Whitney-on-Wye to New South Wales. Whitney-on-Wye Whitney-on-Wye is a village and civil parish in Herefordshire, England, very close to the border with Wales. The population of this civil parish at the 2011 census was 117. It is on the A438 road, and on the River Wye. The village is west of Hereford. The church is dedicated to the Saints Peter and Paul. Whitney-on-Wye was first mentioned in the Domesday Book with the spelling Witenie. The most plausible meaning for the name is "White Water", from the Anglo-Saxon "hwit" (white) and "ey" (water), and probably refers to the River Wye which runs
England–Wales border its residents at the time spoke Welsh. In the late 17th century under Charles II it was added to the Oxford circuit of the English Assizes, following which, according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, it gradually "came to be regarded as an English county". Under that interpretation, the boundary between England and Wales passed down the Rhymney valley, along Monmouthshire's western borders with Brecknockshire and Glamorgan, so including Newport, and other industrialised parts of what would now generally be considered to be South Wales, within England. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica unambiguously described the county as part of England, but noted