Three of the best dog-friendly places to eat in the Wye Valley

At Symonds Yat, lunch comes with the possibility of a hand-pulled ferry. At Penallt, we can park in England and cross the river on foot to a Welsh pub, or climb into the village for a loaf filled with rarebit. The dog gets a walk in each arrangement. We get rather more than a table permitted to have an animal beneath it.

These three pubs make different uses of their part of the valley. The Saracens Head offers the broadest choice for a substantial meal beside the Wye; the Boat Inn makes an economical lunch out of filled ciabatta and cask beer; the Bush puts marmalade on its ham and rarebit inside a loaf. We bring the dog inside, look carefully at the menu and leave time to understand something of the country we have walked through.

1. The Saracens Head Inn, Symonds Yat East

Before we go inside the Saracens Head, we stop beside the river and look at the ferry. It is an unusual piece of pub equipment: a boat pulled across the Wye by hand, allowing passengers to make the opposite bank without the long way round. The operation has continued for generations, but the vessel needs thoroughly modern attention. In 2025 its two-and-a-half-ton hull was taken away for repairs, with new decks fitted before it returned to the water. Keeping a tradition afloat involves a welder as well as someone willing to pull the rope.

We bring the dog into the bar, the permitted indoor area, and find a place among the pews and scrubbed wooden tables. Flagstones make sense in a pub on a walking route, although we still deal with muddy paws before settling. There are other dining spaces and riverside terraces, but a dog owner wanting an indoor meal should reserve specifically for the bar. The Wye Valley Walk passes the door, and this is one of the valley's conspicuous stopping places. The view does not come with a guarantee of a vacant table.

The wild-boar ragù with pappardelle, £23 on the September menu, gives us broad ribbons to turn around a fork. Pappardelle gives a meat sauce enough surface to cling to and enough width to make the pasta part of the meal. We lift a ribbon, turn it back through the sauce and make a smaller forkful. This is food that rewards sitting down properly, with a napkin and some time, after a walk that has made a sandwich seem inadequate. The wild boar gives the familiar pub choice of pasta something more specific to offer.

Across the table, sea bass takes a lighter direction. The £25 dish brings sautéed new potatoes, tenderstem broccoli and caper butter; the capers are the useful detail, adding briny acidity to the butter and fish. We lift a piece of potato through the sauce, then return to the pasta. The menu can accommodate these different appetites without requiring a second venue or sending the dog outside. Pan-fried gnocchi with mushrooms, spinach and Parmesan cream, £21, offers another substantial option, though anyone hoping for a light vegetable lunch should notice the cream before making that assumption.

The bar is worth considering independently of the view. CAMRA lists six cask ales, with Wye Valley's Butty Bach and HPA among the regulars. We choose HPA, a 4 per cent pale ale, keeping the drink modest in strength with more walking ahead. Local bottled cider provides an alternative. This is still a pub where a pint can be the principal reason for coming, even if the ragù has taken charge of our visit. Below the table, the dog has space to rest while we consider whether the afternoon requires pudding.

It does, but only one. We share the baked apples with crumble dusting, honey, vanilla ice cream and berries, £9, a less monumental finish than a full crumble after pasta. Lunch need not become this elaborate: a cheddar-and-pickle sandwich is £12.50, with salad and crisps, and the £17.50 Ferryman's plate puts cheddar, Stilton and brie beside bread, chutney and pickles. The difference between a £12.50 sandwich and our two-course order is significant. Choose according to appetite rather than feeling that a good view obliges you to buy the largest lunch beneath it.

Timing matters almost as much as the table. The main weekday lunch service finishes at 2.30pm, with sandwiches continuing until 3pm; weekends allow a little longer. Ferry crossings depend on conditions and operation, so we check before making one essential to the walk. Our choice is an early bar booking, the ragù and a pint, with the dog able to settle indoors. The Saracens Head earns the stop because it can support a proper meal as readily as a pause beside the river.

Symonds Yat East, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire HR9 6JL.

2. The Boat Inn, Penallt

We leave the car at Redbrook and walk the dog across the footbridge beside the old railway viaduct. England is behind us, Wales ahead, and the Boat Inn is waiting at the other end. This is the approach the pub recommends, largely because parking on its side of the river is limited. It is also a particularly satisfactory way to arrive for lunch. We have crossed a border, looked down at the Wye and given the dog something to investigate before anyone has asked us to choose between bread and chips.

The dog comes inside with us. Two stone-walled rooms, each with a log burner, give the pub an enclosed scale quite different from the open riverbank. The smaller room contains books and tabletop games. We choose a place where our companion can lie clear of the route through, keeping the food and glasses comfortably above its line of enquiry. Outside, the terraced garden rises from the pub, with a rocky, stream-fed area known as the grotto. It is an appealing prospect in dry weather; for an older dog or someone avoiding steps, the levels are a reason to discuss access rather than assume every outdoor table is equally easy to reach.

At lunchtime, the Boat serves warm ciabatta with fries, and we order the pastrami version with garlic-and-dill sauerkraut, cheddar and Dijon mayonnaise, £10.50. Salted meat, fermented cabbage, cheese and mustard make a vigorous sandwich. The sauerkraut is what attracts us: its acidity offers a counterweight to the cheese and mayonnaise, and its presence makes the filling more considered than a pile of meat relying on quantity alone. We cut the bread in half before lifting it, accepting that there is no elegant way to keep every strand of cabbage in place.

A pint of Butty Bach sits beside our ciabatta. The Wye Valley Brewery beer is a 4.5 per cent bitter, one of the Boat's regular cask choices, and the pub has a particular interest in cider too. That makes the information board on its front wall more relevant than most pieces of local history encountered on the way to a bar. Penallt was known for making millstones from puddingstone, the local conglomerate in which fragments of harder rock are bound together. Those stones served cider mills as well as corn mills. The wooded country above us once supplied the equipment that turned apples into the basis of a drink.

Beyond our glasses, the hill merits another look. Penallt's village history records quarries and unfinished stones still scattered through the parish, reminders that this attractive landscape was also a workplace. The river carried trade, and the railway beside our crossing belonged to that practical valley. The remnants are there to look for on a longer walk. For now, we return to the sandwich and the view of a valley that once shifted stone as readily as it now carries canoes.

A falafel ciabatta with roasted peppers, hummus and tahini is £9.50, the useful choice for a vegan companion; gluten-free bread must be requested rather than inferred from the menu's symbols. For something small to share, baked mini Camembert with red-onion jam and bread is £7.50. Evening food is a separate proposition, with the £15.50 Boat Burger adding cheddar, smoked bacon, gherkin and onion jam to its fries. Thursday has its own burger evening; the regular dinner menu is served on Friday and Saturday. Do not arrive on a Tuesday evening expecting the lunchtime kitchen to have carried on indefinitely.

The Boat suits a walk that needs a good pub in the middle rather than a restaurant occasion at the end. Our ciabatta costs considerably less than a main course at the Saracens Head, and its combination of pastrami, sauerkraut and mustard gives us something worth stopping for. With the dog beside us and the return crossing a few minutes away, we can finish the beer without having to organise the rest of the afternoon around lunch.

Lone Lane, Penallt, Monmouthshire NP25 4AJ.

3. The Bush at Penallt

Up in the village, the Bush offers a different view of the country we have been walking through. From the garden we look across the Wye Valley towards the Forest of Dean, then bring the dog inside to the bar. The dog is welcome here, and the flagstone floor and wood burner give the room the practical character our walk calls for. The Inn at Penallt, the name still encountered in older accounts, is now the Bush; Jess and Rowley run it as a village pub with food worth inspecting before falling back on our familiar order.

A baked cob filled with Welsh rarebit and beer-braised shallots is £8.50 to share. We order it and pull off a piece of bread to work into the filling. Rarebit takes cheese into the territory of a cooked savoury mixture; putting it inside a loaf turns the bread from a base into something we can break apart at the table. The shallots offer sweetness against the cheese, with beer tying the filling to the surroundings. It is an appealingly sociable starter, and a sound reason for two people who intended only a drink to begin discussing lunch. Our dog observes the bread from floor level. Its enthusiasm for the format is easy to understand.

The ham, egg and chips is £21, a price that asks us to look beyond the three familiar words. Here the ham hock is glazed with honey and marmalade, with a fried egg, hand-cut chips and pineapple ketchup. We choose it because the kitchen has followed the old relationship between pork and fruit in two directions: citrus in the glaze and pineapple beside it. Marmalade brings the possibility of peel's bitterness as well as sugar; the ketchup gives the fruit a role closer to a condiment than a ring laid on top. We bring a little to the ham, leaving the egg and chips for the next mouthful. Anyone who prefers their ham entirely free of sweetness should make another choice, but the idea is more deliberate than novelty for its own sake.

The beetroot bhaji burger, £18, is the more interesting alternative to the beef burger. Its beetroot-and-onion patty comes with Madras chutney and tarka dal, lentils finished with spices fried in oil or butter. That last accompaniment gives a vegetarian order more to do than copy the meat eater's plate. For fish, the menu offers an £18.50 selection in shandy batter with chips, greens and roasted-garlic aioli; ask which fish are being used rather than expecting a fixed species. We keep the ham and, with the rarebit already under way, decide that pudding can wait for another visit.

The drinks have a local emphasis too, with changing ales and cider alongside the wider bar. We choose cider with the ham, a familiar pork-and-apple partnership that gives the sweet glaze a sensible companion. CAMRA records Gwatkin and Ty Gwyn among the cider suppliers; the day's selection determines the bottle or draught order. We ask which ciders are available, taking a moment over the choice while the dog rests beside us. After the rich rarebit, something drier appeals.

Planning the visit is more important here than the spacious garden might suggest. Under the published autumn hours, Wednesday and Thursday are evening-only openings; Friday and Saturday have separate lunch and dinner sessions, and Sunday is for lunch. Monday and Tuesday are closed apart from bank-holiday variations. We book a dog-friendly bar table for a Friday lunch and keep the garden as an option, rather than relying on the weather to accommodate us. The hilltop position means that a walk up from the river must also allow for the return; this is a village stop, not a pub directly on the water.

We divide the last bread from the cob. The Bush is our choice when the day calls for an informal pub meal with a little invention: cheese and beer inside a loaf, ham given both marmalade and pineapple, a vegetable burger accompanied by dal. Share the cob, choose the ham if its fruit accompaniments appeal, and book the bar so the dog can join the whole meal. That is a lunch worth allowing for when planning the walk.

Penallt, Monmouthshire NP25 4SE.