Wye Valley
The Wye Valley is one of the finest river landscapes in Britain, a scenic corridor following the course of the River Wye along the border between England and Wales from Hay-on-Wye in the north to Chepstow in the south, where the river meets the Severn Estuary. The entire valley has been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the combination of dramatic limestone gorges, ancient oak woodland, medieval ruins and historic market towns makes it one of the most varied and rewarding landscape journeys in the country. The valley became famous in the late eighteenth century through the Wye Tour, an early form of organised scenic tourism that brought visitors by boat from Ross-on-Wye to Chepstow to observe the picturesque scenery from the water. William Gilpin's 1782 account of the tour established the vocabulary of the picturesque that proved enormously influential on both landscape aesthetics and garden design, and the Wye Valley's combination of wooded cliffs, rocky outcrops and ruined abbeys provided the perfect material for his theoretical framework. Wordsworth and Coleridge both made the tour and drew on the experience in their poetry. The ruins of Tintern Abbey near the valley's southern end, a Cistercian monastery founded in 1131 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536, are among the most beautiful and best-preserved monastic ruins in Britain. The roofless nave and elegant Gothic arches of the abbey church stand in the valley floor beside the river, framed by the wooded hillsides above, in a setting that moved Wordsworth to write Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey in 1798, one of the most important poems in the Romantic tradition. The abbey is managed by Cadw and is freely accessible to visitors. Symonds Yat Rock provides the finest viewpoint over the valley's dramatic limestone gorge section, while the market towns of Monmouth and Ross-on-Wye provide historical depth and visitor facilities. The Wye Valley Walk, a 136-mile long-distance footpath, follows the river for its entire length and provides access to the valley's landscapes at a pace that allows full appreciation of its variety.