Giant's Cave
Local highlightA rock-cut cave and cliff-edge viewpoint on the 18th-century Piercefield walks above the Wye, named for a lost statue of a giant with a boulder over his head
The Giant’s Cave is a short tunnel cut through the cliff on the Piercefield walks, high above a bend in the River Wye north of Chepstow. It opens onto a small platform hacked from the rock face, with the river directly below and the wooded slopes of the Wye Valley National Landscape rising across the water.
It is one of a string of viewpoints laid out in the mid-18th century by Valentine Morris, whose Piercefield estate — now the grounds of Chepstow Racecourse — was among the earliest of the great Picturesque landscapes, made to be walked as a sequence of staged and framed views. The cave is named for a stone giant that once stood over its mouth, a boulder raised above his head as if to hurl it at walkers passing below; the figure weathered away long ago, but the name held.
The cave sits on the Wye Valley Walk and is reached on foot from Chepstow or from the lower Wyndcliff car park near St Arvans. It is open at all times and free, though the platform is unfenced and the drop sheer. A little to the north the same cliff-line lifts to the Eagle’s Nest, the highest of the Piercefield lookouts.
