street, extending from this spot to the railway station, where a more
recent and less objectionable continuation of it, called Upper Bangor,
climbs for another half-mile towards the Menai Bridge. The long, long
street of Bangor, narrow and dirty, gives an indescribably second-hand
appearance to everything exposed for sale in its shop-windows; and the
stranger, newly arrived from the champagne-like air of Capel Curig, has
not been in Bangor half an hour before he, too, feels second-hand and
soiled. He goes weak at the knees, totters, and feels utterly undone.
The town lies as it were in the bottom of a funnel, and, tucked away
from actual contact with the vivifying breezes of the Menai Strait, has
air neither from one side nor the other. It is, by consequence, a town
of the sickliest. Let these things, however, be said rather in sorrow
than contempt, for of contempt Bangor has already had sufficient at the
hands of generations of travellers. Many are attracted to Bangor by
reason of its cathedral, but it were better the building had not that
proud title, because those who have already made acquaintance with the
famous cathedrals of England see a lack of proportion in thus dignifying
a church that, for both size and beauty, is surpassed times without
number by parish churches in the shires. For its present want of
interest, such individually remote and entirely dissimilar persons as
Owain Glyndwr and Sir Gilbert Scott are responsible. Owain in 1402 laid
it in ruins; and Scott, who, at a cost of £35,000, was engaged from 1866
to 1875 in “restoring” the debased Perpendicular building he found here,
has impressed his own architectural nostrums upon it in a very
disastrous manner. It is a long, low structure, with a dwarf central
tower, and its own inherent disadvantages are greatly worsened by its
site being in a hollow beside the shabby street.
Doctor Johnson, who, touring North Wales in 1774, found the “quire” of
Bangor to be “mean,” could quite honestly repeat that criticism to-day.
The service in his time was also “ill-read.” A “very mean inn” in the
town further helped to jaundice his views—an inn with little
accommodation, for he records: “I lay in a room where the other bed had
two men.”
De Quincey is one of the very many who have not liked Bangor. He says it
has “fewer attractions than any other spot in Carnarvonshire”—a very
mild and negative way of putting Bangor’s disabilities, and much milder
than it might have been, considering the provocation received. It was in
1802 he was here, following his “elopement” from school at Manchester.
With the weekly allowance of a guinea, he was free for a while to roam
Wales as he pleased, and came (of all places!) to Bangor, where he hired
“a very miniature set of apartments—one room and a closet.” His landlady
had been a servant in the household of the Bishop of Bangor, and, one
day, calling at the Palace, happened to mention to the Bight Reverend
how she had let her rooms. Thereupon that dignified cleric thought it
incumbent upon him to caution her as to her selection of inmates. “You
must recollect, Betty,” he said, “that Bangor is the high road to the
Head (_the Head_ was the common colloquial expression for Holyhead); so
that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from their debts into
England; and of English swindlers, running away from their debts to the
Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route.”
This was excellent advice for judicious ears; but Betty unhappily
repeated the Bishop’s words to De Quincey, together with her reply,
which was, “Oh, my lord, I really don’t think this young gentleman is a
swindler, because——” But the clause that was to have justified him that
young gentleman never knew. “You don’t _think_ me a swindler,” he
interposed; “I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it”; and so
departed, in a righteous fury.
L
It is at Bangor that the old Chester route to Holyhead, by way of
Penmaenmawr, falls into the great Holyhead Road. Although we have not
come by Chester, it may be worth while to glance at Penmaenmawr, that
gigantic headland over whose perilous heights old-time travellers went,
trembling for their safety. Its Welsh name, meaning literally the “great
stone head,” sufficiently describes this old obstacle and
stumbling-block, looking over the water to Anglesey. Nowadays the
railway tunnels through it, and travellers by the Wild Irishman, warned
by the locomotive’s shriek, are plunged into a momentary darkness,
fifteen hundred feet beneath the windy height where the horsemen of two
hundred years ago stumbled along an indistinct track. Swift was of that
company, and it is still told how the inns at either end of this
laborious route used to display on their signs the couplets written by
him:—
Before you venture here to pass,
Take a good refreshing glass.
And—
Now this hill you’re safely over,
Drink, your spirits to recover.
By 1774, when Dr. Johnson toured in Wales, matters had somewhat
improved. “We came to Penmaenmawr,” he says, “by daylight, and found a
way, lately made very easy and very safe. It was cut smooth and enclosed
between parallel walls, the outer of which secures the passenger from
the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. This wall is here and there
broken by mischievous wantonness. The inner wall preserves the road from
the loose slates, which the shattered steep above it would pour down.
That side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones which
every accident may crumble. The old road runs higher, and must have been
very formidable. _The sea beats at the bottom of the way._”
[Illustration: PENMAENMAWR. _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._]
Those italics are not due to Johnson, but are placed here to duly
emphasise the romantic note struck, perhaps unconsciously, by him at the
close of those too-staccato sentences, studded all too plentifully with
that often necessary but harsh word “which.” “The sea beats at the
bottom of the way:” there you have a picture of the place that hints in
a sentence all manner of disasters; ships blown against the rocky coast,
coaches swept off the road into the waves, and obscure catastrophes, the
more dreadful because left to the imagination.
But not every one found Penmaenmawr so safe, even though the new road
had replaced the old. They had not Johnson’s robust nature, or else
desired to make some literary capital out of the scene. Thus, more than
twenty years later, the Rev. Richard Warner describes “the rocky
mountain of Penmaenmawr,” in what he evidently intends to be
blood-curdling terms. “Formerly extremely rude and dangerous,” he says,
“it has been entirely altered and divested of a considerable degree of
its horror. Still, however, it cannot be travelled without shuddering.
Creeping round the side of the mountain, it hangs, as it were, in
mid-air, with a frowning precipice above and a steep descent immediately
under it. The rocks on the right are nearly perpendicular, sometimes
beetling over the road in a terrific manner, at others retiring into
deep declivities of nine hundred or a thousand feet, from whose rugged
sides project fragments of incalculable magnitude, so capriciously
placed, and having such a disjoined appearance that it is impossible for
the traveller to lose the perpetual dread of his being every moment
crushed to atoms under a torrent of huge stones.” That such stormy
torrents _did_ sometimes flow is evident from Wigstead, who, coming to
“where Penmaenmawr awfully raises its aspiring head,” found a mass of
rock recently fallen into the road in a storm; a huge fragment of cliff
that, if broken up, could not have been cleared away by ten large
waggons.
[Illustration: PENRHYN CASTLE AND SNOWDONIA, PROM BEAUMARIS.
_After David Cox._]
When the union of Great Britain and Ireland was effected, the Irish
members clamoured for the immediate improvement of this dangerous road.
Indeed, the city of Dublin had already contributed something towards
such a work, but the present fine highway round the base of the headland
did not come into existence until Telford came upon the scene, blasting
and levelling the way that Turner has pictured so well.
Having passed Penmaenmawr, the old travellers to Holyhead often crossed
into Anglesey by the Lavan Sands to Beaumaris: a dangerous passage only
to be attempted by those correctly informed of the tides. Horsemen would
ride the three-mile stretch of sands exposed at low water, and, hailing
the Beaumaris ferry, be readily landed on the island; but if they by any
chance ventured out half an hour too late, the rising tide swept them
away, or the treacherous sands engulfed them. It was here that Sir John
Bramston and his son were nearly lost in 1641. They had ridden across
the sands to the verge of the channel and hailed the ferry; but the
ferrymen were drunk, and it was long before any notice was taken of
them. Meanwhile, the tide was rising fast, and was swirling about them
before aid arrived, and they were rescued in the nick of time.
LI
The ferries into Anglesey, five in all, from end to end of the Straits,
were all more or less perilous. Crossing by them, according to evidence
produced at an enquiry on the subject, 180 persons lost their lives
between 1664 and 1842. The mail route was by Bangor Ferry, called by the
Welsh Porthaethwy, or the “Ferry of the Narrow Waters,” close by where
Telford’s suspension bridge now spans the channel. Up out of Bangor
drove the Mails, and many of the stage-coaches, post-chaises, and
chariots, to the ferry-house. Thence passengers and their luggage were
ferried across to the opposite side in boats and lighters, each manned
by four ferrymen. Coaches and chaises were in waiting when they landed,
to whisk them off to Mona and Holyhead. Swift crossed here in 1727, and
refers to the inn, “which, if it be well kept, will break Bangor.” There
he lay the night, and was up at four o’clock the next morning. This inn
was the “George,” still standing, with an addition built on, in what was
intended to be a grand and imposing style, about 1850. The huge,
buff-coloured pile, standing in midst of lovely gardens, faces the
Strait. There still hangs on the wall of the coffee-room an autograph of
the Duke of Wellington, taken from the visitors-book and proudly framed:
“I passed the night of the 21st August, 1851, at the George Inn, and was
very well accommodated. Wellington.”
In the terraced gardens is preserved the ferrymen’s horn, but the
ferrymen are dead and gone, and even their huts, built on the rocks of
the Anglesey shore, are in ruins. There stands on that rocky
landing-place an old inn, now called the “Cambria,” but in the days of
the ferry known as the “Three Tuns.” It is a romantic spot, romantic
with all the pathos of a tale that is told. From the wrought-iron
bracket of the inn, long without a sign, to the deserted and roofless
huts and the slippery, sea-weedy rocks, everything tells of a vanished
order of things. A few ancients gossip of what their fathers and
grandfathers told them of the times when exhausted passengers climbed
from the slimy rocks at the water’s edge to the shelter of the inn, and
of the old custom of swimming the cattle across the Straits at low
water, from the island of Ynys-y-Moch that now supports one of the
bridge-towers; but even the bridge is now become something of an
antiquity, and the ferry well-nigh forgot. A well-authenticated story of
it is still remembered. It tells how an attorney, on the ground of
having booked through to London, refused to pay the penny demanded by
the ferrymen for taking his portmanteau across, and how it was
accordingly detained until the Mail had left. The lawyer then paid the
disputed penny and ordered out a chaise and four to London. Arrived
there, he brought an action against the proprietors of the Mail, and
recovered all his expenses and compensation for loss of time. The Judge
expressed his opinion that the plaintiff was a benefactor to his
country, a view not likely to be taken in these times of one who would
spend £50 and perhaps five times that amount in litigation rather than
pay a penny.
The ferry was not superseded without some little contention. It had been
the property, time out of mind, of the Williams family, of Plas Issa,
Conway. Leased to an ancestral John Williams by Queen Elizabeth, for £3
6_s._ 8_d._ a year, there is no knowing how far back beyond that time
the family interest had reached. Government offered a sum in
compensation when the bridge was building, but the amount was not
considered sufficient, and the question was referred to the Beaumaris
Assizes, where the average takings of the last twelve years were stated
to have been £885 18_s._ per annum. In the result, Miss Williams, the
representative of the family, was awarded £26,557, representing thirty
years’ purchase, and she, or rather her husband, for she married in the
meanwhile, was paid that sum on the day the Bridge was opened.
[Illustration: THE OLD LANDING-PLACE ON THE ANGLESEY SHORE.]
Telford was not the first who had proposed to bridge the Menai.
Forty-two years before he had prepared his plans a Mr. Golborne sketched
a design, and Rennie had at a later period proposed a cast-iron bridge
to span the water in one arch. Even Telford’s first proposals differed
wholly from the design he eventually adopted; and he, like Rennie,
favoured more than any other type of bridge the single cast-iron arch.
Difficulties in the way of construction, in some degree, but in greater
measure the objections of the seafaring interest engaged in navigating
the Straits, led to this type being abandoned and the suspension
principle adopted. A legend, much in favour at Llangollen, tells how the
engineer, at a loss for ideas, obtained the suggestion for his Menai
Bridge from a small bridge on the suspension principle that then crossed
the Dee at Berwyn. However that may be, suspension bridges of practical
use, if of no very great size or scientific construction, were already
known to the world. Telford produced his design in 1818, and it was
submitted to the Commissioners and authorised by Parliament in the
following year. The design, carried out exactly as proposed, was to
provide a level roadway across the Straits at a height of 100 feet above
high water, with a clear opening between the main suspension towers of
579 feet, thus providing an ample fairway for mariners, and silencing
the objections of the shipping interest. The spot chosen was at a
narrowing of the channel, where the rocky shores, rising on either side
abruptly to a considerable height, afforded this clearance, and where an
island called Ynys-y-Moch gave a ready site for one of the great towers.
Between these main supports of the chains and the shores, a series of
arches—four on the Anglesey side and three on the Carnarvonshire
approach—were to support the rest of the roadway, to be 52 feet wide,
divided into two carriage ways of 12 feet each, with a central footpath
between of 4 feet width. The total height of the two great towers, above
high water mark, was to be 153 feet, and the entire length of the bridge
1000 feet.
The first stone of this great work was laid on the 10th of August, 1819,
when the tower on Ynys-y-Moch, on the Anglesey side, was begun. In the
course of four years the whole of the masonry work was completed, and
the series of piers and arches, built of Anglesey limestone, ready to
receive the iron chains, weighing close upon 2,200 tons. The first of
these was hauled up to its place on the 26th of April, 1825, in the
presence of thousands of spectators, come, many of them, in expectation
of seeing a colossal failure. When the hauling was completed, and the
first of the sixteen great chains that carry the central span safely
bolted in position, the friends who rushed to congratulate the anxious
engineer found him on his knees, in prayer.
The last chain was in position by the 9th of July, the driving home of
the final bolt, followed by the playing of “God Save the King” by a
brass band placed in the centre of the bridge, and a triumphal march
across it of workmen, amid volleys of cheers from those assembled
thousands who seem to have been constantly on the spot for more than two
months, and were still there on the following 30th of January, when
“this stupendous, pre-eminent, and singularly unique structure,” as an
old writer calls it, was opened “at thirty-five minutes after one
o’clock a.m., to allow the Royal London and Holyhead Mail coach,
conveying the London mail-bags for Dublin, to pass; David Davies,
coachman, Wm. Read, guard.” The Mail was followed by the Bangor Pilot,
and the London, Oxford and Holyhead “Oxonian”; the Holyhead Road
Commissioners, the engineer, and several thousands of persons.
The total cost of the bridge and approaches was £120,000; a very
moderate sum in comparison with many other bridge-building works, and
something less than one-fifth the cost of its huge neighbour, the
Britannia railway bridge, two miles distant, down the Straits. Four
workmen were killed during its progress.
Tolls are still taken at the Bridge. Foot-passengers and cyclists are
alike charged a penny each, and flys and cabs a shilling; the charges
running up curiously to half-a-crown for a stage coach, and three
shillings for a “post-chaise, coach, landau, berlin, or barouche, or
other vehicle with four wheels and four horses.” These charges are
arranged so as not to press too heavily upon the inhabitants of either
side, and one payment frees the bridge for the rest of the day, the
payer of one toll being allowed to come and go as often as he pleases up
to twelve o’clock, midnight.
As a business speculation, if it had been built solely to that end, the
Menai Bridge would be pronounced a failure, for the interest on capital
originally expended comes, at five per cent., to £6,000 per annum, and
the annual income from tolls, returned in 1837 as £1,200, when the
coaches were still running, must now be less rather than more. In
addition to the original cost, the charge for upkeep must be taken into
consideration, although, as the ironwork has not been painted for many
years past, that, perhaps, does not bulk very largely.
Proposals made by the County Councils of Carnarvon and Anglesey to
purchase the bridge from the Government and to open it toll free have
failed, the price asked being beyond the resources of those bodies.
LII
Across this monument of early engineering skill, with roadway swaying
and vibrating to the passage of every vehicle, and bird’s-eye views up
and down the glittering waterway, Anglesey is entered. On its shores to
the right sprawls Menai village, with Beaumaris in the distance, and
down beneath, on the left, lies the Isle of Benglas, with the oddly
placed church of Llantysilio on it.
You cannot unmoved set foot in Mona, as this was called before ever it
obtained its name of Isle of the Angles. It was the last retreat of the
Druids before the advance of the Roman power, and from it they incited
the Welsh tribes to resistance. It was in A.D. 61 that Suetonius
Paulinus, the Roberts of that distant past, made his great march across
Britain, with a resolution to finally crush their mystic power. His line
of march followed the Watling Street, bringing him to the shores of the
Menai Straits at _Segontium_, now identified with Carnarvon. Arrived
there, his first care was to provide a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats
where the Straits narrow, at a point now known as Port Dinorwic. When
this was done, and all in readiness for crossing, he found the passage
energetically disputed, and the unknown shores of the island lined with
a terror-striking army of blue-stained Britons, white-robed Druids, and
shrieking women clad in dark and dismal garments, with hair streaming
wildly over their faces, and carrying torches. These ministering angels
ran like furies up and down the rocks, and cursed; while the Druids
prayed and cursed in one breath. These unusual sights and sounds so
astonished the Roman soldiery that they gaped with dismay, and stood
unnerved, an excellent mark for the javelins the enemy began to throw at
them. They would probably have fled had it not been for their own
general, who encouraged them by promising death to all who flinched.
Death, therefore, being rather more of a certainty in the rear, they
made a wild rush, closed with the howling mob, and completely defeated
them. Many Druids were roasted on their own sacrificial altars that day,
as just burnt-offerings to atone for the cruelty of a blood-stained
religion that demanded living victims and divined events from the
inspection of human entrails. The sacred groves of Mona were cut down,
the altars demolished, and the island reduced to a conquered province.
[Illustration: DESERTED STABLES, MENAI VILLAGE.]
Having said thus much, and given the views of the Druids and their
practices popularly received, it is only fair to those ancients and to
the respectable old gentlemen who, in these days of Celtic revivals and
Eisteddfodau, become Arch Druids and things of that sort, and attend
gatherings in mystic garments like nightshirts over their highly
respectable tweed trousers and broadcloth frock-coats—it is only just
and fair to say that Julius Cæsar, in his _Commentaries_, gives the
Druids a very high character. The priests, he says, taught the
immortality of the soul, and held truth to be the highest virtue. They
were sound as priests, as legislators politic, and as philosophers
enlightened and humane. We have nothing in the way of public men so good
as this nowadays, and therefore we cannot but deplore the action of
Suetonius Paulinus in wiping them off the face of the earth; and at the
same time may hope that the Arch Druids and lesser Druids of modern
summer gatherings in Wales, who look so supremely silly with laurel
wreaths round their respectable old bald heads, and white whiskers and
collars beneath—and would certainly not dream of auguring over any
fellow-creature’s entrails—may get equal wisdom and political soundness.
[Illustration: THE MENAI BRIDGE AND THE ISLE OF BENGLAS.]
There is on the Anglesey side, near Llanedwen, a field called “Maes Mawr
Gad,” or the Field of the Great Army, marking the spot where Paulinus
and his victorious host landed. The Roman general rested but a short
while here, for the Druids had scarce been blotted out when the terrible
news reached him of the revolt of the Iceni, and the massacre at
Camulodunum. He hasted back, collecting an army of ten thousand on the
way, and, leaving the young and old and defenceless of Verulamium to
their fate, advanced into Essex and utterly defeated Boadicea.
LIII
Very few are the old travellers or modern writers who have a good word
to say for Anglesey. It is “flat, dull, monotonous, barren, treeless,
wind-swept,” and many more things expressed by adjectives in the
uncomplimentary sort; but will the present historian be credited when,
with his hand upon his heart, and if necessary—should his bare word not
be held to deserve credit when opposed to that bulk of damnatory
evidence—his lips upon the Book he declares that Anglesey is none of
these things? A recent traveller finds in the word “Mona” what he calls
a “soft-sounding name, well suited to the present aspect” of the island.
What does he mean? “In all the bare, flat fields,” he continues, “you
scarcely see a tree.” To this the returned traveller from Anglesey may
reply, in the inelegant but expressive schoolboy phrase, “What rot!” But
then that writer traversed Anglesey by train, as he confesses, and
therefore has no _locus standi_ in topographical criticism. Probably the
others explored the island as little as he.
It is a high table-land of an island, mounted atop of rugged cliffs for
a goodly part of its jagged and irregular circumference, and divided
athwart by the Malldraeth Marsh, a valley almost deep enough to admit
the sea, which would in that case divide the isle in two unequal parts.
Even the modern and easy high road, made by Telford in 1825 for a direct
line from Menai Bridge to Holyhead, is by no means flat; while the old
coach road is not only hilly but mountainous. Along its course lies
Penmynydd, whose very name, meaning “mountain-head,” should have checked
the pen that talked of flatness in Anglesey. This was the place where
the mails and the stages were commonly upset: the place that so alarmed
London coachmen imported for the duty of driving the mails, that they
refused to remain. Penmynydd is the worst spot on that old road, but
hills along its course are the almost invariable rule, and flat
stretches the very infrequent exceptions.