THIS WEEK’S photograph is in Monmouth, showing Monmouth Boys’ school from Wye Bridge Street, the road at the right of the school is Almshouse Street, the spire of St. Mary’s Church can be seen in the background.

Bonnie Russell, Llanellen

THE WYE Bridge in Monmouth is a bridge across the River Wye. The A466 passes over it and immediately meets the A40 at its western end. The bridge is a grade II-listed building. The total span of the bridge is 71 metres.

The original wooden bridge was built in the Middle Ages; there is a clear reference to it in the 14th century.

Earlier references to a bridge at Monmouth may refer either to a bridge over the Wye or to the fortified bridge over the Monnow.

A plaque on the parapet records the widening of the bridge on both sides in 1878 –80 under the architect Edwin Seward of Cardiff, stating, – This bridge was widened in 1879 from designs by the county surveyor, David Roberts Contractor.

The bridge is built of red and buff sandstone ashlar. It has five arched spans with the original pointed arches visible beneath, but with both faces covered by segmental arches carried on the sharply-pointed cutwaters.

The bridge is a crossing for the Wye but it is also the start of the Wysis Way which is a long footpath that connects Monmouth to the Kemble in Gloucestershire and to other National footpaths.

MONMOUTH SCHOOL is an HMC boys’ boarding and day school. It was founded in 1614 by William Jones. It is run as a trust, the William Jones’s Schools Foundation, by the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, one of the Livery Companies.

On 19 March 2014, some 1,200 pupils and staff from the school, and from Haberdashers’ Monmouth School for Girls, celebrated the 400th anniversary of the foundation of Monmouth School with a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Monmouth School is the senior institution of the Haberdashers’ Monmouth Schools. In 1613, William Jones, a prominent merchant and haberdasher, gave the Haberdashers’ Company £6,000, followed by a further £3,000 bequeathed in his will on his death in 1615, to “ordaine a preacher, a Free-School and Almes-houses for twenty poor and old distressed peoples blind and lame, as it shall seem best to them, of the Towne of Monmouth”.