walk any great length of it. The best of it here is the section above the gorge, where you are on the top with the whole valley underneath you and the abbey small and grey below.

For its last sixteen miles the river is the border itself, from Redbrook down to Chepstow. Look across from either bank and you are looking at a different country, which is a strange thing in a wood.

It is hard to credit now, but this was industrial country. The Angidy valley behind Tintern held the largest industrial complex in Wales in the 1600s, making wire in a building driven by four waterwheels.

Metal was still worked there until 1895. The last wheel in the valley, at Abbey Mill, was put in during 1870 and restored in 2009, and the ruins of the furnaces and wireworks are scattered through the trees.

You can walk it in an afternoon from Tintern, and guided walks of the Angidy run through the season. The Old Station up the road has been turned into a visitor centre with railway carriages, a tea room and the trailheads for several marked routes.