Several parts of an ancient wall that once surrounded Chepstow still remain, with the watch-towers complete; and one gate dating from the sixteenth century—the Town Gate—still stands, a curious archway across the principal street, a thoroughfare that slopes steeply down to the Wye. A church of great antiquity is Chepstow Church, built in the days of the Normans, and containing several monuments of unusual interest, with the grave of Henry Marten, one of the signatories of King Charles’s death-warrant, who spent many long years as a prisoner in Chepstow Castle. One of the towers of the castle is called Marten’s Tower, an unintended commemoration of the Roundhead’s imprisonment within its walls.
Bidding a final good-bye to towns and tributaries, but still retaining its rugged banks and, in a measure, its stately woods, the Wye makes straight for the sea, where this child of the mountains, after swallowing the largess brought down to it by a score of smaller streams, is itself, in turn, swallowed in the greater flood of the Severn. To the very last, however, the Wye retains its individuality and character—picturesque ever, picturesque to the end. From its fount on Plinlimmon to the end of its course of a hundred and thirty miles, where it gracefully rolls into the broad estuary, it has scarcely ever, even for a mile, been commonplace.
E. W. SABEL.
NEAR THE SOURCE OF THE USK, TALSARN-SIDE.