This week’s Forest View is a tribute to Lydbrook, a peaceful riverside village with a great history with memories of the middle ages and from the industrial revolution.

Henry V, who was brought up in Monmouth, honed his horse battle skills on the Monmouthshire side of the river, in preparation for the great ‘Angevin’ battles with France in the early 15th Century. His country estate was the Courtfield, on the Welsh Bicknor side of the River Wye, opposite Lydbrook and the Courtfield Arms was a pub on the English side, at Lydbrook, until its sad demise as a pub a few years ago.

Shakespeare, in his dramatization of Henry V, has Henry’s loyal Welsh captain Fluellen comparing King Henry with a great historical warrior, Alexander the Great, declaring ‘between Macedon and Monmouth, their situations are both alike. There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth’. A fairly tenuous connection, but eagerly quoted by Fluellen.

The village in its industrial past had what was possibly the highest railway bridge in the Forest, now demolished, overlooking the junction of the riverside road and the road which takes you from Lydbrook to the centre of the Forest.

But the great open spaces on the Welsh side of the River Wye are now an open area where sheep may safely graze. On the English side the Lydbrook community have generously created a charming park area where one can view the river in all its various moods, and observe the great area where sheep may safely graze. And there was once a Lydbrook Cricket Club, now sadly no more, whose cricket ground was on the Monmouth side of the river. With no local bridge over the river Wye, players and spectators were ferried across the Wye from the village to the cricket ground. It must have been a most exotic and scenic place to play cricket.

I owe this information to the great Robert Wilkins, who played and supported Parkend Cricket Club for most of the 20th Century. He missed out on playing County Cricket, as the second world war inconsiderately disrupted his first class cricket career, but he was a great cricketer and then supporter of Parkend Cricket Club, with his brother Ferdie, who kept the club going through difficult times.

But now, with the sheep quietly grazing on the far side of the river as we look across from the Lydbrook side, it’s difficult to imagine that the lumpy and hilly ground om the other side of the river was once a village cricket ground, and before then a training ground for mediaeval warriors.