Flowing under the many-arched stone bridge of Builth, that ancient little mart of sheep and cattle, and receiving the Edw from Radnor Forest, the Wye now enters on perhaps the most inspiring of all its upper reaches. For here on the Radnor shore the bold ridge of Aberedw lifts its
rock-plated sides some 1200 feet above the fretting river which upon the Brecon bank chafes the green and woody feet of the high sheep-walks of Epynt. What makes, too, for the exceeding beauty of these particular reaches of the Wye is not alone the lofty hills which press upon its here tempestuous streams, but the further fact that every downward view of the river has for a background the line of the Black Mountains waving at a great height against the skyline. Breaking at length out of its own pent-up channels, and turned back by the formidable barrier before it, which protects the vale of Usk, the Wye now swings to the east and down the broader meadowy vales of Glasbury and Hay; the Black Mountains of Brecon looming high and abrupt on the right, the Radnor moors rising more gradually upon the left, each bank from time to time ornate with some country-seat set back against the base of the hills. This is the spot to remind the reader, if such be needed, that the Wye is a famous salmon river, and that its fish, unlike those of the Severn, share the normal habit of all other salmon, mysterious and unaccountable though that instinct be, of rising in more or less capricious fashion to what we facetiously call, and the salmon most certainly does not consider to be, a fly. The upper or rockier portion from Rhayader to Glasbury is perhaps the best of the river, but all the way down, till it meets the tide at the proper and appointed casts, the Wye is a true salmon river in the angling sense of the word. To discuss its ups and downs, or to dwell upon the tribulations that this one in common with most salmon rivers has experienced in some recent years, is not our province. But the Wye is cursed with the pike, a gentleman that the salmon loathes – not, of course, like the trout, from bodily fear, but he shuns his presence and neighbourhood as a fastidious mortal moves from a neighbourhood invaded by vulgarians. The Llyfni comes with slowish current into the Wye above Glasbury from the neighbouring reedy lake of Tal-y-llyn, otherwise Savaddan, set like a gem in the rich basin between the Brecon beacons and the Epynt Hills, and it is by this route that the unwelcome aliens are said to make their entry. The Wye is also a trout river from its source to near its mouth, though of vastly varying quality, which we need not dwell on here. But in its mountain reaches two generations ago, if the local grandfather is veracious, it was equal to the Usk or Dee or Teify. These halcyon days till you get well above Builth are no more; for not only pike but the chub has pushed in, and in pellucid rocky pools where he has no business whatever, you may now have as fine fly-fishing for chub as anywhere probably in Great Britain. But the trout whose native and perfect haunt it is, has retired a good deal into the background. He exists, to be sure, everywhere, and may with luck be caught anywhere, but the fisherman can no longer as of yore wade up the rapids of Erwood or Aberedw and kill his 10-lb. basket, on a good day, with fly, though he may take a few on a minnow.
Hay (Le Haie, as the Normans called it) marks the boundary on one bank between England and Wales. It was of old a sort of small Berwick-on-Tweed, and many a fight has taken place in its neighbourhood. As at Welshpool the English, mainly the dependants of the Norman castle, now a residence, lived in the east, the native Welsh in the west part of the town, and the memory of such divisions survives even to this day in the respective districts of English and Welsh Hay. Just below Hay the ruined towers of Clifford Castle, whence came fair Rosamond, cast their shadows on the stream. It is sixteen miles from here to Hereford. The Black Mountains recede from the river’s southern shore and droop to the lower ridges, in whose parallel troughs the Monnow, the Honddu, and the Dore, their backs here turned upon the Wye, hurry southward to meet it at Monmouth, 40 miles below. The Radnor moors on the north bank, too, have already fallen back, and the river has broken out into England and the plains of Herefordshire – if so diversified a country may be called by comparison a plain – and to a quiet life, unvexed by mountain spurs and unchafed by resisting rocks. The Wye, however, keeps plenty of life within it, tumbling oftener over gravelly shallows than the Severn, loitering less sullenly in long reaches, and lurking less frequently between high grassy banks – a brighter and more joyous river altogether to be with, and clearer too, for there is practically nothing to defile its waters. Shooting swiftly under the old bridge of Bredwardine, or stealing quietly through the park lands of Moccas, or winding among the pastures of Monington, where Owen Glyndwr is thought to have spent his closing years at his daughter’s home, the Wye is always the best of company. Sleek Hereford cattle, the most decorative of all breeds to English landscape, are everywhere. The high wooded ridges, so characteristic of Herefordshire, rise now on one bank and now on the other, while always the long line of the Black Mountains fills the western sky. Fish of every kind worth having are in the river that offers such variety of lodging – the salmon in his season, the trout, the grayling, the pike and chub and perch, and all the lesser fry. And thus to Byford and Bridge Sollars where Offa’s Dyke, having run from North Wales, ends its course, and leaves the Wye for the rest of its journey to form the eighth-century line of demarcation between Welsh and Saxon, or, more literally perhaps, between those who knocked under to the Mercian Kings and those who would not.
Not much of a boating river as will have been gathered is the Wye, but as it draws near Hereford there is a mile or two of deep water and a good deal more that is available to the energetic oarsman: sufficiently so, at any rate, to make the little cathedral city a boating centre in a modest way. Below the ancient bridge, over which so many armed hosts have marched to fight the Welsh, the Wye spreads into rapid shallows and thus skirts the city; fair meadows upon one side, upon the other the Bishop’s Palace and the Cathedral, and the broad Castle green, where that vanished fortress once stood. And now upon high terraces the citizens of Hereford muster in strength when the sun shines, with a fine prospect over the broad rippling river and over the most wooded of landscapes, to the dark masses of the Black Mountains, behind which the sun sets. Hereford is a clean and pleasant old town, quite unsmirched by any factory chimneys, and largely concerned in cider-making, county business, and matters educational and ecclesiastical: a typical cathedral town, with the virtues and failings of its type in great perfection. It is not so rich in Tudor architecture as Shrewsbury, Ludlow, or Tewkesbury, but has a fair sprinkling of seventeenth-century houses, and many restful byways of Queen Anne or Early Georgian type. The Cathedral is of course one of the lesser ones in size, but is of great interest. Built at the end of the eleventh century to replace a humbler predecessor burnt by the Welsh, it has a great deal of the original Norman work, as, for instance, the piers of the nave, with much of the choir and south transept. As for the rest, there is much fine work, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular.
The building is double cruciform in shape, with a massive central tower. It has several rich chantries of Perpendicular date and some fine cloisters. It was much injured by the fall of a west tower in the eighteenth century, and still more by the inept reparation of the damage by Wyatt, that misguided architect who gained the favour of an uncritical generation and ran amuck among such English cathedrals as were unfortunate enough to demand attention during his lifetime. Hereford may be dismissed with the perhaps serviceable remark that it is the best centre for seeing the Wye valley – using the latter term in the proper sense, not merely as applicable to the reaches between Ross and Monmouth, the conventional limitations of tourist literature.
The second stage of the river’s third or lowland section,