cushion the tram-lines of Newport force themselves upon our attention.
Newport was so called, I believe, because it superseded Caerleon, the
old port, of which Leland says: “Very great shyppes might wel cum now
to the town, as they did in the Romaynes tyme, but that Newport Bridge
is a lette.”
Before leaving Newport any one who is likely to be hungry soon will
do well to secure a meal, for though Cardiff is not far away the
ruins of Caerphilly take some time to see, and the little town cannot
be depended upon for food. And we must on no account miss seeing
Caerphilly; for this vast ruin covers more ground than any other in
this island, and, moreover, has the special distinction of being a
characteristically Edwardian castle of a date earlier than Edward’s. It
was chiefly the work of Gilbert de Clare, the Red Earl of Gloucester,
whose architect, unlike that great artist, Henry de Elfreton, thought
little of beauty when he designed these mighty walls, but altogether
of strength. “Waules of a wonderful thickness,” says Leland; and of a
wonderful thickness they are, and of a wonderful tenacity too, seeing
that one of the great bastions that were mined with gunpowder in the
Civil War was only half ruined, and the other half has been leaning
at a most surprising angle ever since. The history of the ruins is not
at all in proportion to their size; and, indeed, it is possible that
their size and strength may have acted as a deterrent to the makers of
history. There is a story that Edward II. took refuge here with the
Despensers; but even these unyielding walls failed to give any real
sense of security to that poor spirit and at the first word of his
enemies’ approach he hurried away, preferring to trust to disguise.
He chose the inappropriate _rôle_ of a farm labourer--this indolent,
boudoir-King, who had never done a day’s work in his life--and he
failed signally to please his master, who was as anxious to be rid of
him as his subjects were. It was soon after this that he was captured
and led away to the horrors of Berkeley Castle.
On the direct route from Caerphilly to Cardiff there rises such a
precipitous hill that the longer way by Nantgarw is really the best;
and unless Cardiff has some special attraction for us there is no
need to thread our way through its modern streets and its maze of
tram-lines. For the Cardiff of the Romans, and of the Welsh princes of
Morganwg, and of the Norman barons, is altogether overpowered by the
Cardiff of commerce; and though there is a fragment left of the castle
that has sheltered so many crowned heads at various times, the castle
in which poor blind Robert of Normandy was a prisoner for twenty-eight
years, yet even this is modernised and closed to the public.
But in Llandaff, which is now practically a suburb of Cardiff, there
are still signs of age: a picturesque green and restored cross,
some pretty old houses, and the cathedral of the most ancient see
in the island. For even when St. Teilo of the sixth century laid
the foundation of the first cathedral the bishopric of Llandaff had
been in existence for more than five hundred years. By the eleventh
century Teilo’s cathedral was past repair; and when the “business
of the Cross was publicly proclaimed” here it was in a new building
that the Archbishop celebrated mass--the same building, more or
less, that stands down there in that curious hollow to-day. More or
less: for the restorations of this greatly chastened cathedral have
been many, and it has narrowly escaped suffering even more terrible
things at the hands of its well-wishers. Jasper Tudor’s beautiful
and uncommon west tower, for instance, was once threatened by an
eighteenth-century bishop, a versatile soul who wrote a successful
“Treatise on the Modes.” He was evidently more capable of dealing with
the modes than with ecclesiastical architecture, for we hear that he
was seized with a longing to remove Jasper’s tower and replace it with
a rustic porch.[10] For once the poverty of the see was a fortunate
circumstance, and saved the tower. But no doubt that same poverty
injured the building greatly on many occasions; for at one time the see
was so cruelly robbed by the Crown that its brave and humorous bishop
had himself presented to Henry VIII. as the Bishop of Aff. “I was the
Bishop of Llandaff,” he explained, “but lately the _land_ has been
removed.”[11]
[Illustration: CAERPHILLY CASTLE.]
[Illustration: BEAUPRÉ CASTLE.]
The tombs of Llandaff Cathedral are of great interest; and it is
with real pleasure that one sees the new, for once, not unworthy to be
beside the old. The recumbent figure of marble on the grave of Dean
Vaughan is really beautiful.
As we climb the long hill a mile or two beyond Llandaff, we see Cardiff
stretched out below us, a forest of masts and tall chimneys--an
impressive symbol in its way. Then, when we reach the level ground,
we forget everything for a time but the sheer delight of moving on
a perfect road--forget even the heights of Exmoor showing faintly
across the water on the left, and on the right the wild hills of
Glamorganshire rolling away into the distance.
Now, at Cowbridge, it is necessary to come to a decision. If it should
be too much for the resolution of an ardent motorist to leave this
road, he may pursue his way to Neath without “lette,” as Leland would
say; but for all antiquarians, artists, and other lovers of romance and
beauty, the finger-post points very resolutely to a detour by Beaupré,
Llantwit, St. Donat’s, and Ewenny.
About two miles south of Cowbridge is Old Beaupré (Bewper). Do not
climb the stile and walk across the fields, but drive on a hundred
yards or so to the gate; for this grass-grown, deserted avenue is the
fitting approach to the spellbound house of the Bassetts, that strange
mixture of splendour and squalor, with its delicate carvings and dainty
Corinthian pillars and its air of utter desolation. We know very well
as we look at it that fair faces once looked down through those Tudor
windows, and gay satins swept between the classic columns of the
doorway, and the walls echoed to music and singing and laughter, until
the fatal day that an enchantment was laid upon the beautiful white
doorway of the love-lorn Welshman who learnt his art in Italy, and upon
the avenue that once led the Bassetts out to war and home to love, and
upon every stone of the old castle, so that it became a farmhouse.
And now the fluted pillars and carved friezes are green with moss and
fringed with ferns, and the walls echo to nothing but the clucking of
innumerable hens.
Beaupré is not greatly visited. There is, indeed, nothing to see but
that strange, incongruous doorway and the ghosts that flutter round
it; but it is one of those eloquent, unforgettable places through
which, for a moment, one seems to be actually in touch with the life
that they have seen.
At Llantwit Major the interest is of a very different kind. Here there
is not very much to attract the artist, but to the antiquary and
historian “the dwelling-place and home of the Blessed Illtyd” must
surely be of the first importance. For it was here that the Breton
saint, St. Iltutus, or Illtyd, founded a monastery and university that
made a very deep mark upon the life of the sixth century; for its
professors educated not only all the princes of the west, but also
every illustrious Welshman--bishop, saint, or scholar--of the day. It
is not surprising that an institution of its size and brilliancy--for
its 2,400 students filled four hundred houses--should have seized the
imagination of early writers, and given rise to so much picturesque
legend that it is hard to know the truth. Some say that St. David
himself was taught by St. Illtyd, and that Gildas the historian,
called the Wise, and Taliesin, the bard of the Radiant Brow, were
also brought up here. Of Illtyd himself the tale is told that he was
originally a soldier, but hearing the call, he forsook his profession
and his wife for the life of a hermit; and when his poor wife came
to him, one day as he was working in the fields, he silently turned
away from her, and stood so, with his back to her, till she left him
in despair. This is a pathetic foundation for all the scholarship and
saintliness of the sixth century in Wales, and one can only hope, for
the sake of Illtyd’s conscience when he was a comfortable professor,
that it is untrue. Of all the four hundred houses and seven halls of
his university not a stone is now left; but in the church, which is
itself very full of interest, there are some wonderful monuments, one
of them being a memorial raised to St. Illtyd by one of his pupils,
Samson, a saint himself. The head of the cross is gone, but on the
shaft the beautiful Celtic designs are still clear and the words still
legible to those who can read them--“Samson placed this cross for his
soul.”
Just beyond Llantwit and nearer to the Bristol Channel is St. Donat’s,
which, as Leland says, “stondith on a meane hille a quarter of a mile
from the Severn Se.” This castle, partly Norman and partly Tudor, has
been inhabited ever since the Norman conquest of Glamorgan; and so, as
“the parkes booth and the castell long to ... a gentilman of very fair
landes in that countery,” we can see no more than a glimpse of towers
above the trees. But we pass close to the churchyard, and there we may
see the very beautiful and uninjured Celtic cross.
From St. Donat’s we may rejoin the main road at Bridgend; but in this
country, where good accommodation is not always to be found, it is
well to know that there is a very nice modern hotel at Southerndown,
with the Channel and the Exmoor coast in front of it and the trees
and Castle of Dunraven near at hand. The actual building of Dunraven
is new, but a castle has stood on the same spot for many generations,
through many tragedies. In Henry VIII.’s reign the lord of Dunraven,
Boteler, or Butler, lost all his children but one on the same day. He
saw them die, perhaps, for the windows of his castle looked out across
the waters that drowned them. Only one girl was left, and through her
Dunraven passed to the Vaughans, who do not always seem to have made
a good use of its position. For in Tenby Church lies the dust of a
certain Walter of that house, who figures darkly in one of those moral
tales--one might almost call them tracts--of which one occasionally
hears in actual life. In Walter’s day, which was also the day of Queen
Mary, these shores of Dunraven twinkled with treacherous lights, which
lured unwary ships to the shore, causing their complete destruction and
the great enrichment of the lord of the manor. At last, after years of
this villainy, he was waiting one night for the fruits of his labours,
waiting while the doomed ship was shaken to pieces and the bodies of
her crew were one by one washed ashore. The last body that came was
that of his own sailor-son.
Whether we approach Bridgend from Llantwit or from Southerndown, we
shall see on our right the embattled tower of Ewenny among the trees.
The restored conventual buildings of this very ancient Benedictine
Priory are now a private house, but by leaving the high-road we may
pass the fortified gateway that once stood between the monks and their
enemies. There is no finer example, I believe, of a monastery that is
also a castle, and no doubt it is partly owing to the strength of its
defences that the Priory of Ewenny still stands in its original Norman
austerity, not as a picturesque ruin, but as a parish church. With the
exception of one or two Tudor windows, it is pure Norman throughout,
very simple, very dignified; and it is still divided, according to
ancient custom, into two separate churches that were used respectively
by the monastery and the parish at large. The founder, whose beautiful
tomb is wonderfully well preserved, was Maurice de Londres, whose name
we shall meet again in a less amiable connection at Kidwelly. A great
deal has been done in the way of restoring and preserving Ewenny by
its owners, the ancient lords of Coity, whose great castle lies in
ruins a few miles away. The Norman marchers of their house, it is said,
set out to win the lands of Coity by force of arms, but seeing the
fair daughter of the Welshman who owned them, he was himself won, and
never a blow was struck, for Coity became his by marriage. How much of
this story is true I do not know, but it is certainly true that his
descendants have lived within a few miles of the spot from that day to
this.
At Bridgend we rejoin the road that we left so reluctantly at
Cowbridge, and soon, on the right, we pass the hills of Margam, at
whose foot are the fragments of a famous Cistercian abbey, more
celebrated, we are told, for its charitable deeds than any of that
Order in Wales; while on the left there stretch between us and the
sea the dreary sands that long ago buried--“shokid and devourid”--the
castle and lands of Kenfig. The hills, cleft here and there with deep
wooded valleys, are every moment drawing nearer; a strip of glittering
sea appears beyond the sands, and beyond that again are the Mumbles.
For a little time the masts of Aberavon rise picturesquely on the
skyline, but they are too soon replaced by the chimneys of Briton
Ferry.
[Illustration: EWENNY PRIORY.]
[Illustration: NEATH ABBEY.]
It was here that the travellers of old days used to ford the river
Neath. It was a dangerous ford, famous for its quicksands. Wherefore
a certain twelfth-century bishop of St. David’s, being of a prudent
temperament and desirous to cross, selected one of his minor clergy to
ford the river before him, a “chaplain of those parts,” who had lately
incurred the bishop’s displeasure, and had been suspended. The chaplain
meekly consented; took the bishop’s best horse for the purpose; crossed
in safety, and forthwith rode away. And it was only when the bishop
restored the cure that the chaplain restored the horse.
This pleasant little story, recalled by the name of the ugly smoky town
of Briton Ferry, will help us through the dismal streets that lead to
Neath.
Neath itself is not an attractive town. Its abbey to Leland “semid the
fairest abbay in al Wales.” To-day it is perhaps the most pathetic.
During its last and most splendid days a Welsh bard sang of it and
of the monks who lived in it; sang of its towers and cloisters, and
coloured windows and princely shields; of its columns of blue marble
and of the painted archangels on its roof. It was just at this time
that it seemed to Leland so fair, that is to say just before Leland’s
employer, Henry VIII., silenced the “peaceful songs of praise” of its
white monks for ever. Even now we can guess at its past splendour, for
though the blue marble and the archangels are gone, the crypt still has
its vaulted roof, and through the heavy ivy there are fragments visible
of the gleaming white stone with which it was once faced. It stands,
unspeakably desolate, on the low, squalid outskirts of the town, amid a
waste of scrap-iron and nettles and rubbish; but when Edward II. came
to beg for a night’s lodging under its roof, when Neath was little more
than a village and a castle, and there were no shunting, shrieking
trains between the abbey and the hills, this must indeed have seemed a
beautiful refuge for a tired, hunted king.
For close behind the abbey the hills begin to rise, and through them
the river Neath cleaves its way to the sea in a valley that will lead
us, if we follow it, to extremely desirable things. Ultimately the road
will lead us to Brecon, by no means to be despised in itself, but it
is rather for the sake of the miles of moorland that lie between that
we must here strike up into the hills in a way that may seem eccentric
till we know what they are like.
The Vale of Neath itself is famous for its lovely scenery, its woods
and mountains and river. The road is practically level as far as
Glyn-Neath, where, if the day is young, and the mood enterprising, we
may, instead of keeping to our rightful road, diverge for a mile or
so to Pont Neath Fechan. Thence the active-minded and able-bodied may
visit a series of very pretty waterfalls on the river Mellte. This
entails a considerable walk of a rough kind, but it also gives one an
excuse for exploring a little more of this lovely moorland country: for
the best way to approach the falls is to drive up for two miles into
the hills and so reach the river from above.
But probably the most usual course is, at Glyn-Neath, to turn
towards Hirwain. It is after this point that the really distinctive
features of this run become apparent, the features that make the road
essentially one for motorists; for no railway crosses these hills,
and if there be strong-limbed bicyclists who do, they cannot often
be women, I think. For the road that seems to the engine of a car to
be merely gently undulating, is really climbing steadily upwards for
miles. Gradually the scene becomes wilder and wilder, more and more
desolate, till at last we are spinning over a moor as wide as the eye
can see, on a road that winds visibly before us far away into the
distance. Range beyond range, the hills completely encircle us: stern,
bare hills with rugged outlines, and never a tree to soften them; and
in the foreground great sweeping curves covered with short grass and
here and there a glowing patch of heather. Then, when the summit is
reached, and Cardiff waterworks are passed, begins the descent of nine
miles on a perfect surface, close under the shoulder of the Brecon
Beacons. I think this gentle descent is one of the most perfect runs,
from a motoring point of view, that I have ever enjoyed; and if, as is
likely, there is a touch of evening softness over the great hills, few
people will regret having forsaken their direct westward road for the
sake of this drive. Close under the Beacons lies Brecon.
A prodigious amount of fighting has raged round this peaceful-looking
little town. It was not without bloodshed that Brychan the Irishman,
in the fifth century, made this country his own with complete
thoroughness, supplying it not only with a new name but with a new
population (for he is said to have had forty-nine children); and Brecon
was one of the many places that were attacked and overcome by the
army of Alfred’s warlike daughter Ethelfleda; and truly there was no
lack of fighting in the days of the Normans, the Neuf-Marché, and the
de Braose. It was Bernard de Neuf-Marché, or Newmarch, who built the
castle, once “very large, strong, and wele mainteynid,” but now only a
remnant, a bit of battlemented wall and a tower, which passed through
many stormy experiences before it came to the strangest end to which,
surely, a castle was ever brought. For it was the inhabitants of Brecon
themselves who, feeling that they had figured sufficiently in the
annals of their country, demolished their own castle. It was during the
Civil War, and a siege seemed imminent. The simplest way of avoiding
this was to remove the castle.
Brecon might well be tired of fighting. Newmarch had fortified it
well, with walls and gates and the “keepe of the castel very large and
faire,” but it required all its defences and more, for a border castle
was never safe. From the family of Newmarch it passed to that of de
Braose, and they lost it again, not by the sword but by the seditious
spirit and shrewd tongue of a woman. Matilda de St. Valerie, the wife
of William de Braose, “uttered reproachful language against King John,”
which though perfectly just, was rash. She lost not only her castle,
but her husband and finally her life, for Brecon became Crown property;
de Braose, after slaughtering the King’s garrison, fled to Ireland;
and Matilda was starved to death in prison.
[Illustration: BRECON.]
[Illustration: GATEWAY KIDWELLY CASTLE.]
If we spend a night in Brecon we may sit in the pretty garden of
the hotel under the shadow of the last remaining wall of Newmarch’s
castle. Opposite us, filling almost the whole landscape, are the solemn
Beacons; just below us is the Usk and its picturesque bridge.
We must cross that bridge to reach Carmarthen; and following the
course of the Usk, pass through Trecastle, where the scenery becomes
strikingly beautiful as the road cleaves a narrow gorge and then runs
gently down for miles between wooded hills. At Llandovery we enter the
valley of the Towy.
There is nothing to detain us at Llandovery; but as the gay flowers of
the Castle Inn catch our eye in passing we may remember that George
Borrow once spent a night there; and the remains of the castle hard by
may perhaps call to mind the great chieftain Griffith ap Nicholas, who
was lord of Dynevor and Kilgerran as well as of Llandovery and many
another castle. He was also a Justice of the Peace, and a harbourer of
thieves; a _protégé_ of the House of Lancaster who yet died in fighting
for the house of York at Mortimer’s Cross: not a very conventional
person, in short.
We leave the fragments of his castle on our left, and, on a practically
level road, follow the slow-flowing Towy through Llangadoch to
Llandeilo. This pretty little place, where there is a really nice inn,
was once dignified with the name of Llandeilo Vawr, or the Great;
probably because of its close proximity to the great castle of Dynevor.
If we pause for a moment on the bridge that here crosses the Towy we
shall see reflected in the river a thickly wooded bluff. Among these
trees are the ruins of Dynevor, perhaps the most important stronghold
of the princes of South Wales. It was in the ninth century that Roderic
the Great built the first castle here, and from that day forward till
Roderic’s fortress had for many years been replaced by a Norman one,
Dynevor passed from hand to hand, from Welsh to English and from
English to Welsh, and from one turbulent chieftain to another. It
seems to have been regarded more or less as the key to South Wales;
for on one occasion Henry II. sent a special spy to inquire into the
strength of Dynevor and the general character of the country. This
artless knight asked his way of a Welsh dean, and was, as he might
have expected, led by a route so wild, so rough, and so extremely
circuitous that the castle seemed to be practically inaccessible. By
way of heightening the effect this humorous divine paused at intervals
to satisfy his hunger with handfuls of grass. It was the custom in
that poor country, he said. The knight returned to Henry with the
report that the country round Dynevor was “uninhabitable, vile, and
inaccessible, only affording food to a beastly nation, living like
brutes.”
Within a few miles of Dynevor there is another castle that looks as if
it might well have been inaccessible--Cerrig Cennen. It is worth while
to drive a few miles out of our way to see this circlet of towers on
its pale grey crag, dominating the whole landscape of rounded hills.
It is best to approach it by Derwydd Station, partly because the more
direct route leads over a long and precipitous hill, and partly because
from this side one’s first view of the old fortress is more striking.
I think there is little to be gained by trying to drive close to the
actual ruins: the impressive effect is in the distant outline of this
strange and sudden crag, on which, it is said, a Knight of the Round
Table built his fortress before the Norman of later days made it his
stronghold.