Llanthony Priory

A row of pointed arches stands in a dead-end valley under the Black Mountains of south-east Wales, and you can drink a pint inside them. Llanthony Priory was founded by a Norman knight who gave up war for prayer, became a house of Augustinian canons by 1118, and now shelters a small hotel and a cellar bar within the buildings the canons left.

Gerald of Wales, passing through in the twelfth century, called it a place truly suited to the monastic life, a wilderness far from the bustle of mankind, and the Vale of Ewyas has kept the description: one lane runs up it, past the priory, and on over the mountains. The ruins are extensive, their red stonework richly cut, and the frame they make of the hillside has hardly altered since William de Lacy first built his hermitage. Suppression came in 1539; the priory's afterlife is the odd part, because seven rooms in the surviving twelfth-century range are let as a hotel, so guests wake among the arches, and the Cellar Bar serves food and drink beneath them. From the door a 4.5-mile circuit climbs to Hatterrall Ridge, the highest point on Offa's Dyke Path, with Herefordshire off to the east and the whole valley to the west. Abergavenny, the food town, is the nearest base of any size, and Sugar Loaf Vineyard and the garden at Nant y Bedd, twelve hundred feet up the same mountains, are the valley's other stops.