Deep in the Vale of Ewyas
Llanthony
Roofless red-sandstone arches, a rib-vaulted cellar bar and mountain paths meet on the floor of a steep glacial valley.
- Best for
- Priory ruins and mountain walking
- Give it
- A full day between the priory and the ridge
- Don't miss
- The rib-vaulted Cellar Bar in the priory's west range
The Fox verdict
A monastic ruin with a mountain valley attached
Llanthony rewards visitors who come for both halves of the place: the priory complex on the valley floor and the serious walking above it.
The ruined Augustinian church is only the beginning. Its west range still contains an inn and Cellar Bar, St David's survives nearby as a parish church, and the classic circuit climbs through Wirral Woods to Hatterrall Ridge. Farther along the valley, Capel-y-ffin and Cwmyoy add two very different church stories.
Where to go
Places in Llanthony
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesLlanthony Priory Cellar Bar
A tiny bar and dining space in the rib-vaulted 13th-century undercroft of the former prior's lodging, with guest rooms occupying original priory fabric above.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- in Llanthony Priory's west range
- Access
- Dogs are not allowed inside the monument or priory buildings; assistance dogs are permitted.
Capel-y-ffin Monastery
The Gothic Revival remains of Llanthony Tertia, founded by Father Ignatius in 1869 or 1870, paired with a small church and the high-valley landscape.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- at Capel-y-ffin, farther up the valley
Llanthony Show
The valley's annual show brings horses, sheep, produce and crafts, show jumping, shearing, children's sports, falconry, vintage tractors, a climbing wall and fell races to Court Farm.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around three hours
- Locality
- at Court Farm beside the priory
- Access
- This is an annual event rather than a permanent attraction.
Walks & outdoors
1 placeLlanthony and Hatterrall Ridge Circular
A moderate circuit through Wirral Woods to the Beacons Way and Offa's Dyke Path at about 605 metres, returning by a steep field descent with the priory seen from above.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow roughly three hours
- Locality
- from the priory car park onto Hatterrall Ridge
- Access
- The circuit has a stiff climb and steep field descent. Mountain weather, navigation and upland hazards require judgment.
History & heritage
3 placesLlanthony Priory
A Grade I listed and scheduled red-sandstone priory whose remains preserve the church ground plan, much of the west front and towers, the north nave arcade, transepts, east end and parts of the cloister complex.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- on the floor of the Vale of Ewyas
- Access
- Free entry; parking, cycle storage and limited wheelchair access are available. Only assistance dogs may enter the monument.
St David's Church
A Grade I red-sandstone church, probably formed from the priory's infirmary hall and chapel, with a west-wall fireplace, medieval font and finely engraved slate memorials.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- about 50 metres south of the priory ruins
- Access
- Normally open to visitors. There is a level path to the porch, several steps down at the door, an uneven interior and a step to the chancel.
St Martin's Church, Cwmyoy
A church whose tower, walls and chancel lean in different directions because of ancient landslip and continuing subsidence, yet which remains standing and in use.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: allow around 30 minutes
- Locality
- at Cwmyoy, down-valley
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Three ways to explore Llanthony
Signature outings
Arches open to the sky
Trace Llanthony Priory's full church ground plan from the Romanesque east end to the Early English west front and twin towers.
A border ridge above the vale
Follow the five-mile circuit through Wirral Woods to Hatterrall Ridge, then look back across the Vale of Ewyas to the priory below.
The crooked church at Cwmyoy
See how St Martin's tower, walls and chancel lean in different directions while the church remains standing and in use.
The village story
Llanthony Village Guide
A locked Travel Fox story of monastic retreat, practical reuse, mountain walking and life in the Vale of Ewyas.
Arches, inns and an empty valley
Down a flight of stone steps in the west range of the ruined priory, there is a bar. The room is the rib-vaulted undercroft that once held the abbot's cellars: bench seating, old settles, panelled walls, and beyond the door the roofless arches of a twelfth-century church standing open to the sky. This is the Cellar Bar, and above it the Abbey Hotel lets rooms built into the priory's south-west tower and former monastic quarters, some of them looking straight out at the ruins. Annabel and Jamie, who both grew up in this valley, run it, and are into their second season. A recent dinner here ran to beef lasagne and a beef-and-stout cottage pie made with Felinfoel Du.
Llanthony is a scatter of buildings on the floor of the Vale of Ewyas, a steep U-shaped valley that the last ice age gouged out and the Afon Honddu now drains. To reach it you leave the A465 at Llanvihangel Crucorney and follow six miles of single-track lane between sheep pasture, old hedges and woodland, pulling into passing places for anything coming the other way. Hatterrall Ridge rises sharply to the east; the Black Mountains close the western skyline. The pale red-sandstone arches sit low on the green valley floor, and the effect on arrival is roughly what Gerald of Wales meant in the twelfth century when he called the place "truly suited to the monastic life... in a wilderness."
A few hundred yards north of the priory stands the Half Moon, formed from two eighteenth-century workmen's cottages and known equally as the Half Moon Inn and the Half Moon Hotel. Inside are stone-flagged floors, a wood-burning stove and a real fire; the cask beers are Wye Valley Butty Bach and HPA, with Monnow Valley cider by the bottle. It reopened in the spring of 2025 after half a year dark, and it works mainly as a walkers' inn — nine double and twin rooms with shared facilities, a campsite about two hundred yards off, weekend breakfast rolls for people heading up onto the ridge. Reports on the food are mixed enough to be worth stating plainly: some visitors have found it simple, generous and good value, one found a cold room and a poor meal. Dogs are welcome.
Supplies, sacred fabric and the ridge
For everything else you should arrive stocked. There is no shop in Llanthony now, though a photograph from around 1930 records a village post office that has since gone. The garage at Llanvihangel Crucorney has a small shop counter for basics, but a proper resupply means Abergavenny. Down by the river at Mill Farm, Treats runs a small café and campsite with a bunkhouse and thirteen pitches for tents and modest campervans.
About fifty yards south of the ruins is St David's, worth the short walk even after you have had your fill of old stone. It is a plain red-sandstone nave and chancel with a north porch and a bellcote on the west wall, and it is not quite what it appears to be. The strongest interpretation is that the nave was the priory's infirmary hall and the chancel its chapel; a fireplace set into the west wall, unusual in any church, supports the idea. After the monastery fell it carried on as the parish church, which it still is. Inside are a medieval font, a chancel roof perhaps sixteenth-century, an early-eighteenth-century communion rail, and a pulpit reached through the opening once cut for the rood-loft stair. Slate memorials to Ann Lewis, Susan Lewis and Thomas Lewis are finely engraved; the last, from 1854, is signed by John Pritchard of Longtown. The whole church is aligned so that the sun rises in line with it on 1 March, St David's Day.
The walking is the real reason to stay, and it starts at the priory car park. The classic round climbs through Wirral Woods onto Hatterrall Ridge — five miles, about three hours, some 380 metres of ascent — and joins the Beacons Way and Offa's Dyke Path along the top at around 605 metres, with the Vale of Ewyas falling away to the west and Herefordshire spread out to the east. On a clear day you can pick out Sugar Loaf and, far off, the Malverns. The way up is an old packhorse track called Rhiw Cwrw, the Beer Track; the story is that the monks used it to carry ale over to Longtown, and while nobody can prove it, the name has stuck. The ridge itself is the border between England and Wales.
Border walking and the priory's long fall
Offa's Dyke Path follows much of that ridge, and Llanthony sits a mile and a half below it — close enough that walkers doing the national trail drop down for the night and climb back up in the morning. These are proper mountain routes despite the gentle start by the arches: the short circuit has a stiff pull and a steep field descent, and the longer ones need real navigation when the cloud comes down. Wild ponies graze the tops, and there are kestrels and ravens overhead.
The priory itself was founded by a Norman knight, William de Lacy, who by tradition was out hunting, sheltered in a ruined chapel linked to St David, and gave up soldiering for religion; by 1118 there was a house of Augustinian canons here. The mostly English community fell out with its Welsh surroundings, and after 1136 much of it decamped east to found Llanthony Secunda near Gloucester. The great church you see was rebuilt over the following century. Owain Glyndwr's revolt brought an attack in the early fifteenth century; by 1481 the place had become a dependent cell of the Gloucester house it had once outranked, and at the suppression only four canons were left. It was surrendered in 1538 and suppressed by 1539, sold off for £160.
After that the buildings went to a courtier, Nicholas Arnolde, and passed eventually to the Harley family. In the eighteenth century a Colonel Wood of Brecon turned the west range into a house, and those rooms are the ones that became the hotel — reused monastic fabric rather than a folly built to look old. The rest came down in stages: the east front late in the eighteenth century, the south front in 1803, the south nave arcade in 1837, the crossing tower pulled down around the middle of the nineteenth. Stone from it went into buildings nearby. Serious repair only began in 1978, when the ruins came into state care.
Landor, artists and the road in
One owner is worth his own paragraph. Walter Savage Landor, the poet, bought the estate in 1807 or 1808 meaning to make a model farm of it — merino sheep, better roads, thousands of sweet chestnuts, cedars and larches planted across the slopes. He started a mansion above the priory at Y Siarpal and never finished it; debt and lawsuits wore him down, and he left the country in 1814. His verdict on the land was that it "produces everything but herbage, corn, and money," though he claimed to have planted a million trees. Some of them, the Landor's Larches and a few old chestnuts, are still there. His house is a ruin in the woods.
The valley has drawn artists for as long as it has been paintable. Turner made a rain-swept watercolour of the abbey around 1792, working the weather up afterwards from a dry pencil sketch. Allen Ginsberg wrote his poem Wales—A Visitation after a stay here in 1967. Bruce Chatwin knew the border country from boyhood and reworked it in On the Black Hill. Less famously, the painter Reg Gammon farmed forty acres in the valley for about twenty years from the Second World War, helped bring in electricity and the telephone, and titled his memoir One Man's Furrow before leaving for Somerset in 1958. In 1951 there was a proposal to dam the whole valley and turn it into a reservoir; it was raised in Parliament, argued over, and dropped, and the water never came.
Getting here without a car takes some doing. The nearest station is Abergavenny, nine road miles south and served by trains from Cardiff, Newport, Hereford and further afield; from there the last leg is a taxi, a lift or a long walk, because no regular bus comes up the valley. The road was cut by a landslip in February 2026 and fully reopened that May. North of the village it carries on through Capel-y-ffin and over Gospel Pass towards Hay-on-Wye, a mountain crossing narrow enough that bad weather makes the drive slow and uncertain.
Up-valley histories, show day and dusk
Four miles up the valley at Capel-y-ffin, Father Ignatius built another monastery in 1869 or 1870, Llanthony Tertia, after he failed to get his hands on the medieval one; its Gothic Revival remains and a small church make a half-day out. Four miles the other way at Cwmyoy, St Martin's leans in three directions at once, its tower, walls and chancel pushed out of true by centuries of landslip, and it is still standing and still in use.
Once a year the valley fills up. Llanthony Show takes over Court Farm beside the priory with sheep and horses, show jumping and shearing, a companion dog show, falconry, vintage tractors, a climbing wall and a fell race that climbs 350 metres in under four miles. For a day it has decorated floats, children's sports and a farmer's challenge.
In daylight swifts cut around the priory arches; at dusk they hand over to bats, and the valley goes quiet enough to hear the Honddu working away at the bottom of it.
Stay around Brecon Beacons
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Brecon Beacons, linked directly to their property pages.
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Llanthony Priory — cadw.gov.wales statutory register or public authority
- St David's Church — churchinwales.org.uk other published source
- Llanthony Priory Cellar Bar — llanthonypriory.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Llanthony and Hatterrall Ridge Circular — beacons-npa.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Capel-y-ffin Monastery — coflein.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- St Martin's Church, Cwmyoy — beacons-npa.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Llanthony Show — llanthonyshow.org operator, sector body or destination organisation