SPIRO : i SA ase alas ataraceintnines Sia oe se Streeter ates SS ; ae Rasen Macigrceten ne ; Sto : Se SSoonees x. ress Siesta es tne reabee FAM APMIS So 7 ED Fe Ng Sovtearethran Sevres yileay ty tsi: exists a i EPR A SEs ; : = sentra ; EER SOE TS nis oars SANTEE Fae cad eset ees Renee eee a aa ee anon SOS DNS I eewet oP, dea of Sas at erate Tere supe sere THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY QI4.29 B1TZh AND GrogRAark’, , LIBRARY eee. Pe Je JR teh } PD Pp 1 we Dee Oe Woe genre ra awe aw oN “3 # 7: LI VPNs $1) 2 < A 4 Pt A i rs a HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN NORTH WALES MACMILLAN AND CO., LiMiTED LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA . MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD TORONTO THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS ie page iat A Bi ie j Nw. as si AY fe, | HE a ao Lee = ve = =a wire I J - Sas An Old Street in Shrewsbury. Highways and Byways in North Wales BY A. G. BRADLEY WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEPH PENNELL AND HUGH THOMSON Menaen ven aA Ne ON I) oO.) . LI MITE D Peeve EN SS DR HET) LONDON 1923 Pater ke : ion, Reprinted, 1901, 1905, _ First Pocket Editio CONTENTS mie 8 CHAPTER I BOCRURY be. ew) Se a, | CHAPTER II _ SHREWSBURY—LLANGOLLEN . . . . . . Baise CHAPTER It oy ah RN a ne a CHAPTER IV _ VALLE CRUCIS AND GLYNDYFRDWY. . CHAPTER V OWEN GLYNDWR. . . aa ee CHAPTER VI BEORWEN RUTHIN: (of 8 0 0hee Ye Fe Is co 611974 < . . Ces PAGE 21 56 78 1} $103 Vili CONTENTS \ CHAPTER VII RUTHIN—DENBIGH CHAPTER VIII DENBIGH—REUDDLAN =s- a. so ie ou nee CHAPTER -LX RHUDDLAN TO CONWAY CHAPTER X THE VALE OF CONWAY . CIIAPTER XI THE VALE OF CONWAY . CHAPTER XII BETTWS-Y-COED TO BANGOR CHAPTER XIII BANGOR TO TREMADOC . CHAPTER XIV TREMADOC—CLYNNOG CHAPTER XV THE RIVALS—PWLLHELI—ABERSOCH—ABERDARON 145 171 197 219 245 aA 300 322 CONTENTS | ix CHAPTER XVI PAGE PWLLHELI--CRICCIETH— PORTMADOC—MAENTWROG—HARLECH . 351 CHAPTER XVII Pov eh Gk —-LLANBEDR—BARMOUTH =. 92 3 6 ee ew ew ws | 8378 CHAPTER XVIII DOLGHLEY——TALYLLYN—-TOWYN-—-ABERDOVEY . . . . . J... 398 CHAPTER XIX MACHYNLLETH — DINAS MAWDDWY — BWLCH-Y-GROES — LLANU- DVASEL LGN ING Mo ters. Bist eka elroy a see | |e Set “em we ote, ASL CHAPTER XX eevee tee YRINWY—-LLANEFYLLIN «0 6: ¢¢ eos “es 8 & he G43 OTL 1 nh, ane a a a RG TY A’2 Mich OF ILLUSTRATIONS AN OLD STREET IN SHREWSBURY SCRAWLED IN. AN OLD NOTE-BOOK SHREWSBURY CASTLE. . PeLenRIELD CHURCH. ¢.-5 s+. CHIRK CASTLE... WYNNSTAY AND RUABON LLANGOLLEN BRIDGE DINAS BRAN. GEORGE BORROW AT A WELSH INN VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY . HARLECH CASTLE AND SNOWDON A WELSH DROVERS’ RACE . ROMHIN CASTLE... 0. **. THE BURGLARS AND THE SQUIRE HOR EINES I GoLAMeMaMRe Nave f te its) ehh tes | eh ent 1s PURSUIT OF ROYALIST CAVALRY FROM DENBIGH THES CATHEDRAL, ST. ASAPH. . . EEO D DUAN) CASTER. 2oiie oe. EIR GUEIMe fe ed2 es) ba sys CONWAY CASTLE FROM UP THE RIVER Se ish sal YR hs COLWYN BAY FROM PENMAEN RHOS PAGE . Frontispiece Stee ae op edie |S aalernt ran OM 119 GI ey ee ae Re AM a OK acihit 137 I51 161 168 173 176 181 . ° . es LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE BEDWEEN ABERGELE| ARI) COLWYN BAY .... (5 s074) se) 4a Om LLANDUDNO AND ‘THE GREAT ORME... 2) 90 tine ROAD ROUND ‘THE GREAT ORME ©). °.) vs. 4 3 ogee ee THE. CHURCH OF LLANDRILLO-IN-RHOS 'y |. 15) hey ete ea CONWAY BRIDGE AND CASTLE “<2 .4).) 0 ee 2 e208 WALLS OF CONWAY (000.0 ee ON a SUBJECT TO A CATECHISM \. 000 200 sy aA THE VALLEY OF THE: CONWAY: ©.) (el. 5: l/c.) oe Eg ae ete THE BRIDGE AT: LLANRWST =. 0. |. 7. 5 ee IN THE LLEDR VALLEY NEAR BETTWS-Y-COED. . . . .. . : 237 IN. THE LLEDR VALLEY NEAR PONT-Y-PANT “45 25) ele oe NEAR DOLWYDDELAN = 3.07.00 4° 3-05.58 gs THE CASTLE OF DOLWYDDELAN.. 2, 2. > 3 ee ea PONT CYFYNG (NARROW. BRIDGE) NEAR CAPEL CURIG {2 =) 4) i247 ENTRANCE TO THE FAIRY GLEN. . . 4... 248 GLEN NEAR BETTWS 20.0 0) 20000 be We a SWALLOW FALLS)... 42 8) 8, THE PASS OF NANT FFRANCON ©.) 00.09%) (ac 0m geee tse tenets LLYN OGWEN) 60 Se. Sa es PENRHYN CASTLE.) 60 20 eo a BANGOR FROM BEAUMARIS: (0) boise = 6 5) 1 ree THE COAST ROAD NEAR PENMAENMAWR. .. °c: 7) 00) Soe CARNARVON CASTLE FROM RAILWAY BRIDGE . . . . Prana | STORM-CLOUDS ON SNOWDON FROM LLYN PERIS .°. . . « . 285 THE PASS..OF LUANBERIS* 2. 2) .c34 chs 60s SNOWDON AND:LLYN: GLASIYIN 6 oo 5)s) gh eel scares top ime retest LIST OF ILEUSTRATIONS THE BRIDGE AT BEDDGELERT. ere Tee A RUN eee tee ge ec YAGER mie g's Ct gn, Po? kart DE OM bem Cs LAG UN Meters Ayo ie sate ee ty Pek Neth Std ey PTL ese TREMADOC, FROM PORTMADOC ROAD ‘* WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN HIS FATE HAD HIS PEDIGREE BEEN A WELSH ONE IT IS ILL-SAYING” THE RIVALS FROM A DISTANCE WELSH GOSSIPS OF THE OLDEN TIME ABERSOCH . ABERDARON . LOW TIDE, THE HARBOUR PWLLHELI . TES SES (GREATNO BINS peg a i Naas Carn cea oe Oe OL Se Ren SNOWDON FROM TRAETH MAWR EMBANKMENT. FESTINIOG FROM MAENTWROG ON THE ROAD TO HARLECH NEAR HARLECH HARLECH CASTLE FROM THE SHORE GATEWAY, HARLECH CASTLE . HARLECH CASTLE FROM THE EAST. STUDY NEAR HARLECH . CWM BYCHAN LAKE . THE BRIDGE AT LLANBEDR SUSPENSION BRIDGE, MENAI STRAITS LLANBERIS LAKE . THE HARBOUR, PORTMADOC . LLANABER—OLD PARISH CHURCH OF BARMOUTH LOOKING UP THE ESTUARY FROM BARMOUTH THE BRIDGE AT BARMOUTH BARMOUTH . . Die ROAD TO, DOLGELLY+ 3. (Xv 22) os X1V LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS LOW TIDE IN THE ESTUARY BELOW DOLGELLY THE DESCENT TO TALYLLYN ON THE BANKS OF THE LAKE TOWN (6 2 dos ABERDOVEY. . ABERDOVEY FROM THE BACK. MACHYNLLETH. ROAD TO LAKE BALA ; SOUTER: LAST-.OF* THE EALS. | PHOTOGRAPH. . . ° . . . LLANUWCHLLYN, LLANYCIL CHURCH, NEAR BALA . THE OUTLET OF THE DEE. ON THE ROAD TO LAKE VYRNWY APPROACH TO LAKE VYRNWY. ° . e LAKE VYRNWY, FROM THE HOTEL GROUNDS THE GREAT DAM ° . e EEANBYLUIN 203. 1808, ROUTE MAP AT END OF BOOK FROM PAGE 402 406 407 412 ‘414 417 ga 438 441 444 453 454 457 459 4601 465 HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN NORTH WALES . pie HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN NORTH WALES CHAPTER I SHREWSBURY _ “WHERE shall I label your luggage for, sir?” “¢ Shrewsbury.” “Oh, Shroosbury, sir! ‘Ten-thirty ; Number two platform, sir,” says the Paddington porter in a tone of respectful rebuke. “Where for, please sir?” says the inspector, poking his head in at the carriage window ten minutes later. ‘Shrowsbury ” you reply, pronouncing the name in the only possible fashion that the most elementary acquaintance with the capital of proud Salopia admits of. “‘Shroosbury, sir? All right for Shroosbury.” Nor is this all. Should you venture an inquiry at Oxford or Birmingham concerning the time of arrival at your destination you will be almost certainly snubbed in the same exasperating and unmistakably corrective fashion: “Shroosbury? Three- thirty, Shroosbury.” I do believe there is no town in England so defiantly mis- pronounced among high and low, for railway porters and their 2 A POINT OF DIFFERENCE CHAP. kind are by no means the only transgressors. This, of course, is always supposing that we allow a town, like an individual to be the best judge of the pronunciation of its own name. In any case, I should not recommend a visitor to go Shroosburying about Shropshire any more than he would go down to Green- wich, for instance, and pronounce that historic home of white- bait and pensioners as he would Sandwich, for which difference there is, of course, nothing more nor less to be said than there is for the cause of friction between the Paddington porter and myself in the matter of Shrewsbury. The famous Doctor Kennedy, of whom I shall speak anon, took this matter, I believe, greatly to heart. When at a Cam- bridge dinner-party, .or in polite society elsewhere outside the scene of his scholastic triumphs, I have heard that his eye flashed on any such offender with a ferocity almost as great as that with which it blazed at the sound of a false quantity’ He could neither birch nor expel, nor set five hundred lines to his ws @ vis at a dinner-party, it is true; but I have been informed by people who ought to know that he never failed greatly to im- prove the occasion and to leave one outsider, at any rate, with an undying impression of the right method of pronouncing the name of Salop’s ancient capital. Chester, I am quite aware, considers itself immeasurably ahead of Shrewsbury in the attractions it offers to the tourist, and, as everybody knows, draws a great stream of sightseers, particularly Americans ; while few people, I fancy, go much out of their way to visit he old Shropshire town. I hope it is not from any unworthy resentment at what seem to me the somewhat over-weening pretensions of Chester, that I am introducing the reader to Wales by way of Shrewsbury and the Shropshire border. I sincerely believe there are good reasons for this, and not the least of them the fact that Shrews- bury, unlike Chester, is little known, and has nothing like the outside reputation it deserves, and if by a brief glance at it I may haply induce a few travellers, who would otherwise pass by, I CHESTER AND SHREWSBURY 3 to linger there for a few hours, I feel that the first chapter of this book, at any rate, will not have been written in vain. Both towns are sometimes spoken of as the ‘Capital of Wales,” but Shrewsbury, being more central, has had in the past, at any rate, a wider and a deeper grip of the Principality than the Cheshire town. It has done upon the whole, in remote times, more fighting with the Welsh, and has been more generally resorted to in later ones, both for social and educational purposes, by their upper classes than the more northern city ; while flannel and black cattle must have found their way into England in greater volume through this central market than by way of either the northern or the southern extremity of the Marches. Chester has, of course, its Cathedral, whereas Shrewsbury has only its Abbey Church and its beautiful St. Mary’s. The walls of Chester, too, are much more perfect, while its famous ‘“‘ Rows” have, beyond a doubt, no counterpart upon so large a scale in England. But I must confess these always seem to me a trifle self- conscious and to carry a suspicion of being swept and gar- nished for the dollar-distributing visitor from beyond the Atlantic, and a suggestion of being less genuine than they, in fact, really are. However that may be, the moment you are outside these show streets of Chester there is a singular lack of charm about the environment. The taint of commerce and the smoke of the North hangs heavily and unmistakably upon its horizon. Its immediate surroundings are modern and garish to a degree and by no means assist the fiction that Chester is still the unadulterated old county town one would like to think it. Now Shrewsbury on the contrary is a sweet-aired, genuine, dignified, and proud old market town, the resort of squires, parsons and farmers, and mainly inhabited by those who minister to their wants. It never dreams of itself as a show place. I always think, indeed, of Shrewsbury and Exeter as bearing some sort of relation towards each other, and lifted 4 “PROUD SALOPIANS” CHAP. above the average provincial town for many similar reasons, Each is the capital of a large, wealthy and conservative county, | and both of them have what, to borrow a perhaps not very appropriate Americanism, we might call a great “back country,” Wales in large part on the one hand and Cornwall on the other, without important centres of their own. Some years ago, too, a little book was published by a zealous antiquary—not a Shropshire man—enumerating with much detail all the families of England, of a certain consequence, who still occupied either the same estates or estates contiguous to those upon which they were living in the fifteenth century. Shropshire in this honourable competition very easily headed the list, and thereby, perhaps, justified that title of ‘“ Proud Salopians,” which the more consequential of its people submit to with much complacency, even though it be not always applied in a wholly serious vein. The station at Shrewsbury, though it recalls with more fidelity than almost any considerable station I know, the primitive days of railroad travelling, is not a mile out in the country as is the case with so many provincial towns, whose people have good cause to curse the timidity of their prede- cessors. Once out of its yard you are climbing steadily up the main street to the heart of the town, where stands the old market-place. Upon the left rises the Castle, of red sand- stone, built by Edward the First to secure Shrewsbury against the vengeance of the Welsh, which might well and with good cause be looked for when the terror of his presence should be removed. Higher up Castle Street, upon the right, are the old buildings of the famous Grammar School, now deserted for one of the most beautiful academic sites in the kingdom. Set back in a court, on the other side, stands the old Council House, where Charles the First gathered his loyal but desponding followers, and his ignoble son, James II., kept the same state in later years, and where the great Court of the Marches, that for two centuries, even to the time of William I SHREWSBURY’S CHARMS 5 III, was accustomed, when at Shrewsbury, to sit. The beautiful Church of St. Mary’s, with its fine spire and stone- work and carved roof and wonderful stained-glass windows, stands near by. Further on, too, is ‘‘ Butcher Row,” a narrow wynd of projecting black and white houses of the early English type. In the centre of the old market-place stands one of the most beautiful Tudor market-houses in England, and a statue of Clive in front of it reminds us that he was a Shropshire man. Many of the town houses, to which notable Shropshire families resorted in former days when London was outside the limit of the country squire’s vision, are scattered around, rich in carved oak and antique ornate exteriors. In a lofty column nising heavenwards in a far part of the town, the memory of one of the most famous scions of the old Salopian stocks, General Lord Hill, of Hawkestone, Wellington’s favourite lieutenant and his successor, is kept green. There are indeed whole streets and terraces in Shrewsbury that do not lend themselves particularly to description, nor look in the least degree as if they courted admiration, yet people who have a fancy for quiet, clean rows of houses, erected in the Queen Anne or early Hanoverian period, with their mellow red brick fronts and old tiles, and snug bits of garden hidden away behind sunny walls, will find much satisfaction in wandering among them. The town walls too are still perfect at certain spots, dropping sheer down with their warm red stone into green meadows, through which the river but a bow-shot off urges its rapid encircling course: for the Severn here describes a sudden and most remarkable horse-shoe curve, the town lying within it, and thus defended upon almost every side, not only by walls but by water. Upon the east side it is approached by the English bridge, rebuilt more than a hundred years ago. Upon the west by the Welsh bridge, name of significant omen in the old days of race hatreds and race wars. The Abbey, outside both walls and river, is an 6 SHREWSBURY’S ANTIQUITIES CHAP. imposing pile, beautifully restored, and well worthy to be a Cathedral when Shrewsbury becomes, as it some day will, the — centre of a new diocese. It is interesting too on account of its site and the human dust that lies beneath it. But the great pride of Shrewsbury, after all is its Quarry—its park, in short —-which slopes from the western edge of the town in a gentle “incline to the river bank, and is both bordered and bisected by avenues of ancient limes that surpass in height and bulk even those stately groves that patriotic sons of Trinity, Cambridge, are accustomed to regard as unequalled and incomparable. Shrewsbury began life very early as Pengwern, the capital of Powys, and remained a Welsh town for long after the Saxon Conquest. It was not indeed till Offa, King of Mercia, at the end of the eighth century, could no longer tolerate the aggres- sive action of the Welsh, that he collected a vast army and with a great effort drove them once and for all out of what is now Shropshire, and cut that famous dyke, still bearing his name, along the ridges of the border hills, which for many a long day no Welshman crossed except as an enemy and raider. In the delightfully quaint English of Dr. Powell, ‘““he was so heartily nettled at these bo-peep ravagings of the Welsh he would com- pliment them all to their holes.” In short, he cleared Shrop- shire and Saxonized it: Pengwern became Shrobbesberrie, and as anti-Welsh as Worcester or Derby. To say Parliaments were held here is hardly necessary when one remembers to what far more obscure places these autocratic, hard-riding, hard- hitting, restless Plantagenets summoned their Knights of Shires. In truth, this ancient attitude of Shrewsbury to Wales, added to its position in its own great county, gives it a peculiar interest. Shrewsbury juries too, and Shrewsbury judges, were continually in request for the punishment of implacable Kymri, who would certainly have found nothing but sympathy among their own countrymen and peers. And Shrewsbury, at the King’s nod, was always ready to give its legal cachet to the hanging of a Welshman who was troublesome, provided, of ’ i SHREWSBURY’S ANTIQUITIES 4 course, he could be caught. But then after these bellicose and spirited times, when the two countries settled down into a peaceful partnership, Shrewsbury in a fashion wholly friendly became, as I have said, in some sort a Welsh town. Now there is a third bridge spanning the river in a westward direction, neither old, nor in itself picturesque, but providing those who cross it with a most charming view of the river. For the latter, all alive as it is apt to be on a summer afternoon with racing boats and less ambitious craft, is bounded on the one side with the splendid lime-trees of the Quarry, and on the other by the steep green hills, on whose crest stand the new buildings which Shrewsbury’s famous school has now occupied for these last twenty years or so. It.is the outlook from this high plateau that constitutes its chief beauty. The backward view over the river is delightful, the warm hues of the red sandstone and red brick of the town showing out beyond the intervening woodland ; but it isthe great sweep towards the west that chiefly catches the fancy. For on the far side of a ten-mile stretch of rich Shropshire lowland, untainted by the smoke of mines or factories, the rampart of hills which roughly marks the Welsh border fills the horizon for a space that, from north to south, can be little less than fifty miles, with a host of well-known and suggestive and bold outstanding landmarks. There, upon the edge of sight, to the southward, is the hump of Caradoc and the bold outlines of the Stretton Hills. Plainer yet and nearer are the Styper Stones with their rugged summit, and Corndon Beacon over Chirbury, where the famous Lord Herbert of that ilk reigned as scholar, warrior and squire. Northward again and closer, and almost directly fronting us; are the Breidden, looking veritably what in fact they are, two noble pillars of the chief gateway into mid- Wales. From this gap, so ‘nobly guarded by these stately twins, to the misty outlines of the mountains above Chirk and Llan- 8 SHREWSBURY SCHOOL ee Sree gollen, there is no visible break of moment in the high rampart that so effectually and so continuously shuts out the still wilder Wales that lies behind. We can well fancy how anxiously and how often, and for how many generations in the turbulent days of old the straining eyes of Shrewsbury citizens must have scanned this far-stretching outline of rolling hills, which hid behind them such a world of restless enemies, ready at most times, and often without note or warn- ing, to come rushing out through the passes, scattering fire and sword through the rich lowlands that had once been part of their ancient land of Powys. Nor must we leave Shrewsbury without a few words about its famous school. And if it may not perhaps seem exactly germane to our subject, I may fairly plead the fact that it was for generations a great resort of the sons of the Welsh squire- archy, and is intimately bound up with Shropshire life, and fondly cherished by Salopians of all degrees. Even this, per- haps, would not justify our loitering on these heights of Kings- land if this old Foundation, so happy in its new abode, had not been something more, and made for itself a name among the great schools of England and a record that in its way is cer- tainly unique. The ups and downs of Shrewsbury School, as of many others, are picturesque. I have seen a list of the - scholars who were in residence during the troublous times of the Civil War, scrawled in an old note-book by their head- master, the hundred and seventy names or thereabouts being followed by plaintive lamentations on the disjointedness of the times and the struggles which befel him after his ejection in consequence of the ill-usage of the Parliamentarians. When Dr. Butler, however, of famous memory, took up the reins of office, in 1798, he found a strange state of things, as may be read in his life so lately published. The boarders had been reduced to one boy, and the head and second masters were accustomed to kill time by jumping competitions at a flitch of bacon suspended from the kitchen ceiling! A revival however lh ip q | eS. ——) hai ~ Senwled tn an old ncte-book Io ‘“ HONOURS ” CHAP. followed under Butler that was almost as marvellous as that epoch so memorable to Harrovians, when the late Dean of © Llandaff expanded a disorganised remnant of 68 boys into a prosperous and healthy community of 300 in about 18 months —for Harrow was ever fashionable and hard to kill. Butler in a short time, with few such advantages, had turned the solitary boarder into a crowd which more than filled the old buildings in Castle Street that we passed as we came up from the station, and the school to its full limit of 300. But this is not the point, except in so far as to note the comparatively limited material out of which Butler and Kennedy, who followed him, wrought such wonders. Old University men, and more particularly Cambridge men, would be better prepared, probably, than present ones for the really wonderful tale that is told by the honour boards that cover the walls of the corridor in the new buildings. I am not speaking of present times——because in the face of modern com- petition now, such a share of academic spoils and honours would be absolutely impossible for the most vigorous and powerful of public schools—but of the period of Butler and Kennedy, the first half, that is to say, of the century. Allelderly and middle- aged men who have been at college are, of course, familiar enough with the reputation for precise scholarship enjoyed by their contemporaries from Shrewsbury, and will remember what a standing terror they were to all other aspirants for academic laurels. But even they would, I think, be somewhat startled by an actual inspection of these old Shrewsbury boards. It is not for us to linger over them. But we may note one or two, the one for instance, where the three first boys of the school came out at Cambridge, three years after- wards, in the same order, first, second, and third classic ; and another bearing the only name honoured by letters of gold—that of the precocious youth who won the “Ireland” at Oxford in jackets, as it is said, but at any rate some time before he left school, to the considerable consternation of the examiners ; for I DR. KENNEDY 11 the Ireland, it will be remembered, is a distinction coveted and competed for by the most brilliant undergraduates of all stages of residence at Oxford. The identity of this precocious school- boy seems to have escaped the notice of the Dons till the result of his successful papers sprang him upon their attention, some- what to their disconcertment and caused, I believe, some precautionary measures to be taken lest such an untoward event should occur again. Nor should I like to say how many years during this brilliant period the Porson Prize at Cam- bridge fell to Salopians. This old Shrewsbury Scholarship was of a kind so precise no doubt as to invite criticism, and it has had plenty of critics, but that is a matter alien indeed to our subject here. Dr. Butler's achievements are all that is left to remind Salopians of his sojourn among them. But this is not the case with Kennedy, and it would be ill leaving Shrewsbury without a passing mention of the conspicuous place which the figure of the famous doctor still holds in its memory. One of the old school, with prejudices almost as great as his abilities, and a temper as warm as his heart, it is natural enough that anecdote, as well no doubt as legend, should be still busy with his name, and the stories that are told about him—all, however, out of the fulness of Salopian pride and affection—would fill a book. It does not appear that the doctor was, for his kind and his generation, especially given to the birch, but his passionate agony at such transgressions in scholarship or grammar as more particularly outraged his notorious sensitiveness on. such matters, is well known, and I have heard old pupils recall being hunted for their lives, so to speak, round the doctor’s study table after some such lapse as this, the chief after them well- armed and in hot pursuit. There is a famous story too, of how once upon a time, in a burst of righteous anger, at some piece of wholesale slackness in examination, he expelled his entire sixth form—though the sentence, it need hardly be said, was ultimately cancelled. 12 HISTORIC RECOLLECTIONS CHAP. It is a far cry from Doctor Kennedy to Henry of Bolingbroke, to Hotspur and Glyndwr. But of all the memories which | Shrewsbury arouses as one stands looking out from its walls or its red Castle towers, I always think that the one of this fierce fight, the bloodiest that, since the Norman Conquest, had dyed the fields of England, is the most inspiring. No wonder the fancy of Shakespeare was seized by it, and by the storms that gathered round the usurping Bolingbroke, who had so counted on a glorious crusade to Palestine and a peaceful England. ‘No more shall trenching war channel her fields, Nor bruise her flowerets with the armed hoofs ” Of hostile pacers. had been the vain hope indeed of this much harassed monarch but a short time before he had, thus at a moment’s notice, to fight for his kingdom and his crown at Shrewsbury. If there are a vast number of people who care nothing for history and less for battlefields, there are few probably who have escaped the fascination of Falstaff’s humours as a man of war. So, though the ‘“bloudie fielde of Shrobbesberrie ” is not precisely on our road to Wales, I propose to make the slight detour necessary for a passing glance at it. To do this we must recross the bridge, climb to the top of the town, and descend Castle Street, leaving the station upon our right: and passing on through Castle foregate, follow the road trodden by the anxious Henry, his gifted son and his valiant army on that warm morning of July the twentieth, 1403. It isa level road, and leads nearly due north to Whit- church, passing for some time through the most modern and unprepossessing part of outlying Shrewsbury. Beyond these limits there is nothing noteworthy upon either hand, unless you have that invaluable and unfailing support to the traveller—a taste for agriculture. Henry’s soldiers, however, did not march between hedgerows and fields of wheat and hay and turnips, but over a great open heath which, in those days, SHREWSBURY CASTLE 13 stretched far northwards from the town. About three miles from Shrewsbury, and set a little distance back from the road ? on “if Mb y AN \ Shrewsbury Castle. upon the left hand, and across the railway, stands the edifice known as Battlefield Church. I know of no other building of the kind in England that has quite sucha taleto tell. Itisnow 14 BATTLEFIELD CHURCH CHAP. a simple parish church, with a congregation which the very nature of its endowment and situation makes a limited one, for it was not built with any view to the needs of its neighbour- hood, but simply and solely as a contemporary memorial—and something more—of the slaughter that took place upon this Hately field five centuries ago. Let us follow the lane leading to it, and pass through the gate into the green grave- yard where, among the quiet Shropshire fields, and to all seeming forgotten by the outer world, these rarely significant and suggestive walls arise. The restorer has more than once been unavoidably called to their rescue, but still the lower part at any rate of the old church was raised by the hands of men who must have actually witnessed, and possibly taken a part in, the memorable battle. Nor was this church by any means erected upon some chance spot or at random upon the field, as a memorial only of the fight ; but where the latter was fiercest and the dead lay thickest and were huddled by hundreds into great pits, Roger Ive, priest of Leaton and rector of Allbright Hussey in the year £406, with the consent of the King, raised these walls and endowed them together with a College, long since disappeared. And here masses were to be said for ever and ever for the souls of the dead whose bones lay by thousands under and around them, not forgetting, of course, those of Roger Ive and his master, King Henry, whose effigy still looks out from over the east window towards yonder ridge of Haugh- mond, where so many of his flying enemies sought refuge on that sanguinary summer night. Not often has an English King been called upon to fight at such short notice those whom he had to that very moment regarded as his staunchest friends. Harried by Glyndwr, threatened by France, warred upon by Scotland, Henry had enjoyed scarcely a day’s peace upon the throne he had seized with such high hand, and there were plenty in those times who declared that even his nights were not free from troublous visions of the murdered Richard. The Percies of Northumberland had been the most faithful rz NORTHUMBERLAND PERCIES 15 and the most powerful of his friends. ‘They had practically placed him on the throne, and were even now the King’s trusty guardians of the Scottish Marches. ‘They had defeated the Scots at Homildon, and were yet loaded with valuable unransomed prisoners from that hot encounter. ‘There had been of late some trifling coolness between the friends, but there is no need here to notice its causes, nor is it worth while, for such a departure as the one that led to Shrewsbury fight was wholly undreamt of in the South. The King was actually on his way northwards to support the Percies against the Scots, and had reached Burton-on-Trent when the astounding news reached him that the former were in full march for the Welsh border, where Glyndwr and his army were to join them. Glyndwr had been three years in arms. He had with him his erst captive and now ally and son-in-law, Edmund Mortimer, the adult representative of the family whose claim to the throne was better than Bolingbroke’s, who had the actual heir, the boy Earl of March, in safe custody. The ‘Tripartite alliance,” under which Glyndwr, the Mortimers, and the Percies were to divide England and Wales between them, is supposed to have preceded this movement towards united action, which, as we shall see, so lamentably failed. The King had with him a considerable force. His son, the Prince, then but a boy, had been this long time watching the Welsh upon the southern marches with another army. The two had just time to join forces and hurry on to Shrewsbury, which they reached a few hours only before Henry Percy, the famous Hotspur, who had ‘with him a mixed force from Northumberland and Yorkshire, together with all the available levies of the turbulent and dissatisfied counties of Chester and Flint. Many of the Scotch prisoners too from Homildon had gladly given him their services in lieu of ransom, in all some 14,000 men. ‘The Earl of Northumberland, fortunately for himself, was detained in the North by illness, but his brother of Worcester had hastened rh + 16 HOTSPUR’S FATE OO CHAR, from the King’s very side to share the fortunes of his kinsmen and to be, as some say, their evil genius upon this fateful day. Hotspur had pushed his forces right up to the gates of Shrews- bury on the evening of the roth before he discovered that the King and his army had forestalled him and were already in possession. He then fell back on the hamlet of Upper Ber- wick, encamping his troops there for the night and sleeping himself at the mansion of the Bettons. Hotspur was brave enough, but the King had double his forces, and when morning broke and no sign of Glyndwr appeared, even his stout heart began to quail. Historians and poets have loosely blamed the Welsh chieftain for this seeming remissness, but Glyndwr, it now seems almost certain, was busy before Caermarthen, nearly a hundred miles off, and had re- ceived no definite call to Shrewsbury. So the famous Shelton oak upon the Welshpool road from whose branches he is supposed to have watched the fight must, unhappily for its own reputation though not for Glyndwr’s, be regarded as an impostor. There was, perhaps, no choice for Hotspur but to stay and meet these great odds. At any rate he decided to do so, and led his army in the morning over to Hately field and drew it up in battle array, with its centre on or about the spot where the church now stands. Percy’s buoyant spirit seems at this moment to have been tinged with some melancholy foreboding of his coming doom ; for when he called for his sword and was told that by some mischance it had been left at Berwick, the village where he had passed the night, and whose name he had not before heard, he turned pale and said, “I perceive my plough is drawing towards its last furrow, for an old wizard in Northumberland foretold that I should perish at Berwick, which I vainly in- terpreted as that town in the North.” He had carved the outline of his hand too upon a panel in the wall of the Betton mansion, and a local witch prophesied that the Bettons would retain their property only so long as the panel was preserved I THE BATTLE OPENS iy in their family. The heirloom was lost early in the present century, and the estate, so far as the Bettons were concerned, soon followed it. The King had marched his army out in two divisions against Hotspur, who was still manoeuvring, with a view of crushing him between them. Perhaps he wanted after all to give his old friend a chance to escape. At any rate he was slow enough in moving, for it must have been after noonday when the armies faced each other on Hately field, a stretch of growing . peas before them and a gentle slope behind giving that of the Percies some slight advantage. Even then there was great _ delay, creditable enough to the King, seeing that it was caused by the attempts of his mediator, the Abbot of Shrewsbury, at this eleventh hour, to effect a reconciliation. Hotspur, it is said, was touched by these generous overtures, but his uncle of Worcester, showing a strangely hot head beneath his grey hairs, insisted on this rash appeal to arms. So the shadows were already lengthening when the two armies, numbering in all over 40,000 men, and full of the highest and noblest blood in England, met in the shock of battle. Lord Archibald Douglas, the chief of the Scottish prisoners from Homildon, was with Hotspur, and great numbers of Welshmen, identifying his cause with that of Richard II. whom they were half persuaded was still alive, flocked to his standard, wearing Richard’s badge, the white hart, upon their shields and tunics. . Percy’s Cheshire archers, among the finest in England, opened the battle with a deadly hail of arrows. It was prob- ably the first time since the high development of English archery that Englishmen had themselves to face those terrible goose-winged shafts that had stricken France from end to end, and but recently cowed the boldest chivalry of Scotland. This first discharge of arrows every account speaks of as ter- rific. ‘They fell upon the king’s troops,” said Walsingham, “like leaves upon the ground in autumn. Every one struck a B 18 A DESPERATE FIGHT CHAP. mortal man.” The royalarmy could make no head against it, and their formation was badly shaken. Archers and spearmen shrank from the deadly whistling storm, as their comrades fell upon every side of them. Prince Henry, then only a boy of fifteen, was wounded in the face, but resisted every attempt to drag him from the field. A sudden onslaught of the Northern army, coupled with a cry that the King had fallen, created for the moment a wild confusion, and the fate of England and the House of Lancaster trembled in the balance. Many turned to flee, the royal standard was overthrown, and the young Earl of Stafford, Constable of England, fell dead beside it. But Henry of Bolingbroke was at least every inch a soldier, and riding backwards and forwards through his shaken army, to show that he was still unhurt, he rallied his soldiers by voice and gesture to a fresh resistance, and finally to a spirited advance, for which their superior numbers with equal valour and discipline ensured success. It was now a desperate struggle, hand to hand and foot to foot, such as could have but one end. And yet strangely enough, fierce as it was, this was a battle into which little hatred of race entered, nor could partisan feeling have as yet had time, one would have thought, to wax so warm. “ Yet it was more to be noted vengeable,” says Fabian, ‘‘for here the father was slain of the son and the son of the father,” Richard Hussey’s pea field must have presented a sorry sight that harvest ! Some details of the bloody hurly-burly have been preserved to us. Hotspur’s prowess shone conspicuous above all on this, the last evening of his stormy and eventful life. For again and again, in company with the valiant Scot, Lord Archibald Douglas, and thirty chosen knights, he rode through the royal army seeking the King, though by some mischance, both being veritable lions in their conduct, they failed to meet. It was after all somewhere on the flanks that the gallant Hotspur at length fell, and then a great shout arose, started by the | ’ I DEFEAT OF THE PERCIES 19 King himself, that the fierce Northumbrian whelp was dead. It was the beginning of the end. The battle had raged for three hours around the spot where the church now stands, and the sun was drooping to the Montgomery hills when the Percies’ army, unable any more to combat such great odds, at length broke and fled, heading for Wem in the north, or seeking nearer refuge in the wooded ridge of Haughmond to the east. The slaughter, which lasted through the hours of sunset and twilight, was tremendous. ‘The very moon that gah i ue % why stay ww SN iy SANS ANY 1 SAR Ya, maps i Wad ye oe -4 WIP DS ES iy = Battlefield Church. rose early upon the bloody scene and would have perhaps aggravated it, hid her face behind a timely eclipse, which the sages of that day knew well how to make the most of. ‘“ Men lay down,” says Walsingham, “in mixed heaps, weary and beaten and bleeding.” It was a lamentable business. Even upon the King’s side 4,600 are said to have been killed and wounded, while of Hotspur’s small army 5,000 by the most moderate accounts were actually slain, of whom 200 were knights and gentlemen of Cheshire. 20 BURIAL OF THE DEAD CHAP. I There Dutton, Dutton kills; A Done doth kill a Done ; A Booth, a Booth ; and Leigh by Leigh is overthrown ; A Venables against a Venables doth stand ; And Troutbeck fighteth with a Troutbeck hand to hand ; There Moleneux doth make a Moleneux to die ; And Egerton the strength of Egerton doth try ; O, Cheshire, wert thou mad, of thine own native gore, So much until this day thou never shedst before ! The Earl of Worcester was taken prisoner and beheaded, as he no doubt deserved to be, with many others. The rank and file of the dead, as I have before noted, were shovelled into great pits under or near where this Battlefield Church now stands, and no great while ago, when workmen were digging a drain from the Corbet vault, they found themselves cutting through masses of human bones. To give a list of the illustrious dead would weary the reader. Some lie in leaden coffins beneath the floor of the church, more in the older graveyards of Shrews- bury. Hotspur was buried by his kinsman, Lord Furnival, but his body was almost immediately exhumed by the King and placed upright between two millstones near the pillory at Shrewsbury, a ghastly testimony to all people that the brave Northumbrian chieftain was in truth dead. His head and quarters were then sent, after the fashion of the times, to decorate the gates of various English cities, and Henry of Bolingbroke breathed freely for a space, as indeed, if valour merits any reward, he well deserved to upon his much-troubled throne. CHAPTER II SHREWSBURY—LLANGOLLEN THouGH much of the route I have proposed to myself for this little tour in North Wales passes through some of the grandest, as well as the loveliest, scenery in Britain, there will be scarcely a stage that the most elementary cyclist cannot travel, not merely with ease, but i might almost say with luxury, for the roads of North Wales are not only for the most part admirable in themselves, but admirably graded, which is as much to the point. To pretend that a tourist can extract as much pleasure out of a mountain country, from any sort of vehicle, as he can on foot, would be of course ridiculous, though not more so than the absurd contention sometimes urged, that the beauties of landscape remain unrevealed to those who, from choice or the nature of their mode of pro- gression, stick to the road. At any rate, this is singularly inapplicable to North Wales, where I do not think it would be easy to put one’s finger upon a dull mile, and where one is never penned up, as in the West of England, between high fences, that may be the joy of botanists but are certainly the torment of the traveller. In any case, it is not my mission in this little work to ramble over mountain tops, or to follow any of the thousand delightful paths, through wood and meadow and moorland, se ACROSS THE CEIRIOG CHAP. in which the pedestrian finds here such ceaseless and rare delight, and I may add, to the surprise perhaps of some people, such solitude. The many excellent guide books to North Wales point out with ample completeness and in great detail the best fashion in which to enjoy the natural beauties of the country. My object is merely to gossip along the high roads, where the present life and the past history of the country chiefly gathers, and to linger here and there in some sort of endeavour to fill up a little bit of the great blank which, except in mere physical outline, Wales as a country represents to the average Englishman. Perhaps my thoughts are running rather on history, for in this particular the candid attitude of even one’s most accomplished acquaintances towards the past of Wales, gives one much confidence that such excursions will be into almost virgin fields. I only trust I shall not be tempted on this account to venture out upon them too often and too far. It is no slight temptation, the more so if one labours, under something like a conviction that Wales has been badly snubbed, not in a material sense, but that its heroic age has been ignored and its people even in more prosaic times much misunderstood and undervalued. But I am getting too serious and too. sententious altogether and implying some sort of importance for the desultory gossip that is to follow, to which it lays no claim. There is no occasion to return to Shrewsbury, for we are bound for Chirk, twenty miles away to the north-west, upon the Welsh frontier, and are already some little way upon the northern road. A couple of miles from Battlefield Church, by cross roads, will see us out upon the old Holyhead turn- pike, and, so far as this book is concerned, we may pray for a south wind to carry us in romping fashion along the famous highway over the flat plains of Shropshire till we drop into a lateral valley, where the Ceiriog sings beneath us, and the frontier of Wales is crossed. The Ceiriog is a real Welsh stream, clear and resonant, and as II CHIRK AND BRYNKINALLT 23 superior to the rippling Shropshire brook as the latter is to the turgid sluggards of the Midlands. Coming from the heart of Wales, a happier welcome than it seems to give could not readily be imagined, and as one crosses the dividing bridge between the greater and the lesser country, a puff of mountain air blown from the far off Berwyns down the narrow tortuous valley seems to fill one’s lungs with an earnest of good things to come. I don’t know that this frontier village of Chirk need in itself greatly detain us. To tell the truth, though just within the straggling county of Denbigh, which finds its north-western extremity in the far off remoteness of Llandudno, Chirk is some- thing of an English village, though a couple of miles in this border country makes oftentimes a difference in racial and lingual matters that would seem almost inconceivable in such a bustling, congested, progressive land asours. ‘There isa long broad street at the further end of which stands the Hand Hotel, full of the dignity of coaching memories, and having even now between cyclists, anglers and bagmen, I take it, not a great deal to complain of. At the other extremity is the Parish Church, where the really illustrious families of Brynkinallt and Chirk Castle—of Trevor and Myddelton, that is to say—are com- memorated in stone and marble, and brass through many generations. The gates of Brynkinallt being within a stone’s throw, and at the very entrance of Wales, the house and park, though closed to the public, should not be passed by without mention, if only for the great antiquity and ancient splendour of the Trevor family upon the Welsh marches. Possibly a more popular attraction might be found in the memories of the great Duke of Wellington’s boyhood which hang about the place, for his grandmother was a Trevor, Lady Dungannon, a now lapsed title of the family ; and here the future conqueror of Napoleon was wont to spend his holidays when a boy at Eton. Here, too, he experienced the most serious defeat of his memorable career: for falling into a quarrel with a farmer’s son over a 24 THE MYDDLETONS CHAP, ' game of marbles, a desperate conflict ensued, in which the Duke 4, , F f A A ; ‘ was already beginning to hoist the flag of victory, when the 4 farmer boy’s big sister appeared upon the scene with a wetted towel. The advent of the Prussians at Waterloo was scarcely — more happy for the Duke and his friends than the arrival of this stalwart girl was here for his enemy. Nor, according to all accounts, was the defeat of the French more crushing than the utter discomfiture of young Wellesley upon this occasion. The heroine of the affair lived to see her victim crowned with his fullest honours, and, as a portly matron and tenant of the family, to be quite a personage in the country side, on the strength of the thrashing she had administered to the hero of Europe in the days of their youth. But it is the great Castle of Chirk, a mile or more to the west of the village, that overshadows all other interests in this neighbourhood. Known in old days as Castell y Waen by the Welsh, or ‘the Castle in the open meadow,” it crowns the summit of a high swelling ridge, and looks thence west- ward far away up the deep valley of the Ceiriog into the very heart of a country wholly and entirely Welsh. Alone of all the great castles, of which Shropshire itself boasted thirty, that were built to guard and overawe the marches, Chirk still remains, in complete repair and occupied as a country house by its proprietors. And these, again, are no new people, but have inherited both name and estate from Sir Thomas Myddel- ton, scion of an ancient Denbigh stock, who acquired wealth and became Lord Mayor of London in the days of Elizabeth. His brother was the immortal founder of the New River Com- pany, and his son, taking the side of the Commonwealth in the Civil War, was a prominent leader in all the Welsh opera- tions, and among other calls of duty had the unpalatable task of pounding with artillery his own castle of Chirk, which had been seized by the Royalists. Visitors who would see the treasures and the glories of Chirk Castle are admitted one day in the week, and it would II CHIRK CASTLE ls 4: be well worth while going much further out of the way than we have to for such a privilege. An easy mile to the westward across the railway, carries us past the great lodge gates to the further entrance of the park. Thence for nearly as far again there is a steady ascent, under the shade always, of magnificent and immemorial oaks, that must have witnessed the fierce encounter of Cavalier and Roundhead, and for aught we know Pe) Chirk Castle. have been no more than saplings when the Mortimers here set their heel upon the neck of the last princes of Powys. Far down upon our left hand, over billowy waves of silver- tinted fern, where herds of deer are feeding, the Ceiriog plunges merrily through woodland glades. Upon our right, and before us, the open park sweeps gradually upwards to where, rising above their terraced gardens, are the grey feudal towers erected, in part at any rate, by Roger Mortimer, one of the foremost of those great barons who assisted Edward in the B2 26 AN HISTORIC HOUSE CHAP. final conquest of Wales. Fitzalans, Mowbrays, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Stanleys, and finally the royal Tudors, in the shape of Henry VII himself, became lords in turn of this historic and commanding fortress till the ancestor of the Myddleton Biddulphs, as we have seen, stepped into its possession by purchase in the sixteenth century. Cromwell, resenting the recusancy from his cause of this same Myddelton, was anxious to dismantle the castle, but mercifully some stroke of fortune preserved it to its owners—and to the nation —though so sadly battered by the cannon of the Commonwealth that the enormous sum for those days of £30,000 was expended in its repair. Its feudal dignity is well maintained, for after climbing up a stone staircase from the moat and following the domestic, who answers to a deep clanging bell, through narrow passages, you find yourself in a great quadrangle, round which is ranged every stage of the castle’s architecture from the earliest to the last. We must not pause to note in detail the many noble chambers through which the visitor, walking warily over polished, slippery floors, is free to pick his way: nor to linger over the innumerable treasures and curios therein contained, nor the portraits of brave men and women fair or otherwise, but mostly of a celebrity much more than local, hanging upon the walls. Royal Stuarts are there, together with William and Mary and the two Ormondes and the Countess of Warwick, who married Addison, and Myddeltons galore, and a host of worthies but little less renowned—and some who were renowned but could hardly be entitled worthy, such for instance as Mistress Nell Gwynne, who figures here 1n two characters. But the pride of the house is the exquisite cabinet, inlaid with silver and rare artistic work, which Charles II gave Sir Thomas Myddelton in recognition of his tardy but active loyalty, but above all probably of his losses: a masterpiece of workmanship that is said to have cost his Majesty, or some one, #,10,000. By way of contrast and the extreme of severity ee ae age II THE BATTLE OF CROGEN 27 _and simplicity in style, the visitor may gaze on Cromwell’s hat and hat-box, to say nothing of a really interesting collection of Civil War equipments. ‘There is a farcical picture too, above the stairway, famous throughout North Wales, though by no means painted with any humorous intention. ‘This is no less than a full canvas representation in oils of Pistyll Rhaiadr, a waterfall in the heart of the Montgomery mountains, with a considerable navy in full sail at its foot. It was painted by a Frenchman, and the story goes that, when completed, the very appropriate suggestion was made to the artist by a local Welshman that a few “sheeps” would make a good finishing touch to the picture, which was being executed to order. The Frenchman, wondering no doubt at the license which British art allowed itself, took, as he thought, the friendly hint, and produced the masterpiece in question. But for long ages before Roger Mortimer planted the Norman power—for it is absurd to talk about these conquerors of Wales as Englishmen—so irrevocably upon this high green ridge, there had rested here another and no doubt more vulnerable stronghold, known as Crogen. Here Powys lords and princes had come and gone for generations in the thick of the long turmoil of border warfare. But chief of all there was fought—just here upon the Ceiriog and around Offa’s dyke, which runs across the Park—a memorable battle between Henry II and Owen Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales and Suzerain ofall Wales. The battle of Crogen stands out as one of the great conflicts in the long resistance the Welsh offered to the Normans, for Owen Gwynedd, by the power of his name, had succeeded in uniting all Wales beneath his banners, a greater testimony to commanding character in those days than even victory itself. ‘‘ Prince Owen,” says the old historian, ‘‘ was there with his brother Cadwallader and all the strength of North Wales; Prince Rhys with that of South Wales, Owen Ceifeilioc and Madoc ap Meredith with all the power of Powys.’ Henry had vowed vengeance on Wales and destruction to every 28 LOOKING UP THE CEIRIOG CHAP. _ living Welsh thing. He advanced here by way of Oswestry, . bringing with hima motley host of English, Normans, Gascons, Flemings and companies from Anjou and Guienne, and after the fashion of invaders of Wales in those days, had before him thousands of wood-cutters clearing the forests for his slow and timid advance. . Owen, however, came out to face him, and the two armies — met down yonder upon the Ceiriog. A long and fierce combat raged, resulting in the retreat of the Welsh across the Berwyn Mountains to Corwen, followed by Henry, where later in this book we shall find the two armies standing facing one another across the Dee. The King’s life, it 1s said, was only saved by the gallantry of Hubert de Clare, Constable of Chester, who threw himself before his master in the nick of time and received in his stead the fatal wound. The heaps of slain found a fitting and significant grave in the hollow trenches of Offa’s dyke whose course may be here plainly seen. It is quite a noteworthy physical feature, the fashion in which this deep vale of the Ceiriog drives through the high. bordering hills into the heart of Wales. Shoulder behind shoulder comes tumbling down a thousand feet or more to the narrow riband of meadows, through which the joyous little river, hidden behind screens of alders and willows, makes merry music. Welsh life, fed by quarries among the hills, as well as agriculture, hums quietly in thrifty villages, and grows no whit more English because a light railroad and a level turnpike bring it in ready contact with the English plains. It is hardly too much to say that one side of Chirk Castle is as Welsh for every practical purpose as Anglesey; the other as English as Worcestershire. Upon the one side people can speak, after a fashion, two languages, but they only do speak and always think in Welsh. Upon the other few could be found who even understand the latter language, though a slight Welsh intonation trenches far over the Shropshire border from north to south. Such a sharp cleavage in dialect and sentiment may II A FAMOUS BARD 29 -no doubt be found in many outlying parts of Europe, or even upon the further fringes of what may relatively be called bar- barism in the West of Scotland or Ireland. But surely these are in no sense to be compared for significance with this Anglo- Welsh border, for life upon the whole beats here with a quicker pulse than, let us say, in Dorsetshire or Suffolk. The throb of the industrial north can be heard without much straining of the ears ; the smoke of chimneys and the flare of furnaces is often unhappily too obvious ; the busiest seaport of England, the ob- jective point of nearly all travelling and trading America, is almost within sight, and within less than an hour by train. Nor are these people who thus persistently reject the English tongue Basques, or Bretons, or Highland crofters or Con- nemara bog-trotters, but Britons in the very highway of Anglo- Saxon materialism, progression and prosperity, and take a full _ share in such blessings as these things may, or may not, confer, It is surely and of a truth a wonderful thing, the like of which can nowhere else be seen. We cannot undertake it here, but it would be worth any one’s while to run up the admirable and level road that threads the valley of the Ceiriog, so far at any rate as Llansaintffraid or Glyn —some half-a-dozen miles—after which the road, though still excellent, plunges into narrower mountain gorges, and ends virtually in a cu/-de-sac at the village of Llanarmon. Near Glyn Ceiriog, at a farmhouse called Pont y Meibion, abutting on the road, lived one of the greatest of Welsh bards, Huw Morris. He was born in the reign of James the First, and lived to see Queen Anne upon the throne. A violent Royalist, he devoted his pen wholly to that cause, though like many other sensible people, the doings of the second James so dis- gusted him, that in later life he attuned his muse in homage to Dutch William and the inoffensive lady who succeeded him. Huw used to worship at Llansilin church, over behind the great hump of Selattyn Hill yonder, and he lies buried there, beneath the old yew-trees which shade the little churchyard. George 30 TELFORD’S, AQUEDUCT CHAP. © Borrow paid a special visit to his grave, and taking off his hat, he tells us he “went down upon hands and knees and kissed the cold slab covering the cold remains of the mighty Huw, the greatest songster of the 17th century.” In such honour was Huw held in his old age that the parson, who in those days was accustomed to head the rustic congregation in solemn procession out of church, gave place invariably to the famous poet, when he was present: an honour surely more touching and significant than titles and pensions could confer ! Huw Morris has commemorated the glorious hospitalities of the Chirk of his day—and his day was that of the first Myddeltons —in a notable Welsh stanza. “If Cefn Ucha ”—a neighbour- ing hill—he sings, “‘was all bread, and the Ceiriog ran ale instead of water, the former would have disappeared and the latter would have run dry before half a year had passed.” But we must back to the village and our highway, though by no means passing a second time without notice the great lodge gates of wrought and hammered iron, which were brought hither in the days of William of Orange, and are the delight of experts in such workmanship. Conspicuous among the devices which here confront us is the Wolf of the Myddel- tons, as ubiquitous almost as the Tudor rose and the “ Pen Sais” in Welsh heraldry, and derived from a remote ancestor named Raryd, who for his ferocity in war was as distinguished as Blaidd or the Wolf. Passing the station there is a pretty elimpse of the canal with its wooded banks. Passenger boats, drawn briskly by horses, ply upon it between here and Llangollen, crossing the wonderful aqueduct, built a century ago, over the Dee valley by Telford, a performance greatly calculated to upset the equanimity of the timid or the uninitiated. For the boat entirely fills the narrow channel, and thus hovers in mid- air for many hundred yards at a dizzy height above the world below, which hereabouts is a dream of beauty. But we must travel to Llangollen, not in this lazy fashion, but by the Holyhead road, and resisting all temptations to loiter Il THE HOUSE OF WYNNSTAY 31 among the bowery gardens of the /Yazd, we will mount our iron steeds and head for that still more famous, but less picturesque, hostelry of the same name, which stands in the narrow streets of Llangollen. It is a fine highway this, as good as any in the kingdom, and for two or three miles we may as well do it justice, for there is not much outlook to arrest the attention upon either side. But it is far different as we swing round the high shoulder below Pen y Craig, where in similar fashion as the Ceiriog, but on an infinitely greater scale, the Dee valley, broad and beauti- ful, seems to open out Wales in very truth indeed. We seem here at least really entering the Principality,! and by a noble gateway. But even now we must turn our eyes back for a moment from the fascination of the wild array of mountains that in the distance seem as if they must close our westward path. For it would never do to pass by, without some word at any rate of recognition, such a famous seat as Wynnstay, spreading as it does its woods and parklands over the low ridges within such easy sight of us. The house itself stands out in princely and commanding fashion, but is not half a century old, its predecessor having been destroyed by fire. Everybody knows, of course, there have been “Sir Watkins” here since time was, and I suppose if one wished to give a foreign student of our social system a leading instance of its intricacies and apparent contradictions, the position in Wales, of “the lord of Wynnstay,” not as a man, but simply as “ Sir Watkin,” though a mere baronet, would form anadmirable subject. ‘These particular Wynns were of the house of Gwydir, of which I shall have much to say later on. They began to reign at Wynnstay, till then called Wattstay. 1 It is very generally forgotten that the Principality of Wales only included those portions of the country of which the last native Princes died possessed—the remainder and larger portion of Wales with contiguous strips of what are now English counties being known as the marches. 32 WELSHMEN IN IRELAND IN ’98 CHAP. II before the middle of the last century, and their glory culmi- nated, perhaps, in the last squire, whose familiar sobriquet of ‘‘ Prince in Wales ” speaks for itself. Long may there be great commoners in Britain to make a modern peerage seem of poor account, and to confuse the inquiring foreigner. I do not know, however, that any of the successive Sir Watkins did anything of national moment, unless it was the one who took his Yeomanry Corps of ‘Ancient Britons” over to Ireland, and rendered conspicuous assistance in quelling the unhappy rebellion of ’98. A cenotaph rises above the deep dell of Nant-y-Bele (the dingle of the Marten), through which the Dee rushes with much impetuosity, commemorating the officers and men who fell in that horrid tragedy and left their bones upon Irish soil. .One half of the chroniclers of ’98 dwell with much indignation on the zeal with which Sir Watkin’s Welshmen applied the pitch cap and played “‘croppies, lie down ” ; while the other side, with equal insistence, applaud their valour, and their loyalty. At any rate, they stood in the breach at a great crisis when few could be spared to stand there, and it is not strange that the memory of this remarkable adventure still lingers among the old people of the Denbigh border, for in spite of occasional pretensions to the contrary by the politicians of either country, there is mighty little love iost between the Shamrock and the Leek. We have now fairly set our faces westward, and are bowling up the Dee valley towards Llangollen, whose wild fantastic hills fill the sky but three or four miles beyond us. But, though ascending the valley, our road itself is in fact steadily and persistently descending, so high up the hill-side was 1t when we turned the corner of the vale.’ Dear to the hearts of the drivers of the old Holyhead mail was this three miles -of gentle downward slope over a perfect road, with fresh horses waiting them at the foot of it—in the yard of the Hand Hotel, at Llangollen. Many a timid outside fare saw little, I'll warrant, of one of the finest views in Wales as the coach Stic Seas BAA O. Wynstay and Ruabon. 34 INTO THE HEART OF WALES CHAP. 1 rocked behind the smoking team; and time tost between Whittington and Chirk was being picked up at little cost but | to the nerves of fearful passengers. With much less commotion, we in our end-of-the-century fashion might do, perhaps, even better than the mail coach : and that by simply putting up our feet and keeping our eyes upon the road ahead. But that absorbing and ecstatic pastime will not do here if any pleasure is to be derived from the beauteous landscape that les spread out beneath and before us. | Ruabon, with its fiery furnaces and belching chimneys, clustering on its steep hills across the vale, a horrid eyesore of modern growth, is happily soon past, and the busy hum of Acrfair gives place to the green uplands of Trevor, whence sprung that famous border family of whom I have already spoken and shall speak again. The great ridges upon both sides of the valley trend steadily upwards towards the Berwyn mountains. Between their feet spreads the valley of the Dee, a half-mile flat of glowing meadow lands and corn fields, through which the broad and noble stream, laden with the burden of a thousand mountain rills, comes bursting out of inner Wales. Even finer still, perhaps, is this particular bit in August, when the golden flare of harvest glows upon these rich flats and shines amid the varying greens of the meadows and the woods, and the purple heather of the nearer hills, and the blue of the remoter mountains, and the silver of the stream. But it is beautiful enough in June, and over all too- soon, for linger as we may, a certain speed down a descent so facile is almost unconsciously achieved, and we find ourselves creeping in circumspect fashion round the sharp corners and through the grey and narrow streets of old Llangollen. CHAR EEA ALL LLANGOLLEN ‘““A POOR town” is the verdict recorded by most of the old travellers, who in the days of the Georges, rumbled in their post-chaises, or ambled astride of their saddle-bags into the tortuous alleys of low-browed, grey houses which constituted the Llangollen of that day. An unreasonableness in this particular seems to distinguish so many of those who wrote delightfully and with conspicuous good sense upon others. ‘This was the first generation upon whom the light had dawned that mountains had any qualities but such as were calculated to inspire horror and aversion, or that a turbulent pellucid stream was other than a poor thing compared with a meandering, reedy Midland brook. People had just begun, in fact, to look upon with rapture and to write of with a fresh and genuine sympathy the glories of mountain and moorland. But even as late as the beginning of this reign many of them, when they descended into the valley, were apt to be querulous if they were not received into the bosom of a smug, low-country market town—an Aylesbury, shall we say, or a Bishop Stortford ?—lying under the shadow of the Berwyn hills or in the lap of Snowdon. | It would be ill requiting, however, the pleasure that some of 36 ‘A POOR TOWN: CHAP these old pioneers have given us in the reading of their simple adventures amid regions now so accessible by such quibbling as this. ‘They were following Arthur Young or Pennant, perhaps, who did the practical side as well as the other one so capably. At any rate, they would, I think, be much less severe upon modern Llangollen, though we ourselves would be perhaps inclined to linger for choice among what is left of this “ poor town.” ner: XVI A LEAFY ROAD 371 very weariness I think I should have dropped the subject if it had not been for Mr. Pennell, who is a cyclist not only of European experience, but of official rank in the grand order of the wheel, and who has just caught me up, so to speak, and authorised me officially to lay it onas thick as ever I please in this respect. This is very cheering, and so I will let myself go and at once proceed to the statement that this road from Portmadoc to Harlech is one of the best I ever rode upon in my life, and \\\\\ th, \ \ QQ \\ Aw \) NS » 1 ie On the Road to Harlech. certainly one of the loveliest. But its beauty is of a type not easy to reduce to words. There are masses of oak woods mingled with ash and birch and sycamore blowing above green knolls, and banks, where ferns and mossy rocks and white spouting rills and rank grass catch the sunbeams that find their way through the open canopy of leaves. There are glimpses of distant mountain peaks here and there; Moelwyn, Cynicht, and Snowdon. Nearer hills, of less renown, are still more often peeping out above the a | THE VALE OF FESTINIOG _ cur, xw1 9 clustering woods, at heights that are sufficiently imposing. ‘ The road is mostly by the waterside, and between the g enclosing heights and shining through the leaves is always a 4 gleam of yellow sand and blue water, with the white wings of 4 seafowl flashing against the dark background of the narrow a estuary. Approaching Maentwrog there is a peep up the vale — of Festiniog, one of the many gems of North Wales. The wonderfully rich and broken and varied sides of Moelwyn - form its northern wall. The Manods lift their bold heads at — the close of its short course. Below, a rare wealth of meadow 9 and woodland fringe and overlook the waters of the Dwryd as _ they urge their short but swift career to meet the tide where the bridge of Maentwrog at the picturesque village of that | name brings us round again upon the seaward track. Thence ~ a road no less leafy, nor in its way less beautiful, carries us down the Dwryd under the shadow of the Rhinog Range, and turning the corner, after passing the ancient seat of Glynne buried in its woods, soon brings us in sight of the grim | towers of Harlech. | CHAPTER XVII HARLECH—LLANBEDR—BARMOUTH THERE is no doubt that the waves, in times not greatly distant, lashed the foot of the high rock, upon whose summit the Castle of Harlech is so nobly placed. Now, however, the “Morfa Harlech,” beloved of Merioneth and other golfers, spreads green and dry for more than a half mile towards the sea, which booms behind a barrier of sand hills that in size and shape would do credit to the coast of Holland or the Pas de Calais. Springing sharply from the morfa rise the lower ledges of the mountains of Ardudwy, that long coast range of Merioneth, which stands up so nobly and so boldly when viewed from the opposite shores of Lleyn. Along a terrace two hundred feet or more above the plain straggles the ancient village of Harlech, and upon a projecting rock, with a pride of pose before which words are powerless, stands the remotest, and in some ways the most majestic of the conquering Edward’s seven castles. But legend is busy with the rock of Harlech, for over a thousand years before it carried the weight of these great Norman towers. For here, it is written in the Mabinogi, dwelt the un- fortunate Branwen, white-bosomed sister of ‘‘ Bran the blessed ° King of Britain, who, according to the Z7iads, is supposed to have introduced Christianity into Britain, to have been the father of Caractacus, and to have shared his captivity in Rome, ‘“‘Now it so happened,” says the Welsh Chronicle, “he was one 374 BRAN THE BLESSED CHAP. — afternoon at Harlech in Ardudwy, at his court, and he sat upon the great rock looking over the sea, and with him were | his brothers, and many nobles likewise, as was fitting to see around a king. And as they sat thus, they beheld thirteen — ships coming from the south of Ireland, and making towards 4 them. And they came with a swift motion, the wind being behind them, and they neared them rapidly. ‘I see ships afar,’ said the king, ‘coming swiftly towards the land. Com- | mand the men of the court that they equip themselves, and go and learn their intent. So the men equipped themselves and Near Harlech. went down towards them. And when they saw the ships— near, certain were they that they had never seen ships better furnished. Beautiful flags of satin were upon them; and behold one of the ships outstripped the others, and they saw a— shield lifted up above the side of the ship, and the point of” the shield was upwards in token of peace. And the men drew near that they might hold converse. Then they put out boats and came towards the land. And they saluted the king. Now the king could hear them from the place where he was upon the rock above their heads. ‘Heaven prosper you,’ said he, ‘and be ye welcome. To whom do these ships belong and who 4 XVII A SUITOR FROM IRELAND a5 is the chief amongst you? ‘Lord,’ said they, ‘ Matholwch, King of Ireland, is here, and these ships belong to him.’ ‘Wherefore comes he,’ asked the king, ‘and will he come to the land?’ ‘He is a suitor unto thee, lord,’ said they, ‘and he will not land unless he have his boon.’ ‘And what may that be?’ inquired the king. ‘He desires to ally himself with thee, lord,’ said they, ‘and he comes to ask Branwen, the daughter of Lleyn, that, if it seem well to thee, the island of the Harlech Castle from the Shore. mighty may be leagued with Ireland and both become more powerful.’ ‘Verily,’ said he, ‘let him come to land and we will take counsel thereupon.’ So Matholwch landed and they received him joyfully, and great was the throng in the palace that night, and next day they took counsel and resolved to bestow Branwen upon Matholwch. Now she was one of the three chief ladies of this island and she was the fairest damsel in the land.” 376 BRANWEN THE WHITE-BOSOMED CHAP. — The wedding was fixed to take place at Aberffraw in Anglesey, ‘ and both courts proceeded there, the Irish by sea and the British by land. And there they held a mighty wedding feast, all in tents, for no house, says the chronicler, could contain Bran the blessed. Whether this was on account of a passion for fresh air or of his physical dimensions we are — not told. But the story of Branwen the white-bosomed would fill the — whole of a chapter. I must therefore, in brief, relate how — sadly this auspicious match turned out, through no fault of either of the contracting parties. The first mishap occurred on the day of the wedding, when an ill-conditioned brother of the q bride’s turned up, and seeing a great number of gaily capari- — soned horses by the shore, and inquiring whose they were, | was informed they were the King of Ireland’s, who had just ~ married his sister. Whereupon Evnissgen became very wrothat — not having been consulted in the matter, and proceeded to lop off — the horses’ tails and ears, and otherwise maltreat them. There 4 was then a great to-do, as may be well imagined. But ulti- ~ mately Matholwch was paid for the horses, and sailed away with — his bride to Iréland, entirely pacified so far as he was himself ~ concerned. And Branwen won great love and popularity there — till the insults her husband had received from Evnissgen began 1 to rankle afresh in the hearts of his relations. And overawing — Matholwch, they drove the poor Queen Consort to the kitchen ~ and forced her to be cook to the household. So in her sore q plight Branwen caught a starling and trained it to hold converse 4 with her, and having told the bird where her brother lived 4 in Britain, she pinned a note beneath its wing. And the bird soared away, and arriving safely in the island of the mighty, s delivered the letter to Bran the blessed. Whereupon Bran in- 4 vaded Ireland with a great force, and there was both parleying ~ and fighting, and a considerable amount of magic at work for © many weeks. But Bran got so much the worst of the struggle that there | XVII GLYNDWR AT HARLECH 377 were at length only seven of his men left besides himself, and he being wounded, commanded that his head should be cut off and carried to Harlech, and kept there for seven years, and then taken to London, and buried upon the White Mount, with the face towards France. So the remnant of the British, the seven knights, taking the unhappy Branwen and her brother’s head with them, returned to Harlech, landing in Aber Alaw in Anglesey, where they sat down to rest. And Branwen looked towards Ireland and towards the island of the mighty to see if she could make them out beyond the waves. “¢ Alas,’ said she, ‘woe is me that ever I was born: two islands have been destroyed because of me.’ Then she uttered a loud groan and there break her heart. And they made her a four-sided grave and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw.” ‘The spot is to this day called ‘‘ Ynys Branwen” ; and in the year 1813 they found there, beneath a tumulus, an urn in good preservation, containing ashes and fragments of calcined bone. And he would be a bold man who went into the neighbourhood and ventured to assert that these ashes were not those of the ill-starred Branwen, the white-bosomed sister of Bran the blessed. However shadowy may have been the walls of the old ‘Twr Bronwen upon the rock of Harlech and the old legends that surround it, there is nothing mythical’ about these massive round towers and lofty curtains that the first Edward reared here, nor legendary in the deeds of arms they have witnessed. In every war since their foundation they have played a leading part. Glyndwr for long besieged the castle and for still longer his own forces were besieged here, while Mortimer, his son-in-law and ally, died here on the last occasion. And when in the decline of the Welsh chieftain’s power the place was captured, it was the temporary refuge of his wife and daughter and the dead Mortimer’s children, who were carried to London as prisoners. In the Wars of the Roses, too, great things were done at Harlech and occasioned the writing of that stirring march N 2 378 “MARCH OF THE MEN OF HARLECH” cHap. | which if music can nerve an arm or fire a soul seems to me 5 prodigiously well calculated to do both. In the days of Henry VI and Margaret, one David ap Sinion ef g Hh I wr , uJ Gateway, Harlech Castle. was Constable of the castle. But Edward IV on his succession : requiring him to give it up, the doughty Welshman, who had fought in the French wars, refused, and occasioned that famous XVII A SCRUPULOUS CONSTABLE 379 and desolating march across Wales of Lord Herbert—afterwards of Pembroke—and his brother, of which we heard something in a former chapter. The Constable on being called upon by Herbert, to surrender, made a notable rejoinder: He had held a castle so long, he said, in France that all the old womien in Wales had talked about it, and now he declared he would hold Harlech so long that he would set the tongues of all the old women in France wagging. At length, however, after a long siege he surrendered, on condition that Herbert should do what he could to save his life. ‘The King grumbled and gave his promise, but afterwards showed signs of breaking it, whereupon Herbert, with commendable honour, most humbly begged his Majesty to do one of two things: either to allow him to put David back in the castle, and send some other captain to try and fetch him out again, or failing that, to take his, Herbert’s, life in lieu of the Constable’s so that he might prove he had done his uttermost to keep his word. Harlech was the last castle to hold out for the house of Lancaster and one of the last to do the same for the King in the Civil War, surrendering finally to Colonel Jones of Maesygarnedd, Crom- well’s brother-in-law, of whom we heard something in the neighbourhood of Llangollen. The view from the battlements of Harlech is truly noble. Snowdon and its Satellites, when the skies are clear, rising in great majesty and perfection of outline to the north ; while the great promontory of Lleyn stretches far away to the west- ward, throwing here and there into the sky those isolated peaks, which give it so marked a character. Nor is it any wonder that Harlech, in a quiet and even select fashion, is popular. Except for the houses which have sprung up to meet this recent demand, it has always been, perhaps, the most insignificant- looking place in Britain to have borne the name of a town, to have had assizes and quarter sessions and been at one time the capital of a county. There is nothing now of old Harlech, and never has been anything but a small cluster of WSDY 84) WMOLL ISD) YIRAO ET CHAP. XVII THEEVALH OF VTHE ;ARTRO 381 mean cottages. And these look the smaller and the more insignificant from the very strength and size of the great castle, which, on the landward side, opening to the village, seems to have been made especially formidable, with a view no doubt to the fierceness of the Welsh attacks, and its isolated situation. The coast road from Harlech southwards is hardly so good as most of those we have been travelling upon of late, but is swung finely, for quite a distance, and at some elevation, between the mountains and the sea. Only at one point, how- ” \ i} \ FA . ‘a ive : Pets Ne Study near Harlech. ever, the waves actually break beneath us: for all along this Ardudwy coast runs a strip of drained marshes or sandy barrens, the villages following each other in quick succession where hill and plain meet. ‘The Artro however, debouching into the sea at Llanbedr, makes a great break and opens out a long drift into the mountains, and reveals the vision of a leafy valley winding far inland into distant scenes suggestive of much sternness and grandeur. A good road turns upit, and though relapsing, when civilisation is left behind, into a farm lane, may readily be followed to its terminus by those who love the constant 382 CWM BYCHAN LAKE CHAP. company of a joyous mountain stream leaping through wild sylvan scenery of the greenest and the richest, that this moist coast of Merioneth can boast of. But this would not be sufficient excuse for going up there now and embarking on one of those side rambles which are outside my plan of campaign if it were not that there is something at the end of it which I cannot bring myself to pass within six miles of and ignore. This is Lake Cwm Bychan, which, for loneliness of situation and sternness of surroundings, as well as for the beauty of its approaches, is among the spots in North Wales that most appeal tome. ‘Traps can be laboriously hauled there, but it is well to leave wheels of any sort at Dolwreiddiog, a farmhouse on the verge of civilisation, where the Artro ceases to burrow in woods and glimmers in zig-zag fashion through the open heathy moorland. Here the Rhinog Mountains, rising high before us, shut out the east. Lofty spurs come out to threaten us upon the right and left, crowned with a wild turmoil of rock and crag; and entering between them, we find a long lake filling the narrow valley. A track leads along the northern shore, till at the far end, under the shadow of the wild and really savage slopes of the Rhinog range, in a veritable cu/-de-sac, is an ancient stone house and a trifling oasis of meadow, and the signs of a small pastoral industry. It is, I think, the loneliest and most impres- sively situated homestead I know of in Wales, and looks its part best in clouds and storms. The human interests of the spot are in rare sympathy with its natural sublimity. The stone house, which is small, bare, unsheltered, and rude, was built about 1600. But the Lloyds, who have only lost the property quite recently, were living here for 500 years before that—monarchs of this solitude of crag and cliff and lake, and such pasture as grows between the rocks that tower to heaven with an Alpine ruggedness on almost every side. Nature has set her own bounds to this romantic estate, which may be some dozen of square miles in area, though indeed, to estimate such a valcanic XVII AN ANCIENT STOCK 383 looking wilderness by miles or acres, never, I should imagine, occurred to any one but an ordnance surveyor. It carries to-day 500 sheep: there is no reason to suppose it was ever capable of carrying a sheep more, or a sheep less. And upon this, for nearly eight centuries, lived in direct succession, a family who had the right, at any rate, to bear arms. I don't know where they went for their wives. It is possible, of course, heiresses may have found their way into this astounding wil- derness ; but I am quite sure no heiress would have stayed at Cwm Bychan, save under lock and key, and these excellent people seem never to have stirred from the time of the Norman Conquest ‘though no Normans ever found them out) till her late Majesty was quite a middle-aged lady. Our old friend Pennant, 110 years ago, was so captivated by the romance of the thing that he rode far out of his way to spend the night with the Squire Lloyd of that day ; and he has left us his pedigree, which some of my readers may like to see. Most, I fear, will skip it without hesitation. But here, at any rate, it is. Evan ap Edward ap Richard ap Edward ap Humphrey ap Edward ap Dafydd ap Robert ap Howell ap Dafydd, ap Meirig Llwyd o Nannaw, ap Meirig Vychan, ap Ynyr Vychan, ap Ynyr ap Meuric, ap Madog, ap Cadwgan, ap Bleddyn, ap Cynvyn, Prince of North Wales and Powys. ‘‘T was introduced,” says Pennant, ‘‘to the worthy repre- sentative of this long line, who gave me a most hospitable reception, and in the style of any Ancient Briton. He welcomed us with ale and potent beer, to wash down the Coch yr Wden, or hung goat, and the cheese compounded of the milk of cow and sheep. He likewise showed us the ancient family cup, made of a bull’s scrotum, in which large libations had been made in days.of yore. The family lay in their whole store of winter provisions, being inaccessible a great part of the season by reason of snow. Here they have lived for many generations, without bettering or lessening their income, without noisy fame but without any of its embittering attendants.” 384 LAWS OF THE CHASE IN ANCIENT WALES. cpap. One of them at any rate, Dai Llwyd, sought fame, beyond the marches, for he followed the banner of Jasper Tudor, and fought against Richard III at Bosworth ; and his absence seems to have been so remarkable an event and one of such importance as to inspire a bard to write a song called “ Farewell Dai Llwyd,” which is sung in Wales to this very day. In the centre of this punch-bowl, and quite detached from the naked mountains that guard it, rises the Carreg-y-Saeth, or the “crag of the arrow,” with much boldness to the height, perhaps, of a thousand feet above the lake which laps its base. And its name reminded the patriarch of Pennant’s day to tell his guest that he had conversed with men in his routh who had seen wild deer grazing in the meadows. The Welsh of old time were, like the Normans, great sportsmen. The rules of the chase as propounded in the laws of Howell Dda, who was pre-Norman, are most elaborate. Unlike the Scottish High. landers, who, in spite of the familiar and stirring cantos in the Lady of the Lake, as a matter of fact used no dogs in the chase, but drove the quarry when meat was wanted, by lines of beaters, into corners or corrals, the Welsh hunted always with hounds. Game was elaborately classified and, to some extent, protected ; no man was allowed to kill an animal onits form. Hounds and greyhounds were both used, the latter being slipped from leashes, and the rules to be observed by the various sportsmen who had dogs out, are extremely precise. Indeed, the old Welsh hunting code seems to have savoured somewhat of ultra red tapeism, for no one was allowed to carry a horn till he had passed an examination in the laws and objects of the chase. Nor, among other things, was the royal huntsman ever to swear an oath except by his horn and by his leash, a restriction that would go hard indeed with a modern M.F.H.! However, it is quite certain that nowadays, “No hunter tracks the stag’s green path,” in the lonely hollows of Cwm Bychan, nor do any hoofs but those of the nimble mountain sheep tread the patchy turf that grows between its grim and naked rocks. ol on a XVII THE ROMAN STEPS EGOS Strange to say, though, Cwm Bychan was a much more frequented place in the days of the Romans than in the days of the Lloyds, there is, in fact, only one method of egress to the east, and this is by way of that wild pass through the Rhinog mountains known as the Roman Steps, than which there is of a truth nothing more wonderful of the kind in all this country. For after following the infant Artro up to- wards its source, you suddenly find yourself treading on flat stones laid as a causeway over the spongy bogland. As the =A ay \ ee y e on SS . Oy \ ; N ) NI 2 ane He pgad¥ay) OT 1‘, | aera ‘WINS My tl, jill sass <4 J ii oA A Ray i Cun Bychan Lake. track érends upward through a scene of infinite wildness and a gap in the ridge of the mountains begins to suggest itself, the causeway develops into a regular ascending staircase of well-laid steps. As the defile grows narrower and the stairway steeper and even yet more perfect, one tries to pull one’s self together and realise what it is that is carrying one up, without an effort, fora full mile to the summit of one of the wildest and remotest of Welsh passes. The carriage of ore or mineral wealth of some kind can be the only possible explanation of this 386 THE GATE OF ARDUDWY CHAP. elaborate and lengthy staircase in such a place, and indeed there is a spot even. yet upon the eastern side called the “ field of the forges.” Whether the treasures came by sea from Lleyn or from Snowdonia, in both of which districts the Roman miners were busy, is of little consequence. It may be permitted us, at any rate, to picture the long processions of British slaves toiling upward with their burdens beneath these sombre crags, or possibly leading packhorses, for the grade and the con- struction of the winding staircase would quite admit of this. There are people who are bold enough to say that these steps are older than the Romans: but that is perhaps only for the sake of argument, which is after all the very life of these excursions into unrecorded times. But here we are, not only wandering about mountain tops, against the rules, but wetting our feet in the edge of the deeper water of prehistoric speculation, which is much more unprofitable. A good legend, however, is quite legitimate ; so, as we have mounted thus high, and are looking out eastward over a country that suggests the tale, though an oft-told one, I must for that very reason not omit it. Now the right thing for us to do would be to descend into the boggy flats beneath, and to come back through the Rhinog range by way of the next pass to the south, which is regarded as the most savage and rugged in all Wales, namely, the Drws Ardudwy, or the ‘gate of Ardudwy.” Once upon a time the men of this same sea-coast Cantref which stretches from the Dwryd to the Mawddach, ran short of wives, or perhaps they were not satisfied with one apiece. So marching as was their wont when bound for war, through this gloomiest of passes, between Rhinog fawr and Rhinog bach, they set their faces towards the distant Vale of Clwyd with a definite and clear purpose in their minds. Here, in that fat country, either by force or stealth, the incident of the Sabine women was sucessfully repeated. But the men of Ardudwy with their spoils had hardly got within sight of home when a lamentable thing happened. For XVII THE LAKE OF THE MAIDENS 387 the fathers, husbands and brothers of the Vale of Clwyd, recovering from their first surprise, had followed them over the Hiraethog and across the sources of the Conway, and now fell upon them with such force and vigour near Festiniog that, they slew them to the last man. But the strangest thing of all is yet to be told, for it seems that either the fascinations of these warriors of Ardudwy were so irresistible, or else the life of a lady in the Vale of Clwyd was so intolerable, that the fair captives, on beholding the slaughter of their captors rushed The Bridge of Llanbedr. with one accord into a neighbouring lake, which is called to this day Llyn-y-Morwynion or “the lake of the maidens,” and there dismally perished. As for the men of Ardudwy, the upright stones that mark their graves were not long ago quite thick, and some still survive as a terrible example to those who would break the tenth commandment in such violent fashion. ‘But we must take a jump back to the sea-shore, and to Llanbedr, where a charming little country inn, with the Artro leaping past its lawn, stands at the turn of our road and invites / 388 BETWEEN SEA AND MOUNTAIN - CHAP. the thirsty and the weary, and a row or two of new cottages shows that the summer visitor penetrates even here. The eight mile run to Barmouth hovers mostly between the marshes and the mountain slope, the sea glinting behind the vivid greens of these fat lands, with here and there a strip of sandhills or white pebble ridges to mark the limits of the tide. Sometimes we are down on the flat and can hear the drubbing of the pewits’ wings, as they come wheeling close past us from the marshes, and then again are lifted up and treading on the mountains’ toes, and can hear the calling of the curlews on the hill. It is not perhaps a country that a quick run through would fasten on the memory. The mountain tops upon one hand ~ lie out of sight, while upon the other the sea is thrust so far back that you can in ordinary times scarcely catch the voice of the waves falling on the shore. But there is-a great deal to be seen and done here by any one who would leave the road and ramble about the western slopes of these Ardudwy mountains. Few bits of Wales are richer in the relics of dumb ages, and grey- stones, that were not set in their present sockets by nature, are thick upon the land, besides camps and cromlechs without num- ber ; while out upon the higher slopes of Llawlech and Diphwys, you have half North Wales before you and a fine solitude around you, that even Barmouth in the season does not greatly modify. And looking down upon Cardigan Bay, too, even from the higher points of this coast road, when the waves, that is to say, are still, and above all, when the tide is low, you will be little in tune with the folk-lore of the region if your thoughts do not turn towards the submerged cantref of Ardudwy, the drowned country of Gwaelod, that has lain now, this thirteen hundred years and more, beneath thesea. For in the reign of Gwyddno Garanhir, a fair land covered with villages spread out here, be- tween the horns of Cardigan Bay, far into the sea. And it was guarded by artificial banks which were under the charge of one Seithenin, who ona fateful occasion took too much to drink, and ieft the water gates open, so that the Irish Sea rushed in and ir- XVII THE DROWNED CANTREF OF GWAELOD 389 retrievably submerged the whole land of Gwaelod. I have said that at low tide more particularly, a glance seaward will not fail to recall the story of the ruined cantref, for a ledge of sand and stones can be seen stretching for miles into the bay, a line of surf marking its course clearly enough, and at certain periods, the wall itself showing high and dry above the waves. It is known as Sarn Badrig or Bad-rhwyg, “the ship-breaking cause- way,” as well it may be. From Towyn, twenty miles to the southward, another mysterious wall of a similar. kind, Sarn y Suspension Bridge, Menat. Straits. Bwch, the causeway of the buck, runs out for as great a dis- tance, trending at its point so near to that of Sarn Badrig that the narrow entrance is a source of infinite danger to those who are unskilled in the local navigation. ‘The dangers of Cardigan Bay indeed account for its desolation in the matter of shipping. Strangers give these terrible causeways a wide berth, and woe betide the foreigner, who in a westerly gale, is driven within reach of the stone dykes of the drowned country of Gwaelod. So far as local history goes, the whole seaward slope of Ardudwy, from the Mawddach to the Dwryd, seems to centre 300 CORS-Y-GEDOL CHAP. in the old mansion of Cors-y-Gedol. For it dominated one of the few really great domains of bygone Wales, claiming at one time, it is said, the whole country between the estuaries. The Vychans or Vaughans were its owners in its palmy days, and en- joyed for generations the distinction which belonged to such broad acres. The old house looks towards the bay, standing near the mouth of a glen, down which the clear streams of the Ysgethin — come leaping from two mountain lakes towards the sea. Upon a one side of the road the ancient church of Llandewe suggests a Put oe v wnt $ } BY ‘ p z re a \\ \ N \\ er P| : {i . a if if HC gd, fe / \\ Trot a dk ane A A ASLO SP y. Sui: itt ls’ vis ‘i Pe = ae | } | Nh é Llanberis Lake. rare mausoleum of manorial bones, and a very treasure-house of Cors-y-Gedol memories. But the avenue that runs back from the lodge facing it hardly gives, perhaps, the impression that one of the proudest and oldest seats in all North Wales lies at its extremity. The woods for the most part are beaten and battered by the sea winds. There is nothing imposing about such park lands as lie round it. But the old house is charming and not altogether the worse, to my thinking, for its near contact with nature and its lack of those conventionalities of domestic XVII DESMONDS AND VAUGHANS 391 landscape that one has learnt to associate with the profits of Old Broad Street and Mincing Lane. It has passed through several hands since it lost touch with the old stock, and been much restored ; but many of its fine rooms are still intact, and the gateway and courtyard leading to the door are still the pride of its possessors. Its once owner, Griffith ap Llewelyn, was Sheriff of Merioneth in the reign of Edward ITI, and his great grandfather was a cadet of the great Irish house of Desmond, Osborn by The Harbour, Portmadoc. name, who settled in this neighbourhood. And from these sprang the Vaughans, who lorded it right royally for many hundred years between the Rhinog mountains and the sea. One of them who sat in parliament for Merioneth in Charles the First’s time was so fat that the folding doors of the House of Commons had to be both opened whenever he went in or out. As this was an honour otherwise conceded only to the Usher of the Black Rod, speculation used to be rife among the members when the doors flew open as to whether it was to herald the entrance of the Welsh knight or the Black Rod. BO2 *. APPROACH TO BARMOUTH CHAP. Charles II once slept at Corse y Gedol ; the room is still intact, and till quite recently the bed itself was carefully treasured. But as the house is not shown to strangers, it would be futile to dwell longer on its interior. Sea and mountains draw nearer together as we approach the bold corner of the Mawddach estuary, to which Barmouth clings. We leave the remains of Llanegrin Abbey embodied in an old farmhouse upon the left of the road, and upon the right, a full mile short of the town, stands its old parish church Llanaber, poised above the sea upon a sloping, crowded churchyard. No one should pass it by, for it is one of the oldest buildings in North Wales and one of the most beautiful specimens of the early Gothic to be found in the country. Signs of Barmouth, which has been almost wholly built within this century, and mostly in the latter half of it, are now thick before us. The castellated villa with which the Lancastrian of the last generation loved to decorate the coast of Wales is painfully to the fore, and glares in unabashed fashion at one from sites that are worthy of a Harlech or a Conway. But I will spare the reader any of Barmouth’s architectural details. Nature has been so lavish hereabouts, and is on so great a scale, it matters little what type of tenement the visitors that flock in summer to the foot of this mountain promontory take shelter in. The large new church however is really a very fine affair, its situation most effective, and the pink and grey stone of which it is built extremely pleasing. It was the scene some seven years ago of a terrible calamity. Great efforts had been made to raise the large sum of money necessary for building a church big enough for present and even more for the future needs of so popular a watering-place, and at the same time one archi- tecturally worthy of the situation. It had just been completed when all Barmouth was startled from its bed one night by a most unearthly crash, and hurried out to find its fine new church a heap of ruins. The setting of the corner stone XVII THE FALLING OF BARMOUTH CHURCH 393 of the central tower upon a sloping rock seems to have been the cause of the calamity, and I do not think it would have been well for the builders of the church to have been in the near neighbourhood of Barmouth upon the following day, for people of all denominations had put their hands in their pockets and from every variety of motive. I have stood inside the present church with the good Rector, who was naturally the working head of the whole movement, and heard him tell the harrowing tale. Never surely, in this 7 Me \ Vr Hah Ne Wha. Dy, , i nh Llanaber—-Old Parish Church of Barmouth. particular line, was there quite so hard a case. Let any country clergyman who has just accomplished his heart’s desire consider for a moment what a blow was this. But in the direness of Barmouth’s extremities a good angel arose. A local lady, who had already been of vast assistance, stepped once more into the breach, and behold! the finest modern church west of the Vale of Clwyd. But we have really no business with modern churches, only pausing before this one, on account of the tragedy it recalls. se St cae - Se 304 THE MAWDDACH ESTUARY CHAP. Unless indeed, the further fact is worth noting, that Barmouth boasts three striking types of as many periods in ecclesiastical architecture : the new church already dealt with, Llanaber noticed but not done justice to, as one of the most perfect of the earlier buildings, and lastly the Georgian edifice at the foot of the town, which as a specimen of that debased period would for unmitigated homeliness be very hard to beat, Nothing, however, can do much to make or mar Barmouth, or as the Welsh more rightly call it Abermaw. It is overawed by mountains up whose steep slopes the jerry builder cannot readily climb, though triumphant on the strip beneath, and is = rai Looking up the Estuary from Barmouth. washed upon one side by the sea, and upon another by the restless waters of its incomparable estuary. A large proportion of those people who know Wales intimately would probably rate the estuary of the Mawddach when the tide is high as the most beautiful spectacle to be seen in the whole of this beautiful country. Mr. Pennell thinks that it is even better at low tide, when gleaming lines of golden sand are thrown out one behind the other from spur to spur. Like that of the Dwryd, but on a larger scale, the estuary of the Mawddach and the Wnion, for it belongs to both, cuts deep into the mountains, the tide flowing three parts of the way to Dolgelly, which is ten miles XVII AN INCOMPARABLE OUTLOOK 395 inland. Both roads and railroad traverse this exquisite route along the shore line; but it is the outlooks from Barmouth itself that are above all, perhaps, preeminent. A long bridge for both trains and foot passengers crosses the estuary near its mouth, opposite to the town. “There is not sucha promenade in Europe,” declares a well-known guide book with pardonable enthusiasm. I, at any rate, would not criticise such fervour, and I dare say, if the scene were in Italy, no one would. It would be difficult at any rate to conceive any river mouth from which one could look inland on a more beauteous com- ‘y : cen Ak y owed Wi IN Ay |} ‘4 AN \\\\ AS \ ae ‘ \ (WS rh) The Bridge at Barmouth. bination of lowland richness and upland grandeur, though to take in the whole wondrous scene at a single glance and to the greatest perfection, the panorama walk just above Barmouth should be sought. Hence you may look down on what at high tide is a blue lake, somewhat less than a mile wide in most parts, and some half a dozen in length, winding between steep shores where rocky crags and wild woodland alternate with the rich luxuriance spreading around the country houses that nestle in the bays. And above all this wealth of wood and water and rock and meadow, blended in a fashion so exquisitely 396 CADER IDRIS CHAP. unconventional, uncommon and indescribable, are always the great mountains, climbing heavenwards. The triple peaks of Cader Idris look close at hand thrusting out the high tributary ridge along the southern shore of the estuary, that cloven by many a shadowy hollow, falls, over against the town of Barmouth, with much boldness and from a great height, into the sea. At the head of the lake, the twin peaks of the Arans lift their distant and more misty forms against the eastern sky ; while, pressing close upon the rich fringe of the northern Barmouth. shore, the mountains of Ardudwy are well worthy to match the rugged summits of the Cader range which faces them. This futile effort to describe the Mawddach esttiary leaves out all mention of the wealth of detail that charms and delights the traveller as he follows the Dolgelly road which curves around the indented shores through scenes of ceaseless beauty. There are roads up both the northern and the southern bank—both of them, more especially the former, of the first quality, and almost equally beautiful. XVII BARMOUTH FIFTY YEARS AGO 307 Barmouth, it must be confessed, is a little too popular in August to be at that season a pleasant place of sojourn. In May and June, however, it is quiet and delightful, and in winter boasts a-climate that for mildness has no superior in the island : while the beauty of its outlook, though the quality may change, is not of the kind which comes and goes with seasons. Some day, perhaps, this warm and sheltered corner may become a winter resort. There is no seaside town in Wales and most certainly none in England where a wintry sun lights up a scene so infinitely grand. Even before the railroad ventured beyond Shrewsbury, Barmouth was a popular place, but in a quiet and select-fashion. Even honeymooners of quality came here in post chaises, taking Llangollen or Bettws y Coed en route. Reading parties from Oxford and Cambridge revelled in its primitiveness and, I have no doubt, astonished the natives from time to time with many original performances. Indeed I know they did, for I have gossiped much with the ancient inhabitants, upon whose minds such things made a lasting impression fifty or sixty years ago. There is a house in Barmouth even yet called informally the Collegian’s house, having once been a favourite with University men, who if they are living might well be great grandfathers. But those were the days when people came to places with a view to a lengthy sojourn. There were no “week ends” for humble or hard-worked folk, while those who were more fortunate had not been bred to restlessness, and indeed when they found themselves in good quarters had every incentive to stay in them. d 2 CHAPTER Xx iat DOLGELLY—TALYLLYN—-TOWYN—ABERDOVEY THE old road from the Ardudwy coast villages to Dolgelly gave a wide berth to the then unimportant Barmouth, turning off through a pass in the mountains before reaching the mouth of the estuary. ‘The portly squire of Cors-y-Gedol, spoken of in the last chapter, was accustomed to be carried over this steep — route in a sedan chair when he journeyed to London for his parlia- mentary duties ; and the rows of pack-horses, trailing up the now _ grass-grown track, were vivid memories to men not a great while dead. In ancient days, travellers in Wales, whether bent on peace- ful or warlike errands, were given to keeping high up on the hill- sides. The valleys were neither easy going, nor were they safe. Even the Roman causeways ran, for the most part, far above the modern routes of travel. The two delightful roads, that follow the banks of the estuary from Barmouth to Dolgelly, are at any rate wholly modern, and cut through a bosky fringe © of country between the mountain and the water, that counted ~ for little in bygone Welsh life, and was rarely trodden in the © days of old. If only one of these can be accomplished, though both are lovely, that on the north shore should be taken for preference. For though the mountains on the Ardudwy side are fine enough; yet from the road they actually overhang, which looks over a continuous and exquisite foreground of — wood and rock and water, you have the great glories of the Cader range piled all the time against the sky. CHAP. XVIII CYMMER ABBEY 399 Some two miles short of Dolgelly, the road emerges from the scarcely broken roof of verdure with which the feet of the Ardudwy mountains have covered it, on to the wide green flats, where the Mawddach and the Wnion meet. Here stands the idyllic village of Llanelltyd with its ancient church and church- yard looking down upon the peaceful meadows through which the first of these rivers steals in quiet streams and bubbling salmon pools to meet the tide. And here, too, upon the further bank, nestling beneath the steep green hills of Nannau, The Road to Dolgelly. stand the ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of Cymmer. One’s thoughts on beholding its situation go back _ instinctively to Valle Crucis, and one’s loyalty to that stately ruin as the most ideal abiding place of monks and abbots in North Wales for amoment wavers. ‘This would be a hard matter indeed to decide, but as there is so much more left of the fabric itself at Valle Crucis, and its Abbey was so much the more important, any comparison may on that account, perhaps, be waived. As Valle Crucis was founded by the Princes of Powis in 1200,.so Cymmer was built by the grandsons of Owain Gwynedd, King 400 A POLLUTED STREAM CHAP, of North Wales, just two years before, and became to the land of Mawddy and Ardudwy, what Conway was to the north shore, and the great Llangollen Church to eastern Powisland. The ruins are now enclosed in the old farm buildings of Vanner. ‘The refectory and'the monks’ dormitories are even yet in good preservation, and indeed in constant use. Of the Abbey itself, the east end and a considerable extent of the walls are still standing, and being overhung with ancient trees, and thickly clothed with ivy, make an exquisite picture in such a setting of wooded hills and mountain peaks that is here laid around it. Cymmer derived its charter from Llewellyn the Great, and Henry III, during his wars with the Welsh, captured it upon one occasion, and, it is said, was only prevented from burning it down by the payment of a large ransom. The narrow valley of the Mawddach, which cuts into the mountains on the north and almost at right angles to the estuary, 1s among the most beautiful and most notable of ‘Welsh glens, and a first-class road runs up it for five miles to a romantic and picturesque inn which, at Tyn-y-Groes, looks down over a wealth of woodlands to the river chafing on the rocks beneath. It is beyond this spot’and near where the river forks, that the gold-mining of which much has been heard from time to time, disfigures the scenery, while a copper mine enjoys the unenviable distinction of having polluted one of the most pellucid and romantic rivers in North Wales, the only river too, that I know of in all this country that has been thus abused ; for the once bright Mawddach now goes leaping down its winding glen from Tyn-y-Groes to Cymmer, a torrent of thick milk. A melancholy and repulsive spectacle is this for those who can remember the days of old, and such as makes one wish there were a cursing well about, like that of St. Beuno at Clynnog, into which one might drop a coin or a pin, and consign the desecrators to some fate worthy of so heinous a deed. If the filth had actually killed the fish, something more effective than even a cursing well would have of course been XVIII NANNAU PARK 4ol brought to bear ; but both trout, sewin and salmon, though they cannot see to rise at a fly, contrive somehow to exist under these depressing conditions. This fact, I believe, makes the van- dalism technically legal. At Cymmer we are standing near the fork of the letter Y. The stem represents the estuary, and the arms the two rivers flowing into its head. Dolgelly lies close by, to the right, on the banks of the Wnion crouching beneath the rugged and fantastic slopes of Cader Idris. The angle between the streams is completely filled by the great hump of woodland park and pasture, on whose summit, nearly a thousand feet above the estuary, stands, not only the highest, but one of the most famous and most ancient country seats of North Wales, that of -Nannau. It is not so much the fabric itself, but the memories connected with its romantic site, and the antiquity of the Vaughan family, who have dwelt up here since time was, that have given Nannau such distinction. Above all it is the scene of a most memorable incident in Owen Glyndwr’s stormy life. For it so happened, that in the Peay of Glyndwr’s glory the then owner of Nannau was his own cousin, Howel Selé, who by no means sympathised with either the doings or the aspirations of the Welsh patriot leader. This bred bad blood, as was natural, between the relatives, which the excellent Abbot of Cymmer, deeming a lamentable thing, he conceived the praiseworthy notion of bringing them together again. Glyndwr was consequently induced to visit Howel at Nannau, and his conciliatory overtures being apparently reciprocated, the two men went for a walk together in the park lands below the house, the lord of Nannau, at any rate, being armed with his bow. Seeing a fine buck grazing within shot, Glyndwr suggested to his cousin that he should take this opportunity of exhibiting his marksmanship. Whereupon Howel, lifting his bow made feint to bend it at the deer, but curning suddenly round, dis- charged the arrow full at Glyndwr’s breast. Either by rare O 402 THE FATE OF HOWEL SELE CHAP. forethought or great good luck, the Welsh leader had a shirt of mail beneath his tunic, and the arrow fell harmlessly to the ground. The fate of Howel, however, was swift and terrible, neither his wife nor family nor any of his friends ever setting eyes upon him again. It is supposed that the two men and their attendants forthwith engaged in deadly combat ; Glyndwr, at any rate, proved the victor, and not satisfied with that, he burnt the house of Nannau to the ground, and its remains could still be seen in the last century. What had become of Howel — or of his dead body remained for a generation a mystery. SSS SNE SS) J ww {1}22) i 4 HY ah Low Tide in the Estuary below Doilgelly, Forty years afterwards, however, near the spot where he had been last seen, a skeleton, corresponding to the proportions of the missing man, was discovered in a hollow oak tree, and according to some versions of the legend there were those still living who could and did, explain how the vanquished Howel had been placed there dead or alive by Glyndwr. The old oak, which stood at no great distance below the present house, lived on into this century, and was an object of pious horror to the natives of the locality. It was known as the ‘“‘hollow oak of demons” and terrible sounds were XVIII THE HOLLOW OAK OF DEMONS 403 heard issuing therefrom by all such as were so hardy as to venture near it after dark. Sir Richard Colt Hoare, the famous antiquary, was by chance a singularly appropriate and sympathetic witness of its collapse. Happening to be on a visit to the Vaughans of Nannau, the oak was then, he tells us, twenty-seven feet in circumference ; and on the 13th of July, 1813, on one of the sultriest days he ever remembers, he made a drawing of the old tree then in the last stage of decay. That very night, unscathed by lightning and untouched by winds, it collapsed from sheer old age. The fancy of Scott, when he came through this country, was greatly taken by the tale and the mystery that for so many centuries hung round the spot. In writing Marmion he recalled it to mind— All nations have their omens drear, Their legends wild, of woe and fear. To Cambria look—the peasant see ; Bethinks him of Glyndowerdy, And shuns the spirits’ blasted tree. It is nearly two miles from the lodge at the foot of the hill to the mansion at its top. The woods and flowering shrubs, through which the various drives wind and climb, are luxuriant and beautiful. The broken nature of this mountain park too, with a natural tarn nestling in a wooded hollow near its summit, and the amazing outlook over a veritable fairyland of glen and mountain, make one wonder if there be many other historic families who possess so uniquely beautiful and so proud a perch. It isnot surprising that.people from all parts of Britain find their way to this enchanting spot, and follow a somewhat giddy path, known as “‘the Precipice Walk,” which has been cut for their benefit around the crown of the hill. For here Cader Idris rises immediately facing you in grand and rugged majesty, showing its whole mass, from the grey roofs of Dolgelly and the leafy gorges of the Wnion far beneath, to the three craggy peaks which leap so high into the sky. From here too may be seen the whole estuary of the Mawddach, gleaming seawards between its 404 DOLGELLY CHAP. soft wooded promontories and shaggy cliffs, with the mountains — of Ardudwy piling up against the west, and the beauteous gorge of the Upper Mawddach glowing and narrowing above the silver thread of the stream towards the north. ‘There again is the humpy back of Moel Offawrm, “the Hill of Sacrifice,” showing quite near to us, with the further peak of Rhobel fawr bounding the view. Much more than this is seen that to the eye is beautiful, but in the telling would grow tedious. I have no doubt a chapter or more could be written on Dolgelly. The pulse of Celtic Wales beat high enough in these sombre little grey towns, which after all were, in olden days, scarcely more than gathering points whither men flocked from castle, cottage, farm and manor house. The walled towns of the © Denbigh and Conway type, the “ English towns” of Edward the First, are another matter ; but of these others, of purely native origin, there would be little left, if the additions of the last hundred years or so were swept away. Inold Dolgelly, however, — such as it was, Glyndwr held one of his parliaments, and for long it was a great rallying point for his North Welsh adherents, and © from here he wrote those notable letters to the King of France, which speak so eloquently of the power he had made himself. Nowadays it is a quaint and rambling collection of grey-walled slate-roofed houses, surrounded by leafy and attractive villas that the beauty of North Wales gathers round all such little towns. But the charm of the capital of Merioneth —for thus much honour belongs to Dolgelly—is so great in the matter of its situation, that it would be absurd to linger over its unpretentious architecture. Cader Idris, as I have said, springs magnificently from its very doorsteps, while the clear streams of the Wnion, after long and plaintive burrowings in the wooded ~ gorges of Pont Newydd and Dolserau, sweep under its ancient bridge and out into the daylight. | Merioneth was one of Edward the First’s five counties, but it was a straggling, ill-shaped, unmanageable affair. It was ill conceived too, and rode roughshod over ancient cleavages, for it CR ner! Se rl ie | ges _ XVIII THE MAKING OF MERIONETH 405 - touched Llangollen, while it included Harlech, and stretched southward even to the banks of the Dovey. Flint and Anglesey, _ Carnarvon and Cardigan were in a sense compact and homo- geneous. But Merioneth took a bite out of two ancient and rival kingdoms, Gwynedd and Powys. It almost felt the English border, while at the same time it looked upon the sea, and was broken up moreover into a chaos of hills and moun- _ tains running in various directions. Great estuaries in primitive _Ardudwy, “the land of the sons of Conan, times and mountain ranges made common-sense boundaries that law-makers and map-compilers took long to leap. From the Mawddach estuary northward to Snowdon stretched ” as Giraldus Cambrensis rightly calls it. South of the estuary to the equally significant barrier of the Dovey, stretched the cantref and lordship of Mawddwy, clearly destined by nature and common sense to be a district to itself. The one had been in the kingdom of Gwynedd, the other formed the western extremity of Powys, Edward brought them both into his new Merionethshire, or tried to. But there is reason to believe that the landowners of Mawddwy remained a law unto themselves for generations,-and that the King’s writ had uncommonly little significance till the murder of Lewis Owen, Vice Chamberlain of North Wales, and Baron of the Exchequer, in 1555, on his way to the assizes _at Dolgelly, stirred the authorities to vigorous action. No particular inconvenience, however, now arises from the awkward shape of Merioneth. Its rugged mountains are pierced by roads, its valleys rattle to the railway train: its people no longer remember the differences between Gwynedd and Powys, or meet the officials of the North Wales circuit with cross-bows _ and daggers. If the “ Gwilliad Cochion Mawddwy,” or the red-headed _ banditti of Mawddwy, who for the best part of a century after the wars of the Roses, held this region in terror, were still about, this road would be an ill one to travel, that twisting up as it does behind the back of Cader, takes us over the lonely pass 406 PEBBLE POOL CHAP. which leads down to Talyllyn and the Dysanni valley. The scene is bare and wild enough as we drop down from the water- shed ; naked mountains rising sharply from the rough road upon either hand. shore while they themselves devoted, for the most part, their at- tention to the glorious country inland. There were scarcely any — houses upon the quiet foreshore in those days, but a pleasant common, bordering on the sandy beach, seemed to complete the sum total of juvenile safety and content. But in an evil hour the - controllers of ‘Towyn’s destinies conceived the notion that its — hour for encouraging brass bands and promenaders had arrived, They disregarded the warnings of its old patrons, the quiver-— fuls, and also the fact that few spots upon the Welsh coast were more ill adapted for drawing the gay and the gregarious and those to whom the negro minstrel is dear. I do not like to quote from memory the sum said to have been expended in turning the foreshore end of the common into a conventional promenade. But it is at present one of the most melancholy — esplanades in Britain. The old Aadztués fled long ago in disgust — from their mutilated playground, while the lovers of brass bands _ and promenading have as yet shown no hankering to foregather oe XVII ST. CADVAN’S CHURCH 413 on a strand that from their miserable point of view is melan- choly and forlorn. ‘Towyn, say its people, is now in a transition state ; and seems likely enough to remain in it for some time. It is off, in fact, with the old love, but not yet on with the new. All this, however, has nothing to do with its famous church of St. Cadvan, one of the oldest in Wales, and thought by many to be an actual fabric of pre-Norman times. Whether the massive pillars and arches are Norman or British, however, there is a stone column, now lying ina corner of the church, which arouses the curiosity almost more. It once stood up- right in the churchyard, and bears an inscription which has been thus rendered :— “The body of Cyngan is on the side where the marks will be. Beneath a similar mound is extended Cadfan. Sad _ that it should enclose the praise of the earth! May he rest without blemish !” | | Now Cadvan was a saint of the sixth century, who, like so many others, came to Wales from Brittany, and Cyngan was a local prince who co-operated in the founding of the church: four upright stones marking their grave may yet be seen outside the west door. Leaving Towyn with its fresh breezes, its lovely inland views of Cader, and its beautiful river, to consider whether it has made the most of all these things, we must get round the range that followed us from Talyllyn and now divides us from the Dovey estuary. To do this and to reach Aberdovey, whose situation has a singular resemblance to Barmouth, we have only to follow the excellent coast road which skirts the base of the hills, and looks down over drained marshes, where black cattle are feeding in great abundance, towards the sea. In less than four miles we have turned the corner, and may stand as soon as we choose upon the wharfs of the little fishing port and modest watering place of Aberdovey, and look out over the blue water, and gleaming sands of the river’s mouth, to the bold headlands of the Cardigan coast, which hide Aberystwith from our sight. POSTS ‘san0p.9g V CHAP. XVIII ABERDOVEY 415 As Barmouth clings to the feet of the Ardudwy mountains at the northern point of its estuary, so clings Aberdovey to the lower ledges of the green hills of Mawddwy, in the same relation to the mouth of its own river. If one had not come straight from the unrivalled beauty of the more northern estuary, one would wax enthusiastic over the charms of this one. For here also are hills and mountains, in plenty, to be seen on all sides. Here are fair shores, rich in woodland and well sprinkled with country houses. Here, too, are wooded knolls and rich tinted headlands upon the north bank, thrust out into the blue water, as at Barmouth, and sweeps of golden sand gleam against the verdant colouring of the distant marshes. But the mountains do not drop into the water, and fill the eye, and dominate the whole scene, as in the other. Across the estuary is South Wales, and behind a narrow stretch of low- land, the Cardiganshire hills sweep away in billowy ridges to- wards the smooth crown of Plinlimmon, which, though not actually visible from this point, is nevertheless the king of all. The harbour bar is a mile from the town, and in rough weather there is a fine line of raging surf joining the sandy points and fighting with the Dovey’s outpouring streams. On the hither side of the river mouth there is a great waste of sandhills, toss- ing ridges of bent grass, and scant pastures which were the scene of the now ubiquitous golfer’s first invasion of North Wales. Beyond the mouth stretches far along the sea coast the great green marsh of Fachno. Along its further edges, skirting the wooded feet of Cardiganshire hills, you may see the white smoke of the trains, toiling with their heavy freights towards Aberystwith. Outlined between plain and sea the scanty houses of Borth, where Uppingham school, in Dr. Thring’s time, took up its abode for a year or two, and caused some flutter in this little corner, till then unheard of, leaving it under the impression that a great destiny as a watering place lay before it. As for Aberdovey it consists, in the main, of a long row of houses, extending for half a mile or more along the river bank. 416 THE BELLS OF ABERDOVEY | CHAP. Many of these are of recent date, and are obtrusive caterers for the passing visitor. But Aberdovey is not a fashionable place, and upon the whole has a local and not unpicturesque look suggesting the notion that its tastes are nautical, and that it does its chief business upon great waters ; small craft of all sorts lying at anchor in the river beside its single street, or drawn up on the steep shelving beach. Nor is the impression altogether a false one. For men who have sailed round the world at the mouth of the Dovey are not uncommon, and veterans may be found sunning themselves upon the seats overlooking the river, who ask eager questions about foreign news, but know nothing of intermediate education, and have a proper contempt for Board Schools. “‘ Do you see that boy, Sir?” said one of these ancients to me the other day, pointing to a lanky youth of some. fifteen summers sprawling over the bottom of an upturned boat. ‘ He’s never done a half-day’s work in his life, Sir; and do you think he’s likely ever to learn to do a good whole day’s work now, at his age?” But this is rank heresy in North Wales, where education, with a very big E and a very accentuated “shon,” is the sure road to a social and material Utopia. Ihave asa matter of fact considerably toned down my Aberdovey friend’s views on the matter, which are pronounced, and have only alluded to them as a curiosity within the Calvinistic fold to which he belongs. How about the “bells of Aberdovey”? is an inevitable query at such a moment. ‘The Aberdovey people are hard put — to it for an explanation of the song that has given them such measure of fame as they enjoy beyond the bounds of Wales. Unhappily, there was no church in the place till recent times, the inhabitants in old days walking all the way to Towyn: a rise in the ground, from which the approaching worshippers first caught sight of the tower of that venerable building, being still called Bryn Padria, signifying the spot where the devout ones among them paused to say their “ paternosters.” But the Aberdovey church itself is only about forty years old; a XVIII A WILD BACKGROUND 417 so where and what were the bells? A _ pretty explanation suggests: that the old song was a metaphorical allusion to maidens’ voices sounding across the water. Another tale runs of a great giant, perhaps Idris himself, who carried a huge bell in his hand, and was wont to wade across the estuary at low water. One day, however, by some mischance he was over- whelmed by the tide and drowned, and his bell-is said to sound over the sands at certain hours and seasons. The ledge on which Aberdovey stands is so narrow that its US eS D t, e | sts es ‘Ee n| I, Up EES YFKE "Se SY WD" yt eine GS OL A); F ey oy N ) ad ryt g i yee Up { i Oe Hy, (tg Aberdovey from the back. more pretentious residences are forced to find perches for themselves on the steep slopes behind. Above these, fine sheep-walks stretch upwards and away in the direction of Cader Idris, and once on the top you may walk over twenty miles of turf or heather without ever descending into any serious form of civilisation, or encountering any one but a shepherd or a hill-farmer and his dogs. From here, too, you may look far into Cardiganshire, and into almost, another land from that more rugged and more immediately striking one that we have so long been exploring. Not that the physical difference between North and South Wales is the point I would make; for the latter, 418 NORTH AND SOUTH WALES CHAP.” 4 which few outsiders know, maintains an average of natural beauty much higher than is generally suspected. But the cleavage between the people of the two sections is very great —much greater than in general statements is admitted. That the people of Anglesey should be more like those of Aberdovey than the folks yonder across the river, whom you, can almost see with a naked eye going about their business, seems incredible. But I believe this is not very wide of the mark. At any rate, without quibbling as to the matter of a mile or two, South Wales generally not only speaks a different dialect of Welsh in its Welsh-speaking districts, but carries a population by no means wholly sympathetic or having like characteristics with those north of the Dovey. With the exception of a single county, the one now before us, the southern far more than the northern half of the Principality, has been subjected to English and alien influences. Half Pem- broke for eight centuries has been wholly Flemish and Saxon, and no more Welsh in blood or speech than the people of Hamp- shire. Radnorshire has so completely forgotten the native tongue, that it cannot even pronounce its place names properly. That most of Carmarthen, much of Brecon, and eastern Pembroke are as Celtic in their way as Carnarvon, is neither here nor there, though their way, if the paradox be admitted, is different. A North Welshman of the Shropshire border, and of the further end of Lleyn, talks practically the same dialect. But Welshmen from either side of the Dovey, allowing a little latitude, do not readily understand each other, and at the best use a vastly different accent and a greatly differing dialect. Each affirm they speak the purest tongue. To cite their arguments would plunge us into philology and worse; so I will content myself with saying that North Wales is generally thought to have the best case of the two. When South Walians go north as curates it is a familiar pleasantry that they prefer to speak English when- ever possible, lest they should provoke ridicule by their accent. But language is not by any means the only difference. The South Welshman, though upon the whole, inferior in physique, XVIII A WORD ON CARDIGANSHIRE 419 js held to be a cheerier, a more humorous and a less prejudiced person—more tolerant, more open to conviction. The North Walian, on the other hand, affirms that his compatriot of the south is less staunch and reliable, a mutual estimate which, read between the lines of local prejudice, would seem to corroborate the opinion of the outside observer. It is quite certain the North Walian takes even more readily to Calvinism, and has allowed it to influence his whole life in a fashion that people may criticise or admire according to their temperament. He is at least con- sistent. Religion with him is not only a Sunday matter, but its exercises are more often than not the recreation, to which the small farmer or country tradesman turns naturally in his spare time and on his holidays. If this devotion to the chapel is some- times due to mixed motives or to social pressure, the fact 1s not so obvious as among other communities. But, as I have already observed, the rising generation are beginning to think that some greater measure of worldly amusement, such as they see falling to the lot of others, should be theirs. ‘The South Walian, being naturally then more volatile, is less austere in his ways of life, and, as some people would say, more liberal in his views. But Cardiganshire though it is essentially South Welsh, it claims to be, and with good reason, a land unto itself. No county is more homogeneous, more isolated and purely Welsh. It is large and populous, and perhaps of all counties the least touched by English influences, being at the same time almost wholly agricultural, and, except at this corner around Aberystwith, entirely outside the tourist traffic. Welsh is spoken from end to end; and though it may seem impossible that there could be any regions more completely Welsh in every detail than most of those lying back from the roads we have been traversing in this book, there are yet those who declare that Cardiganshire is in some ways of all Welsh counties taken as a whole the most completely typical and representative. Should you ask a Welshman outside Cardigan what are the chief products of that great county, he will instantly reply, “ Pigs and parsons.” It is certain that it supplies the Welsh Church with a very 420 “PIGS AND PARSONS” CHAP. XVIII large proportion of its clergy, and these, curiously enough, are frequently the sons of Nonconformist farmers. The Cardigan- shire farmer is thrifty even above Welsh thrift. He has long held it as an object of common ambition, whatever be his own persuasion, to have at least one son in the Church, and for this he will make great efforts. Lampeter, moreover, being within the county limits, stimulates the tradition. And it would be strange under these conditions, if, in this, though the most isolated of all Welsh counties, Church and Chapel were not upon better terms than elsewhere. But seeing that it is outside the limits of North Wales, I have already spent too much time upon this country beyond the Dovey. Sowe must take the road which, skirting for some miles the leafy coves and bays of the northern shore of the estuary, at length breaks inland on its level and uneventful way towards Machynlleth. A startling instance of the ignorance that prevails even in high places upon Welsh matters, occurred in the debate on the Benefices Bil] last June. A distinguished Liberal statesman, and actually member for a quasi-Welsh con- stituency, showed himself to be labouring under the amazing delusion that the services in the parish churches of Welsh-speaking Wales were conducted officially in English, Welsh services being only grudgingly and sparingly conceded. Having discovered this astounding mare’s nest, the right hon. ‘gentleman waxed naturally indignant as well as eloquent over it. And- there being no kind friend near enough to pluck his sleeve, proceeded to put his foot into it even yet more lamentably, denouncing in fervent language the present practice of ‘‘sending men down to Welsh parishes stuffed with Latin and Greek and ignorant of the language of the people.” The House apparently preserved its decorum through this singular ex- hibition, andan honourable member, with much forbearance, then explained to the chief that Welsh was the regular and official language of the Church throughout Welsh-speaking Wales, and that English services were only conceded as a voluntary extra by the parson when there was a justifiable demand for such. The notion of the Welsh country clergy as aliens, un- necessarily weighted with classical erudition, and ignorant of the Welsh tongue, is altogether delightful. Welshmen at any rate forgot for a moment their political differences, and shared in the enjoyment of what really was an excellent joke, perpetrated so unconsciously too by one of the wittiest Englishmen living. CHAPTER XIX MACHYNLLETH—DINAS MAWDDWY—BWLCH-Y-GROES— LLANUWCHLLYN As I have told in a former chapter the Welsh version of Merlin’s origin it would be ill passing in sight of the village of Taliesin, lying just across the Dovey, under the Cardiganshire hills, without a word about the famous seer and bard who named it. It was in the days of Maelgwyn that noted King of Gwynedd, in the sixth century, that Gwyddno Goronhir—a sub- prince of his kingdom—had a son named Elphin, the unluckiest youth that had ever been known in Wales. It is said that the drowned Cantref of Ardudwy had been his share in his father’s territory ; and in other things evil fortune had so dogged his steps that Gwyddno, in pity for his son, had granted to him the annual dragging of a certain famous and prolific weir, at the mouth of the Dovey. Why this weir was only netted once a year I do not know. It would be a blessed thing for people . higher up the river if the present owners of the Dovey estuary followed the example of Gwyddno Goronwy. At any rate this annual operation never failed to produce at least a hundred pounds worth of salmon, a prodigious sum in those days. But — when the unfortunate Prince Elphin, full of confidence in the unfailing harvest, proceeded to gather it in, he and his servants, were filled with grief and consternation at the result ; for when the net was brought ashore, lo and behold there was not in it so much as a single fish, and Elphin sat himself down, and began to think now inall seriousness that life was no longer worth living ; and his servants and the people about him were 422 ELPHIN AND THE LEATHER WALLET CHAP. almost frightened that the ill-luck of a single man could destroy, as 1t so seemed, a fishery that had never been known to fail. But just as they were bemoaning this evil fortune, Elphin espied a leather wallet, suspended to one of the poles of the weir ; and he remarked, in sorrowful jest to his downhearted people, that there might after all be the value of a hundred pounds in that unpromising looking casket, and he bade thek eeper of the weir go bring it to him. And they opened the leather bag, and to their amazement found a youth alive inside it ; and his forehead shone with such a lustre that the man who opened it exclaimed “ Taliesin” (what a radiant brow!) ‘“ Taliesin then let him be called,” said Elphin ; and he took the boy sorrowfully in his arms, and placed him behind him on his horse, and rode slowly homewards. And as he went along at an easy pace, the lateinmate of the leather bottle, who had been so mysteriously washed up by the tide, began to address his deliverer in an impassioned ode, which i is still preserved. Here is the beginning and end of it, as translated by a Welsh lady of the last century ‘* Elphin ! fair as roseate morn, Cease, O lovely youth, to mourn. Mortals never should presume To dispute their Maker’s doom. Feeble race ! too blind to scan What the Almighty deigns for man. Humble hope be still thy guide ; Steady faith thy only pride. Then despair. will fade away, Like demons at the apenas of day. Behold me, es if fanen nae Yet heaven illumes my soaring mind, Lo! from the yawning deep I came, Friend to thy lineage and thy fame, To point thee out the paths of truth, To guard from hidden rocks thy youth, From seas, from mountains, far and wide God will the good and virtuous guide. 2 aos aeeailion tp oe RAS dea XIX TALIESIN AT CAERLEON 423 Elphin ! fair as roseate morn, Cease, O lovely youth ! to mourn. Weak in my leathern couch [I lie ; Yet heavenly lore I can descry. Gifts divine my tongue inspire ; My bosom glows celestial fire, Mark ! how it mounts! my lips disclose The certain fate of Elphin’s foes.” So Elphin, marvelling at the supernatural gifts of the infant with the radiant brow, carried him tenderly home, and gave him to his wife to care for and bring up. But his father jeered at him much, saying, ‘Alas! what will this child profit thee?” And Taliesin, to Gwyddno’s amazement, took upon himself to answer that question: ‘‘ He will profit him more than the weir ever profited thee.” Whereupon Gwyddno, taken vastly aback, laid himself open a second time to the little creature’s rebukes saying: “ Art thou able to speak, and thou so little?” And Taliesin answered : ‘Iam better able to speak than thou to question me.” And he broke out again into verse, which caused all around to marvel. Henceforward Taliesin became the good genius of Elphin, causing him to prosper wonder- fully and in due course found his way, to the court of the Emperor Arthur, at Caerleon, and became, as we know, one of the greatest of British bards, and presided over the chair of the round table at Caerleon. Finally let any one who has not read that inimitable work of Thomas Love Peacock —The Misfortunes of Elphin—lose no time in doing so, for they have a treat in store. There is not much to detain us at Machynlleth. It is a typical little Welsh town, just within the limits of Montgomeryshire. It manufactures some flannel and is greatly given over to church and chapel rivalries, and lies on the flat meadow lands of the Dovey, pressing against the low hills that are the outworks of the Plinimmon range. The gates of Plas-Machynlleth, a seat of the Marquis of Londonderry, open on to the very streets of the town, which are wider and more cheerful than one usually looks for in North Wales. Machynlleth, however, has filled a, vs 424 MACHYNLLETH AND GLYNDWR CHAP. big place in history ; for Owen Glyndwr, during his successful years, made it his capital. In 1402 he summoned a parliament Machynlleth. from all the counties in Wales, having successfully repulsed Henry IV., and being practically the ruler of the country. The old house where these native legislators gathered is still standing ee ee eee Six DAVY GAM 425 nearly opposite to the gates of the Plas, but it has long been adapted to the needs of a private residence. Tradition too points to a building, still called the Royal House, where the Welsh chieftain is supposed to have resided. It was to this parliament that David Gam came, with fell intentions of assassinating Glyndwr. Now Gam was a landowner of Brecon, and quite a famous character in his day. He was a close adherent of Henry IV., having been long attached to his father’s household. When Glyndwr, however, became for a time the ruling power in Wales, Gam feigned conversion, and came to Machynlleth with the rest of the Welsh gentry. It was an audacious intention, and one almost forgives the treachery in the devotion to the house of Lancaster which inspired so desperate a venture. But Davy or Syr Dafydd, as the chroniclers sometimes call him, was not as cautious as he should have been with regard to his intentions ; and Owen, coming to hear by some means what these were, had his would-be assassin seized and thrown into prison. He spared his life, per- haps with the notion that an indefinite imprisonment of the sort that obtained in those days would be the more complete revenge. So Owen kept Davy Gam under lock and key for ten years it is said, rejecting all overtures for his ransom, of which the King himself made several. Poor David must have led a miserable existence, particularly during the time when Owen himself was being driven and pushed through the mountains. He recovered his freedom, however, in time to be welcomed by Henry V., the son of his old patron, and to accompany that great monarch to the field of Agincourt, where he fell gloriously by the King’s side. But Glyndwr was not satisfied with keeping Gam a prisoner, for the next time he passed through Brecon he took his house Cyrnwigen upon the way for the especial purpose of burning it. And the story goes that while Owen was watching with much enjoyment the flames leaping and crackling, Dafydd’s steward arrived upon the scene, and upon this the Welsh leader, though so great a patron of 426 DOVEY ANGLERS CHAP. - bards, for the first and only time himself, so far as is known, burst into verse, and thus addressed the farmer of Cyrnigwen in an englyn of which the following is one of various trans- lated. ‘* Shouldst thou a little red man descry, Asking about his dwelling fair, Tell him it under the bank doth lie, And its brow the mark of the coal doth bear.” For Davy Gam, it may be noted, had a cast in his eye, and red hair, and was of short stature. He is supposed to be the original of Shakespeare’s Fluellen and is said to have been knighted while dying on the field of Agincourt. The Cambrian Railway, which runs down from Welshpool to the coast, and thence up it, clings to the river, as does the road which, with Dinas Mawddwy for our goal, we follow for some half a dozen miles to Cemmaes. There is much that is pleasant during this smooth and undulating run on which to rest the eyes. Low hills are upon our right, shut- ting out from view the great Plinlimmon wilderness, while through leafy hollows and past snug grass farms come rippling brooks to meet the Dovey, that upon our left sweeps from side to side of a broad meadowy vale, its silver streams. A famous salmon and sewin river is the Dovey, as well it may be, with so fine an estuary below, and such grand pools above, palpitating with perhaps the very clearest water to be found in all Wales. It is a little early yet, not for the fish, who begin to run from the sea in later June, but for the full array of rods that you may see waving along its banks in the holiday month of August, between Machynlleth and Cemmaes road. I should not like to say how many I have sometimes counted from the train window, when an August flood is fining, lest the local authorities should fall foul of me for diminishing the attractions of their tickets and licences, which all who will may buy, and may in truth draw prizes with, for there is no doubt about the fish. XIX WELSH GOLF LINKS 427 - Now it has always seemed to me a wonderful thing that an average golfer, to say nothing of a duffer, should so often betake himself, with the world to choose from, to some celebrated and crowded Links, where the moment of his start from the tee is regulated and posted up the day before, and he becomes the centre of a procession, and possibly spends his day being pressed by scratch players, or chafing behind a pair of worse duffers than himself. There is of course no need to go to Wales in order to find sufficient peace and quiet, with other conditions quite good enough for the average player. But if the reader who is as yet unconverted to the popular pastime of the hour will pardon the digression, I should like to say that North Wales has three centres at least,—namely, Conway or Llan- dudno, Harlech, and Aberdovey,—where the golfer will find all that he desires in the shape of eighteen-hole courses, laid out over a true golfing country and well kept. Of these the first is the most bracing. Harlech slightly the best and the most frequented, and having probably the most beautiful outlook of any green in Britain; while Aberdovey is the oldest and quietest ; and, having said so much, it would not be fair to omitall mention of Rhyl and Barmouth, as having tolerable facilities of this kind to offer to the visitor. ‘The rest, as the saying goes, is silence ; though by no means so as regards the advertisements by which hotels and watering places recommend themselves to the world.! All this, however, should really have been said while we are still upon the coast ; but, asa matter of fact, it was the conges- tion of ardent salmon fishers that I have sometimes seen on the Lower Dovey that reminded me of my omission. At Cemmaes Road we leave the railway, which here begins to mount the steep gradient to the cold heights of Llanbrynmair and Carno. Our own road following the Dovey swings to the north, and entering Merionethshire again soon brings ustothe hamlet of Mallwyd, with its curious old church and cluster of grey cottages. 1 Since this was written things have progressed, but Harlech still holds the lead, and, ceteris paribus, must ever be the most attractive. 428 AN OLD-FASHIONED HOSTELRY CHAP. Nor must I forget its fine old-fashioned hostelry, the Peniarth Arms, that thrusts its rambling and ivy-clad walls out into the angle where three roads meet. ‘The vale of the Dovey has here narrowed almost to a gorge. The river is no longer curving leisurely over a pebbly bottom through broad pastures, but is tumbling just below us over limestone rocks and shooting between mighty boulders where the gathered moss sparkles — from the spray of the river and the drip of the overhanging trees. The Peniarth Arms is a place where fishermen greatly for- gather, for the Dovey hereabouts is not open to all the world who choose to pay for the privilege, as it is lower down. ‘The situa- tion too is delightful, lifted as it is some hundred feet or more above a wooden glen, and looking down the valley towards Cemmaes, and up to the defiles of Dinas Mawddwy, and across to the immense green walls of the Ddolgoed mountains that seem, when mists are rolling in from the sea, as they so often are in these glens, to touch the very skies. Let us drop down for one moment to the river, for there is just here on its banks a fair natural lawn, shaded by a grove of tall and stately oaks. Sweeping its edges and breaking on a strand of shingle and tumbling over ledges of blue-grey polished rocks, and beating on the far side against banks of ferns and the roots of over- hanging alders, goes the crystal water, taking every colour from the rocky bottom and every shadow from the quivering roof. How it throbs and bubbles and steals and swirls and rushes and roars, now white as gin, now green, now amber, now glittering in a wreath of foam, now sulking in a deep pool of inky blackness, where flakes of creamy froth go circling round in never-ending eddies. Approach carefully and look intently into the depths of that amber-tinted pool, whose surface is so troubled that the rocks and gravel at the bottom, though vaguely visible, have a blurred and shifting look that tires the straining eyes. For some time you will see almost nothing, till bit by bit the bottom of the pool will begin to discover itself and take shape and form, 2 ig 2 Be a a4 | # eet pa aR er rt hee aoe gt a i Bah Scot big ham a ee XIX A WATERSIDE STUDY 429 -and a shadow perhaps will faintly flit across a pale coloured rock, ora yellow gleam of gravel. Keeping your eye upon the spot, the dark streak will drift over it again, and in a short time where it had lately seemed impossible to discover anything beneath the shifting, scintillating surface, you may make out with entire distinctness the length and goodly proportions of a noble salmon. If your eyes and ardour are equal to the search, you will probably discover its fellow somewhere near it, and two or three sewin perhaps lying at a respectful distance in another chamber of the pool. And even as you look a king- fisher will perchance dart downwards through the leaves, or a white-breasted ouzel take its perch upon a mossy rock, or a sandpiper go fluttering by in great commotion, as if you harboured designs against its four or five fluffy young ones, that have not yet ventured from the snug hole in the hollow bank where they were hatched. ' Themen of Dinas Mawddwy and this upper end of the Dovey valley have had for all time a somewhat lawless name, and people will tell you in the vague fashion that localities speak of one another, that they are a century behind the rest of Wales. The lordship of Mawddwy was in fact not really united to the county of Merioneth till Henry the Eighth’s time; and even then, as has been already mentioned, its inhabitants cruelly murdered Lewis Owen, vice-chamberlain of North Wales, and that not two miles from the spot on which we are now standing. For in the year 1554, our old friend Sir John Wynn, under commission from the Crown to stamp out the lawlessness of the district captured no less than eighty miscreants, many of whom at the hands of Judge Owen in his official capacity suffered the extreme penalty of their crimes, An old dame, the mother of one of these, piteously besought the judge to spare her son; but he well knowing the man to be one of the worst of the gang, had stoutly resisted the woman’s importunities. The latter, finding at length, that these were of no avail, tore open her kerchief in a 430 THE MURDER OF JUDGE OWEN CHAP. rage, crying out, ‘‘ These yellow breasts have given suck to those who shall wash their hands in your blood.” The outlaws vowed vengeance, and upon Christmas Eve of the same year lay wait for the judge as he was returning from Montgomery assizes through the woods of Mawddwy. Barring his path with fallen trees, they assaulted him of a sudden with showers of arrows ; and these not immediately taking effect, they fell upon him with bills and javelins, leaving him dead, with thirty wounds on his body, and the spot to this day is called ‘‘ Llidiarty Barwn.” His son-in-law John Lloyd of Ceisgwyn defended him manfully till the last, but the rest of his. attendants fled at the first onslaught. The district still bears traces in a modified form of the old lawlessness. It has the reputation, for one thing, of breeding the most determined fish poachers in Wales, and that is saying a great deal. Many more salmon, trout and sewin, beyond a doubt, fall to the share of the midnight spear, the gaff and the net of the poacher, than to the fly or minnow of the gentle angler. It is in the blood of the people ; and the magistrates of Mawddwy, and indeed of many other parts of Wales, some of whom are very beacons and shining lights of local morality, would seem to do their best to encourage poaching, by the deliberate and significant leniency with which they treat offenders. A section of the Welsh bench one might almost suppose made it their special and tender care that the idle loafers who net, lime, otter, and even dynamite the rivers and lakes of the country shall be shielded from every penalty that the law and the common sense of every civilised country enacts. In many places they will rally in force to a case of this kind, as if to ensure that the professional depredator, the wholesale ravager of streams that would be otherwise prolific, shall be turned loose again, with a trifling fine, that isn’t even paid by the culprits themselves, and is regarded as an excellent joke. Yet some of the gentlemen who evince such sympathy with this particular form of law-breaking would most certainly hold up 4 f| Se eet SON PRS MY SoD 4 | | XIX POACHING RAMPANT 431 their hands in horror if these same ruffians came to chapel on Sunday on a bicycle. This attitude is the more strange too, since the fish poacher’s trade, besides being illegal, is supremely and entirely selfish. He kills fish wholesale on their spawning beds in the hills, and pockets the money he receives for their: unwholesome carcases. In the numerous streams that are open to the humble as well as to the richer class for fair fishing, he takes no heed that he is destroying the frequent pleasure of' a score or two of people, when he puts his miserable net into the holes and scoops out every trout, in order that he may sell them in the nearest town for money that he is too lazy otherwise to earn, by working on a farm or quarry. The Welsh fish poacher is, in fact, the worst kind of enemy to the honest folk around him, who look to the tourist business to bring in an annual harvest ; for the fisherman is no unimportant item of it, and the rumour of regularly poached waters drives a large share of custom from a district. Poaching pheasants damages a single individual ; but fish poaching in North Wales harms an entire neighbourhood and all classes of individuals: and is followed by the lowest and worst of the community, without even the excuse of want of employment. On this side of the question, however, there is nothing particularly strange ; but the really curious part of the business is the amazing short-sightedness and the unac- countable sympathy for these pestilent law-breakers that animate what may be called the popular side of the Bench. The weapons used by the Dovey poacher are the big stones that form the bed and shores of the stream. The heedless pedestrian coming at night on one of these marauding parties would be greeted by volleys of these; and if he fancied, as is possible, that he was merely the sport of some village urchins, and pressed on to vengeance, he would very soon find out his mistake. A watcher or keeper is powerless against these combinations : and what encouragement indeed have they to risk their lives, when a conviction results only in fines such as the offenders themselves laugh aloud at in the very court itself? 432 JACK MYTTON | CHAP. I spoke of Harlech as being the smallest of places to have enjoyed civic distinction, Dinas Mawddwy too is but a trifling village ; and though it never aspired to be a county or assize town, yet it once had°a mayor and aldermen, the former in Pennant’s time being the blacksmith. I should imagine it to be a unique case of its kind, and that it arose out of the patch- 4 work government of North Wales in the middle ages, for there is, I believe, no trace of a charter from any king. The village functionaries who bore these fine titles exercised a sway only — over the large parish of Dinas Mawddwy, which runs for many miles up the deep thinly-populated gorges which here converge, and over the pathless hills which rise up on every side. The stocks were standing till quite recently, and were in frequent use by this rustic Corporation, as may well have been seeing what an unruly community they had to govern. A court leet, is © still held twice a year at Dinas Mawddwy by the Lord of the Manor, and fifty years ago the hapless Jack Mytton of Halston was the squire. Many of those pranks which helped him to get through a large fortune and brought to the dust an ancient name were performed here. His biography has been written and may be read, though what purpose either process can serve it is difficult to conceive, unless as a warning which was not, I fancy, the motive of his admirers, if such there could be, for attempting his immortality. Asa sportsman he was certainly neither an Assheton Smith nor a Hawker, and how he used to go out shooting ducks in his nightshirt at Christmas and ride his horse upstairs and over tables for wagers is not the sort of thing that is congenial food for con- templation in the presence of scenery so sublime as that among which Dinas Mawddwy nestles. For there is no place I think in all Wales quite so hemmed in by over- shadowing hills. | 3 Now we might, with more comfort, slip over the lesser pass, the Bwlch Ooeddrws, to Dolgelly, wild and high and beauti- ful enough though even this is; but I have undertaken to 5 Oe ne an hae aw | A De RT RR hE LETT ER EET FP ng RS eT he eT oe See | XIX THE GREEN HILLS OF DINAS MAWDDWY 433 carry the reader over the other and greater pass, the Bwlch y Groes, that leads northward to the head of Bala lake, which is twelve miles distant. I will say at once that the strongest cyclist will have to walk about three miles of it. It is the highest driving road in Wales, touching at its: loftiest ridge an altitude of 1800 feet. A smooth green hill, if it is high enough, which is seldom, and steep enough, and the sun is shining on it, impresses one, I think, in a fashion almost as much as sterile crags. Now, Dinas Mawddwy, nestling beside its sparkling river and narrow strip of meadow, seems literally buried beneath the immense and overhanging hills. Upon every side spring up these steep green walls, looking from below as if a sheep could scarcely scale them, and yet overlaid from base to summit with a coat that after the summer rains, which are seldom lacking, might be taken for the softest and richest velvet. Here and there is the gash of a half-worked quarry, Or an outcrop of precipitous rock. But for the most part there is little to break the surface of these wonderful green steeps which seem entirely to cut off the little townlet, with its quaint traditions of doubtful and eccentric characters and lawless ways, from the outer world. The red-haired banditti of Mawddwy may well have laughed long at all attempts to drive them from such defiles. And, in- deed, as we emerge from the enclosures of the narrow valley five miles above Dinas, and face the open and precipitous terrors of Bwlch-y-Groes, we feel thankful to be living in the nineteenth century, with all its drawbacks. It is calleda mile from here to the summit of the pass, but measurements are sometimes foolish and deceptive things. The road must climb at least 1000 feet in this distance, so the steepness of the grade may be readily calculated by any one who likes to put the difficulties of the ascent into figures. But the grandeur of the scenery cannot be reduced to mathematics, nor can it readily be put in words. ‘The wall that frowns down upon the pass is no longer carpeted with velvet, but becomes a rampart of almost naked P 434 THE BWLCH-Y-GROES CHAP. rock, rising precipitously above the infant Dovey, which leaps in thin cataracts down a bare channel at its rugged feet. This fierce cliff, for there is scarcely a touch of verdure on it, must rise eight or nine hundred feet above the trough-like glen below, and cleaving its centre comes down in what looks from our side to be a single continuous cataract, the eastern fork of the new- born river, a long white shimmering trail against the grim precipice. | | We shall have paused so often to take breath before reaching the summit of the Bwlch that I will say nothing about the wonderful backward view which will to a surety have been well imprinted on the memory. Before us, however, is a long stretch of wild moorland over which we might try to make some speed, but the road itself is indifferent. ‘The solitude is intense ; it is rarely indeed that you meet a human being treading this steep track. It is heavily metalled, too, and the rough stone will lie there for years upon the road for all that either human feet or passing wheels may do to level it. Away to the right stretch the great moors of Montgomeryshire. ‘To the left the mountains of the Aran. range open deep: thew lonely valleys, and thrust their rock-crowned heads 3000 feet into the sky. Before us far away, and beyond, Bala lake, the Big Arenig and Rhobell Fawr shut out a world of moorland stretch- ing to the Conway. ‘The small mountain sheep lie about the . road, and spring away with nimble foot through the heather as if a traveller were a rare and startling sight. The white-backed wheatear shows infinitely greater confidence, and flits along the wall beside us. The curlews make their wild music, beginning afar off with their plaintive pipe, and as they come forging nearer breaking into those prolonged half-shrieking notes of alarm that seem so fitly to fill the measure of a mountain solitude. Let us pray that the skies be clear and the sun be shining, as we drop down the narrow road cut into the face of the precipice on the Bala side of the watershed. The road vitself is good, and not so steep but that you may ride down it. XIX A DANGEROUS CORNER 435 There is no wall upon the left, however, and to go over would mean a broken neck. Far above the road in threatening > attitude springs a pile of cliffs, ragged and fierce of aspect, from which fragments are continuously plunging headlong, as is evident enough from the debris that lies upon the steep slopes below the road. Passing under this precipice when rains have been lashing the earth around these boulders, it is well to keep your eye upon the heights above. And yet this is a pity too; for the vale below, which may be seen winding downward to the head of Bala lake, whose blue waters are all but in sight, is one to fill the eyes with a great sense of calm and space, and beauteous _ colouring, and altogether a scene of rare delight. Here, again, beyond the valley and the glittering thread of the newly-born Twrch, which twists along its flat béd, is one of those vast upland Sweeps of green, stretching to the blue skies. At no long intervals it is cloven with glens which deepen and darken as they draw near the valley meadows, though always showing the white trail of a cataract fed by the rivulets and bogs above. But up behind these verdant ridges, high though they are, the peaks of Aran, at a greater distance and of a colouring and contour wholly different, shoot up another thousand feet or more into the sky. From the frequented regions round Dolgelly and the coast these fine mountains look bold and high and green. But from this little known back country they show a heap of rugged rocks, to which ferns cling in patches, or sheer cliffs, where no foot can tread, nor living plant grow, and where the falcon breeds, and its clamorous young make weird music amid the echoing crags, through the long days of early summer. It is a four-mile run down the narrow valley of the rushing foaming Twrch to the head of Bala lake, where lies the charming village of Llanuwchllyn. It was near here, and at the foot of Aran Benllyn, that Spenser has placed the 436 ARTHUR AND TIMON CHAP. home of King Arthur, in his childhood, Timon his foster-father, q as we shall see, living close by. “ ‘¢ His dwelling is low in a valley greene, Under the foot of Rauran' mossy hore, From whence the river Dee as silver cleene, His tombling billowes rolls with gentle rore, There all my dayes he trained me up in vertuous lore.” Three considerable streams run through Llanuwchllyn to feed — the lake, which is a mile below it. It is the middle one of 4 these, the Dwfrdwy, or the Little Dee, which the Great Western 4 railroad, climbing upward to the wild watershed, before 4 dropping down to Dolgelly and Barmouth, follows, that enjoys — the distinction bestowed on it by Spenser. An old cottage, still” 3 called Llys Arthur, or Arthur’s Court, crouches in the valley, a with the peak of Aran Benllyn towering to the south, and the infant Dee prattling by the door. The Dwfrdwy has yet to go | through Llyn Tegid, or what is generally known as Bala lake a so that there might be just dispute why this one, rather than 4 the larger and more beautiful and longer streams of the Lliw 7 from the north-west, and the Twrch, which accompanied us _ hither from the south, should claim the honour of being the source of holy Dee. 4 I have used the epithet “sacred” so often while wandering by § the lower and broader streams of this famous river, it seems : right that some explanation of its claim to sanctity Shoe be forthcoming. But that is just what is beyond my power to give. 7 That the Dee, however, was always regarded asa sacred river is am fact too often emphasised, in prose and verse, from earliest _ times, to have any doubts upon. It is only left us to speculate vaguely on the cause. Llanuwchllyn, which means- “the church above the lake,” les in a flat valley, a green and dry extension as it were of the level of Llyn Tegid, which 1 Aran Benllyn. xix , THE THREE STREAMS OF LLANUWCHLLYN | 437 can be seen sparkling beyond its farms and cottages. The village is within two miles of the watershed, between the streams which eventually run into England and those which travel their short impetuous courses to Cardigan bay. Being some 600 feet above the sea, with the whole length of the lake upon one side, and a fairly open valley narrowing into a gorge descending to the coast upon the other, it has probably one of the best climates of any place situated upon a main line in North Wales. ‘Three valleys, as I have said, meet here, one of which we have just descended, and the others, the Dwrfdwy and the Lliw, are each well worth exploring. It is striking to stand upon some elevation,—the slightest will be sufficient,—and see the three streams, after their long boisterous voyage through mountain glens, winding gently like silver streaks through the green meadows of Llanuwchllyn, and losing themselves in the shining lake beyond. Llanuwchllyn, however, is little known. A fertile and home- like valley, surrounded by mountain, lake and moorland, with Arenig Fawr lifting its double peak on one side, and the mighty Arans upon the other, it seems to me to have a special charm of situation. But with the exception of one of the best kept small hotels in North Wales at the station, and one or two private houses in the village, there is no encouragement held out to visitors, in what is really one of the most attractively situated villages in the country. Plenty of objects of historical and legendary interest too lie around this end of Bala lake. I do not call a gold mine an object of interest, unless for the fact that the one in the glen of the Lhw, near the village, was known to the ancient Britons. But at any rate it does not pollute the limpid waters of the romantic stream that plunges past it, so let us hope it pays. Above it, however, nobly poised upon a spur of the overhanging mountain, is Castell Corn Dochan, a mere heap of ruins, that speaks vaguely to us of the pre-Norman period, and was a stronghold of the princes and chieftains of ancient Wales. 438 | WELSH HATS—-TWO GENUINE SURVIVALS = cHap. 3 Now in the beginning of this journey I committed myself to — a statement which I am only too delighted to recant, and that here, at this very village of Llanuwchllyn. I am quite sure that nineteen Welshmen out of twenty would have spoken with the same confidence that I did, and as I felt justified in doing after so many years of Welsh wanderings; and this relates to the extinction of the old beaver hat worn formerly by the Welsh peasant women. I have now seen with my own eyes two old women wearing them at a funeral in Llanuwchllyn, and that be ee ad: “pilttiy ) mi 4 HH) fi [N Sa U ve Tale : Trin, ZATS ee if: ’ 33 He ~—- \ fe = Mai, it aja t ab ee Kt \ i} Road to Lake Bala. only just in time to save a mistake going irretrievably into print, which, though entirely venial, I should have been sorry ‘ for. Both these old ladies were over eighty-five, and I am quite sure many Welsh and other readers interested in Wales will be glad to hear that three or four of these wonderful and characteristic hats are still occasionally to be seen in Bala market. One would have looked for such things rather in the farther ends of Lleyn, or at Dinas Mawddwy, or in Anglesey. But Bala, though so linked by railroads with the outer world, sometimes claims to be the heart of Welsh Wales, and these XIX A ROMANCE OF CAERGAI 439 surviving hats are certainly a tremendous argument in favour of its pretensions. For I need ‘hardly say there is not the faintest suspicion of posing among these aged ladies from the hills. Nor have they anything in common with the elaborately bedizened female who sits throughout the season beneath a tree in front of the Goat Hotel at Beddgelert, and does a thriving business with the tourists. But there is a farm-house on the road to Bala, about a mile from Llanuwchllyn, called Caergai that is worth pausing to take note of. It is of the Tudor style, and has a history ; for Vaughans lived here for centuries, and it was burnt by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War. The John Vaughan who flourished immediately after this was a well-known poet as well as a somewhat erratic character in his day. For an old story tells how, though a married man, he adventured as a soldier upon foreign service and was away for many years, sending back no word or tiding of himself, and very nearly suffering the penalty that so often attaches to such thoughtless and foolish persons. But deciding on a sudden to revisit his home he stopped upon the last stage of his journey at Rhiwaedog, an ancient manor still standing at the further end of the lake. And here, waking very early in the morning, he heard a great stir in the house, and inquiring the reason, was told that the heir of Rhiwaedog was to be married that day to the heiress of Caergai —-in other words, to his own wife. Thinking the best place to put a stop to this would be at Caergai itself, John Vaughan hurried on his clothes, ordered his horse, and made best pace along the shores of Bala lake till he had arrived at his own door. Here being unrecognised by the domestics he was refused entrance, on the plea of the preparations that were going forward for the wedding of their mistress. He managed, however, after a time, to gain admission, and remained in the background till the dancing had begun. He then asked for a harp, and played a spirited Welsh air, which seemed to affect the bride with intense emotion, so much so that some of the visitors 440 VAUGHAN THE CAVALIER CHAP. interfered and peremptorily ordered this inconvenient stranger out of the house. But Vaughan upon that stood boldly out and sang a Welsh verse, which the present vicar of the parish, who has not only written a short history of the district, but a good deal of more extensive and useful historical work, thus trans- lates— ‘* If while away I lost my wife, My own Angharad Fychan. Go out yourselves. I will not lose My home, my harp, my hearthstone.” The agitated bride was asked which of the two men was to be ejected, and she intimated that her first husband was to remain, and it must be confessed this was somewhat hard luck for the heir of Rhiwaedog. Caer Gai is supposed to have been the real home of Gai or Timon, King Arthur’s foster-father. But its chief interest lies in the fact of its having been the home of John Vaughan, the father of the hero of the adventure just related. An eminent Welsh author was this gentleman, and translator of many pious books into Welsh, with a view of enabling his poorer country- men to have the benefit of their contents. He became an officer in the army of the King at the outbreak of the Civil War, and had his house burnt over his head, being himself carried prisoner to Chester, where he was kept for three years immured in the Castle. His estate was confiscated, but regained after much loss and litigation. There are several Welsh inscriptions on the walls of the house which in recent years has been exactly remodelled on the one he built. Here is a translation of one of them— ‘* Give praise to all ungrudging, And love thy common brother, Fear God, for this is good, And yield the King his honour.” This same road, and a most admirable one it is, carries us along the lake shore for another five miles to the town of Bala. XIX ALONG THE LAKE SHORE 441 The whole lake, the proper name for which is Llyn Tegid, or ‘‘the beautiful,” belongs to Sir Watkin Wynn, as well as much of the country around its head. His shooting-box, Glanllyn, lies pleasantly among the woods sloping down to the water. Other less noted country houses and old-fashioned farms, with their surroundings of wood and pasture, slope down to the shingly shores, on which for most days in the year and with most winds the waves of this large sheet of water are beat- “The Last of the Hats.’’ Llanuwchllyn, 1898, from a photograph. ‘ing with no little commotion. Across the lake, which is less than a mile wide, the high green moors are sweeping and swelling above the rich strip that fringes the water. Within a mile of Bala, its old parish church of Llanycil, a long low pic- turesque fabric, stands in most peaceful and idyllic fashion upon the very shore of the lake, whose dancing blue waves form a rare background to the dark yew trees, and the grey roof of the time- honoured building in whose crowded churchyard such a store of P2 ’ 442 THE GWYNIAD CHAP. XIX. local memories sleep. There is sailing and boating in plenty on 4 the lake, though no steamers or steam launches are haply q permitted to ply upon it. It is famous also for its pike and © perch, and a certain number of trout manage to lead a pre- — carious existence alongside of their most ruthless and deadliest — foe. | But there is a fish called the gwyniad, which Bala alone, ~ I think, of all waters in Great Britain possesses ; and it has been ~ there so long as the longest records tell of. A herring perhaps would best describe its size and appearance. Like the delicate white fish of the Canadian lakes, it is not to be beguiled by any bait, but is so tender that after a storm numbers are founddead upon the leeward shore, killed by being dashed against the ; _ rocks ; and, more curious still, many, when hunted by the fierce pike, fling themselves in their panic on to the gravelly strand — and die there, unable to get back. CHAPTERY AX” BALA—LAKE VYRNWY—LLANFYLLIN BALA is really quite a unique place among Welsh country towns. It has the easy peaceful look of a large village, and as the only street of which strangers probably carry away any recollection is of generous breadth and fringed in boulevard fashion with trees, it has a general air quite unlike the little cramped grey towns we have hitherto paid flying visits to. Then again, being near the lake shore, the neighbourhood of so large a sheet of water, simmering, or whitening, or trembling beyond the grey gables, is a feature wholly unlike the pent-up rush of a salmon river, or the prattle of a trout stream, such as lulls to sleep the good folks of most Welsh market towns. Bala, on what may be called its off-days, and they of course are in the great majority, is more placid and peaceful than any even-of these. It is a great gathering place, however, for Welshmen of all kinds and degrees, and can put itself ex féfe for a protracted Methodist meeting, or an Eisteddfod, as vigorously as the best of them. There is really not very much of Bala itself; what there is, however, is pleasing, and its surroundings are delightful ; while its only street worth calling such has the look of existing for the entertainment of the country, rather than of doing business with it. If I were asked off hand what Bala was noted for, I should probably reply : ‘‘ Grouse, theology and cwrw-dda.” So far as the first of these products is concerned, the little town is 444 THE CAPITAL OF GROUSE-LAND CHAP. surrounded upon all sides by the finest moors in Wales. Behind the strip of rich civilisation which fringes its lake, and the narrow valleys falling into it, great solitudes roll away for interminable distances. Particularly is this the case to the north and west, where the railway route from Bala to Festiniog is probably the wildest and most impressive hour of railway travelling in England or Wales. The shooting box to which the lessee of a Scotch moor transports himself and party for a long period is little in evidence here It is not required. Welsh moors, CBOE —— a SSS Ges ASS Rie SS ae in. te aS ei ee Bs Re S Llanycil Church, near Bala. when leased by strangers, are comparatively accessible from their own roof-trees ; whence they make several brief campaigns during the season, utilising hotels, farmhouses, or even temporary huts. So Bala is very wide awake during the latter half of August, and alive with sportsmen, dogs and keepers. As for the two other staples that the name of the place suggests, I trust I shall not be suspected of insinuating any connection between the theology and the cwrw. Indeed, in regard to the latter, it is no suggestion of intemperance I would insinuate; but I wished rather to be complimentary XX WELSH HONESTY | 446 ‘towards the solid, cheerful, old-fashioned hotels, which behind their fringe of rustling trees give Bala street such a hospitable look. Nor is it with any particular or special application to Bala that I would choose this moment to pay a special tribute to the ex- cellence of the Welsh as hosts. Whether male or female, whether in hotel, farmhouse, or ordinary lodging ; they are of the very best. So much nonsense is sometimes talked about the Welsh character, I feel glad to have had an experience large enough to enable me to speak with some particular confidence on this side of it at any rate, and to find that others familiar with the country are of the same mind. A few seaside places in the season naturally excepted, Wales is a cheap country. This, perhaps, is no special virtue, and is a mere matter of demand and supply. But when the price is fixed, whatever it may be, the conduct of the Welshman or Welshwoman towardsa guest is distinctly creditable. There is no desire, speaking of course generally, to overreach you, and there is every desire to make you comfortable. I have never seen any sign of that undue grasping that comes so easily and so readily to the average professional entertainer, great and small, in most countries. And there are always most admirable manners, and often a readiness to do all sorts of little things that are not in the contract and have been unsolicited, and for which no guid pro quo can be given or is expected. Another type of hostess with which most of us are familiar, who has no manners worth mentioning and cultivates a bored expression, and a keen eye for swelling a bill, and would not dream of doing a_ superfluous kindness, would no doubt stigmatise the Celtic attitude as insincere. All I can say is, give me insincerity, if this be it, and when on my travels may I always be in such hands. I think perhaps the Welshman or Welshwoman of this class wants taking the right way. If the humbler type of landlord is treated as a machine, or a servant, he is apt to shrivel up and hold his virtues in abeyance. He would not forget his manners,.but 446 SOME ENGLISH TOURISTS CHAP. the latent antagonism of the Celt to the Saxon would be awakened. It must be remembered too that there are a great many Saxons of a rough-natured and rough-tongued type, who go about Wales, as they go about France and Belgium, making fun of the people and ridiculing their language ; and, not being privileged to see themselves as others see them, are entirely convinced that they are the salt of the earth. Welshmen like this sort of thing even less than French and. Belgians. For one nation can afford to ignore the gibes of another ; but one section, and that the smallest and weakest one of a country, does not appreciate being ridiculed and derided by the other ; and the measures which the Saxon, too often on his walks abroad, takes to show his superiority to another race are not conciliatory or convincing, as most of us who have been much about the world know well. ‘There are no better men than the best, and no worse men than the worst, of the Welsh,” said Geraldus Cambrensis in 1188, or thereabouts. ‘“ When a Welshman is a good ’un, he is a good ’un, and when he’s a bad ’un, he is a bad ‘un,” a shrewd gamekeeping friend of mine, bred in Norfolk, but whose duties lay for half his life on the Welsh marches, used to say some seven hundred years later. And both Geraldus _ and the keeper were excellent judges, and had great opportunities. While in politics—politics meaning chiefly church and chapel —the Welshman is usually a Radical, he is still at heart eminently Conservative. His political leaders are never tired of accusing him of servility. There is, I suppose, a good name and a bad name for everything, and I do not know whether it is servile or polite for, let us say, a small farmer to touch his hat to the squire or to people of a social degree superior to his own. I should have supposed it was ordinary courtesy, the social superior, if he be in truth a gentleman, returning the salute. I cannot believe that life can be in any way better or nobler by reducing roadside manners to the hog-like brutality that nowadays distinguishes so many parts of this free island, and such as a down-east Yankee would blush for. Of all peoples, I suppose the Saxon has been XX WELSH CONSERVATISM 447 ‘least endowed by nature with outward graces of thiskind. But political ethics that would rob him of the trifle he has, and then point to the result as a spectacle for congratulation among men, must be a strange creed indeed. At any rate, I trust it may be long before the Welsh countryman returns a passing “ Boreu dda ”or ‘“‘ Nos dach” with a surly stare. It is, at any rate, quite certain that at present he still cherishes much respect for an old name and an old stock. The chapel has done much to banish interest in older history and legend ; but it has not eliminated the harmless side of the old feudal feeling. I am not sure that it wishes to. I think its high priests themselves, or very many of them, have a great regard for such things; and why should they not? The Welsh Radical frets himself less, I think, about social distinctions, and all that pertains to that thorny question, than the Saxon of the same persuasion. Commonplaces of a con- trary kind may drop from the lips of political leaders, but they are not seriously responded to—not in the agricultural parts of North Wales at any rate. But the chapel and Sunday school are, after all, the chief centres of Welsh life. The church, outside the towns, with few exceptions, is not at present comparable to the other in this respect. How could it be? When from the average congregation of a Welsh country church you have deducted the squire! and the parson, and possibly a doctor, with their respective households, and a certain number of immediate outdoor dependants, there will not often be many pews regularly occupied. The numbers will vary in their paucity, while here and there you will to be sure find a full church, but we are not concerned with exceptions. The chapel in rural North Wales, speaking generally, holds the field and influences its life. It is true that when the young people leave home for England, or distant towns, a teaction from the sombreness of Calvinism is very apt to take hold of them, and the music 1If there is one and he understands Welsh also, See note relating to special English services, page 420. 448 CHURCH AND CHAPEL “CHAP, and ritual of the Church of Iingland to lead them ready captives. But in their own country parish, this straying from the fold is rare, and to the would-be strayer a rather | formidable proceeding. It is not, in Wales at any rate,a mere question, as some English writers who discuss the question seem to imagine, of sitting in church or chapel upon a Sunday. The chapel is an elaborate and highly organised club. The social intercourse and the recreation of its members centres in it, with its classes, concerts, meetings, picnics, and so forth, and above all business relations are vitally concerned and secession would very often spell ruin. To break away from that community, and repair to what would seem the cold formality and the social stiffness of the parish church ; to throw up a club, in short, to which you have belonged alll your life, and which includes nearly all your friends, would surely require some very strong reason.. Now if the reader will put himself in the place of a Welsh man or woman of the lower middle class, does he think it likely that he would do this thing? Seeing that it is admitted by most sane people nowadays that both church and chapel lead to heaven, is a half-educated person likely to throw up nearly everything, and face the fire of all his friends, for an abstract admiration for the stately periods of the Litany ? Where you find a Welsh clergyman outside the towns who has made an empty church full or half-full, you may be quite sure that he is no common man, or else that he has had a little luck in the way of chapel dissensions and divisions, which is often a source of profit to the church. But because you find your- self one of a dozen at morning service, it by no means follows that the parson will preach a poor sermon, or that he is necessarily of a sluggish temperament. What can a poor vicar do if he is face to face with a united and contented chapelry ? I have mentioned elsewhere that a danger which does threaten the Nonconformist body is a tendency to revolt among the younger at the rigidity of the older generation. But the latter will no doubt give way. The Welshman, it need hardly be said, is a staunch Sabbatarian. But then he is not generally an xa. BIGOTS AND BICYCLES 449 aggressive one outside his own sect. He is consistent enough in his own practice, but does not look glum at those whoSe opinions permit them to walk abroad, or even ride a bicycle, on the Sabbath day : so long, that is to say, as they are not members of his chapel. If they are, no such immunity is at all likely. The parish doctor of a village with which I am well acquainted is a Nonconformist, and lives a long way from his chapel, so to give his hard-worked horses and his groom a rest, he took to coming to chapel and to visiting his Sunday patients on a bicycle. The result of all this was a letter of remonstrance from the deacons. Having an established reputation he could afford to give them a little piece of hismind. But had he been youthful and struggling, he would undoubtedly have been wise to have brought his horses and his groom back to their Sunday work. This is but one of a half-a-dozen such cases I could cite. Education, however, 1s advancing by leaps and bounds in Wales. Paradoxes like this will soon become apparent in all the full glare of their absurdity to the rising generation, and such prodigious and illogical bigotry defeat its own object. The Welsh have, indeed, a most praiseworthy devotion to public worship, and in pursuit of this will, even if Nonconformists, frequently patronise the church. Lestit should be said that it is to look at one another’s bonnets, or to see one another home or to enjoy music, I should like to recall an instance of what may in truth be called heroic church-going. It was in Anglesey, and I had walked over ona hot Sunday afternoon with a friend to see a certain inscribed stone, which lay within a small and ancient and out-of-the-way church in the neighbourhood. When we arrived a single bell was tinkling for service, and the scene within was much more curious than the inscribed stone. The building was diminutive to a degree, and absolutely unkempt. A few rough benches were placed on the rude stone floor: and on these were seated less than a dozen youths and old men of the very humblest class. The parson had ridden over from a distance, and proceeded with some expedition to read the 450 A MIXED CONGREGATION __ cuap. afternoon service in Welsh, no music of any kind being possible under such conditions. But at the beginning of the service three smartly dressed girls, evidently belonging to an altogether different social stratum from the shock-headed youths who sat hunched up on the front benches, put in an appearance. The ladies, we naturally assumed, belonged to some ardent church- a going family, and endured this primitive performance for the sake of example. Now there was a cottage abutting on the churchyard, and as we came out, there sat at its open door a ruddy and stalwart matron, looking almost as if she invited conversation. My friend, who could speak Welsh glibly, at once embraced the opportunity, 4 and enquired as to the three young women. We were told that they were the Miss Joneses, daughters of a well-to-do farmer, who q lived some two miles off, that they-were by no means church- women, but on the contrary strong chapel members, and the reason of their attendance, which was regular, was much more astonishing. For it seems, there being services at their own chapel in the morning and evening only, to fill up the measure of their assiduity they walked two miles on the Sunday afternoon to this, the most primitively depressing church service I have ever assisted at in my life. Our informant was of quite another type. She was a prodigious bigot, and took a savage joy in not having been inside the old church in her life. This, how- ever, I certainly should not have known had not my companion been a Nonconformist and a Welshman. I have spoken of theology as being one of Bala’s products, For one thing, the training college for the ministry of the Calvinistic Methodists, by far the largest and most powerful Nonconformist body in Wales, is here. But still more than this, Bala was a busy centre in the great revival of the last century that finally ended in the rise of N onconformity in Wales, and the virtual collapse for the time being of the Church. Like most towns in North Wales, the old parish church lies some distance off. We passed Llanycil, it will be remembered, on BG ig XX | CHARLES OF BALA 451 our way hither, picturesquely filling the strip between the road and the lake. Here was buried Charles of Bala, whose statue now stands in the town. Charles was a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford, anda clergyman. He was ordained about 1778, but remained within the fold of the Church till 1811, when he broke away, one may almost say in despair, with many others, and founded the Calvinistic Methodist body, which has ever since counted for so much in Welsh life. Howell Harris had been the first originator of regular “ field preaching ” in Wales, and in 1741 there were great riots in Bala, Harris being knocked down and beaten with stones and sticks. It was soon after this that the Dissenters began to threaten that secession which, as I have said, did not actually take place till this century. The Welsh Church, one need hardly say, was now at its very lowest ebb; many of its clergy seemed to think that there was upon them no obligation of decency or morality of whatsoever kind. The evangelists who arose, chiefly from their ranks, and who were, in truth, noble and single-minded men, were treated almost as criminals. The ignorance and irreligion among the Welsh mountains was what might only have been expected. There were few Bibles, and few people could read or write. This handful of Methodists not only represented nearly everything there was of religion in the church, but two or three of them gave up their lives to the cause of education, founding humble schools all over the country. The story is not a pleasant one, and itis much too long to tell. But by snubbing and persecution and fatuous courses generally, the Welsh church had by the beginning of this century purged itself of nearly all that was vital or noble in its body, and having done so and founded rivals that were almost to exterminate it, sank back into the lethargy which, after all, was much more the fault of its English rulers than of its rank and file. Charles, at any rate, is the patron saint of Bala. His staiue looks down its leafy street, and the nursery of the sect he founded rises in grey stone upon the hill slope above, while 452 BORROW AT BALA | eMaR. | his bones lie in the romantic churchyard of Llanycil. The memory of all these things is very vivid among Welsh Non- conformists. It has shaped to some extent their national life. The chief interest they take in the past is in the men that made this bit of history, and no opinions on the Welsh church question are worth the paper they are written on or the breath they are uttered with if this attitude is not recognised and under- stood. Among their rank and file there is not, as a rule, one ~ particle of sentiment for the hoary and often beautiful buildings that represent the faith, and certainly over-shadow the bones, — of their forefathers. What there is, is reserved for the naked, ; unbeautiful, modern chapel which represents the struggles of — Howell Harris and Charles of Bala and a host of heroes, whose ~ names are unknown beyond the bounds of Wales. 7 To descend, however, from these elevated reflections, it q was at the White Lion at Bala, still one of the best innsin — Wales, that Borrow smacked his lips over the “finest glass of — ale he had ever tasted in his life.’ Those, however, were the — days of home-brewing, and by the same token it should not be forgotten that Bala, under local enterprise, is making efforts to introduce a “Welsh whisky” to the world, the dis- tillery being on the banks of the Treweryn, not far from the town. It was at Bala, too, that Borrow, recalling the number of Joneses he had encountered, cried for mercy from the inevitable name. I have some reason to think with Borrow that Bala has — yet another claim to notoriety, as being the very home and ~ centre of that world-famous family. I was asked recently to secure lodgings there for a friend, and not knowing the — capacities of the place in that particular, I betook me to one 7 of the chief shops and sought guidance from its proprietor. The — result of this was to turn my steps toward the outskirts, where a 4 house called Plas B——, presided over by a Mrs. Jones, caters for _ visitors. Plas B—— seemed everything that could be desired, but was unfortunately already bespoken. “But,” said Mrs. Jones, : “there is a house at the corner of yonder street where I — xX THE UNIVERSAL JONES 453 believe they let apartments.” I found her impression to be correct. The apartments were to be let, and were excellent ; but the situation did not recommend itself. So taking note for possible future use that the name of this lady also was Jones, I fell back upon my shopkeeper friend for further recommenda- tions. “I tell you what, sir,” he said, ‘‘ there is an agent here for these matters, and your best plan would be to ask him ; and, by the way, there he is just going into that shop across the street.” ‘What is his name?” said I. “ Jones, sir !—R. T. Jones.” This II rf % i ( 4 y fy ae. By on ry Foy 3 3f ey : fo Gath ke US Sake Ve mt \ - a _ 1X ma) lane Tabs w so = he i ATLA DAMN f ee “hq - & . NWWENSS \" x te De WW BD AN / S He > STs S Tha SS i CS 8 SS i me ta \ . Ws NN NS The outlet of the Dee. was No. 3. I lost no time in tracking Mr. R. T. Jones and interviewing him on the subject in hand. Rooms in Bala when the college students are in residence are not plentiful, and the expert had to gently rub his forehead for a few seconds. “ Yes, sir,” said he, “I can direct you to two places, each of which I can recommend. The first is up this lane to the left—a Mrs. Jones, sir, an excellent woman, and the other is nearer the college.” “And,” said I, though the odds seemed terribly against it, “I do hope and trust that is kept by a Mrs. Jones too.” “Yes, sure,” said Mr. R. T. Jones, to my delight, quite unconscious of course that there was any humour surrounding the transaction, “that is 454 THE TOMEN Y BALA CHAP. a Mrs. Jones too, a Mrs. Cadwalader Jones.” This was a pretty — long run of Joneses ; and if ever among the wonders the future has in store a great reunion of the Jones clan should be celebrated there is not the slightest doubt it should be held at Bala, though competition throughout North Wales, for the matter of that, would be keen enough. . A hundred years ago Bala was wholly absorbed in the knitting of stockings, from two to five hundred pounds worth being sold from there every week ; and the industry even yet is not quite — ~ 2 SS SU PRINS \ XN AN S\ S& NJ a NY 2 the road to Lake Vyrnwy. dead. It was not only the women and children whose needles went merrily from morn till eve, but the very men gave them- selves over to the gentle and profitable toil. A conspicuous object at the end of the town is a prehistoric tumulus known as Tomen of Bala, the first of a long line of such mounds stretching down the Dee valley, erected by a race forgotten and for purposes unknown. Upon the Tomen of Bala, say old writers, the army of knitters used to sit in fine weather looking down the lake, and made a brave show ; while in winter they gathered round the firesides, where aged seers expounded the legends of former days, or harpers played the airs of Wales, and _ local DL o.¢ THE EISTEDDFOD 455. bards recited their last productions. ‘These things are done now under the elaborate guise of the Eisteddfod, of which Bala, like every other little town in North Wales, has its share. An Eisteddfod is a function which everybody who has any desire for seeing Welsh life should sit through, once at any rate, though this on the part of a person ignorant of Welsh is no small feat, seeing that it lasts, with intervals for meals, about twelve hours. There are, first, the competitions between choirs and individuals, all rendering, that is to say, the same piece. Then the awards are made known, and the chief judge criticises each performance. There are speeches, too, of which the glories of the Eisteddfod are the chief burden. Then the local bards mount the rostrum one after the other, and recite the verses they have composed on the subject of the day, and when they have retired, each man’ to his seat in the audience, and the award is given, and the laureate of the day crowned, the blushing poet is led from his place to the stage again by his brother bards and then the ancient and mystic process of “chairing” is gone through. A naked sword is held above the victor’s head, accompanied by some time-honoured incanta- tion. ‘The new hero of the moment is then pressed down into the carved armchair of oak standing ready for him. In this he sits for all to admire—and poets are not always physically admirable—for the rest of the day, carrying it home with him as atreasured relic of his triumph. The day, or rather night, is then finished with an ordinary concert, at which Welsh pro- fessional talent from London often assists. Every village and district contains several individuals who give some of their leisure hours to the composition of poetry, or what would fain be poetry.!_ Every one of these singers has a “ bardic name,” which he greatly cherishes. The Eisteddfod, at any rate, is a common ground, on which church and chapel meet ; the squire and the deacon, the parson and the preacher, sitting side by side in the seats of honour. If any people are hostile to it, it is 1 The great national Eisteddfod is of course a more elaborate performance. i 456 RHIWLAS AND RHIWAEDOG CHAP. a section of Nonconformity, who regard it as bordering too much on the frivolous and encouraging levity ! Just outside Bala town the beautiful Treweryn comes pouring its strong clear streams through the wooded gorges of Rhiwlas with its fine old mansion and great sporting estate, so familiar by name throughout the Principality. Prices went hence to Parliament in Charles I.’s time, and Prices live there yet. In the flat meadows below the lake and town the Treweryn and freshly-liberated Dee mingle their waters, which go rushing hence for a dozen miles through the sweet vale of Edeyrnion, beating, ultimately, the parapets of that old bridge at Corwen where we lingered for a few minutes, it may be remembered, at an early stage of our journey. The view up Bala lake from this lower end is full of charm, and by no means devoid of the grandeur that is sometimes said to find no place here. To see Llyn Tegid at its best, however, 1s to drift in a boat over its surface ona summer evening, when its rich sloping banks are throwing shadows on the water, and the twin peaks of the Arrans and the mighty mass of Cader are looming clear and grim nea the western sky. My space is nearly out aie our journey is nearly over, but I propose to employ what remains of the first in looking at Bala’s new rival, which was called into being some ten years ago and is about as many miles distant. It may seem, perhaps, a trifle absurd to speak of an old and famous and beautiful lake suffering from sudden competition and having its supremacy threatened by a new reservoir. But when we get to Lake Vyrnwy this will be more readily understood. The road which connects the two lakes, the old one and the new, 1s not such as a cyclist would select for a merry spin. It is, in fact, rough and steep, having to surmount the Berwyns and traverse an unpeopled country. Before plunging, however, into the valley of the Hirnant, which strikes southward from the foot of Bala lake, we must not omit to note the old manor house of Rhiwaedog, or “the bloody brow,” that has seen »o.4 OVER THE BERWYN 457 much history. Fora great battle was fought there once between the Saxons and the Welsh, where the noted warrior bard Llowarch Hén witnessed the death of the last of his four-and- twenty sons, Cynddelw, and wrote a pathetic elegy on the subject, still extant, and familiar to Welsh scholars. ‘The owner of Rhiwaedog in the fourteenth century was fighting in France with John, Duke of Lancaster, and must have been a com- panion of Glyndwr’s youth, being virtually his neighbour, and both attached to the English Court. eG Ae Ay AS, ih Approach to Lake Vyrnwy. I may as well say at once that there are about three miles of steady pull to the ridge of the Berwyn, which the road crosses, and that this is from 1200 to 1400 feet above Bala lake. Grouse rise continually to the right and left, for these are some of the best moors in Wales ; but there is little else of life to be met upon this lonely pass. Hills sweep away in every direction ; and the scene, though not so beautiful as many passes we have crossed, is wild and impressive. We are soon upon the sources of the Vyrnwy, and, descending a bare valley, pass ultimately through a wooded gorge on to the shores of the largest lake in 458 A SUBMERGED VILLAGE iB Wales, and upon the whole, I think, the most beautiful. We A see before us from this upper end a long valley, bounded upon’ ‘ either side by lofty hills, and filled, for as far as we can see it, which is about five miles, with water. Once down upon 3 its shores, the mountain road we have been laboriously travelling changes to a carefully made level track, as good as any in all Wales. Here as we roll easily along the edge of the lake, there _ is ample opportunity to look about us, and try to realize, among other things, that not more than a dozen years ago, where now all is water, fields, farms, and houses, a village, and a church, and a population of some 500 souls, were peacefully living out thei sequestered lives without a thought of the coming deluge, beneath which the distant city of Liverpool in its needs for fresh water was about to bury them. There was no spot in all Britain where life had flowed more tranquilly than in this remote village and parish of Llanwddyn the more so as it forms a cul de sac, the valley terminating abruptly in the bold front of the Berwyn mountains, which we have just crossed. Something like 500 souls, who spoke no~ English worth mentioning, were living here at the time when the news came on them like a thunderclap, that they were to be e wiped off the face of the earth. I do not think it would be un- | just to the average villager of, let us say, Wiltshire or Suffolk, to suppose, that under a similar shock, he would find more than solace in the prospects of financial compensation inevitable in so drastic a scheme. The Celt of Wales may, or may not, lack some of the virtues of the English rustic, but his affection for the home of his fathers is incomparably greater, and often indeed rises superior to gold or worldly advancement. At any rate, when the Cor- poration of Liverpool, after hovering in threatening attitude over many Welsh valleys, descended finally upon this devoted spot, the consternation among a portion of its inhabitants was very — great indeed. It is painful enough, for those who are sensitive — on such matters, to be dragged from their homes ; but to have XxX A STRANGE UPROOTING 459 these and every neighbouring landmark buried permanently under eight or ten fathoms of water is still more distressing, and a strange experience in the annals of the poor. It was commonly said that many of the old people who were thus uprooted did not survive the process, but died of a broken heart, as old people often die after a disastrous and humiliating war. Most of the village was blown up or pulled down preparatory to the damming of the waters. One stout old dame vowed that she would perish beneath the ruins of her roof-tree rather than be evicted, and resisted all efforts to remove her, with an energy that would have Lake Vyrawy from the hotel grounds. done credit to a Tipperary heroine playing to an applauding audience of peasants and politicians. The vale of Llanwddyn, however, has long ceased to exist : church, inn, vicarage and village street have all gone. Not only were the living transferred from their habitations, but the very dead, whose bones could still be found, were taken from their graves, and laid in a fresh resting place, some 300 feet nearer heaven, and under the shadow of a newly-built church. ; The hotel, built by the Corporation of Liverpool on a high 460 A BEAUTIFUL SCENE CHAP. spur above the foot of the lake, commands an outlook of a kind differing from any that I know of, from a hotel window in Wales. We find ourselves looking down from a considerable q height over rustling tree-tops, which seem to dip into ‘the | shining surface of this noble sheet of water, that, stretching away westward for five miles, seems to press right into the very heart of the Berwyn mountains. One behind the other lofty hills, from an elevation of 2,000 feet, drop their shoulders to the water’s edge, till the gradually narrowing vista is closed by the great wall of grouse moors which separates the waters that swell the Severn from those that swell the Dee. This is much the most imposing lake in all Wales; and the Corporation of Liverpool take a just pride in their unique property, for it is not only the water itself that belongs to them, but many thousand acres of mountain and moorland on which grouse now fly as thickly as in any part of the Principality. Though Liverpool owns it, neither Manchester nor Liverpool come here in the tourist sense, for of accommodation other than the admirable hotel, which caters chiefly for sportsmen, there is none. Nor would any efforts to provide this be permitted, seeing that population by the lake shore is being reduced to a minimum for the sake of the purity of the water. The upper fringe of old Llanwddyn civilisation still remains — 1 above the waves, and with pastures, woodlands, and a few ancient homesteads, makes a rich and pleasing margin between the bold face of the mountains and the lake. But the bulk of it lies as effectually buried beneath the waves as the drowned cantrep of Ardudwy, and looking up the lake or looking over it from any point where the dam is not actually visible, there is nothing to suggest that the waters have been pent up here by the hand of man. To engineers, indeed, the very dam that holds back this immense volume of waters, thirty to eighty feet in depth and eleven miles in circumference, is a work of profound interest. Happily its builders had art in their minds as well as safety, and the stonework which carries the high XX ROUND THE LAKE | 461 ‘road across the dam, some six hundred yards at this narrow point of egress from shore: to shore, is so far from being an eyesore, that I have heard artists speak of it as a thing of beauty ‘nitself. The hotel is of the first grade and in good hands. Being not far short of a thousand feet above sea level, it is beyond doubt the most bracing place in North Wales, where a comfortable existence can be led, as well as occupying a site whose beauty in summer it would be hard to exaggerate. A fe Lo Li ZZ» yi} I Yuli WY 5 ~ ) rt : tay NG) Pir BS SK Ca f f f his - 4 in j/ i Gar i) / / Z y Wy / Hf rly y ALi yf / L y y y y/ i 4 FH f y ns y ey 3 f j x j fff sh a Nii fal ¥ “| a, SA Ay, x Vv é3) | The Great Dam. perfect road, too, has been made all round the lake, and being so deep in the Montgomery mountains, whose highways are all either perpendicular or rough, this twelve miles of smooth macadam amid a scene so fair is doubly grateful. Deeply indented and curving bays on the lake shore now mark the spot where lateral valleys in former days sent their tributary streams spouting down into the Vyrnwy, which then meandered through flat meadows. Around many of these inlets the planter has been busy. On their quiet surface, free from the breezes that out- side are almost always stirring, the shadows of exotic trees, 462 TROUTING ON LAKE VYRNWY CHAP. || of copper beeches and maples, and arbor vite, grow longer year by year; and each June the gay bloom of azaleas and thododendrons light up with increasing splendour the base of the eternal hills. : Lake Vyrnwy has become a very notable fishing resort, and is probably the best trouting lake south of the Scottish High- lands, accessible to any one who is ready to. pay for a licence. The stocking of so large a sheet of water and the progress of the fish has been an experiment interesting to all piscicul- | turalists. But the reader being probably not of that persuasion, I will refrain from discourse on a congenial theme, merely remarking that the once small troutlets which peopled the infant Vyrnwy and its tributary brooks have proved better than any imported stock, and may be seen, now grown to goodly trout of a foot long, breaking the surface when a rise is on in every direction and in all parts of the lake. | \ Indeed, it is in the intervals of a day’s fishing, when out on the broad bosom of the lake, that you may best take in both the beauty and romance of the place. Then is the time, after straining your eyes for an hour or so at where you know your flies to be among the dancing ripples, then is the time to lie back and rest them on the silent crags towering to the sky, on the emerald turf, fresh with mountain mists and warmed by the suns of May, that sweep upward to their feet. The middle heights, too, are all ablaze with golden gorse and sprinkled thick with feathery birch trees. From the straggling woods of primitive oaks, hoary with trailing moss and waist deep in bracken, that dip here and there to the water, comes at such times the note of the cuckoo, full and clear. Upon the high, rough pastures that fringe the moorland one hears all day long the bell-like trill of the nesting curlew, while in sunny thickets by the water side the thrush pours out her homelier gush of melody. But perhaps after all it is at sunset, when the day’s work is over, and the breeze is dead, and we are stealing slowly homeward down the lake, that the spell of its strange associations is j XX, SENTIMENTAL REVERIES 463. strongest. On the banks of Lough Neagh, according to Tom Moore. ‘* When the fisherman strays, At the dim cold eve’s declining, He sees the round towers of other days In the wave beneath him shining.” Surely we too, as we drift along over the steely surface of Lake Vyrnwy, with the mountains darkling upon either hand, and the crimson after-glow paling into green behind the rugged brow of Allt-yr-Erydd, may indulge in reveries justifiable as those of ‘Tom Moore’s fisherman. We may behold in the glass beside us, with the eye of memory at any rate, if not of fancy, the cheerful homesteads of Llanwddyn, that now lie ruined and sodden be- neath the seventy feet of water over which we glide. In the village street big eels are now sliming in the mud ; over the old hearth- stone of the “ Powis Arms,” that welcomed with its cheery blaze ‘so many generations of travellers from the cold passes of the Berwyns, this is surely a meet occasion to drop the tributary tear. Where hedgerows bloomed gay with wild dogrose and honey- suckle huge trout, that human eye never beholds but angling fancy fondly pictures, sail lazily around, no doubt amid dank and trailing weeds. The old church that St. Wyddyn founded in the sixth century, and the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem rebuilt in the twelfth, should surely have some message to send up from the depths. In the Duke of Beaufort’s famous progress through Wales in the reign of James the Second, his secretary tells us how the bell in its little belfry ‘‘jangled for loyalty with . such strange noise and good affection” as his grace passed, that the writer was impelled to enter the church and discover of what material it might be fashioned. Nor is it given to many people to catch trout fifty feet above the fields where they have once shot partridges and the bogs where they have once killed snipe. A story is told too of a native of Llanwddyn who, after years of wandering in foreign lands, thought he would look up his old friends. Not being ofa communicative turn of mind no hint of 464 LLANWDDYN TRADITIONS CHAP. — the fate that had befallen his native village reached his ears on — the way from the sea-coast, so his sensations on surmounting © the hills above the Vyrnwy and seeing nothing but a waste of i waters beneath him, may be well imagined. The form which — the surprise of this unsuspecting seaman took is differently — reported, but at any rate he survived the shock. Perhaps the — disappearance of the ‘‘ Powis Arms,” the only public-house in the _ neighbourhood, was not the lightest part of the blow. Both legend and history have been tolerably active in this old-world corner. It was one of the favourite resorts, for one thing, of iY those terrible red-haired banditti of Mawddwy, whom it will be _ remembered Sir John Wynn’s ancestors had such trouble with when they first settled at the head of the Conway. It is ~ pleasant, too, to know that the cell of the saint who gave the 6 church and valley its name has just escaped the deluge; for : its site is said to be where the Ceunant waterfall splashes a down into the lake. That this holy man, however, was no St. Kevin, the marvellous tenacity of Welsh nomenclature has provided us with incontestable evidence ; for a path is still : called Llwybr Wddyn, along which, so says tradition, he used _ to walk to the cell of a certain pious lady, St. Monacella, who fled from her home in Ireland and established herself at no great distance up the valley. The blasting of the big stone in the river just below the dam, and the abominable outrage thereby perpetrated on the spirit that had been held in awe by so many generations of Llanwddyn peasants, has been already spoken of in a former chapter. But it is neither history, nor legend, nor old wives’ tales, that most people will be thinking of, should they be fortunate enough to spend a fine week in this fascinating spot. The peace and spaciousness, the beauty, and even the grandeur of the outlook _ is unforgettable if enjoyed when the skies are clear and the elements are kind. And it so happens that when the summer sun is setting, it sends a trail of golden glory quivering down the centre of the long and narrow lake which starts at the further end XX THE ROAD TO LLANFYLLIN 465 five miles away, and burns into the very woods blowing beneath your feet. Below the dam, too, is a charming scene, where wooded hills press close together, and the Vyrnwy, released from its vast prison house, leaps joyously between them and urges on its crystal streams, by emerald meadows, by cottages and scattered hamlets towards Meifod, where dwelt in ancient days the Princes of all Powysland. Lake Vyrnwy is twelve miles from Llanfyllin, the terminus WSS = Wart f SR Ve ys * Se +. UT f city uw mW? aa C 2 aN x na tp TEs Lianfyllin. of a short railway from Llanymynech. Thence lies our way out of Wales. And at a point some two miles along it, after climbing the steep hill out of the Vyrnwy valley and before starting upon the long run down towards the English border, I would fain pause for a moment to cast one backward look. For no more characteristic bit of wild Wales to carry away as a final memory could very well be found. The deep green valley with the Vyrnwy glittering and sparkling through its midst, the white homesteads glinting amid their sheltering groves, the black cattle browsing on the narrow lowlands, the mountain Q 466 A FAREWELL CHAP. XX sheep dotted about the breezy moorland, the wooded ridges upon which the new Llanwddyn is so picturesquely perched, with just a gleam of the lake below, and behind all the backbone of the Berwyns rolling along the distant sky line. Well indeed may the sons of a land so fair cherish for it a something more than common passion. If the peculiar pathos that belongs to Celtic countries, where misery, poverty and depopulation strike an all pervading note of melancholy, | finds no expression among the Welsh hills, the lack of it is surely no matter for regret. Perhaps rather the very thrift and quiet prosperity that so distinguishes the Principality, helps to sustain the tenacity with which these old Britons cling to their ancient customs, and, above all, to their ancient tongue; and in so doing fulfil with such picturesque completeness Taliesin’s famous prophecy. Their Lord they shall praise, Their language they shall keep, Their land they shall lose, Except wild Wales. LA oe Me Se aon Aa ise aes pat ‘ eee 2 “~ Wi ar or ot A parting glimpse. THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS _———— en ener ee ———$ — eel SS HOLYHEAD BAY LLANERCHYMEDDO HOLYHEAD ; ‘ ! Oe HOLYHREAD . . Saanes ABERGELE \RHUDDLAN ISLAND | 25 5 x 3 . QO7; CHESTER DENBIGH E Llemrhaiaad aa CARNARVON = BAY WREXHAM O | ° Chnnag oo et rte | Cerrig-y-aruiaion yew Plas ngan | Gwe Ay ae | | The Rivals na Pont Aberglasliyn’ apne fe Cale crude’ a | \ Llanacthafan® DoOlPENUTTRaA Cc : i Fa 0 ‘ pins oS ree. RCORWE Make y | | sy 3 ers eka LLANGOLLEN-= : | ye SMe | } 40 v- ig ACUwrog of , | ot 4% - . A, Ir R 0 0 G OW, ake \ bs f | 1 xg vd BALA =og = oy! oe por : eo} wR. ce! Z PWLLH re cri’ BALA \ ! { Lian betrog Lae AOC, HARLECH eetian OSWESTRY Oo \ ~ , G SYCHERTH O \ iB CUTE etre Llanrxuwchyllyn? BAY = | 4{bersoch | Bwleh-y- groes § | Q | Qa, LAKE \ Llanelliya - Llanymowddwy y Asie e O LLANFYLLIN y 1 =) r . f N j N ve . | BARMOUTH QY/ / \6e Wy ae | OK os Si QMZZ CYDINASMOWDDWY BARMOUTH aA & : | py teh Wyer Moray Malinyd ¥ SHREWSBURY © | AS lyre | a | H 507 Cenunes f | Scale of Miles. RY “4 | Poles £5 /0 ‘5 re | aa TOWYN AW Pennalg MACHYNLLETH AUiorSs: nou ; 7.& R.Clarh, L@ Printers, Edinburgh A ABERDARON, 347 Aberconway Abbey, 209 Aberdovey, 415 Abererch, 358 Abergele, 124 Abergwynolwyn, 410 Aberffraw, 274 Abersoch, 333 Afon Wen, 359 Alwen, R., 105 Anarawd, King, 177 Anglesey, 276, 325 Anglesey, Marquis of, 273 Anian, Bishop, 162 Aran Mountains, 435 Ardudwy, Men of, 386 Arenig Fawr, 437 Arthur, King, 436 Artro, R., 381 Assheton Smith, 272 Augustine, St., 62 B BACHECRAIG, 143 Bachymbyd, 125 Bala, 443 Baldwin, Archbishop, 183 Baner, The, 132 Bangor, 262 Bangor Iscoed, 63 Bardsey Island, 349 Barmouth, 393 Barnet Fair, 100 Baron Hill, 265 INDEX Beaumaris, 264 Beddgelert, 295 Berwyn, 71 Bethesda, 258 Bettws-y-coed, 245 Beuno, Saint, 318 Bird Rock, The, 410 Bodelwyddan, 168 Bodfari, 126 Bodscallon, 195 Bodvel, 335 Borrow, George, 53, 221, 297 Borth, 415 Bowles, Dr., 328 Braieh-y-pwll, 349 Bramston, Sir John, 268 Bran the Blessed, 374 Branwen, the White-bosomed, 375 Bron-y-foel, 315 Brynbella, 144 Bryn Eglwys, 107 Brynkinallt, 23 Brynkir, 309 Brynsaithmarchog, 115 Butler, Dr., 8 Bulkely, Sir R., 149 Bwlch-y-groes, 433 C CADOGAN, KING, 69 Cader Idris, 404 Cadvan, Saint, 413 Caer Drewyn, 105 Caergai, 439 Caerhun, 222 Capel Curig, 252 470 Caradoc, King, 172 Cardiganshire, 417 Carnarvon, 278 Carnedd Llewelyn, 256 Carnedd Dafydd, 256 Carreg-y-Saeth, 384 Carrington, Lord, 233 Carrog, 90 Castell March, 339 Catherine, Queen, 257 Catherine of Beraine, 141 Cefn Amwlch, 343 Ceiriog, R125 Cernmaes Road, 427 Charles), 154,217 Charles II., 392 Charles of Bala, 451 Chester, 3 Chester, Lupus, Earl of, 108 Chirk Castle, 24 Churchyard, the Poet, 56 Clarendon, Lord, 269 Clenenny, 309 Clough, Sir R., 143 Clynnog, 318 Coiiwyn Bay, 181 Conway Estuary, 200 Conway Castle, 210 Conway Town, 212 Conway Valley, 219 Corn Dochan, 437 Cors-y-gedol, 390 Corwen, 95 Cox, David, 249 Crecy, Battle of, 202 Creuddyn Peninsula, 189 Criccieth, 362 Crogen, 27 Cromwell, 308 Cumberland, Duke of, 195 Cwm-bychan, 383 Cyffyns, the, 314 Cymmer Abbey, 399 Cynieht, 300 Cynwyd, 105 D DANIELis, Rev. J., 337 Dafydd, Prince, 187 INDEX Dafydd-ap-Llewelyn, 207 Dafydd-ap-Shenkin, 257 Dafydd-ap-Sinion, 378 Dee, R. 5°335) 7259 ao Deganwy, 198 De Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, 136 Denbigh, 131 Dick of Aberdaron, 352 Dinas Bran, 46 Dinas Emrys, 293 Dinas Mawddwy, 429 Dolbadarn, 284 Dolbenmaen, 309 Dolbens, The, 130 Dolgelly, 404 Dolwyddelan, 242 Dovey, R., 426 Drws Ardwdwy, 38 Dwryd;R.,°372 Dwyfach, R., 317 Dwyfawr, R., 359 Dysanni, R., 410 i EDEYRNION, Vale of, 104 Edward I., 169 Edward II., 278 Edward IV., 278 Eisteddfod, 455 Egbert, Kingi72 Eliseg, Pillar of, 67 Elfreton, Henry de, 210 Elizabeth, Queen, 149 Ellis, of Ystymllyn, 370 Elphin, Prince, 422 Elwy,-R.; 4160 PR FARMERS, Welsh, 112, 345 Festiniog, Vale of, 372 Foxhall, New, 156 G GALLTFAENAN, 160 Garnedd Goch, 317 Gam, Davy, 425 - GelrW,) Rags LOS Gerald de Windsor, 69 ~ Gesail-Gyferch, 316 Giraldus Cambrensis, 60 Glan Conway, 220 Glaslyn, R., 297 Gloddaeth, 194 Glydyrs, The, 254 Glyndyfrdwy, 75 Goodman, Dean, 121 ° Great Orme’s Head, 190 Grey, Lord, 79 Griffith-ap-Cynan, 108 Griffith-ap-Dafydd, 246 Griffith-ap-Gronow, 315 Griffith-ap-Llewelyn, 364 Griffith, Sir Piers, 260 Griffith Vychan, 82 Gutyn Owen, 51, 58 Gwaelod, cantref of, 388 Gwaenynog, 145 Gwenwynwyn, 51 Gwyddelwern, 108 Gwyddno Goronhir, 422 Gwydyr, Castle, 223 Gwynfryn, 359 H HanMeErs of Hanmer, 81 Harlech, 373 Hell’s Mouth, 342 Henllan, 158 Henry I., 69 Henry II., 106 Henry III., 207 Henry IV., 14, 175 Henry V., 89 Henry VII., 138 Henry VIII., 138 Herbert, Lord Pembroke, 379 Hiraethog, 116 Hirlas Horn, 262 Hirnant Valley, 456 Hoare, Sir R. C., 463 Hookes, Nicholas, 213 Howell, Coetmore, 231 Howell, Dda, 384 Howell, Gethen 237 Howell, Harris, 481 INDEX Howel-ap-Rhys, 312 Howel-of-the-Poleaxe, 365 Howel, Selé, 401 Hutchinson, Colonel, 308 I Ipris, The Giant, 417 Idwall, 258 Iolo Goch, 81 Ireton, Colonel, 308 Ive, Roger, 14 J JEAN DE RIEUX, 87 Jevan-ap-Meredydd, 313 Jevan-ap-Robert, 310 Johnson, Dr., 121 John, King, 207 John-ap-Meredydd, 366 Jones, of Maesygarnedd, 68 Jones, R., of Tremadoc, 304 Jones, Sir William, 339 K KENNEDY, Dr., 10 Kingsley, Charles, 290 L LEICESTER, Earl of, 148 Llanaber Church, 393 Llanaelliaiarn, 326 Llanbedrog, 337 Llanbedr, 381 Llanberris, 285 Llandudno, 189 Llandulas, 174 Llanegrin, 392 Llanengan, 342 Llanelltyd, 399 Llanerch, 160 Llanfair, P. G., 265 Llanfyllin, 465 471 472 Llangar, 105 Llangollen, 35 Llanrhaiadr, 130 Llanrhydd, 120 Llanrwst, 229 Llansantffraid Glyn-Ceriog, 29 Llansilin, 29 Llanuwchllyn, 437 Llanwddyn, 463 Llanycil Church, 441 Llanystumdwy, 359 Lledr Valley, 240 Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, 61 Llewelyn, last Prince of Wales, 185 Liiew, Re, 437 Llowarch Hen, 457 Llugwy Valley, 250 Llwyd, Humphry, 156 Llwyds of Cwm Bychan, 382 Llyn Ogwen, 255 Llyn y Morwynion, 381 Llys, Arthur, 436 Luxmore, Bishop, M MACHYNLLETH, 423 Maddox, 301 Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd, 306 Madoc ap Gryffydd, 56 Madryn, 343 Maelgwyn Gwynedd, 206 Maenan Abbey, 224 Maentwrog, 372 Mallwyd, 427 Manods, the, 372 Marl, 195 Margaret of Penllyn, 286 Matholwch, 376 Mawddach Estuary, 394 Mawddwy, 406 Meifod, 72 Menai Straits, 264 © Menai bridges, 273 Merioneth, making of, 405 Merlin, 294 Moel Eilio, 220 Moel Fernau, 76 INDEX Moel Fammau, 116 Moel Fenlli, 116 Moel Gamelin, 72 Moel Geraint, 72 Moel Gest, 368 Moel Hebog, 309 Moel Siabod, 250 Moelwyn, 300 Morgan, Bishop, 162 Morris Huw, 26 Mortimer, Roger, 78 Mortimer, Edmund, 86 Mostyn family, 191 Myfanwy Vychan, 51 Myddeltons, the, 24 Myddelton, General, 152 Mytton, General, 153 Mytton, Jack, 433 N NANT CLWwyp, 116 Nant Ffrancon, 257 Nant Gwrtheyrn, 328 Nant Gwynant, 293 Nanhoron, 342 Nannau, 40 Nanney, 304 Nest, 69 Newborough, Lord, 350 Nigel de Lorynge, 356 O Orra’s DYKE, 308 Owen ap Cadogan, 69 Owen, Rev. Elias, 158 Owen, Goch, 285 Owen, Glyndwr, 78, 401 Owen, Gwynedd, 27 Owen of Clenenny, 217 Owen, Lewis, 430 iy PANTON, Mr., 187 ‘ Paris, Matthew of, 208 Pebble Pool, 406 Pembroke, Earl of, 235 Peniarth, 411 Penmachno, 244 Penmaenmawr, 268 Penmaen Rhos, 174 Penmon Abbey, 265 Penmorfa, 307 Penmynydd, 206 Penrhyn, Llandudno, 191 Penrhyn Castle, 260 Penrhyn slate quarries, 257 Pentre Voelas, 116 Pen-y-gwryd, 290 Percy, Earl, 15 Percy, Henry, 16 Pilleth, battle of, 85 Plas Newydd, 41 Plas Eglwyseg 68 Plas Clough, 154 Plas Chambres, 155 Plas Heaton, 160 Pont-y-Meibion, 29 Pont Aberglaslyn, 297 Portmadoc, 370 Precipice Walk, 493 Puffin Island, 265 Pulestones, the, 282 R RHINOGS, the, 382 Rhiwaedog, 439 Rhiwlas, 456 Rhuddlan, 168 Rhyll, 173 Richard III., 172 Rivals, the, 326 - Robert ap Meredydd, 313 Robin ap Inko, 312 Roderic the Great, 172 Rock of the Falcon, 237 Roman steps, 385 Ruabon, 34 Rig, 108 Ruthin, 117 S SALUSBURY, Sir John, 139 Salusbury, Sir William, 152 INDEX 473 Sarn Badrig, 389 Sarn Helen, 240 Sar Melteyrn, 344 Scott, Sir Walter, 41 Seiont, R., 284 Shrewsbury, I Shrewsbury, battle of, 14 Shrewsbury, School, 8 Shelley, 302 Snowdon, 288 Soch, R., 342 St. Asaph, 102 Stanley, H. M , 145 Stephenson, 273 Sycherth, 81 TALIESIN, 421 Talycafn, 222 Talyfan, 220 Tallyllyn, 408 Tanyrallt, 301 Telford, 273 Thelwall, 120 Thrale, 123 Timon, 436 Towyn, 411 Traeth Mawr, 301 Trefdraeth, 324 Trefnant, 160 Trefriw, 223 Tremadoc, 304 Trer Cein, 327 Trevors, the, 23 Treweryn, R., 456 Tryfan, 254 Tudor, Owen, 266 Twistleton, Col., 320 Twm or Nant, 146 UWECIL R435 Vv VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY, 56 Velvilles, the, 140 Vortigern, 293, 328 Vychan, Ednyfed, 235 Vychans, of Caergai, 439 474 Vychans, of Corse-y-gedol, 396 Vychans, of Nannan, 403 Vychan, Sir William, 153 Vyrnwy, Lake, 458 WwW WARREN, Earl, 38 Watkin, Sir Edward, 290 Wellington, Duke of, 23 Welsh Land Commission, 115 Whitchurch, 139 Williams, Canon, 194 INDEX Williams, Lord Keeper, 216 Wordsworth, 42 Wrexham Church, 107 Wynne’s, of Wynnstay, 31 Wynne, Captain, 131 Wynne, Maurice, I41 Wynne, Sir John, of Gwydyr, 233 Wynne, Richard, 236 Wynnes of Peniarth, 411 Wynnstay 31 vi YALE, Elihu, 107 THE END. 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