Herefordshire is a historic county on the Welsh border, bounded by Shropshire to the north, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire to the east, Monmouthshire to the south, and Radnorshire in Wales to the west. Eighteenth-century surveys measured it at thirty-five miles long and thirty broad, some 660,000 acres divided into eleven hundreds, with eight market towns and 176 parishes lying wholly within the diocese of Hereford. The county's air was reckoned so healthy that antiquarian writers repeated, as proof, the story of a morris dance performed before King James I by ten men and women whose combined ages totalled a thousand years.
Herefordshire's rich red soil made it one of the most celebrated agricultural counties in England: Leominster's wheat and fine wool were famous enough to give rise to the saying 'Lemster bread and Weobley ale', and the county's cider, pressed from its abundant orchards, was already by the 1770s exported across the whole of England, an association that has never really faded. The Wye, Monnow, Lugg and Frome watered the county thoroughly, and its salmon were prized above those of other rivers, said to remain fat and fit for the table even after spawning, when fish elsewhere had grown lean and unpalatable.
Hereford Cathedral, with its ancient chained library, stood as the county town's principal monument, while Goodrich Castle above the Wye and Wigmore Castle, seat of the powerful Mortimer family who dominated the Welsh Marches through the medieval period, were counted among its most notable antiquities. The winding course of the Wye below Ross, already admired by eighteenth-century travellers for its wooded cliffs and river scenery around Symonds Yat, anticipated the picturesque tourism that would draw visitors to the valley in growing numbers over the following decades.