Monmouthshire occupies a distinctive and long-debated position among the historic counties: formerly reckoned part of Wales, as described by the antiquarian William Camden and other early writers, it had by the eighteenth century come to be classed by most authorities as an English county, though its geography, language and culture remained thoroughly Welsh in character. It is bounded by Herefordshire to the north, Gloucestershire to the east, the River Severn to the south, and the Welsh counties of Brecknockshire and Glamorgan to the west, extending some twenty-nine miles from north to south and containing 340,000 acres divided into six hundreds, with seven market towns and a population of nearly 39,000.
The county's mountainous, wooded terrain supported sheep, goats and cattle on its higher ground, while the valleys produced grass and corn of notably good quality, its wheat said to rival that of any county in the kingdom. Monmouthshire was, and remains, richly watered: besides the Wye, which forms its boundary with Gloucestershire, and the Monnow, dividing it from Herefordshire, the county has the Usk running through its own heart from Abergavenny down to the Severn, and the Rhymney marking its western edge against Glamorgan — all of them, but especially the Wye and Usk, celebrated for salmon and trout.
Chepstow Castle, guarding the Wye's junction with the Severn, and the nearby ruins of Tintern Abbey, already by the 1770s attracting antiquarian and picturesque tourists to the wooded Wye Valley, were the county's most celebrated antiquities, alongside Raglan and White Castle among the chain of Marcher fortresses built to secure the Anglo-Welsh border. This ambiguous status — administered with England yet Welsh in nature — persisted until the Local Government Act of 1974 formally recognised Monmouthshire as part of Wales, closing a debate that had run for the better part of four centuries.