The Market House sits on stone pillars in the middle of Ross, red sandstone, built between 1650 and 1654 to replace a wooden hall. Markets have been held under and around it since the 1650s, and they still are, on Thursdays and Saturdays. The upper storey is now Made in Ross, a co-operative selling work by people who live within twenty miles of the town.
The town sits on a red sandstone promontory above the Wye, which loops below it in a horseshoe bend. From the Prospect gardens and the churchyard you can see the bend, and beyond it the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons and the Malverns. The Prospect is a free public park, laid out by John Kyrle in the 1690s on land he rented from the Marquess of Bath. Kyrle turns up everywhere in Ross, of which more shortly.
For a drink, the Tap House is the one to find. It's a micropub in the old tap house of the Alton Court Brewery, which closed in 1956, and does six real ales and a cider on hand pump and nothing to eat. One reviewer called it "by far the best place to drink in Ross on Wye," and it is, by the same account, "truly dog friendly."
Down by the river, the Hope & Anchor has a large riverside terrace, a stretch tent and a bandstand with live music, plus a hut selling cakes and ice creams. It does breakfasts and a homemade pub menu, with afternoon teas next door in the Pavilion if you book. The King's Head, a former coaching inn on the high street, claims a 14th-century origin and has a sixty-foot well as the centrepiece of its back restaurant, which is a lot of well to build a dining room around.
The food shops are good. Truffles is a deli that stocks nearly a hundred ciders from twenty suppliers and bakes its own cakes and quiches. Hanks' on Broad Street is a butcher dealing in local meat and game, jams and eggs. Out at Peterstow there's Pengethley Farm Shop.
St Mary the Virgin has the tallest spire in Herefordshire, around 205 feet, visible from every direction. Kyrle rebuilt the unsafe top of it and added the pinnacles and a bell. Inside are the Rudhall family monuments, alabaster tombs spanning the 16th and 17th centuries, and in the churchyard a Plague Cross marking around 315 townspeople who died in 1637 and were buried at night, without coffins, in a pit.
John Kyrle, the Man of Ross, lived here on about £500 a year in a timber house opposite the Market House. He brought in a public water supply, repaired the spire and settled arguments. Alexander Pope wrote him into a poem. He is buried under the church floor.
The river is the reason people came. In 1745 the rector started running boat trips down the Wye, and by 1808 eight boats made regular excursions — the birthplace, Ross will tell you, of British tourism. There's a station at Ledbury for the trains and the M50 for the cars; the town's own railway shut in 1964 and is an industrial estate now. You can still hire a canoe and paddle down towards Symonds Yat, past herons and, if you're lucky, Goodrich Castle on the bank.