A Postcard from the Wye

The Wye flows for more than 130 miles, from the high slopes of Plynlimon in Wales to the Severn Estuary, passing through some of the most picturesque scenery in Britain en route. Indeed, the Wye Valley was the birthplace of modern tourism – when many eighteenth-century travellers undertook the English equivalent of the Grand Tour. By the nineteenth century, when the railway had arrived, many enterprising locals were running boat tours along the river, stopping off at Goodrich, Chepstow and Tintern to take in the ‘picturesque landscape’, and famous names such as Pope, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thackeray had all made the pilgrimage here. By 1850 more than twenty accounts of the Wye tour had been published.

A Postcard from the Wye takes the reader on a journey in words and pictures along the entire length of the river, using more than 200 postcards from the authors’ extensive collections. It is a record of how the river once was, including its industrial heritage as well as more rural scenes, and shows how it was immortalised by earlier generations of photographers and artists for the benefit of innumerable tourists and travellers.