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covers 842 square miles and is located in west central England, on the Welsh border. The County town is Hertford.
Industry
The County is mainly agricultural and is famous for its apples and its red Hereford cattle.
Geography
Herefordshire’s countryside is an undulating land, which rises to the Black Mountains. and Malvern Hills. The Major rivers are the Wye, Lugg, Frome, and Dore. The largest is the River Wye, the source of which is 2000ft above the sea level on Plynlimon in mid-Wales. The fertile soils of the valley, rest on red sandstone, producing the well known red soils. The County has a very varied landscape with the Wye Valley in the west and the city of Hereford at the centre of the county. It has the Market Towns of Ledbury and Bromyard in the Malvern Hills, Ross-on-Wye, which is famous for its book shops, the Golden Valley to the west. It also has Hay-on-Wye, with Leominster and Kington to the North, set amidst the delightful Black-and-White timbered Villages.
History
For a time Herefordshire was combined with almost all of Worcestershire to form the county of Hereford and Worcester. Both Counties were re-formed in 1998. The city of Hereford, in the centre of Herefordshire, was a frontier town on the border between kingdoms of the Welsh and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. The Saxons never totally conquered Herefordshire and many Welsh place-names in the county show where the Celtic peoples managed to hang on to their lands. Offa’s Dyke, built in the 8th by King Offa of Mercia was a border with Wales. Border warfare with the Welsh was common in the Middle Ages, and there are many ruins of castles and fortifications, built by the Norman Marcher Lords, who were almost independent Kingdoms.
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