Monmouth to Tintern

Cleddon Falls is a Site of Special Scientific Interest important for liverworts and mosses. A stone’s throw from the falls are the strangely shaped Bread and Cheese Stones, once a lookout for Cleddon residents, who could spot trows coming up the river and race down to the quay to get work unloading cargoes. It is thought the views here inspired Wordsworth, when he visited the area in 1798, to write his famous ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’.

Celebrating art, plants and wildlife this south-facing garden is the vision of artist Gemma Kate Wood, whose grandparents starting an organic small holding here in the 1950s. Her parents, both botanists and ecologists, have been collecting plants for over 40 years. Today a series of formal lawns surrounded by colourful herbaceous borders, wooded areas and an orchard provide the backdrop for Gemma’s sculptures, which reflect a life deeply connected to this landscape.

Flourishing from the 1560s the Angidy Valley was one of the earliest places in the UK to industrialise. By the 17th century, Tintern was an industrial village where hundreds of people were employed in one of the first integrated industrial complexes in the country - making wire. The village’s metal industries stayed at the cutting edge of industrial development in Britain for more than 300 years 20 or more waterwheels along the Angidy in the 19th century. The Angidy Trail follows old leats and tracks for 2 miles(3.2km) up to the ruins of Abbey Tintern Furnace.