Monmouth

The Gate on the Monnow

Monnow Bridge is a stone bridge with a gatehouse sitting in the middle of it, built around 1300 and now the only fortified river bridge left in Britain. You cross it on foot to get into the old town. It was designed to control who came and went, and these days it mostly controls where people stand to take photographs.

The town proper spreads up Monnow Street from the bridge, on a low spur of land where the Monnow runs into the Wye. This is two miles from the English border and, being low-lying between two floodplains, it floods. The Welsh name, Trefynwy, means "Town on the Monnow," which is about as much as a name can be asked to do.

Shops and Old Inns

Monnow Street is where the shops are. The Marches Delicatessen sells chutneys, jams and Welsh beer, cider and spirits. Fingal-Rock is a wine merchant run by Tom Innes, a former barrister who opened it in 1987 as a cheese shop and switched to wine only in 2003; Burgundy is his subject. At number 34, Hancocks is a family-run butcher established in 1900. Around the corner at 9 Church Street, third-generation butcher Neil Powell sources meat from farms in Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. Salt and Pepper at 31–33 Monnow Street sells cookware.

The Robin Hood Inn is one of Monmouth's oldest pubs — two low beamed rooms behind a wide Tudor arch, entered through a great wooden door. For more than a century an upstairs room hosted secret Catholic masses. Fifteen years after the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, the inn was licensed as a "Publick Catholic Chapel"; traces of religious paintings later emerged beneath the plaster.

Square and Spire

On Agincourt Square, the Punch House pours Wye Valley Butty Bach and was named Wales's Most Dog Friendly Pub by Rover.com. Bar 125 sits by the bridge, overlooking the river.

St Mary's Priory Church has an octagonal needle spire with a gilded cockerel weather vane 205 feet up — the tallest thing in town. Pevsner's John Newman called it "large and austere." Lady Llangattock's extensive Nelson collection is held in Monmouth. Nelson himself came in 1802, dined on the square, and remarked, "To be known at such a little gut of the river as the Wye fills me with astonishment."

Famous Names and Hill Paths

Two other men from here travelled further. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his History of the Kings of Britain around 1136 and more or less invented the King Arthur legend. Charles Rolls, of Rolls-Royce, has a statue on Agincourt Square; he died in a plane crash in 1910, aged 32. Henry V was born in the castle in 1386.

The walking draws many visitors into the hills. The Peregrine Path follows the Wye towards Symonds Yat, but a section near Symonds Yat Rock is closed following a rockfall, with barriers and no signed diversion. For a steeper outing, the Offa's Dyke Path climbs to the Kymin's 18th-century Round House and Naval Temple above town.

A Town the Railway Left

There is no railway station. All four lines closed by 1964.