6 Te Travel Guide Wild in the Wye
The river-veined valley that bills itself as the birthplace of British tourism is an ageless scene. Enjoy the Wye’s simple pleasures, from chattering birdlife and slow-moving boats to walking trails weaving through steep, squirrelly beechwoods and views of the castle-studded Welsh borders. Words: Ben Lerwill. Photographs: Greg Funnell
Promotional Content • Saturday 25 September 2021
Canoeing on the River Wye near Welsh Bicknor with Stuart Wyley of Wye Canoes I
t’s 4.30am and the Herefordshire dawn has arrived. Far below me, the River Wye is a silver swathe through high-banked
woods. Te sky is soft and peach- coloured, the forest a dense, dark jade jungle. Trough it all, filling the scene, is a crescendo of squawks, tweets and hoots. “Cup your ears,” says Ed Drewitt, as we face the natural amphitheatre in front of us. “What you’re hearing is the sound of hundreds of birds singing at the same time.” I’ve met birdwatching guide and
local resident Ed on Symonds Yat Rock, a 400ft-high outcrop of cliff- flanked limestone looming over the Wye Valley. On my last visit here, the viewing platform had been packed, but at this hour it’s empty — of humans, at least — and under Ed’s commentary, the wash of birdsong becomes an orchestra of identifiable parts: chiffchaff, firecrest, coal tit, nuthatch. And then something different. “Hear that?” he says, his eyes lighting up. “Peregrine.” Within minutes his telescope
is trained on the bird, resting on a rockface. I see a flecked breast, a black hood, pointed wingtips. Te peregrine falcon is the world’s fastest bird, able to spot prey from a mile away — pity any wood pigeon in the wrong place at the wrong time. I
Visitors have been wowed by the panorama here for hundreds of years.
Te Wye Valley bills itself as the birthplace of British tourism
watch the raptor as it scans the view and a citrus sun swells over the hills. On a morning like this it’s hard not to wish for wings of your own to unfurl.
The Wye’s tourism history Visitors have been wowed by the panorama here for hundreds of years. Te Wye Valley bills itself as the birthplace of British tourism, or the original staycation spot (as they definitely wouldn’t have said in the Georgian era). From 1770 until at least 1830, the so-called Wye Tour attracted poets, artists and regular carriage-loads of other sightseeing ladies and gents. Turner came. Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, too. Wordsworth visited twice. For the leisured classes, a trip here was the must-do travel experience of its day, a domestic alternative to the European Grand Tour at a time when the Napoleonic Wars had made continental journeys all but impossible. I can’t help but feel a little pandemic-era symmetry. Te Wye Tour centred not just on a
river, but on a book. Reverend William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye, which gave a first-person account of the author’s two-day boat trip between Ross-on-Wye and Chepstow in 1770, is considered the first tour guide to be published in Britain. It’s fair to say it caused a splash. Gilpin, who lived in South London, was an artist, cleric and schoolmaster, and his guidebook championed the then- radical idea of finding artistic beauty in the outdoors. Stride forward a few decades and an entire industry had sprung up around replicating Gilpin’s trip, with 20 rival guidebooks in print. So, why the Wye? Te simple reason
is that the winding stretch of river between Ross-on-Wye and Chepstow
— a distance of 38 miles by water, though only 19 miles as the peregrine flies — is shudderingly handsome, and not just at sunrise. Te Wye rises in the Cambrian Mountains in Wales and flows down to Chepstow and the Severn Estuary, twisting, turning and crisscrossing the England-Wales border at will. By the time it reaches Ross-on-Wye, the waterway is a wide, chuckling thing, passing crumbling castles, wild green escarpments and the kind of pastoral, sheep-chewed scenery that belongs to a slower time. Symonds Yat is today the route’s most celebrated viewpoint, but it’s one of many that conform to the notion of nature as something to marvel at.
Gilpin’s timeless influence “Gilpin promoted the idea of the picturesque. It was a new way of looking at the landscape,” says Anne Rainsbury, the curator at Chepstow Museum, based in a grand, 18th-century townhouse befitting the grandeur of this historic port town. Anne is showing me round a permanent display room dedicated to the Wye Tour. “It wasn’t long before this that people on the European Grand Tour would pull the blinds down in their carriage as they were crossing the Alps. Mountains were seen as unnatural.” Some 250 years after Gilpin’s
landmark trip, this portion of the Wye Valley doesn’t draw the kind of attention that falls onto other UK destinations — and sadly you’ll find no more oarsmen or steersmen — but there’s plenty here to make a noise about. And not just the dawn chorus. First published in the September 2021 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK). Read the feature in full online at
nationalgeographic.co.uk
Naturalist and zoologist Ed Drewitt on Symonds Yat Rock
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