A Picturesque Wye Valley walk
In the mid-18th century, the most desirable possession a young landowner could have, aside from money, was a view. Valentine Morris was therefore doubly blessed when he inherited the Piercefield estate by his sugar plantation-owning father. The land ran alongside the river Wye near Chepstow, dropping away steeply to the river’s edge amid woods and ancient rocks.
The Wye was at that point on the verge of becoming the centre of Britain’s first tourist boom. Since 1750, when John Egerton, the Rector of Ross-on-Wye had begun offering his guests two-day excursions by boat from Ross to Chepstow, a mini-tourist boom began to grow up as writers and artists came to admire the high banks of the valley and float or walk past sites of interest, in particular Tintern Abbey.
Young men returning from the Grand Tour had learned the attractions of the belle viste and the belvederes of Italy. Romanticism, with its penchant for the leaping cataracts and lofty crags, was stirring.
Morris set about creating stopping-off points of interest on his woodland walk, where visitors could pause and enjoy the views over the river on strategically placed viewing seats and specially themed nooks. First of these was the Alcove, a covered seating area that looked down over a bend in the river towards the ruins of Chepstow Castle, a most suitable first sight for visitors of the early Romantic period. Then came another fashionable feature, the Grotto. A stone-clad hollow, lined with quartz crystal, iron cinders and copper, it was a spot where wanderers could find shelter and imagine or experience the night sky. And, according to the journal of visitor Jon Byng in 1781, this was a location that would ‘inspire in youthful pairs every tender sensation.’
Next stop was the Druid’s Temple, another example of the spirit of an age which had a fancy for the ancient and was not above rearranging existing sacred standing stones to suit their aesthetic. The most ambitious resting place was yet to come. At the Giant’s Cave, Morris had a 12-yard passage blasted through a rock and a circular seating and viewing area placed in front of the entrance. Above was a little practical joke: a statue of a herculean figure that held a rock in his two raised arms as if to drop it on the heads of those who dared pass through the stone passageway. The final highlight, by which time one would have passed the Platform, the Double View and the Cold Bath, was the Temple, the highest point of the walk at 160 metres above the river.
The route took 20 years to complete but attracted visitors from far and wide, including a young Samuel Coleridge, who declared it ‘a godly scene’ where ‘whole world seemed imaged in its vast circumference.’ A few years later in 1798, Wordsworth, on his second visit to the area, composed his Lines Above Tintern Abbey while contemplating life, and a similar view, a few miles further upstream.
The Wye Valley was not a rural idyll, despite Wordsworth’s poem’s focus on ‘steep woods and lofty cliffs’ and a ‘wild secluded scene’ where there are also ‘pastoral farms, Green to the very door.’ Tintern was the site of a flourishing ironworks and the woodlands on both sides would have been hives of industries including stone, iron and lead mining as well as coppicing.
Wye-appreciation reached its zenith after the publication of Observations on the River Wye, an account of a 1770 tour by William Gilpin, a school teacher and artist from Surrey. Gilpin set out his ‘rules’ for the correct aesthetic for landscape painting, which was growing in popularity. In his opinion, an ideal scene would have dramatic natural features, preferably with a river in the foreground, bounded by a crag, and a ruin in the distance. A lone human figure could be added for scale and to increase the drama of solitude and awe. His advice created the Picturesque movement and drew more sketchbook-wielding crowds to the area. Gilpin was not easily pleased, however. Finding Tintern Abbey rather better-preserved than he had hoped, he had declared, possibly tongue in cheek, that a ‘mallet judiciously used’ would make it more aesthetically suitable. Of Valentine Morris’s creation, he opined rather sniffily that although the views were ‘extremely romantic, and give a loose to the most pleasing riot of imagination’ they were generally ‘either presented from too high a point, or…they do not fall into such composition as would appear on canvas.’
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It’s possible to explore the Piercefield walk today, on a well-signposted path which forms part of the Wye Valley Way. My daughter, dog and I set off on the three-mile route from Chepstow Leisure Centre to the Eagle’s Nest one day in early May.
Valentine’s viewing points are marked out with information boards but little is left of the original structures: there are no colours left in the grotto, and the Platform has been completely taken down and the area cordoned off due to slippage. Only one druid’s stone remains and although the path goes through the Giant’s Cave, trees have long since supplanted the herculean statue. Tall trees, mainly beech with some yew, occlude every one of the views, which must be best appreciated in winter after the leaves have fallen. But we found plenty to enjoy about the woodland itself, with light filtering through the bright green furry leaves of the beeches onto banks of shy nodding English bluebells below. Higher up there are the damper-loving species that are signifiers of ancient woodland; hart’s tongue and polypody ferns, moss and lichen-covered rocks and branches, and the bright dead nettles known as yellow archangels.
The final ascent to the Eagle’s Nest can be approached by two options, a moderate route or a strenuous option involving 365 steps through the woods. We had chosen the latter with the thought that it is easier to go up steep steps rather than descend them, but I cannot vouch for the final view as, after 250 steps, a flight of metal-grilled steps over a chasm became a step too far for our old labrador who sensibly put his paw down, refusing to go further. Until that point, it has been a pleasant woodland walk, affording a few glimpses of the extraordinarily brown Wye winding its way to meet the Severn Estuary, which can also be seen as one ascends.
Piercefield House, which once had a fine Georgina façade but is now in a dangerous state of decay, cannot be seen from the walk. After 175 years, its fortunes are going the way of Valentine Morris, who got himself deeply into debt, had to sell the slave-run Antiguan sugar plantation and then Piercefield. He died in poverty in 1789 aged 61. His legacy is our leisure. One sign on the walk put up evidently some time ago by the Gwent Wildlife was thought-provoking in itself about legacies. ‘The river Wye is the cleanest and most natural river in Britain’ it states. Today’s Wye is the focus of a vociferous campaign to save it from dying completely, swamped by pollution and run-off from the region’s super-sized chicken farms that have grown up to serve our huge appetites. Perhaps every age has a legacy and a shameful secret.
