Wales
Llanthony Priory
Augustinian ruins in a dead-end valley, a bar in the priory, seven beds among the arches.
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.
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Solo
Sleep in the priory range, take Hatterrall Ridge early, and the ruins in the evening light.
Couple
The arches at dusk, supper in the Cellar Bar, and the valley silent beyond an open door.
Friends
Walk in over the ridge from Offa's Dyke, sleep in the priory, and drive out through Abergavenny for the market and the Walnut Tree.
- Gerald of Wales wrote in the twelfth century of a site truly suited to the monastic life, in a wilderness far removed from the bustle of mankind, and Cadw still cannot name a better one.
- The Norman knight William de Lacy gave up war for religion and founded a hermitage here; by 1118 it was a monastery of Augustinian canons, and it lasted until 1539.
- The surviving row of pointed arches and richly decorated red stonework frames a view up the Vale of Ewyas that has barely changed since de Lacy's time.
- You can sleep in seven rooms that were part of the twelfth-century priory buildings, wake to the ruins, and walk the 4.5-mile loop to Hatterrall Ridge, the highest point on the Offa's Dyke path.
Ale and supper in the Cellar Bar, the bar that lives inside the priory buildings beneath the ruins.
Sunday lunch at the River's Edge in Pandy at the valley mouth, the pub that was the Old Pandy Inn.
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