From the high ground above Chepstow Castle on the border between England and Wales, Turner looked south along the Wye to its junction with the broadening Severn.

This was the first of ten plates in the Liber that Turner crafted without the assistance of an engraver.  In theory, the process of adding mezzotinted tones over line etching paralleled his habitual practice of washing watercolors over his pencil outlines, but as W.G. Rawlinson wrote in the first catalogue of the Liber Studiorum, "it is difficult to believe that mezzotinting such as we have here was done  without training and almost without practice."