Gilwern

Pizzas and village pubs

The old Rhymney Brewery "Hobbyhorse" sign still hangs outside the Towpath Inn, left over from an earlier life. The pub has been the Bridgend Inn, a Felinfoel house and closed altogether before reopening under its present name on the canal bank. What it does now is pizza, in two shapes. The Detroit style comes rectangular, with a thick base, sauce spooned over the top and a caramelised edge of cheese; the New York style is a fourteen-inch round with a thinner, crisper base. Toppings run to Porcini & Chive and Red Pepper, there is a tomato pie, and vegan cheese and gluten-free bases are available, though the kitchen is honest that it cannot promise the gluten-free ones for coeliacs. Well-behaved dogs are welcome inside and out, there is a beer garden, and one changing cask beer is usually on, lately Evan Evans Cwrw Haf.

For something plainer, the Beaufort Arms sits on the main road, a traditional pub and small hotel with three rooms, a garden, games and parking, and a rotating cask beer, typically Sharp's Sea Fury. The Corn Exchange, once the real-ale option on Crickhowell Road, closed in 2025 and has not reopened.

Shops, community and canal walks

The shopping is better than a village of this size has any right to expect. Bromfields, at 40 Main Road, is a third-generation butcher going since 1976, cutting Welsh meat to order and making its own sausages, among them a traditional thick pork and a spiced mango, lime and coconut. A few doors along at 32a is the Gilwern Village Fish Bar for chips. At the community centre, Roots is a volunteer café run on a pay-as-you-feel basis, with handmade cakes, coffee and children's juices; it hosts Knit and Natter and passes on surplus vegetables from the village's growing project.

Most people come for the water. Gilwern sits where the Clydach Gorge opens into the broad Usk valley, and the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal runs through the old core on a prominent wooded embankment overlooking it. From the car park and limekilns you can walk the towpath level all the way to Llanfoist, three and a half miles each way, crossing the Gilwern Aqueduct and passing Govilon Wharf and the Wharfinger's House. For more effort, a six-mile loop climbs the gorge past Devil's Bridge to the Clydach Ironworks and the waterfalls of Cwm Clydach nature reserve, with no stiles to negotiate.

The embankment that made Gilwern

The embankment is why the village exists. Canal construction began here in 1797, and the engineer Thomas Dadford hired the Abergavenny contractor Thomas Powell to carry the waterway across the gorge on a bank of rock and earth about a hundred metres long and twenty-five metres high, with the River Clydach and a tramroad each running through its own tunnel underneath. The heritage writer David Viner called it "this enormous undertaking." Coal, iron and lime moved along it for decades; the former railway is now a cycleway, its old bridge still standing on the towpath walk.

St Elli's above the village

Above the village on the hillside is St Elli's, the parish church, with a nave probably thirteenth- or fourteenth-century, a broach spire added in 1897, and an east window showing the Good Shepherd flanked by the Sugar Loaf and the Blorenge, the two hills that define the wider views here. Several churchyard slabs rest on iron colonnettes probably made at the nearby Clydach Ironworks.

Arriving and getting outdoors

Abergavenny and its station are about seven kilometres east, and services 76 and A3 serve Gilwern; check current stops and timetables before travel. There are cycle stands and a public bike pump by the toilets, a skate park and a pump track for the children, and the two hills waiting on the skyline for anyone who wants them.