Property News · July 29, 2016

Let’s move to Monmouth and the lower Wye valley: where sightseeing began


Its toytown streets and thriving culture are a perfect escape from the rat raceWhat’s going for it? Funny how history of the most violent kind can, centuries later, become picturesque. This was border country 1,000 years ago, the river Wye as divisive as the Rio Grande, and Monmouth built by our Norman overlords with high walls and watchtowers to keep the Welsh from the region’s precious iron. Today we gaze on the ancient walls and fortified bridge with selfie sticks, and drift down the once-bloody wooded Wye on pleasure cruisers gawping at misty Tintern Abbey. The Shire Hall may look all Downton Abbey-ish, but in its chilly halls our Chartist comrades were sentenced to hanging, drawing and quartering. The Wye valley and Monmouth were where modern-day sightseeing began in the 18th century, so it’s perfectly pretty, the kind of place you or I might decide upon to escape the rat race, with its toytown streets and thriving culture. Just remember its bloody past when you skip down heritage streets en route for a slice of locally churned ewe’s milk cheese. In the words of Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre: “Spaces sometime lie.”The case against… Getting about is slow: narrow lanes, few river crossings and geography field trip coaches do not a happy driver make. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Let’s move to Monmouth and the lower Wye valley: where sightseeing began

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