Wye Valley
Sheer wooded cliffs and stunning limestone gorges may be indisputable evidence of the Wye River’s hard work over millennia – and the reason for its valley’s great renown – but today this natural border between England and Wales is one of tranquillity. From high on Yat Rock, 150 metres above the villages of Symonds Yat East and West, the river has a dark, burnished surface void of so much as a ripple. The breathtaking scene, looking out between Huntsham and Coppet Hill towards Goodrich and the broad meadows beyond, never fails to impress. And during my visit in November, the trees are aflame with the finest autumn splendour for many a year.
Of course, the beauty of the Wye Valley (Dyffryn Gŵy in Welsh) was recognised a long time prior to its December 1971 Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) designation – people have lived here for 12,000 years; there is evidence of a settlement dating from the Palaeolithic at King Arthur’s Cave at nearby Doward. And this is, after all, Wordsworth’s ‘sylvan Wye’. Indeed, there is little one can write about it that hasn’t been expressed before (and better).
At 251 kilometres, the Wye is the UK’s fifth-longest river and was the first to be designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) along its entire length. Eccentric as well as beautiful, it doesn’t play by the rules: instead of fanning out near its mouth, it has carved deep gorges; it’s unusual for being tidal (up to Brockweir) due to draining into the Severn; and here at Symonds Yat, it blithely cuts across the landscape without regard for the geological composition of soft and hard rock.
A gaggle of ornithologists chattering among themselves ignore the peregrine falcons on the nearby cliff face, on which their impressive telescopes are trained. Their complacency testifies to a Wye Valley conservation success story: for 30 years, the peregrine’s distinctive dark head and broad, pointed wings weren’t seen at Yat Rock following a nationwide population crash caused by the use of now-banned pesticides.
Since then, the list of protected designations within the AONB has flourished like the peregrines. There are 85 Scheduled Ancient Monuments, three candidate Special Areas of Conservation – just one of which boasts nine roosting sites for greater and lesser horseshoe bats – 45 SSSIs and three National Nature Reserves. And the lower Wye Valley is on the Register of Landscapes of Outstanding Historic Interest in Wales.
Banging heads
At 45 kilometres from north to south (11.3 kilometres at its widest point), the Wye Valley AONB extends beyond what’s commonly known as the Wye Valley, its 326 square kilometres also encompassing the Hereford plains. From Mordiford, just east of the city of Hereford, the river haphazardly meanders on its 116-kilometre journey to the impressive 12th-century Chepstow Castle, on the AONB’s southern edge.
Some 24,370 residents live in the market towns and villages that comprise its one per cent of urban area. Job opportunities are relatively few and many people commute
out of the area. The main industries are forestry, quarrying, tourism and agriculture, the latter covering 58 per cent of the AONB and comprising mainly arable and dairy, with orchards in the north.
As well as uniquely straddling the border of England and Wales, it also lies within three governing regions, under four local authorities – Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire and the Forest of Dean. Such piecemeal ownership and different ways of doing things presents a major challenge to the Monmouth-based AONB office of just four staff led by Andrew Blake.
‘The administrative complexity of the AONB is both a strength and a weakness,’ Blake explains. ‘Occasionally, it can feel like we’re banging heads together across Offa’s Dyke, but it also means we don’t keep our eggs in one basket.
‘The divergence of policy and funding in England and Wales is a serious threat, countered by lobbying at all appropriate levels. One way we overcome this is by piloting a project in one county or region and then, if successful, rolling it out across the whole AONB. Often, at least one local authority will emulate a successful scheme across their entire county.
‘We can draw on expertise from both Natural England and the Countryside Council for Wales, both Cadw and English Heritage,’ Blake continues. ‘Indeed, we provide one of the few opportunities for organisations to legitimately liaise with their cross-border counterparts.’
Tapping into the Wye
The main recurring issues facing the AONB are agricultural intensification, river-related problems, use of the redundant railway line and quarrying. ‘A living, working landscape, as this AONB is, should never be “enshrined”,’ Blake says. ‘It must grow and evolve. It’s the rate of change that we need to manage.’
With a current budget of around £170,000, the office funds and oversees numerous projects, such as Savour the Wye, which promotes locally produced food, and another to repair the region’s deteriorating dry-stone walls.
It’s also spearheading renewable energy initiatives, such as solar-powered toilets and showers at a remote campsite, and a groundbreaking community hydro-electricity scheme – currently awaiting planning permission – to power up to 50 homes and annually save 90 tonnes of carbon emissions. ‘In terms of its community ownership and its returning all surplus revenue to the local community, the Tintern Angidy Project is, to my knowledge, unique, and a truly sustainable enterprise,’ says Andrew Nixon, the AONB’s community links officer.
Perhaps the biggest challenge concerns woodlands – in the form of overgrazing by deer, invasion by non-native species, fragmentation and the decline in traditional management. Forest covers 26 per cent of the AONB, representing one of the few remaining areas in Britain with large tracts of ancient broadleaved woodland, featuring rare limestone tree species.
Also at risk are the species that depend on the trees: the virtually continuous 29 kilometres of ravine woodlands of the Wye Gorge are home to nationally important populations of species such as dormouse, greater and lesser horseshoe bats, white admiral butterfly, Tintern spurge and narrow-leaved bittercress.
Not all ‘newcomers’ are necessarily bad news, however. At Yat Rock, I was surprised to see warning posters for illegally reintroduced wild boar. ‘Although they became extinct in Britain centuries ago, the Forest of Dean was, aptly, one of their last strongholds,’ says Dr Martin Goulding, an independent wild boar consultant. Although a pest to farmers, boar remains a keystone woodland species. ‘The boars’ rooting activity actually leads to an increased biodiversity,’ he says.
In order to help improve woodland management, the AONB publishes guidelines and co-ordinates deer management groups. It has also recently completed a three-year Ravine WoodLIFE project – with partners the National Trust, Woodland Trust and WWF-UK – which carried out restoration on 884 hectares of internationally important native woodland.
Peculiar beauty
‘If you have never navigated the Wye, you have seen nothing.’ So wrote Reverend William Gilpin, who knew a thing or two about landscapes, after his 1770 river experience. To Gilpin, the Wye Valley was the physical definition of the Picturesque aesthetic movement, of which he was a pioneer.
From the 1770s, commercial boats took visitors down the Wye from Ross-on-Wye, a practice made popular by Gilpin in his 1782 book Observations on the River Wye, one of the first British tour guides, which helped the Wye Valley became one of Britain’s first tourist attractions. In 1792, a 17-year-old JMW Turner took a Wye tour by ferry from Bristol.
Since that time, the train has come and gone – the Wye Valley Railway was completed in 1876, but the last passenger service closed in 1959. There are still seasonal river cruises, but the two million annual visitors today arrive by road. ‘Tourism has been a part of the local economy for 250 years,’ says Blake. ‘Yet the motor car has put an indelible mark on the landscape.’
Attracting 72,000 visitors per year, Tintern Abbey is the jewel in the Wye Valley tourism crown. Established in 1131, it was colonised by French monks whose Cistercian brand of monasticism insisted upon the rejection of luxury. (They were known as ‘white monks’ because their habits were made of coarse, undyed wool.) In 1536, Henry VIII’s suppression of the church brought 400 years of monastic life at Tintern to an end, after which the abbey fell into an aesthetically pleasing and ivy-cloaked (not to mention ivy-damaged) ruin that later captured the imagination of late-18th-century Romantic artists.
Since 1984, the abbey has been in the care of Cadw, the Welsh Assembly Government’s historic environment division (Cadw, pronounced ‘ka-doo’ means ‘to keep’ in Welsh). Due to severe erosion to the West Front, the abbey’s most famous feature, Cadw is preparing to undertake what Rick Turner, inspector of ancient monuments, tells me is ‘by far the most challenging conservation project that we’ve carried out at the abbey, given its scale and complexity’.
‘There is no doubt that acid rain, allied with inappropriate cement-based mortars used in the past century, has accelerated the rate of erosion,’ says Mial Watkins, principal architect at Cadw. The works, which are expected to last about nine months, will involve the use of lime-based soft-mortar to recreate eroded architectural features, and steel pins, copper wires and epoxy-based resins to reinforce loose masonry. ‘This work should last 75 years, which is the length of time since the last major works to the West Front,’ says Turner.
Get your boots on
Heading north from Tintern Parva, the Wye Valley Walk footpath – which follows the river’s entire length – rises through woodland, while the Offa’s Dyke Path follows the river closely to the east until it reaches the iron Bigsweir Bridge, over which the A466 crosses the river.
‘In summer, I love to sit near Bigsweir watching salmon leaping out of the water, as kingfishers flit along the banks and buzzards hover overhead,’ says Allan Thomas, footpaths officer for the Ramblers’ Association, Lower Wye Group. Not everyone comes to the Wye Valley to walk – other activities include canoeing and excellent salmon fishing – but studying the OS map, it’s apparent that forest trails, footpaths and scenic viewpoints abound.
‘You don’t get a proper feel for the valley unless you get out of the car and put on a pair of boots,’ insists Thomas. And if the Wye Valley AONB doesn’t tempt you out of your car, I’m afraid that nothing will.
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: Andrew Blake’s recommended Wye walks
1. The Symonds Yat circuit via the suspended Biblins footbridge and hand-pulled ferry at Symonds Yat West offers an experience that’s unique in the UK.
2. Piercefield – previously a famous park, now the site of Chepstow Racecourse – is spectacular, especially the 365 Steps leading to the Eagle’s Nest lookout, which inspired the Romantic poet Coleridge to write ‘Oh what a godly scene…’.
3. The Kymin, or Kymin Tower, a National Trust-owned two-storey circular Georgian banqueting house and naval temple that lies along the Offa’s Dyke Path overlooking Monmouth amid four hectares of wooded land, affords spectacular views of the surrounding area.
4. Little Doward Woods (at Wyastone Leys, near Whitchurch) is a particular favourite family walk through 82 hectares of Woodland Trust-owned forest.
Of course, the beauty of the Wye Valley (Dyffryn Gŵy in Welsh) was recognised a long time prior to its December 1971 Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) designation – people have lived here for 12,000 years; there is evidence of a settlement dating from the Palaeolithic at King Arthur’s Cave at nearby Doward. And this is, after all, Wordsworth’s ‘sylvan Wye’. Indeed, there is little one can write about it that hasn’t been expressed before (and better).
At 251 kilometres, the Wye is the UK’s fifth-longest river and was the first to be designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) along its entire length. Eccentric as well as beautiful, it doesn’t play by the rules: instead of fanning out near its mouth, it has carved deep gorges; it’s unusual for being tidal (up to Brockweir) due to draining into the Severn; and here at Symonds Yat, it blithely cuts across the landscape without regard for the geological composition of soft and hard rock.
A gaggle of ornithologists chattering among themselves ignore the peregrine falcons on the nearby cliff face, on which their impressive telescopes are trained. Their complacency testifies to a Wye Valley conservation success story: for 30 years, the peregrine’s distinctive dark head and broad, pointed wings weren’t seen at Yat Rock following a nationwide population crash caused by the use of now-banned pesticides.
Since then, the list of protected designations within the AONB has flourished like the peregrines. There are 85 Scheduled Ancient Monuments, three candidate Special Areas of Conservation – just one of which boasts nine roosting sites for greater and lesser horseshoe bats – 45 SSSIs and three National Nature Reserves. And the lower Wye Valley is on the Register of Landscapes of Outstanding Historic Interest in Wales.
Banging heads
At 45 kilometres from north to south (11.3 kilometres at its widest point), the Wye Valley AONB extends beyond what’s commonly known as the Wye Valley, its 326 square kilometres also encompassing the Hereford plains. From Mordiford, just east of the city of Hereford, the river haphazardly meanders on its 116-kilometre journey to the impressive 12th-century Chepstow Castle, on the AONB’s southern edge.
Some 24,370 residents live in the market towns and villages that comprise its one per cent of urban area. Job opportunities are relatively few and many people commute
out of the area. The main industries are forestry, quarrying, tourism and agriculture, the latter covering 58 per cent of the AONB and comprising mainly arable and dairy, with orchards in the north.
As well as uniquely straddling the border of England and Wales, it also lies within three governing regions, under four local authorities – Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire and the Forest of Dean. Such piecemeal ownership and different ways of doing things presents a major challenge to the Monmouth-based AONB office of just four staff led by Andrew Blake.
‘The administrative complexity of the AONB is both a strength and a weakness,’ Blake explains. ‘Occasionally, it can feel like we’re banging heads together across Offa’s Dyke, but it also means we don’t keep our eggs in one basket.
‘The divergence of policy and funding in England and Wales is a serious threat, countered by lobbying at all appropriate levels. One way we overcome this is by piloting a project in one county or region and then, if successful, rolling it out across the whole AONB. Often, at least one local authority will emulate a successful scheme across their entire county.
‘We can draw on expertise from both Natural England and the Countryside Council for Wales, both Cadw and English Heritage,’ Blake continues. ‘Indeed, we provide one of the few opportunities for organisations to legitimately liaise with their cross-border counterparts.’
Tapping into the Wye
The main recurring issues facing the AONB are agricultural intensification, river-related problems, use of the redundant railway line and quarrying. ‘A living, working landscape, as this AONB is, should never be “enshrined”,’ Blake says. ‘It must grow and evolve. It’s the rate of change that we need to manage.’
With a current budget of around £170,000, the office funds and oversees numerous projects, such as Savour the Wye, which promotes locally produced food, and another to repair the region’s deteriorating dry-stone walls.
It’s also spearheading renewable energy initiatives, such as solar-powered toilets and showers at a remote campsite, and a groundbreaking community hydro-electricity scheme – currently awaiting planning permission – to power up to 50 homes and annually save 90 tonnes of carbon emissions. ‘In terms of its community ownership and its returning all surplus revenue to the local community, the Tintern Angidy Project is, to my knowledge, unique, and a truly sustainable enterprise,’ says Andrew Nixon, the AONB’s community links officer.
Perhaps the biggest challenge concerns woodlands – in the form of overgrazing by deer, invasion by non-native species, fragmentation and the decline in traditional management. Forest covers 26 per cent of the AONB, representing one of the few remaining areas in Britain with large tracts of ancient broadleaved woodland, featuring rare limestone tree species.
Also at risk are the species that depend on the trees: the virtually continuous 29 kilometres of ravine woodlands of the Wye Gorge are home to nationally important populations of species such as dormouse, greater and lesser horseshoe bats, white admiral butterfly, Tintern spurge and narrow-leaved bittercress.
Not all ‘newcomers’ are necessarily bad news, however. At Yat Rock, I was surprised to see warning posters for illegally reintroduced wild boar. ‘Although they became extinct in Britain centuries ago, the Forest of Dean was, aptly, one of their last strongholds,’ says Dr Martin Goulding, an independent wild boar consultant. Although a pest to farmers, boar remains a keystone woodland species. ‘The boars’ rooting activity actually leads to an increased biodiversity,’ he says.
In order to help improve woodland management, the AONB publishes guidelines and co-ordinates deer management groups. It has also recently completed a three-year Ravine WoodLIFE project – with partners the National Trust, Woodland Trust and WWF-UK – which carried out restoration on 884 hectares of internationally important native woodland.
Peculiar beauty
‘If you have never navigated the Wye, you have seen nothing.’ So wrote Reverend William Gilpin, who knew a thing or two about landscapes, after his 1770 river experience. To Gilpin, the Wye Valley was the physical definition of the Picturesque aesthetic movement, of which he was a pioneer.
From the 1770s, commercial boats took visitors down the Wye from Ross-on-Wye, a practice made popular by Gilpin in his 1782 book Observations on the River Wye, one of the first British tour guides, which helped the Wye Valley became one of Britain’s first tourist attractions. In 1792, a 17-year-old JMW Turner took a Wye tour by ferry from Bristol.
Since that time, the train has come and gone – the Wye Valley Railway was completed in 1876, but the last passenger service closed in 1959. There are still seasonal river cruises, but the two million annual visitors today arrive by road. ‘Tourism has been a part of the local economy for 250 years,’ says Blake. ‘Yet the motor car has put an indelible mark on the landscape.’
Attracting 72,000 visitors per year, Tintern Abbey is the jewel in the Wye Valley tourism crown. Established in 1131, it was colonised by French monks whose Cistercian brand of monasticism insisted upon the rejection of luxury. (They were known as ‘white monks’ because their habits were made of coarse, undyed wool.) In 1536, Henry VIII’s suppression of the church brought 400 years of monastic life at Tintern to an end, after which the abbey fell into an aesthetically pleasing and ivy-cloaked (not to mention ivy-damaged) ruin that later captured the imagination of late-18th-century Romantic artists.
Since 1984, the abbey has been in the care of Cadw, the Welsh Assembly Government’s historic environment division (Cadw, pronounced ‘ka-doo’ means ‘to keep’ in Welsh). Due to severe erosion to the West Front, the abbey’s most famous feature, Cadw is preparing to undertake what Rick Turner, inspector of ancient monuments, tells me is ‘by far the most challenging conservation project that we’ve carried out at the abbey, given its scale and complexity’.
‘There is no doubt that acid rain, allied with inappropriate cement-based mortars used in the past century, has accelerated the rate of erosion,’ says Mial Watkins, principal architect at Cadw. The works, which are expected to last about nine months, will involve the use of lime-based soft-mortar to recreate eroded architectural features, and steel pins, copper wires and epoxy-based resins to reinforce loose masonry. ‘This work should last 75 years, which is the length of time since the last major works to the West Front,’ says Turner.
Get your boots on
Heading north from Tintern Parva, the Wye Valley Walk footpath – which follows the river’s entire length – rises through woodland, while the Offa’s Dyke Path follows the river closely to the east until it reaches the iron Bigsweir Bridge, over which the A466 crosses the river.
‘In summer, I love to sit near Bigsweir watching salmon leaping out of the water, as kingfishers flit along the banks and buzzards hover overhead,’ says Allan Thomas, footpaths officer for the Ramblers’ Association, Lower Wye Group. Not everyone comes to the Wye Valley to walk – other activities include canoeing and excellent salmon fishing – but studying the OS map, it’s apparent that forest trails, footpaths and scenic viewpoints abound.
‘You don’t get a proper feel for the valley unless you get out of the car and put on a pair of boots,’ insists Thomas. And if the Wye Valley AONB doesn’t tempt you out of your car, I’m afraid that nothing will.
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE: Andrew Blake’s recommended Wye walks
1. The Symonds Yat circuit via the suspended Biblins footbridge and hand-pulled ferry at Symonds Yat West offers an experience that’s unique in the UK.
2. Piercefield – previously a famous park, now the site of Chepstow Racecourse – is spectacular, especially the 365 Steps leading to the Eagle’s Nest lookout, which inspired the Romantic poet Coleridge to write ‘Oh what a godly scene…’.
3. The Kymin, or Kymin Tower, a National Trust-owned two-storey circular Georgian banqueting house and naval temple that lies along the Offa’s Dyke Path overlooking Monmouth amid four hectares of wooded land, affords spectacular views of the surrounding area.
4. Little Doward Woods (at Wyastone Leys, near Whitchurch) is a particular favourite family walk through 82 hectares of Woodland Trust-owned forest.
