The image depicts a broad, flat plain, interrupted at its further end by a grey body of water. In the distance, a low mountain range looms in vague, dark contours against the sky, nearly touching the cloud formations above. Small, white buildings, dwarfed by the mountains, cluster on the plain between the body of water and the mountain range. What appear to be tall fir trees are grouped darkly in the right quarter of the aquatint. Another tree sits low in the left corner. 

The aquatints engraved for Gilpin’s Tours were based on sketches made by Gilpin himself. A comparison of similar aquatints from the second, third and fifth editions reveals subtle variations among them and suggest that new aquatint etchings were used in each printing. Gilpin first toured the Wye area in the summer of 1770 while still master of the boy’s school at Cheam in Surrey. He illustrated an account of these travels which received praise in its unpublished form from both Under Secretary of State, William Frasier, Esq. and the poet, Thomas Gray (Templeman 227). In this image, Welsh ruins blend into the countryside, symbolizing the close connection between medieval architecture and picturesque beauty.

By the 1790s, the British aristocrats who had grown accustomed to visiting the sites of ancient Greece and Italy had been cut off from the Continent by the violent and unstable political situation (Andrews 34). As a result, domestic sites came to constitute a new "Grand Tour." Gilpin highlighted the affordability of travel in England, Wales and Scotland, and argued that such national sites held the potential for enacting moral edification (Bermingham 86). This potential arose in the exposure of the viewer to the divine in nature: "a search after beauty should naturally lead the mind to the great origin of all beauty . . . Nature is but a name for an effect, / Whose cause is God" (Gilpin, Three Essays; 46-7).

The Abergavenny ruins are difficult to identify as ruins in this aquatint. In the accompanying text, Gilpin briefly comments on the castle as if it is only barely noticed: “We approached it [Abergavenny] by the castle; of which nothing remains, but a few staring ruins” (Gilpin 90). The ruins blend into the overgrowth as if it were becoming another land formation, and its towers are echoed and overshadowed by the peaks of the mountain range behind it: the first crest is directly beneath the left peak of the mountain, and the second crest of the ruins mimics the descending gradation of the right mountain peak.

Medieval ruins were valued in the Romantic period because their decaying forms were being subsumed by the landscape—stained, overrun and rent by insects and vegetation (Ruskin qtd. in Lowenthal: 157). Scholars such as Malcolm Andrews and Anne Janowitz argue that, in the attempt to unify the diverse peoples of the British Isles into one nation, ruins became sites of national memory and historic pride, material evidence of a history shared by England, Scotland and Wales (Andrews, Part I; Janowitz 4). Several primary sources support this opinion. A ruined mansion in Brambletye was the occasion for John Byng to contrast his own era to "those Gothic days":

Over and about these ruins I . . . meditated . . . [on] the great improvements of the roads, which have introduced learning and the arts into the country and removed the (formerly wretched) families, who buried themselves in mud and ignorance, to the gay participation of wit and gallantry in the parishes [towns] of Marylebone and St. James! (Byng 89)

Commenting on the ruined Caraig-cennin Castle in Wales, traveler Henry Penruddocke Wyndham declared: "'This was doubtless . . . a British building, as is evident from its plan and the style of its architecture’" (qtd. in Mavor: 343). For Wyndham, then, “Britain” is represented in a Welsh ruin by synecdoche. While Gilpin himself may not have been consciously seeking to express such ideas, his renderings of the ruins nevertheless serve to illustrate the visual unity connecting the British land with its national monuments.