girls,” as he calls them, and have his word for it that they were “the
guardian angels of the village”; but whatever they may have done in
their lifetime has been quite thrown into the background by the
posthumous benefits their fame has conferred upon Llangollen. Local
charities until recently benefited largely from the fees charged to
visitors curious to see the collections at Plas Newydd; but since a
party of thieves and vandals broke some of the objects and stole others
the house has not been so readily accessible. It would be quite
impossible for a stranger to visit Llangollen for even the shortest
space of time and then to come away ignorant of the Ladies, for
photographs of them, statuettes, and paintings abound at every turn, and
must prove an important source of revenue. It is no more possible to
flee from the Ladies of Llangollen in Llangollen than it is to avoid
Lorna Doone at Ilfracombe, or Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon.
XXXVII
The settlement of “The Ladies” here synchronised with the appreciation
of the picturesque in rural scenery, then a new-born and strange
portent. The only travellers along this road into Wales had been those
who were obliged to take the journey on business; pleasure in
travelling—pleasure in such solitary and rugged scenery—was quite out of
the question, and if travellers remembered Llangollen at all, it was as
a place where the coach changed horses, and where the one inn afforded
the worst cheer at the highest prices. But in the last quarter of the
eighteenth century the tourist sprang suddenly into existence. None were
more astonished than the Welsh peasantry at this strange spectacle of
people who had riches and comfort in their own homes travelling for
pleasure and delight in their mountains and rivers; aye, and often
walking, not for economy, but for love of that exercise, in strange
places. Sometimes the astonished Welshman was incredulous. He would ask,
“Where do you come from?” “Why do you come here?” and “Where do you go
to from hence?” and, dissatisfied with the answers received, would ask,
“Are there, then, no mountains or rivers in England?”
One of these early tourists was Warner, author of a “Picturesque Tour.”
Arriving at Llangollen on their walk through Wales of over a century
ago, Warner and the companion of his pedestrian tour went, of course, to
the “Hand.” But that then solitary inn of the place could not attend at
once to the tired and hungry tourists. Much more important guests than
dusty-footed travellers (always at that time regarded with suspicion)
were occupying the attention of the establishment. These were the
Margrave of Anspach and his suite, who came, undoubtedly, in carriages,
and whose dinner the wearied couple could distinctly smell. Abashed,
they went to contemplate the beauties of Valle Crucis, what time the
Margrave dined. It is not surprising that they did not altogether care
for the place. Empty bellies are not kindly critics of architectural
ruins. But what _does_ surprise the reader of their tour is that they
went on and explored the mighty hill of Dinas Bran before returning to
the “Hand,” when, the Margrave and his suite, even down to the footmen
and page-boys, having fed to repletion, they found, at last, some
attention.
It would seem, judging from an expression used by Daniel O’Connell, that
the hotel now called the “Royal,” but originally named the “King’s
Head,” was established by some action on the part of the Ladies of
Llangollen. The “Hand” was in those days notoriously ill-equipped, and
O’Connell wrote in the visitors’ book of the “King’s Head”:—
I remember this village with very bad cheer,
Ere the Ladies, God bless them, set this inn here;
But the traveller now is sure of good fare,
Let him stay at this inn, or go to that ’ere;
But all who can read will sure understand
How vastly superior’s the Head to the Hand.
The sign of the “King’s Head” was changed to the “Royal” after the visit
of the Duchess of Kent with the Princess Victoria in 1832.
[Illustration: VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY. _After J. M. W. Turner, R. A._]
XXXVIII
When the traveller sets forth from Llangollen, he does so primed with
stories of the excellence of the scenery and the road. The folded
mountains, some clothed with pine and larch to their very summits,
others stern and jagged with rocks, far exceed any word-picture, as do
also the valleys and the glittering course of the Dee, dashing
impetuously over boulders and pebbly beaches, or more rarely sliding
quietly where the trout lurk in deep and darkling pools, where the
Welshman still navigates that early British canoe or boat—whichever you
like to call it—the “coracle,” a craft that no Saxon can master. The
scenery is exquisite, the air cooler and more refreshing as you leave
Llangollen, and the road broad and hard.
But as you come past Berwyn station, that picturesque little place on
the railway line running so neighbourly and yet inoffensively parallel
with the road and the Dee, you are conscious, whether awheel or afoot,
that the road is not by any means flat. The old coachmen, indeed, knew
this, although imperceptible to the casual eye, to be one of the most
trying rises on the way to Holyhead; and the modern cyclist, who pedals
bravely up its two miles, thinks sadly upon the debilitating air of
Llangollen until its crest is reached and he perceives the true state of
affairs. Telford was confronted by a dilemma here. He could do either of
two things: carry the road thus steeply over the ridge of Rhysgog, or
take it in more level fashion, but in three parts of a circle, following
the great bend the Dee makes at this point—a bend so great that it
almost coils back upon itself. He chose the first course, and so,
although he saved more than a mile, has punished all travellers that
have used the road since then.
Emerging from the sombre plantations that darken the greater part of the
rise, the road, terraced on the shoulders of the hills, runs down to
Glyndyfrdwy, passing the toll-house of that name, and coming to the
village where the “Sun” inn stands on the left, on entering. This is the
little “pot-house called the ‘Rising Sun,’” mentioned by Colonel
Birch-Reynardson, one of the places where the Holyhead Mail changed
horses when he took the reins. Across the river is Llansaintffraid,
which gave a name to a toll-house here—one of the few that have been
demolished.
At the other end of Glyndyfrdwy, passing that pretty, tree-shaded
anglers’ house, the “Berwyn Arms,” the hills recede and the valley opens
out. The Mail at one time changed here. In those days it was called the
“New Inn.” Just before the scenery becomes comparatively homely, two
strikingly prominent hills or tumuli, at a short distance from one
another, are seen overhanging the Dee. The second of them, standing
isolated and crowned with a spindly group of fir trees, is known as
“Owain Glyndwr’s Mount,” and there are those among the great Owain’s
worshippers who still affect to see the foundations of his house in the
rolling meadow beneath.
Owain Glyndwr is one of the greatest and latest of Welsh national
heroes, and the valley of the Dee is especially linked with his memory.
It could scarce be otherwise, for his name of Glyndwr was a territorial
one, and derived from his ancestral estate situated here at Glyndyfrdwy
and for some miles along the Dee between Berwyn and Corwen.
[Illustration: OWAIN GLYNDWR’S MOUNT.]
It was in the year 1400 that Owain rose in rebellion and set all Wales
aflame against the English. He was no hot-headed patriot, rising for the
mere idea of throwing off a foreign yoke, but a man who had suffered
wrongs and sought redress in vain. Lord Grey of Ruthin, one of the
powerful Lords Marchers, had seized a portion of his land, held it by
force of arms, despite the decision of the Courts in London, and
represented the injured man to be a rebel who refused the feudal duty of
sending help to aid the King against his opening campaign against the
Scots. Hitherto he had been no rebel, but a loyal supporter of the
English rule, at that time long established firmly in Wales. Not only
so, but he had moved in the Court circles of that day, and was not only
an educated gentleman, but a personage of wealth, consequence, and
influence in his own country, and precisely one to be well treated by
politic rulers.
Glyndwr was driven into rebellion, if ever man was. He was no youth, but
a man of forty-two years of age when matters came to this crisis. He was
also one of skill and resource, and, before the provocative Grey could
do much, had burnt his town and castle of Ruthin, and, turning towards
England, advanced with fire and sword up to the very walls of
Shrewsbury. Fortune smiled from that time, first upon one and then upon
the other side. English expeditionary forces under the young Prince of
Wales drove Glyndwr back, and burnt his ancestral halls at Sycherth and
Glyndyfrdwy, and yet when stress of weather warned the English to
retreat, Glyndwr, unconquered, was snarling at their heels. Later, he
himself assumed the title of Prince of Wales, and in royal manner
entered into a tripartite alliance with Hotspur and Mortimer to dethrone
Henry IV. and divide England and Wales between them. And had the Battle
of Shrewsbury been decided the other way there can be little doubt of
their success.
The Welsh bards and seers had been very busy with prophecies and
portents even at his birth, and Shakespeare—who thought Welshmen
excellent subjects to make fun of—has used these forebodings and
Glyndwr’s rising arrogance with effect in that scene of _Henry IV._
where the allies meet at Bangor. “At my birth,” says Glyndwr—
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak’d like a coward.
“Why,” retorts Hotspur, “so it would have done at the same season if
your mother’s cat had but kitten’d, though you yourself had never been
born.”
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” adds Glyndwr; to which the
unromantic Hotspur observes:—
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
It is plain, if we take the Shakespearean view, that there were never
such ill-assorted allies as Hotspur and Glyndwr. The one boasts, in true
Welsh style, that no man is his equal, and Hotspur is only ready to
allow that no man speaks better Welsh.
Had this alliance been successful, Glyndwr’s sovereignty was to extend
over Wales and to include all the territory comprised within a line
drawn from the Mersey to Burton-on-Trent, and from thence to Worcester
and the mouth of the Severn. But he distrusted Hotspur, even if he was
frank with Mortimer, who had become his son-in-law; and when Hotspur
advanced from the Scottish borders to give battle to Henry IV. at
Shrewsbury, left him to fight a hopeless struggle against overwhelming
numbers. Had Glyndwr been a true ally and joined forces Shrewsbury Fight
would have had a different ending. But, cursed with those streaks of
treachery and suspicion that mar the character of the Celt, Glyndwr let
his ally be destroyed, and with that desertion wrought the eventual
failure of his own ambitions. This is no place to follow his fortunes,
rising and falling in a long and hopeless struggle. Successes he had in
plenty, and he laid the greater part of Wales waste, but Saxon tenacity
wore him down in the long run. After a romantic career, he at length
became a beaten fugitive, and at the last fades out of sight, in 1416.
No man knows where or when he died; but legends connect the little
village of Monnington, in Herefordshire, with his obscure end.
The Welsh bards who twanged their harps in Owain’s halls, and ate his
food and swilled his sack and metheglin, did him an ill service when
they sang of the deeds he was to do and the glory that was to be his.
His halls are gone, and only traditions and the researches of the
antiquary preserve his story. His Mount stands still by the roadside,
and vague stories of how he stood here and watched for the approach of
his enemies are told; but one may have a shrewd suspicion that it is
only your literary Welshman who nowadays knows or cares much about him.
XXXIX
More in accord with modern Wales is Llansaintffraid, across the Dee,
with its trim lodging-houses and villas, and little railway-station
which the railway authorities, alarmed at the name of Llansaintffraid,
have christened by the simpler title of “Carrog.” More villas, more
lodging-houses, and many tourists mark the approach to Corwen, a village
or townlet that does not favourably impress the stranger fresh from
Llangollen. No one could with truth say that the houses of Llangollen
are beautiful, but the scenery there makes full atonement: at Corwen the
scene is tame, the hills recede, and the Dee flows through a wide
valley. Just here, where the town should be especially attractive, it is
mean at the best, and at its worst downright ugly. Moreover, the railway
company has deliberately chosen to place its coal-sidings and
engine-sheds alongside the road and abutting upon the old Dee bridge.
Opinions upon Corwen are singularly unanimous through the course of over
a hundred years. In 1797 Wigstead must have found it at its worst. The
houses were then, he says, of clay and loam, and “most miserable hovels:
the people, cows, asses, hogs, and poultry all live in one apartment,
and all turn out at the same time in the morning.” The following year,
another tourist finds Corwen a “disagreeable little town”; and in modern
times the kindliest of itinerists has nothing better to say of the place
than that “the tourist will not find much to detain him” in it.
The little that does suffice to detain him centres in the old church
whence the name of the town derives, Cor Wen meaning White Choir. No
longer white, but on the contrary, greyish-black and unlovely, the
church stands behind the houses of the long street, and immediately
under a huge pile of cliff-like rocks called Pen-y-Pigyn, crowned by a
flagstaff, whence Owain Glyndwr is said to have cast his dagger, in some
unexplained fit of anger. It is a legend stupidly invented to account
for the rudely incised figure of a cross, resembling a short sword, seen
in the granite slab now built as a lintel into the south porch. A
battered old churchyard cross stands near the west door, and several old
slate tombstones with two semicircular hollows, are to be seen, cut in
this manner to receive the knees of those who came to pray by the
graveside of their dead. On the southern side of this churchyard, more
melancholy than most, a row of almshouses, called “Corwen College,” may
be noticed; built in 1750 for six widows of Merionethshire clergymen,
who may thus meditate among the tombs from morn to eve on the evil fate
that left them widows before their husbands had attained to fat
prebends, decanal dignities, or the culminating honours and riches of an
episcopal throne.
The odd effigy of Iorwerth Sulien, an early vicar of the church, divides
with the fine old timber roof the honours of the interior.
The “Owen Glendower” inn at Corwen has long since lost the “fierce
gigantic figure like that of some Saracenic Soldan” that once served for
a sign, and attracted the attention of every eighteenth-century
traveller; and has in other ways altered since the time when the first
tourists came, note-books in hand. It must be confessed that the first
tourists in Wales are now become highly amusing where they intended to
be improving, and not a little dull when their intent was jocular. One
of them who says he was “Josephus Rex,” is not a little obscure at
first, but presently we find that phrase to be a ponderous play upon
words, and that, in short he meant he was Jo King—joking. You take him,
do you not? How exquisitely pretty a wit!
Such an one as this must have been the Rev. Mr. Evans who, in 1705,
toured the Principality. He found “decent accommodation,” and pointed
civility at Corwen, where others had found nothing of the kind; but it
was stupid of him to ask for a “tonsor” when he meant “barber,” and
wanted a shave. Instead of bringing him a tonsor, they brought him a
blind harper. He retained the harper, but still clamoured for his shave;
whereupon, a “blooming damsel of twenty-five years” came with razors,
soap and hot water, and deftly scraped his chin.
Most of Corwen’s business activity is centred in its railway-station at
the further end of the town, where roads divide like the two arms of the
letter Y; one, to the left, going to Bala, and the other for Holyhead.
Here those two leviathans, the Great Western and the London and
North-Western Railways, meet and go their several ways to Barmouth and
to Rhyl. Beyond, for twenty-two miles, there is a vast expanse of
country where no railway goes, and if Corwen wants to visit
Bettws-y-Coed and Bettws desires to return the call, they have either to
take the road or else embark upon a roundabout railway journey of fifty
miles. The engineering works for a line that should connect the two
along the Alwen, Geirw, and Conway valleys would not be so very great;
the difficulty perhaps lies in the question, which of the rivals is to
do it? Meanwhile, one passes over the ancient bridge that spans the Dee
on six lichened arches, and bids good-bye to the modern world for awhile
just as effectually as Borrow did when he tramped the road fifty-five
years ago.
It is at first a tame road, by comparison with the scenes left behind,
and it is not until the “Druid’s Head” inn—or what once was that
hostelry—is passed that its character grows wild. The old toll-house of
Macs Mawr and the “Cymro Goat Inn” mark the change in pleasant fashion
by a bridge at the confluence of the Alwen and the Geirw. Their _curu_
at the “Goat” (whether it be a Billy or a Nanny is no matter) is better
than their English, and the traveller is little likely to make himself
understood, unless he be as clever a Saxon as Borrow himself, who lost
no opportunity of showing the astounded Welshmen that he understood
their language. Imagination pictures what he would have done, after
several highly critical pulls at his tankard. “Maes Mawr,” he would have
asked, “that means ‘great meadow’; that is it, I suppose, across the
road?” pointing to a pasture under the lee of the hills; and, when he
had been answered in the affirmative, telling his astonished host the
history of it, carefully “got-up” before-hand.
Here you meet few people besides farm-hands and drovers. Of drovers
plenty, urging their small Welsh sheep and their bony cattle to market.
If you be at all curious you remark, perhaps, that the sheep are small.
“Yess,” says the drover, “they wass ferry small sheeps whateffer. They
wass take them from the mountains to makee the other sheeps petter. They
will be”—here they break away suddenly, and the drover hurries after
them with an opening “Tam!” swallowed up in a torrent of Welsh
expletives.
XL
From Maerdy Post-office, half a mile onwards, commences a steady rise of
nearly two miles, the uplands on the right presently culminating in the
crags of Cader Dinmael, and the valley of the Geirw on the left
gradually deepening and contracting into a profound and narrow gorge;
the road running round cornices of rock, fenced by breast-high masonry
on the one side, and overhung by rocky cliffs on the other. With
boring-tools, pickaxe, and blasting-powder, Telford forced a way for his
road round this shoulder of the mountain and converted what had been a
narrow and dangerous track into a smooth highway, thirty-six feet in
width. This is the spot rightly called in the old road-books “the
romantic Pass of Glyndyffws,” and the bridge that seems to hazardously
leap the gorge where the Geirw plunges and foams is identical with the
“Pont-y-Glyn-Bin”—the Bridge of the Glen of Trouble—named by Borrow.
Very justly he speaks of this as “one of the wildest and most beautiful
scenes imaginable,” and of the bridge as “a kind of Devil’s Bridge,
diabolically fantastical, flung over the deep glen and the foaming
water.”
“Projecting out over the ravine,” he continues, “was a kind of
looking-place, protected by a wall forming a half-circle, doubtless made
by the proprietor of the domain for the use of the admirers of scenery.
Cut on the top surface of the wall, which was of slate and therefore
easily impressible by the knife, were several names, doubtless those of
tourists who had gazed from the look-out, amongst which I observed, in
remarkably bold letters, that of T******”
Borrow would have been more correct in his surmise if he had given the
credit of this little balcony built out from the road to Telford. He it
was who designed that little look-down into the depths, together with a
few others along this road at particularly favourable view-points, thus
proving his own appreciation of scenery and the possession of that
artistic sense denied engineers by architects, who, as a body, are the
most intolerant, opinionated, and barbarous set of professional men in
existence, ready to ruin an old building for an idea, or to destroy the
artistic work of one period to replace it with modern imitations of the
especial style that suits their individual opinion.
Glyndyffws (how tearful and wonderful these Welsh names!) is lovely
beyond expression. Nowhere else are the mountain-ashes and the
scrub-oaks more exquisite than here, where they are seen clinging
tenaciously to the jagged ledges of the ravine, soaked continuously in
the moisture thrown up from the tortured water below, and clothed in
every twig and wizard limb with moss and lichens. This, of course, was a
spot that most powerfully impressed the imaginations of old travellers.
Hear one of them. He speaks of the “deep and dismal chasm through which
the hoarse-sounding torrent roars over the disjointed rocks beneath,
and, lashing the rocky sides that check its impetuosity, rolls its angry
waters to the Dee.” But we have not done with him yet. He goes on to
describe the “stupendous fissure fully two hundred feet deep, overhung
by large forest trees,” and continues in that strain to a wearisome
length, until, in fact, we tear ourselves away, catching as we go such
disjointed phrases as “awful scene,” “maddened torrent,” “profundity of
horrible bed,” and so forth. That old tourist, fortunately for himself,
did not visit Snowdon, after so recklessly expending all his adjectives
on the way. Had he done so, he must surely, bankrupted in phrases, have,
in presence of Snowdon’s grandeur, become a literary insolvent, paying
the equivalent of a farthing in the pound.
Leaving Pont y Glyn and its “tremendous roar” behind, “the prospect,”
according to a century-old wayfarer in these wilds, “becomes as
uninteresting as Bagshot Heath.” But scarcely so. That Heath has no
mountains enlivening the distance, nor a clear and beautiful stream
trickling in little sharps and trebles through a solitary valley, such
as this. Indeed, the hamlet of Tynant passed, where a shop, an inn, a
chapel, and some scattered farmsteads in the cwms or on the hillsides
comprise the whole, the rest of the way to Cerrig-y-Druidion is
singularly beautiful in the open and unfenced sort. The name of Tynant
alone, which means the “House by the Stream,” points to a solitude once
greater than now, when the inn was the only house here.
It was to this quiet spot, by the sparkling trout stream, that Dick
Vickers, who once drove the Holyhead Mail between here and Shrewsbury,
retired, as Colonel Birch-Reynardson relates. He had been in early days
a postboy, and had then performed the feat of driving “His Honour,” of
Pradoe, from that place to London faster than the fastest. “His Honour”
was posting up to town in a light barouche, and reached the “Lion” yard
at Shrewsbury just as the “Wonder” was starting. “Dick,” said the
squire, “I wonder whether I could beat the ‘Wonder’ into town; I should
like to do it if I can.” And, in short, it was done, that celebrated
coach coming in a bad second.
But steady and careful as old Time was little Dick when on the bench.
“Little Dick” they called him because “he had to get on sixpennyworth of
halfpence to look on the top of a Stilton cheese,” and those cheeses are
of no great stature. In an evil hour he gave up the ribbons and set up
as a farmer at Tynant, where, when his day’s work was done, he had been
used to fish the little stream. But farming was a very different matter
from driving four horses, and he lost his money in it, and so one ill
day they found him hanging from a beam in one of his barns.