On 13 July 1798, a twenty-eight-year-old William Wordsworth walked along a stretch of the River Wye, looked up at the broken Gothic shell of an abandoned Cistercian abbey, and went back to write one of the most influential poems in the English language. "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" gave the village a kind of permanent passport into the canon of English literature, and ensured that the tourists who had already started coming up the river to see the ruins would never stop. Today around 70,000 visitors a year file through Tintern Abbey, founded in 1131, dissolved in 1536, ruined ever since, and entirely magnificent. But the village they pass through is older than the abbey, and stranger. There were ironworks here making fish hooks in the sixteenth century. There was a Welsh king who became a hermit. There was a pub called The Moon and Sixpence renamed after Somerset Maugham stopped in for a drink in 1948.
The name Tintern may derive from the Welsh din and teyrn together: roughly "rocks of the king." The king in question, according to tradition, was Tewdrig, a sixth-century ruler of the kingdom of Gwent who abdicated to live as a hermit somewhere in this valley. He came out of retirement, the story goes, to lead his old people in battle against invading Saxons, and probably died at the ford across the tidal Wye that bore the village's name. The cairns called the Devil's Lap Stones on the hillside above are said by local tradition to be the graves of soldiers killed in his battle. Whether or not Tewdrig is myth or memory, the ford itself was real, in use since Roman times. A village grew up around the crossing, and the kingdom of Gwent that emerged after the Romans left held this stretch of the river for centuries before the Normans arrived.
On 9 May 1131, Walter de Clare, the Norman Lord of Chepstow, founded a Cistercian abbey here. It was the second Cistercian house in Britain, after Waverley, and its monks came from a daughter house of Citeaux, the Burgundian motherhouse of the order. The Cistercians sought wilderness, and the looping bend of the Wye gave them exactly that: a valley contained on all sides, water and woodland and silence. They rebuilt the abbey on a larger scale between 1270 and 1301, and when the work was finished some four hundred monks lived in the complex. The order divided its land into agricultural granges; local villagers worked the fields, served the kitchens, and watched the abbey become the economic engine of the region for four centuries. Then Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536, the lead was stripped from the roofs, and the abbey began the long quiet collapse that made it picturesque. In 1984 Cadw took over its care.
Behind the abbey, up the Angidy Valley, the village had a second life that few visitors notice. In 1568 the Company of Mineral and Battery Works built an ironworks here, drawn by water power from the Angidy stream, charcoal from the surrounding forest, and iron ore that could be brought down the Wye. They made iron wire, mostly: cards for combing wool, pins, knitting needles, nails, fish hooks. The seventeenth century brought blast furnaces and finery forges run by men like Sir Basil Brooke and the ironmaster Thomas Foley. For three hundred years the Angidy was an industrial corridor disguised as a beauty spot. The works limped on until the late nineteenth century. The Wye Valley Railway built a branch to the Lower Wireworks in 1875, too late to save them; the wireworks bridge across the Wye now carries walkers instead of trams. In March 2021 an underground stone-lined channel was discovered alongside the Angidy Brook. At first it was reported as a "secret medieval tunnel system." Archaeologists soon identified it as a leat, the water-supply channel for one of the abbey's lost mills.
By the late eighteenth century, Wye tours had become fashionable. Visitors hired boats at Ross or Chepstow, drifted down the river, and put on the proper romantic shudder at the proper romantic places. The Reverend William Gilpin's writings on the picturesque, published in 1782, helped invent the whole enterprise. Wordsworth came in 1798. J. M. W. Turner painted the ruins. The Wye Valley Railway's arrival in 1876 brought the rest of the public. Modern Tintern has fused two old villages, Tintern Parva to the north and Chapel Hill to the south, and in 2022 the local community was formally renamed Wye Valley. The Wild Hare Inn, once the Royal George Hotel, still trades. The Moon and Sixpence is now three private houses, having changed its name in 1948 after Somerset Maugham, author of the 1919 novel, paid a visit. Tintern Abbey Football Club still plays in the East Gwent League, on a pitch known throughout Welsh football for its view. The abbey ruins behind the goalposts have not moved in five hundred years.
Located at 51.70 degrees N, 2.68 degrees W on the west bank of the River Wye, about five miles north of Chepstow, just inside Monmouthshire on the Welsh side of the England-Wales border. From above the abbey is unmistakable: a Gothic cruciform skeleton beside a tight bend in the river, with the village pressed in along the bank. The wooded Forest of Dean rises to the east. Nearest major airports are Bristol (EGGD) 16 nm south-east, Cardiff (EGFF) 22 nm south-west, and Gloucestershire (EGBJ) 22 nm north-east. Best viewed from low altitude in clear weather; the river valley can fill with mist.