Qualla: Tintern

Tintern: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Read more: Tintern on Qualla

Tintern: King Tewdrig's Ford

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 reti...

Read more: Tintern on Qualla

Tintern: The Abbey

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wilder...

Read more: Tintern on Qualla

Tintern: Wire, Forges, and a Hidden Tunnel

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Tintern on Qualla

Tintern: Picturesque to the Present

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, ...

Read more: Tintern on Qualla