6 Best Sights in Abergavenny, Wales

For hundreds of years, South Wales has been famous for its mining industry. Decades of decline—particularly during the 1980s—left only a handful of mines in business. The mines around Blaenavon, a small town 7 miles northeast of Abergavenny, have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and this fascinating museum is the centerpiece. Ex-miners lead you 300 feet underground into a coal mine. You spend just under an hour examining the old stables, machine rooms, and exposed coalfaces. Afterward you can look around an exhibition housed in the old Pithead Baths, including an extraordinary section on child labor in British mines. Children under 3½ feet tall are not allowed on the underground portion of the tour.

Built early in the 11th century, this castle witnessed a tragic event on Christmas Day, 1176: the Norman knight William de Braose invited the neighboring Welsh chieftains to a feast, and in a crude attempt to gain control of the area, had them all slaughtered as they sat to dine. The Welsh retaliated and virtually demolished the castle. Most of what now remains dates from the 13th and 14th centuries. The castle's 19th-century hunting lodge houses an excellent museum of regional history. There's a re-created saddler's shop and a World War II air-raid shelter, but the Victorian Welsh farmhouse kitchen, with its old utensils and butter molds, is perhaps the most diverting exhibit.

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the 1789 Blaenavon Ironworks traces the entire process of iron production in the late 18th century. Well-preserved blast furnaces, a water-balance lift used to transport materials to higher ground, and a terraced row of workers' cottages show how the business operated.

Impressively complete from the front, majestically ruined within, Raglan was built in the 15th century and was the childhood home of Henry Tudor (1457–1509), who seized the throne of England in 1485 and became Henry VII. Raglan's heyday was relatively short-lived. The castle was attacked by Parliamentary forces in 1645, during the English Civil War, and has lain in ruins ever since. The hexagonal Great Tower survives in reasonably good condition (you can climb to the top), as do a handful of rooms on the ground floor.

Literally a stone's throw from the English border, Tintern is one of the region's most romantic monastic ruins. Founded in 1131 by the Cistercians and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536, it has inspired its fair share of poets and painters over the years—most famously J. M. W. Turner, who painted the transept covered in moss and ivy, and William Wordsworth, who idolized the setting in his poem "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." Come early or late to avoid the crowds. The abbey, 5 miles north of Chepstow and 19 miles southeast of Abergavenny, is on the banks of the River Wye.

An extremely rare surviving example of a fortified medieval manor house, Tretower Court was built in the early 1300s and expanded in the 15th century. The atmospheric interior contains a large hall, which was probably used for public business, and a solar, a private space used for working and relaxing. Buildings such as these were huge status symbols in their day, as they combined the security of a castle with the luxury of a manor house. On the grounds are the ruins of an earlier Norman castle and a medieval barn; the latter was renovated in 2021 and turned into a visitor center and restaurant. Tretower Court, restored in the 1930s, is signposted from the idyllic village of Crickhowell, which is 5 miles northwest of Abergavenny.