Wye Valley

Where to base yourself in the Wye Valley depends on how much of the gorge you want on your doorstep. Symonds Yat, split across its East and West banks by the river, suits anyone who wants to step straight out of their room onto the gorge paths or into a canoe, and the choice ranges from a historic riverside inn to a family-run hotel in a sixteenth-century building. Ross-on-Wye offers the widest spread of accommodation types and the most restaurants and shops within walking distance, making it a sensible base for a longer stay or a first visit that wants some flexibility. Further south, Monmouth and the villages around it, including Whitchurch and Clearwell, put you closer to Tintern Abbey and the lower gorge, while a night in a converted farmhouse or country house near Ross-on-Wye adds a slower, more rural pace to a trip built mostly around walking and the river.

Booking ahead matters more here than the valley's quiet reputation suggests. The best riverside rooms at Symonds Yat and the handful of well-regarded restaurants-with-rooms scattered through the valley are genuinely small operations with limited capacity, and they fill for summer weekends, half-term and the October half-term leaf-peeping season well in advance. Outside those peaks, particularly in winter, most properties in the valley have more room to negotiate on rates and are used to guests arriving for a short, walking-focused break rather than a full week, so one or two nights are easy to accommodate at short notice.

The valley rewards slow travel more than a checklist, but these are the places most visitors build a trip around.

• Symonds Yat Rock is the valley's best-known viewpoint, a limestone outcrop with a sweeping view over a hairpin bend in the river, and one of the most reliable places in England to watch wild peregrine falcons through the RSPB's viewing telescopes.
• Tintern Abbey stands roofless beside the river in the village of the same name, its soaring Gothic arches and empty window tracery largely unchanged since Wordsworth's visit and still one of the most atmospheric ruins in Wales.
• Goodrich Castle, a red sandstone Norman fortress on a bluff above the Wye, is one of the best-preserved medieval castles in the country and comes with a genuinely dramatic approach across a dry moat.
• Canoeing the Wye between Symonds Yat and Monmouth, or further downstream towards Tintern, is the classic way to see the gorge from water level; several operators run guided trips and canoe hire from Symonds Yat East.
• Chepstow Castle, begun within a year of the Norman Conquest, is reckoned to be one of the oldest surviving stone castles in Britain and dominates the cliffs above the tidal Wye at the valley's southern end.
• Puzzlewood, an ancient oak woodland riddled with moss-covered rock formations and used as a filming location for several fantasy productions, sits just over the border in the Forest of Dean.
• The Peregrine Path and gorge walks around Symonds Yat and the Biblins suspension bridge give access to some of the best short walking in the valley, with options to loop back along the riverbank.
• Ross-on-Wye's market and riverside are worth an afternoon in their own right, with the town's red sandstone church spire, Georgian market house and independent shops overlooking meadows that flood gently most winters.

The Wye Valley sits at the heart of English and Welsh cider and perry country, and small producers along both banks of the river press their own from old local orchards, with tasting rooms open through the autumn pressing season. Herefordshire is also serious cattle country, and beef from the valley's pastures turns up on menus throughout the region, alongside lamb from the hill farms above the gorge. The county is one of England's main hop-growing areas too, and the Wye Valley Brewery, founded in Hereford in the 1980s, has become one of the best-known independent breweries in the West Midlands, its beers on tap in most of the valley's traditional pubs.

Ross-on-Wye's Thursday and Saturday markets are a good source of local cheese, meat and seasonal produce, while Monmouth's own market and independent food shops reflect its role as the main town on the Welsh side of the valley. Riverside pubs are a defining feature of the area: the Saracens Head at Symonds Yat and the Boat Inn near Redbrook both serve food with direct river views, while smaller villages such as Whitebrook and Hoarwithy hold dining pubs that have built strong reputations well beyond the valley. Salmon and trout from the Wye itself, once a much bigger part of the local diet before stocks declined, still appear on some menus, usually sourced with an eye to sustainability given the river's protected status.

Camping in the Wye Valley means pitching within earshot of the river more often than not, since most established sites cluster along the water between Hereford, Ross-on-Wye and the Forest of Dean, taking advantage of the flat meadowland the Wye has carved out over centuries. The terrain away from the river turns quickly to wooded hillside and limestone outcrop, so most campsites sit in the valley bottom rather than up on the gorge sides, giving easy access to canoe launch points, riverside pubs and level walking without a steep climb back to the tent. Ground can be soft after wet weather, and several sites close or restrict pitches through the winter months when the Wye is prone to flooding its meadows.

Wild camping has no general legal right in England or Wales outside a small area of Dartmoor, so camping in the Wye Valley means using one of the valley's established sites, whether a simple farm-based field or a larger touring park with full facilities; landowners along the river are generally unwilling to permit informal pitching given how much pressure the gorge already receives. The most comfortable months to camp are May to September, when river levels are lower and more predictable for canoeing and the woodland paths are dry underfoot, though committed campers with good kit find late September and early October rewarding for the autumn colour along the gorge, provided they can handle cooler nights and the occasional wet spell rolling in from the Atlantic.