Rhaiadr-y-Wennol, or the “Swallow Falls,” conduct upwards, out of the
hole in whose kindly shelter Bettws lies. Along this somewhat tiring
incline a long procession of sight-seers may be seen toiling every day,
from April to October, at any time between eight a.m. and seven in the
evening, for the Falls have always been considered one of the sights
best worth seeing in Wales, and even the Holyhead Mail used to pull up
for five minutes to allow passengers to see them. They obtain their
pretty name only, it is sad to reflect, by error, in an old confusion of
“Wennol,” the Welsh word for “swallow,” with “Ewynol,” which means
“foaming,” and is therefore a description merely Saxon in its
unimaginative matter-of-fact. To those who would compare the Swallow
Falls with Niagara or Alpine waterfalls, with intent to disparage this
beautiful spot, we need have nothing to say. Let it be sufficient that
these foaming waters, overhung with rocks and fantastically-rooted
trees, are sufficiently lovely. The Falls are so close to the road as to
be readily seen from it, between the trunks of the little fir plantation
that intervenes, while their roaring can be heard far away. They begin
with a tumbled race of the Llugwy between scattered rocks, developing
into three distinct steps or falls, followed by a long slide. These
masses of water, flung riotously upon one another, produce a curiously
beautiful effect on the river immediately below, the element being so
thoroughly aerated that for many yards onward it is full of air-bubbles
as brilliant as the sparklets in champagne or mineral waters. The
Swallow Falls have, of course, their legend. Beneath them is supposed to
lie the spirit of Sir John Wynn, of Gwydyr, a canny baronet of the early
seventeenth century, who was so “shrewd and successful in his dealings”
that his Welsh neighbours, rightly or wrongly, thought him enriched by
foul means at their expense. Accordingly, here his unhappy shade was
sent “to be punished, purged, spouted upon, and purified from the foul
deeds done in his days of nature.” According to latest advices, it is
here yet, “damned moist, unpleasant.” If all erring shades were banished
to such situations, it is to be feared there would not be waterfalls
sufficient to go round; but, indeed, it is to a roomier and a drier
place that they are generally thought to be consigned.
[Illustration: THE SWALLOW FALLS. _From an Old Print._]
The Llugwy, more and more a mountain stream as we proceed, borders the
road, on one side or the other, as far as Capel Curig. Half a mile
beyond the Swallow Falls, it is crossed at Ty-Hyll bridge, and is
thenceforward on the left-hand. The road still ascends, crosses a wild
tract with an ancient fir-crowned tumulus, and comes steeply up to
Pont-y-Cyfyng and the Cyfyng Falls, a pretty scene, among scrub oaks and
silver birches, with one of Telford’s happily placed little alcoves, for
the amateurs of the picturesque, built out from the breastwork
protecting the road.
[Illustration: CYFYNG FALLS.]
Here the great road enters upon its wildest and most impressive
stretches, but not without such compensations to the traveller as the
pretty, artist-haunted inns of Tan-y-Bwlch afford. Another
toll-gate—never, surely, was there a great highway to vie with this in
the number of them—blocked the way until the close of 1890, and the old
house remains. Just beyond it, and full in view of the trim peaks of
Snowdon, of Moel Siabod, and their great cloud-capped brethren, is the
little village, or rather hamlet, of Capel Curig, lying in the valley
where roads go off left to the stormy pass of Llanberis and so on to
Carnarvon; and on the right to Holyhead. Capel Curig was, like Bettws,
never more than a chapelry in the wilds; but, unlike Bettws, it has not
grown with modern times. One may seek the reason with success in the
fact that no railway comes near it. A contributory reason is perhaps
found in the nature of its surroundings. Grandeur of scenery, and purity
of air do not compensate holiday-folks for the mists, the furious
storms, and the frequent rains that haunt the spot. Visitors to Capel
Curig have been known to drive into it through the rain, to stay as
indoor prisoners to stress of weather for a week; departing without ever
once having seen the mists disperse that cling so fondly about Snowdon,
and veil his majesty from many eyes.
A thunderstorm here is a terrific and appalling thing, with the
encircling mountains acting as sounding-boards to the demoniacal peals
of thunder that crash with ear-rending reverberations along the valleys.
Fortunately for those who are unwilling witnesses of this elemental
strife, Capel Curig possesses a very large and resourceful hotel,
standing off the Holyhead Road, by the twin lakes in the valley. It was
built about 1802 by the then Lord Penrhyn, one of the first to urge the
improvement of the Holyhead Road and the adoption of this route, instead
of the older and more circuitous one by Chester. He probably could not,
with the best will in the world, have erected a plainer building.
When Borrow, tramping eighteen miles on a hot and dusty day, came here,
he found the fashionable company in the grand saloon surveying him with
looks of the most supercilious disdain. They thought him some poor
fellow, tramping from motives of economy.
[Illustration: CAPEL CURIG.]
The poor little whitewashed church of Capel Curig—the original Chapel of
St. Curig that gives the place its name—stands quite near the big hotel.
It was dedicated to Curig and to Julitta, his mother. The missionary
zeal that impelled them to come here, a thousand years or so ago, must
have been at fever heat, for this was then a place of unutterable
loneliness: not as now with a fine road running by, but a trackless
country, deeply shadowed by the almost impenetrable oak woods that
covered the mountain sides and the moorlands, now almost entirely
innocent of trees of any sort. A mild specimen of what even eighteenth
century roads were like will give some notion of the difficulties of
approach that remained until 1820. This “awful example” is the four-mile
length of deserted road between Capel Curig and Llyn Ogwen. It was once
the only way, and the modern Holyhead Road between these two points is
wholly of Telford’s making. The beginning of this track—for it was
little better—may be sought between the Post Office and the whitewashed
cottage that was once the “Tap” of the hotel down yonder. Passing
immediately over a rugged bridge spanning a waterfall on the Llugwy, it
mounts across the rising moorland, and climbs a boulder-strewn ridge; to
descend to the shores of Ogwen under the beetling crags of Trifaen
mountain. There is sufficient evidence that it is little less than the
bed of a mountain torrent in winter-time, and even to pedestrians the
exploration of it is difficult.
XLVI
Telford’s road takes an infinitely better course, although, to be sure,
the four miles onward to Lake Ogwen are on a steady and uninterrupted
rise, almost impossible to face with a steady head-wind, and wholly so
when storms scour through the pass. Here is the summit-level of the
road, 957 feet above the sea, with mountains 3,000 feet higher
surrounding the lonely moorland. Infrequent farmsteads of the smallest
and most cabin-like kind are scattered about the almost barren space,
among the bogs and the tremendous boulders that have at some time or
other come hurtling down from the mountain-sides, where there remain
many more of the same sort, ready to descend. Peat-stacks to every farm
tell of what fuel they use here, just as the great stones placed on the
roofs of stacks and cabins alike hint of the fury of the winds.
Llyn Ogwen comes at the end of this moor, where the mountains close in
and narrow the passage. It borders the road for a mile; a shuddery lake
of ice-cold water, sombre and austere as Trifaen the three-headed
himself, or Braich Du and Carnedd Dafydd on the opposite shores; all of
them mountains of the most craggy and stupendous sort.
Trifaen, an abrupt mountain of 3010 feet, is incomparably the finest in
Wales, after Snowdon. Its three peaks, with tattered shreds of mists
clinging about them, seem to hang immediately overhead, and the huge
fissures up its mighty sides, with moisture sparkling here and there on
the slaty rocks, like jewels in the sunshine, forbid all but the most
determined climbers.
[Illustration: LLYN OGWEN AND TRIFAEN MOUNTAIN.]
[Illustration: THE FALLS OF OGWEN.]
The anglers who fish for trout in Ogwen, the cyclists, and the
brake-parties from Bangor, all help to make the little refreshment house
that was once a toll-house, a busy enough place. It stands where the
overflow from the Llyn dashes down more than a hundred feet, in a series
of cascades, into a deep valley. These are the Falls of Ogwen, and the
valley that opens out below and stretches for miles onward, with a
glimpse of the sea in the distance, is the far famed Nant Ffrancon—“the
Glen of Beavers.” Until Telford reconstructed the road from this point,
the way—“the most dreadful horse-path in Wales” as Pennant describes it
in 1759—led over the Falls by an extremely narrow bridge without
parapets, and descended in break-neck fashion into the other side of the
valley. Telford wholly abandoned that suicidal drop and set his workmen
to quarry and blast out a gradual three miles’ descent on the hither
side, along the shoulders of the hills: a gradient so gentle that,
although the road is situated in the midst of the most rugged scenery,
it never exceeds 1 in 22. He built a new bridge over the Falls, and
propped up his road from falling into the valley by a massive length of
retaining-wall; carrying underneath the carriage-way by cross drains,
the little spouts of water that fall at every few yards from the
mountain sides.
[Illustration: NANT FFRANCON. _After David Cox._]
The old bridge may still be seen, a moss-grown and decrepit arch, beside
the modern, and the old road still descends the vale; but no one save
the peasants and the wandering shepherds ever trace the deserted way.
David Cox has left a line view of the modern road, with Carnedd Dafydd
and Trifaen in the background, and the scenery to the right, where the
black and frightful precipice called the “Devil’s Kitchen” gapes;
vapours overhanging it like the steam of some infernal cookery.
XLVII
The Glen of Beavers is a beautiful spot from the standpoint of the
tourist, if not of the farmers, who have with infinite labour collected
the scattered boulders, and built boundary walls with them; and essay to
grow corn and hay in the bottom, where the Ogwen stream goes prattling
in summer on its winding course. The Ogwen is no friend to the farmer,
for walls and stacks and earth are often carried away in winter by the
innocent looking brook, that arises at such times and, clearing the
fields far and wide in an irresistible flood, deposits stones where the
good earth bad been, and carries the earth itself in solution down to
Bangor, and so out to sea. Before agriculture can feel secure here,
locks and dams should regulate the tricksy watercourse, just as was done
by the dams the beavers built in the unrecorded ages, before ever the
farmer came.
[Illustration: NANT FFRANCON.]
At the foot of the descent is Tyn-y-Maes——the House in the Meadow, a
hamlet where an inn stood in coaching days to supply relays for the last
stage into Bangor, and where, one may be quite sure, the coachmen and
passengers coming down or going up, partook of those creature comforts
the rigours of the journey demanded. A coachman was said to have lost
his eyesight from the effects of a snowstorm at Nant Ffrancon.
It is a woeful exchange from the quiet streams and the rural sights of
the last few miles to Bethesda and the hideous slate quarries that gash
the hillsides. “A Scriptural name,” said Borrow, when a chance
acquaintance on the road told him the name of the village.
“Is it?” said he; “well, if its name is Scriptural, the manners of its
people are by no means so.”
If the appearance of Bethesda (now a town, and a very mean and ugly one)
were any criterion of the character of its inhabitants, then, the
Bethesda people would be past praying for. It is a long, long street of
the most furiously ugly houses that ever roof was put to, and the whole
of its surroundings are pitifully sordid. Whether cheap stucco or slate
be the building materials, the result is the same, and the generations
of quarrymen who have laboured to enrich Lord Penrhyn and his ancestors
are doomed to dwell in a most squalid place, within sight of some of the
most beautiful scenery in the world.
For Lord Penrhyn is the owner of land far and near. Not, for the most
part, land that would enrich its possessor, but in the slate quarries of
Bethesda a veritable mine of wealth, far surpassing the riches derived
from many a goldfield. Slate rock that can be quarried and split into
the thin sections required for roofing is of the rarest occurrence, and
most of it is situated within the bounds of the Penrhryn estates, that
for centuries have produced more than three-quarters of the slates
coming into the market. Not only the home market is supplied from here,
but foreign also. Unlike the working of most mineral estates, the
quarries are not let out to some middleman, but worked direct for Lord
Penrhyn, and have been notorious from time to time for the bitter and
long-drawn strikes that have taken place. The middleman is not generally
regarded with favour, but it is safe to say, without following the
wretched story of the Bethesda quarrymen, that if such an one had the
control of the quarries, such occurrences, although possible, would not
have been of so protracted a character. A man who should lease the
quarries could not afford to lock them up, and, putting the key in his
pocket, let the strike go on for ever, or until the workmen and their
families were starved into accepting terms; but the Lords Penrhyn can.
The Penrhyns have been so greatly enriched by the quarries that their
wealth is colossal, and current income from that source can be cut off
without any discomfort. The whole pitiful business would be impossible
under that enlightened statesmanship which some day will make all
mineral wealth public property.
The chief features of the Bethesda scenery are the long series of
rubbish-heaps, or rubbish-mountains, and the terraced clefts in the
hills whence the slates have come. Whole hillsides have been cut and
blasted away, to be fashioned into slates that have roofed half the
little suburban villas of the world. The great success of Welsh slates
is due to their cheapness, and to the thinness to which it is possible
to split them, so that the cheap builder of cheap houses need not
provide a very substantial roof to bear their weight. It is very
different with the Cumberland slates; smaller and thicker and a great
deal more expensive, they are only to be found on buildings where
cheapness has not been the first object. Between the Welsh and the
Cumbrian products there can only be one choice on the score of
appearance and strength. Welsh slates have a disagreeable colour,
something between a blackish-blue and dark purple: those from Cumberland
are a delicate grey-green, beautiful when new, and improving with age.
Their comparative thickness, too, is an advantage from many points of
view.
[Illustration: PENRHYN CASTLE.]
[Illustration: LONISAF TOLL-HOUSE.]
The gates of Penrhyn Park confront the traveller when he has at last
left Bethesda in his wake. They are appropriately feudal and
threatening, in a revival of the old castellated style, just as though
the owner of the quarries had shut himself within, and was prepared to
defend himself and his hoards to the last extremity against the starving
thousands of the quarry-town. The little village of Llandegai stands
near, and beyond stretches the Park, with Penrhyn Castle in its midst: a
lovely scene of dense woodlands falling towards a blue expanse of sea,
with an island and a lighthouse and white-winged yachts. The Castle
turrets dominate the whole, an elaborate and highly successful piece of
make-believe, compelling the reverence of the wayfarer, until he draws
near and discovers that the Norman keep, own brother in appearance to
that of Rochester Castle, was built about a hundred years ago by a
certain “judicious Hopper” (not our old theological friend, the
judicious Hooker), “who with his usual taste and science has preserved
in his improvements the characteristic style of the military Gothic.”
Positively the last toll-house before Bangor is found at Lonisaf,
standing not far from the spot where the old road from Ogwen Falls joins
the modern. Some toll-gates were provided with weighbridges, and Lonisaf
was one of them, the little weigh-house still remaining. The especial
function of these weighbridges was to detect overloading. Fines for
carts and waggons laden beyond their proper weight were very heavy, and
their severity and frequent application fully reimbursed the trustees
the cost of installing a check of this kind.
XLVIII
The road makes an abrupt turn to the left to enter the city of Bangor.
The grim stone walls on either side of the forbidding edifice in front
do not represent a prison, workhouse, or lunatic asylum, but have at
present the honour of housing the University College of North Wales,
founded in 1884. Years before that date this was the “Penrhyn Arms”
hotel, one of the largest and best on the road, with great resources in
the way of reception-rooms, extensive private suites for the
considerable personages who travelled to and from Ireland, and stabling
for over a hundred horses. A private inclined road leads up to the
pillared doorway, and an arch over the public road conducted in those
days to the hotel farm and dairy. It is frequently found to be too low
to permit the passage of hay and straw waggons and other mountainous
loads, with the result that the so-called “private” road is used, and is
almost as public as the other. The best side of the building is turned
away from the road, and looks from amid wide lawns and beautiful gardens
across the Menai Straits to Beaumaris. Here they show with reverence the
stump of a fir tree planted by the Princess Victoria in 1832. The tree
died in 1899. The interior of the house is, of course, divided into
class-rooms, lecture-rooms, and the like. The kitchen and scullery are
now a library, and students now swat where fat cooks once sweated before
roasting fires. The change is one that would have horrified Colonel
Birch-Reynardson, equally with the coachmen and guards of the Holyhead
Mail that used to change here in the palmy days of Host Bicknell.
[Illustration: THE PENRHYN ARMS.]
The Colonel, as an amateur whip, often drove the Mail between Oswestry
and Bangor, and tells how others occasionally did the same. There was,
for example, one who took a glass or a bottle too much at the “Owen
Glendower” at Corwen, and wrought havoc with the mail and other things
along the road, with the result that the bags were too late for the
packet at Holyhead, and the Post Office authorities heard of it. Result
number two was that horse proprietors were severely admonished not to
allow any one but the authorised coachman to drive. They did so all the
same, but the reins were prudently made to change hands when nearing
“the change.” Charlie Harper, who about that time had been promoted from
the slower Chester and Holyhead to the fast direct Holyhead Mail, had
resigned his ribbons one day to the Colonel, but took them over on
nearing Bangor. The Colonel, however, good-humouredly took Bicknell to
task for giving _him_ the sack. The hotel-keeper was sorry, but no
amateur could drive the Mail again after the wigging he had got from the
Post Office.
Some little while later, one stormy evening, the Colonel was on the Mail
at Bangor. Harper, at the end of his day’s work, got down and went home;
the new team was put to, and the Mail stood waiting for Jack Williams,
the coachman who was to take it across the bridge and on to Holyhead.
Five minutes passed; time was up, and no coachman appeared. “What the
devil are you waiting for?” asked Hodgson, the guard, coming back from
the Post Office with the bags. “Where is Jack Williams?”
No one had seen Jack Williams, and no one seemed to know whether he was
dead or alive. At last one of the horsekeepers seemed to remember all of
a sudden that Williams had been summoned to attend a magistrates’
meeting on the other side of the Menai Bridge; that Harper was to have
taken the Mail over the bridge, and Williams to get up at the
public-house where the worthy beaks who had summoned him were to hold
their conclave. “Yess, inteet, I remember it wass summoned to attend the
magistrates’ meeting” (_it_ standing, of course, for ‘Chack’ Williams).
“Now then,” said Hodgson, growing impatient, “we can’t wait here all
day; somebody must drive. Mr. Reynardson, will you be so good? We shall
be late for the packet.”
“I don’t care,” said the Colonel, “whether you are late or not; I am
thankful to say I am not going to cross such a day as this. Jump up and
drive yourself, and I’ll take charge of your bags. Bicknell has said
that I am not to drive his horses, and if you take root here I don’t
care; I’ll not touch them.” “Well, sir, we shall be late for the packet
if you _won’t_,” said Hodgson. “I don’t care,” he replied, “I dare say I
shall be able to get to where I am going in time for dinner, or at all
events before bedtime, so I’ll have nothing to do with either the mail
or Mr. Bicknell’s horses, and if the mail stays here all night it’s
nothing to me.” “Now, Hodgson,” said Bicknell, who just then appeared at
the door, “what’s the Mail standing there for.” “That’s _just_ what I
should like to know,” answered Hodgson; “but the Mail can’t go, sir,
without some one to drive it. Jack Williams is not to be found, Charlie
Harper has gone home long ago, and Mr. Reynardson says you said he was
not to drive your horses any more, and he won’t have anything to do with
them; so what’s to be done I don’t know. We shall be late for the
packet, and then you know there’ll be a row again with the Post Office
people.”
Things seemed to be in something of a fix, and Hodgson, though in a fuss
to be off, was rather enjoying the joke, which began to be a serious
one; for there seemed to be no chance of any one to drive. It was
blowing great guns, and the Menai Bridge would be rocking about like a
cradle, and the team of greys were not the handiest in the world, if
they had not got up the right way in the morning, and if things went a
little wrong.
“Well,” said Bicknell, “this won’t do. Will you drive them, Mr.
Reynardson, till you find Jack Williams on the other side of the
bridge?” “No,” said the obstinate Colonel, “you may drive them yourself,
if you like; I won’t touch them.” Things looked bad; Bicknell was no
coachman; Hodgson said he could not, and Reynardson that he would not,
drive, and there seemed none of the horsekeepers competent to perform
the feat. So at last, Mr. Bicknell, putting on his most affable face,
said: “Mr. Reynardson, Sir, will you be so kind as to take them across
the bridge? I shall be very much obliged to you if you will.” “Oh! Oh!”
said the pacified amateur, “if you are going to be obliged, or anything
of that kind, I don’t mind obliging you, Mr. Bicknell,” and the thing
was done.
XLIX