Llanfihangel Crucorney

Stories and sustenance at the Skirrid

The Skirrid Inn stands beside the A465 with stone-flagged floors, timber panelling and fires kept lit. It claims to be the oldest pub in Wales, though the building you actually sit in dates to the mid-to-late seventeenth century, and the older stories — a courthouse, the hanging judge Jeffreys, executions carried out on the premises — belong to legend rather than record. A former owner, Geoff Fiddler, kept them in proportion: "Local legend has it that the notorious 17th-century hanging judge may have heard cases here." He also maintained the nightly Pwcca Cup and named the resident ghost, an eighteenth-century barmaid called Fanny Price.

The kitchen keeps to steak and ale pie, fish and chips, Welsh beef lasagne and a Sunday roast, with Wye Valley Butty Bach as the regular cask beer and a changing guest beside it. There is a large garden for the days that allow one, and three rooms upstairs if you want to stay the night where the stories are told.

Walking country and medieval stone

The village sits on a ridge of glacial moraine about eight kilometres north of Abergavenny, at the foot of Skirrid Fawr and inside the Bannau Brycheiniog national park. This is walking country before it is anything else. The Beacons Way climbs steeply out past Llanvihangel Court and over Skirrid Fawr on its seven-mile run to Abergavenny. The Crucorney and Lingoed circuit covers a similar distance in about four and a half hours, following the Honddu to Pandy, then the Offa's Dyke Path to Llangattock Lingoed and back across fields — expect many stiles and two steep pulls. A little further out, Coed y Cerrig is a deep wooded glacial valley where an alder boardwalk stays flat and accessible while the rest of the reserve climbs steeply, bluebells in spring and orchids after them. Parking there is very limited.

St Michael's, the parish church, is medieval and built of red-sandstone rubble. The west wall of the nave may be Norman; the porch has a wagon roof carved with rose and fleur-de-lys bosses, and inside there is a 1667 wall memorial to Richard Sidnee and a weathered relief tomb slab that looks Elizabethan. The nave roof was removed and partly rebuilt in 1974, and the work was completed in the 2000s with Heritage Lottery help. The Book of Llandaff suggests a church stood here before the end of the tenth century, and in 1542 Henry VIII granted the local tithes to fund Abergavenny's grammar school.

The surviving formal gardens

Llanvihangel Court, at the edge of the village, is a seventeenth-century house on older foundations, remodelled by John Arnold after 1665. Its formal gardens are unusual survivors: terraces and stone steps, a sweet-chestnut avenue, a walled kitchen garden, a ha-ha and a lake, and a 1627 sundial initialled for Nicholas Arnold. The stone eagles that once topped the entrance piers were stolen in the late 1980s. The house opens on announced dates rather than daily.

Supplies and connections

For supplies there is the Skirrid Mountain Garage on the main road, which sells fuel and convenience groceries. The nearest station is Abergavenny, about four and a half miles south, step-free to every platform; the village had its own station once, opened in 1854 and closed in 1958, and while the line still runs past, no platforms remain. Stagecoach service 23 stops at the Skirrid Inn between Hereford, Llanvihangel Crucorney and Abergavenny.

The crooked church up the valley

Cwmyoy, a short way up the valley, has St Martin's church, which subsidence has left as the most crooked in Britain. Back in Llanfihangel, St Michael's still runs a craft group and an October pet service, and for one flower festival the congregation built a Tower of Flowers between them.