Wye oh wye

Face it, the Thames is an old has-been. Oh, it looks very grand and sedate in places, but if it didn't flow through our nation's capital, would it be famous? It's been tamed. It has the Thames Barrier and it's lined with locks and the so-called Thames Valley is a broad flood plain with mole hills on either side. After London it's boring beyond belief.

The Wye, now, that's another matter. It tolerates us but no more than that. Its waters are dark and slow. Its banks are steep and overgrown, even where it deigns to flow through a town. It's a national boundary for a large part of its route. It defines the very nature of its region because anywhere that is anywhere is on it. And it has a gorge. Yeah, baby, a gorge.

Put it this way - if I was a pagan, I know which river god I'd be sacrificing my firstborn to.

So that's where we started - drive down to Chepstow, turn right and up the Wye valley, wooded slopes and limestone cliffs towering above us. First stop, the ever delightful Tintern Abbey where the sun shone on the ancient stones and swifts buzzed about within the skeleton of the old church like miniature Me.109s. Lunch, and onwards past Monmouth to the Violette Szabo museum, which turns out to be part museum and part shrine - a one-lady enterprise run from a small building at the end of the garden of the house where Violette's aunt and uncle once lived. The one lady in question is the kind that you suspect Violette might have become if she hadn't been executed at a young age in Ravensbruck. 'Indomitable' is one word that comes to mind. 'Bats' is another. But it's a labour of love into which she has poured huge amounts of effort, a worthy tribute to a very brave woman, and it's not an experience to miss.

Then, finally, Hereford, skirting the outskirts to head out to Credenhill where we used to live and where, 300 years earlier, poet Thomas Traherne was rector. A small detail that completely passed me by back then. What also passed me by at ages 9 to 12 was how beautiful the whole area is, shining gold in the sun while the Tolkeinesque Black Mountains line the southern horizon.

Then onwards to find our hotel - clean, quiet and cheap, which is all I really ask for in a hotel, and dedicated to redressing the disservice it feels the hotel trade has dealt to short people over the years. Maybe the owner is very short and a tall person was once rude to her. If I was standing up then the rule of thumb was to duck, because if the light fittings didn't get me then the door into the bathroom would, or the shower cubicle as a last resort. Our bed was, I suppose, technically a double, in that you could get two pillows on it side by side. Just. I like to feel close to my wife after nearly a year of marriage, but sheesh.

That evening and the next day - Hereford! Which has hardly changed at all in the last 30 years. Well, here and there, obviously. Some fool has moved the cathedral a couple of hundred yards to the end of Broad Street, when I know it used to be opposite the Green Dragon hotel. Possibly the same fool, flush with success at his undetected fiddling, moved the Market Hall from the south side of the High Street to the north. Said Market Hall is a bit like Oxford's Covered Market except, as Best Beloved wisely pointed out, it contains reasonably priced items that you might actually want to buy. Less tourist trap, more actual market. Then outside and down the street to the old town house museum, the sole remnant of an ancient Hereford street that has been kept like a 17th century black and white timber home. And of course, the cathedral. Still not quite my favourite cathedral - you'll have to try very hard to knock Salisbury off that perch - but with many points in its favour, not least of which is free entry. Salisbury technically has free entry if you can find it within yourself to walk straight past the ticket desk soliciting recommended voluntary donations, but at Hereford they don't even hint at you. You pay for the tower tour but it's worth it, climbing up inside the walls to reach fantastic views out over the surrounding countryside.

Thirty years ago, as far as I remember, you could also get to see the chained library for free, and the Mappa Mundi just hung vaguely on a wall. Nowadays they've been moved into a custom built library of their own, for which you have to pay. So, no Mappa Mundi.

And all the while the sun shone beautifully. Come six o'clock, everything closing but not quite ready for dinner, I proposed a drive out to Dinedor, venue for many Sunday afternoon outings when I was young. An old iron age fort, like Credenhill itself, but more accessible; overgrown and wild but in a safe sort of way with footpaths and nooks and crannies and the potential for spotting hobbits.

(A thirty-year flashback; I could show Best Beloved the place where my father once parked the car on a steep slope, facing down, on a cold and icy day. His cunning plan was that to reverse out, he would position a ground sheet beneath the rear wheels. I would stand on the ground sheet to weight it down and the sheet would give the wheels traction. Eventually he worked out that I didn't keep falling over out of perversity and I wasn't being wilfully non-massive; there was just an inherent flaw in the plan that had to be worked with. He got the car back up, somehow.)

As we walked, admiring the views through the trees, the first misty spray began to play on our faces. We gazed across the vale and saw the Black Mountains dissolving into rain. Slowly but surely the rain grew harder ...

... and, 23 hours later, it has yet to stop. Today we were going to drive home via Goodrich castle, another popular childhood attraction, but it really didn't seem worth it, so we just came straight back.

Ooh, do you know, I think I see blue sky in the distance. Oxfordshire was obviously worried that it had lost us and is welcoming us home. And if it weren't for, you know, things like career and a child at a local school approaching his GCSEs and this being where most of our friends are, that worry might have been within reason.