THE WYE
If the Severn under its infant name of Hafren leaps towards such
modified civilization as Llanidloes and the lonely trail of the Cambrian
railway implies, amid solitudes profound, the Wye, though running even
longer in the wild, has the company almost from its source of that
ancient coach-road that in the good old stay-at-home days took even
persons of condition on their wedding tours to Aberystwith. It was a
wild and long way though, and its solitudes must have struck something
like terror into the hearts of a Midland or East Anglian squire of the
Regency period, getting outside the hedges as it were for the first time
in his life, and looking possibly for the only one, upon actual
mountains and tumbling streams. The Severn running north-east, and
drawing mainly on the fountains of North Wales in its way to Welshpool
and Shrewsbury, taps another country from the Wye. The latter is soon
swollen into quite a large river by many lusty affluents from one of the
wildest and most prolific watersheds in England or Wales. Birmingham,
some of us may regret, has already discovered and laid this last under
tribute. London engineers have had it all surveyed this ten years, and
some day it is to be feared London will make it a burning question. The
ordinary Londoner of intelligence, however, knows nothing about it
outside possibly the path from Aberystwith to the top of Plinlimmon and
back. Of its great lonely heart, tuneful only with the noise of waters,
the bleat of sheep, and the plovers' cry, of its romantic girdle of crag
and wood, of little white-washed sycamore shaded homesteads and rude
hoary shrines of British saints through which these bog-fed torrents
break, the outer world knows absolutely nothing at all. Here, however,
are about 600 to 800 square miles of more continuously wild upland than
anything even in North Wales, all lying in a block, to which the
counties of Montgomery, Radnor, Brecon, Cardigan, and Caermarthen each
contribute a slice. A land penetrated by no roads south of the Upper
Wye, though pricked around its edges by rough and short-lived arteries
[Illustration: THE WYE, HAY, BRECONSHIRE]
[Illustration]
for local use. A region whose hidden charms are for the stout pedestrian
alone, but have remained so far undiscovered even by him, for
practically no human form but the Welsh-speaking sheep farmer on his
pony or some more than commonly adventurous angler or occasional grouse
shooter ever breaks upon the solitude of this far-reaching mountain
waste even in mid-August. This barrier, so broad, so lofty, and so long,
which counted for so much in Welsh history, was known by the men of old
as "the mountains of Ellineth." They have now no composite name, and
there is not a range in Britain needs one more. It is as if Dartmoor and
Exmoor, which could be together dropped into this other one, each lacked
a concrete designation.
The Wye draws little further on this watershed, till after 20 miles of
wandering in the wilderness, growing gradually less savage, and playing
all the tunes and chords known to little trout streams amid the pastures
of Llangurig, it meets the Marteg and the Elan, near Rhayader, and
begins to take itself seriously. This indeed is the real beginning of
the Wye, for most of those who know its upper reaches. For here it
achieves maturity and enters the world; and a beautiful world too, of
waving woodlands and overhanging mountains, but one which many pass
their lives in and others visit, and traversed by a good valley road and
a railway. The Elan but a few short years ago came from the west out of
this Ellineth wilderness, bringing with it the waters of the Claerwen
through a deep vale, unforgettable by those who knew it for the
exquisite combination of luxuriant low ground and the fine grouping of
its overhanging mountain walls. If Cwm Elan was retired from the world
in the ordinary sense, it is a familiar enough name to all students of
Shelley, whose cousins then owned it, and who himself settled here for a
time with his young, hapless, and ill-suited wife. The hills and crags,
however, that inspired the poet's earliest muse,
Those jagged peaks that frown sublime,
Mocking the blunted scythe of time,
look down now upon far different scenes, though perhaps in their way not
less lovely ones. Deep waters now glimmer from hill to hill where the
Elan ran but yesterday through wood and pasture to join the Wye; and yet
deeper into the hills, where the Claerwen leaped from the wild into this
now submerged Arcadia, is another lake, thus laying both the main stem
of the valley and its forks under the same vast sheet of water. If this
chain of lakes is the work of the Birmingham Corporation and not of
Nature, they are of this last at any rate a good imitation, and reflect
upon their bosoms no shadows less harmonious than those of the
everlasting hills.
The Wye is a delightful river from its source to its mouth; scarcely a
suggestion of industrial defilement comes near it anywhere. The, in this
respect, utterly guileless Cathedral town of Hereford is, indeed, the
only place above the scale of a small market-town within touch of its
banks. Everywhere, even between the rapids, the river itself is instinct
with the sense of buoyancy. After leaving the Black Mountains above
Hereford it becomes at intervals for pleasure-boats a navigable stream;
but till it leaves Wales it has all the boil and rush and stir of a
salmon river. It is easy to pick out those sections of the Wye, charming
as they are in a quiet, pastoral, Severn-like fashion, which are the
least distinguished. And that they form collectively much the smaller
portion of a river running a course of 130 miles, says something for its
qualities. The Wye divides itself readily into four distinct stages. The
first, its infancy as a mere mountain stream to Rhayader; the second,
its course thence for some 30 odd miles as a considerable river
fretting in a rocky channel, and pressed between the heavily-wooded feet
of hills and mountains, to Boughrood with a few reaches more of less
violent perturbation, but imposingly guarded by the Black Mountains, to
Hay or Clifford. The third stage may be reckoned as covering the rich
and broken low country of Herefordshire; while the fourth begins near
Ross, where the river enters that series of magnificent scenes which,
opening with Symond's Yat, continues for above 30 miles, past Monmouth
to Tintern, the Wyndcliff and Chepstow, maintaining a standard of beauty
and grandeur altogether above the scale that you would look for, even in
the more than pretty region through which it cuts its way. It is by
means of this lower stage that the Wye seems to defy a rival; for as
regards its upper reaches between Rhayader and Hay, beautiful as they
are, the Dee through the vales of Edeyrnion and Llangollen, the Usk
between Brecon and Abergavenny, the North Tyne, and one or two Yorkshire
rivers, could show 30 miles of as noble a torrent, equally beautiful in
environment. But none of these rivers, after they have abandoned their
highland glories and settled down into the comparative quiet of the low
country, wake again as they near the sea as the Wye awakes, and repeat,
though with a difference of detail that is the more charming, the
glories of their prime. Which of the two sections of the Wye is the more
beautiful it would be ill saying. Their contrast, happily, makes
comparison foolish. No other English river of any size can offer at once
such a spectacle as Symond's Yat on the Wyndcliff, near its mouth, and
the long gorge between Aberedw and the Epynt in its higher reaches.
This it is which crowns the Wye as fairest of English rivers by a
practically indisputable title. So, carrying thus the Elan and the spare
water of its many lakes with it, the Wye thunders on in rocky channels
or heaves in wide swirling pools, beneath woods of oak and ash and
larch, with the green or purple crests of the great hills looming high
above. Plunging past Doldowlod and Llysdinam it receives the sprightly
Ithon, which, born in the Kerry hills and gathering in its course half
the waters of Radnorshire, has twisted between its red crumbly banks
with much sound and laughter through 50 miles of that most delectable
little county. Dividing Brecon here from Radnor, two unknown shires that
outside North Wales and the Lake District it would be hard to match,
counted as one, for their high qualities of form and detail, the Wye
rages down those jagged stairways known as "Builth rocks," and noted as
a famous stretch of salmon water. Here on the western bank a large
tributary, and itself at times no mean salmon river, the Irfon comes
pouring in its amber bog-fed streams. Born far away in the very heart of
the high moors, within hail of the resounding struggles of the infant
Towy in the gorges of Fanog; cradled in unvisited hollows beneath
raven-haunted crags of old Silurian rock; fretting amid the lush bracken
glades and indigenous mountain oaks of Abergwessin and "the steps of the
Wolf," this bewitching stream drives downward through a rich and narrow
vale encompassed by lofty hills, till, fuller by a half-score of
mountain brooks, it meets the Wye near that historic spot where Llewelyn
the Third, the last Prince of Wales, fell in battle at an unknown
soldier's hand.
Flowing under the many-arched stone bridge of Builth, that ancient
little mart of sheep and cattle, and receiving the Edw from Radnor
Forest, the Wye now enters on perhaps the most inspiring of all its
upper reaches. For here on the Radnor shore the bold ridge of Aberedw
lifts its
[Illustration: THE WYE, ROSS, HEREFORDSHIRE]
[Illustration]
rock-plated sides some 1200 feet above the fretting river which upon the
Brecon bank chafes the green and woody feet of the high sheep-walks of
Epynt. What makes, too, for the exceeding beauty of these particular
reaches of the Wye is not alone the lofty hills which press upon its
here tempestuous streams, but the further fact that every downward view
of the river has for a background the line of the Black Mountains waving
at a great height against the skyline. Breaking at length out of its own
pent-up channels, and turned back by the formidable barrier before it,
which protects the vale of Usk, the Wye now swings to the east and down
the broader meadowy vales of Glasbury and Hay; the Black Mountains of
Brecon looming high and abrupt on the right, the Radnor moors rising
more gradually upon the left, each bank from time to time ornate with
some country-seat set back against the base of the hills. This is the
spot to remind the reader, if such be needed, that the Wye is a famous
salmon river, and that its fish, unlike those of the Severn, share the
normal habit of all other salmon, mysterious and unaccountable though
that instinct be, of rising in more or less capricious fashion to what
we facetiously call, and the salmon most certainly does not consider to
be, a fly. The upper or rockier portion from Rhayader to Glasbury is
perhaps the best of the river, but all the way down, till it meets the
tide at the proper and appointed casts, the Wye is a true salmon river
in the angling sense of the word. To discuss its ups and downs, or to
dwell upon the tribulations that this one in common with most salmon
rivers has experienced in some recent years, is not our province. But
the Wye is cursed with the pike, a gentleman that the salmon
loathes--not, of course, like the trout, from bodily fear, but he shuns
his presence and neighbourhood as a fastidious mortal moves from a
neighbourhood invaded by vulgarians. The Llyfni comes with slowish
current into the Wye above Glasbury from the neighbouring reedy lake of
Tal-y-llyn, otherwise Savaddan, set like a gem in the rich basin between
the Brecon beacons and the Epynt Hills, and it is by this route that the
unwelcome aliens are said to make their entry. The Wye is also a trout
river from its source to near its mouth, though of vastly varying
quality, which we need not dwell on here. But in its mountain reaches
two generations ago, if the local grandfather is veracious, it was equal
to the Usk or Dee or Teify. These halcyon days till you get well above
Builth are no more; for not only pike but the chub has pushed in, and
in pellucid rocky pools where he has no business whatever, you may now
have as fine fly-fishing for chub as anywhere probably in Great Britain.
But the trout whose native and perfect haunt it is, has retired a good
deal into the background. He exists, to be sure, everywhere, and may
with luck be caught anywhere, but the fisherman can no longer as of yore
wade up the rapids of Erwood or Aberedw and kill his 10-lb. basket, on a
good day, with fly, though he may take a few on a minnow.
Hay (Le Haie, as the Normans called it) marks the boundary on one bank
between England and Wales. It was of old a sort of small
Berwick-on-Tweed, and many a fight has taken place in its neighbourhood.
As at Welshpool the English, mainly the dependants of the Norman castle,
now a residence, lived in the east, the native Welsh in the west part of
the town, and the memory of such divisions survives even to this day in
the respective districts of English and Welsh Hay. Just below Hay the
ruined towers of Clifford Castle, whence came fair Rosamond, cast their
shadows on the stream. It is sixteen miles from here to Hereford. The
Black Mountains recede from the river's southern shore and droop to the
lower ridges, in whose parallel troughs the Monnow, the Honddu, and the
Dore, their backs here turned upon the Wye, hurry southward to meet it
at Monmouth, 40 miles below. The Radnor moors on the north bank, too,
have already fallen back, and the river has broken out into England and
the plains of Herefordshire--if so diversified a country may be called
by comparison a plain--and to a quiet life, unvexed by mountain spurs
and unchafed by resisting rocks. The Wye, however, keeps plenty of life
within it, tumbling oftener over gravelly shallows than the Severn,
loitering less sullenly in long reaches, and lurking less frequently
between high grassy banks--a brighter and more joyous river altogether
to be with, and clearer too, for there is practically nothing to defile
its waters. Shooting swiftly under the old bridge of Bredwardine, or
stealing quietly through the park lands of Moccas, or winding among the
pastures of Monington, where Owen Glyndwr is thought to have spent his
closing years at his daughter's home, the Wye is always the best of
company. Sleek Hereford cattle, the most decorative of all breeds to
English landscape, are everywhere. The high wooded ridges, so
characteristic of Herefordshire, rise now on one bank and now on the
other, while always the long line of the Black Mountains fills the
western sky. Fish of every kind worth having are in the river that
offers such variety of lodging--the salmon in his season, the trout, the
grayling, the pike and chub and perch, and all the lesser fry. And thus
to Byford and Bridge Sollars where Offa's Dyke, having run from North
Wales, ends its course, and leaves the Wye for the rest of its journey
to form the eighth-century line of demarcation between Welsh and Saxon,
or, more literally perhaps, between those who knocked under to the
Mercian Kings and those who would not.
Not much of a boating river as will have been gathered is the Wye, but
as it draws near Hereford there is a mile or two of deep water and a
good deal more that is available to the energetic oarsman: sufficiently
so, at any rate, to make the little cathedral city a boating centre in a
modest way. Below the ancient bridge, over which so many armed hosts
have marched to fight the Welsh, the Wye spreads into rapid shallows and
thus skirts the city; fair meadows upon one side, upon the other the
Bishop's Palace and the Cathedral, and the broad Castle green, where
that vanished fortress once stood. And now upon high terraces the
citizens of Hereford muster in strength when the sun shines, with a fine
prospect over the broad rippling river and over the most wooded of
landscapes, to the dark masses of the Black Mountains, behind which the
sun sets. Hereford is a clean and pleasant old town, quite unsmirched by
any factory chimneys, and largely concerned in cider-making, county
business, and matters educational and ecclesiastical: a typical
cathedral town, with the virtues and failings of its type in great
perfection. It is not so rich in Tudor architecture as Shrewsbury,
Ludlow, or Tewkesbury, but has a fair sprinkling of seventeenth-century
houses, and many restful byways of Queen Anne or Early Georgian type.
The Cathedral is of course one of the lesser ones in size, but is of
great interest. Built at the end of the eleventh century to replace a
humbler predecessor burnt by the Welsh, it has a great deal of the
original Norman work, as, for instance, the piers of the nave, with much
of the choir and south transept. As for the rest, there is much fine
work, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular.
[Illustration: THE MONNOW, OLD BRIDGE, MONMOUTH]
[Illustration]
The building is double cruciform in shape, with a massive central tower.
It has several rich chantries of Perpendicular date and some fine
cloisters. It was much injured by the fall of a west tower in the
eighteenth century, and still more by the inept reparation of the damage
by Wyatt, that misguided architect who gained the favour of an
uncritical generation and ran amuck among such English cathedrals as
were unfortunate enough to demand attention during his lifetime.
Hereford may be dismissed with the perhaps serviceable remark that it is
the best centre for seeing the Wye valley--using the latter term in the
proper sense, not merely as applicable to the reaches between Ross and
Monmouth, the conventional limitations of tourist literature.
The second stage of the river's third or lowland section, if so
geometrical a term is in order, that, namely, from Hereford to Ross,
must merely be indicated as of the same quality, though in detail
perhaps more emphatically picturesque, as the stage from Hay to
Hereford. The delightfully inconsequent outcropping wooded heights and
ranges of Herefordshire press more closely on the river, particularly on
its eastern banks, and amid the stately purlieus of Holm Lacy. From the
gate of Wales to Hereford, ever charming though the river itself be,
one looks always westward and up stream to the dominant Welsh hills and
mountains as the outstanding feature and background of the canvas. Below
Hereford, as Wales grows dim, the valley begins to supply more prominent
characteristics of its own--not such as it achieves later, but quite
sufficiently distinguished in height and opulence of colouring to save
its reputation from the reproach of a single commonplace interlude. Just
below Hereford, too, the Lugg, bringing with it the waters of the Arrow,
joins the Wye. Both these rivers rise in the Radnor hills, and have been
always noted for their trout and grayling, particularly the latter, a
fish now fairly distributed, but a generation ago only found in the
comparatively few rivers where it was indigenous. Among these the Lugg,
like the Teme, held high rank. After running out of Wales through the
deep woody glens about Presteign and Aymestry, and then traversing the
battlefield of Mortimers Cross, it turns due south at Leominster, and
ripples brightly over a stony bed, amid lush meadows and ruddy banks,
down the heart of Herefordshire towards the Wye.
Ross is, of course, quite a noted little place, and has associated
itself with the glories of the Wye with a particularity that is, I
think, just a trifle unfair to Hereford, which as a town is of course
incomparably more interesting, and even as a vantage point on the Wye
has some advantages. But Ross is the place where oarsmen, with a trip to
Chepstow in view, usually hire their boats, and if not archæologically
inspiring, it is picturesquely seated on a ridge above the river, with a
fine church crowning it, and a good Jacobean town hall. Also a "man of
Ross," an estimable and philanthropic eighteenth-century country
gentleman no doubt, whom Pope made fortuitously famous by a line or two,
but as a claimant on the interest of the outsider is now made something
of a bore by Ross literature.
It is at Goodrich Castle, where Sir Thomas Meyrick once kept his
celebrated collection of armour, with its Norman keep and imposing
modern substitute half a mile away crowning the steeps, that the first
premonitions of the transcendent beauties of the Lower Wye show
themselves, and lofty hills begin to trench upon the river-banks. At
Symond's Yat begin those remarkable lower reaches of the Wye, which in a
sense challenge comparison with the Welsh section, and are far better
known. But this should not be, for they are quite different. The latter
lie among the moors and mountains. The Wye is there what you expect to
find it--a characteristic mountain river. Down here, however, its
suddenly uplifting qualities and transcendent beauty burst upon you in
the nature of the unexpected. In a series of quite extraordinary loops
it burrows in deep troughs for many tortuous miles, overhung on both
sides by masses of woodland. These almost perpendicular walls of
foliage, 600 to 800 feet in height, are buttressed, as it were, by grey
bastions and pillars of rock that project in bold and fine contrast to
the soft curtain of leaves that hang in folds round them. The noted view
from the summit of Symond's Yat is as bewildering as it is beautiful;
for the river here makes a loop of 4 miles, the neck of which is but a
few hundred yards wide. For over 10 miles, in alternate moods of shallow
rapids and quiet deeps, the Wye is forcing itself in violent curves
through this strange group of lofty sandstone hills. Roads scarcely
penetrate them, but the railway from Ross to Monmouth, with the help of
tunnelling, gets through with stations at Lydbrooke Junction and
Symond's Yat. At the latter place is a good hotel attractively
situated, besides accommodation of other kinds. All this district is now
Crown property, which greatly simplifies the question of exploring it.
Escaping from this delightful and stupendous entanglement of cliff and
wood, the Wye runs down to Monmouth through a most exquisite valley, and
between hills of goodly stature verdant to their summits with green
pastures, criss-crossed by straggling hedges or belts of woodland. Small
farms and cottages, with brightly-tinted walls, perched here and there
upon a ledge on the steep face of the hills, are a characteristic
feature too of all this lower Wye. Away to the south-east, stretching
almost to the river, spreads the Forest of Dean. To the west the rolling
surface of Monmouthshire, luxuriant in verdure and opulent in colouring,
is cloven by the valley of the Monnow, which well-nourished and rapid
stream meets the Wye at Monmouth.
Rising at the head of the outermost eastern gorge of the Black
Mountains, the Monnow runs a course from its source to its mouth of
unremitting loveliness. Met at the base of the mountains by the Honddu,
coming fresh from the sacred pastures of mountain-girdled Llanthony, the
united streams are still further reinforced at Pontrilas by the waters
of the Golden Valley. Thence, running under the high-poised ruinous
Castle of Grosmont, through the chase of Kentchurch Court, where another
daughter of Glyndwr lived and her descendants live to-day, and onward
yet down a deep, narrow vale overhung by hills over a thousand feet in
height, washing the ivy-clad ruins of Skenfrith Castle, the beautiful
stream slacks something for the last half-dozen miles of its pilgrimage
to Monmouth. For the number and average weight of its fish the Monnow is
perhaps the best trouting stream on the whole Welsh Borderland, which is
saying a good deal, though the introduction of grayling has not been
favourable to its maintaining its former high standard. It has given its
name at any rate to a town, a county, and a king. A great king too was
Harry of Monmouth, of whose birthplace, the Castle, there is not a great
deal left, beyond the very perfect gateway on the Monnow Bridge.
Regarding the county whose boundary against Herefordshire the Monnow
forms for the greater part of its career, this was named, of course,
from the town when Henry the Eighth created it out of many lordships. It
would be ill forgetting, however, Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose "study,"
by a pious fiction, is pointed out to the stranger in a fragment still
remaining of a twelfth-century Benedictine Priory. Whether Geoffrey as a
historian was over-credulous or a bit of a wag does not matter. The
later poets and their readers are much indebted to him for the Arthurian
legend. If Arthur did not hold his Court at Monmouth, he held it at
Caerleon, in the next valley, and the glorious Usk, child of the Black
Mountains, and almost the Wye's equal in its upper reaches, is nowhere
an English river--happily for our space. With the memory of many a
ramble by the Teme and Lugg, the Monnow and the Honddu, it goes hard
enough to pass them by, but the passing of the Usk in such light fashion
would be harder still. As for Monmouth itself, there is nothing else
remarkable about it, nor yet, fortunately, is there anything calculated
to disturb the peaceful and romantic nature of its setting.
For the ten succeeding miles to Tintern Abbey the Wye valley is only
less delectable of aspect than above Monmouth, while below Tintern,
retaining almost to the last some of the stir of a salmon river in its
maturer stages, it has all the charm of a broad one, flowing in a narrow
valley between hills at once lofty in altitude and opulent in detail.
For a time, however, below Monmouth the river flows in what approaches
to a gorge with heavily wooded sides. At Redbrook, too, where a stream
comes in, there is just a smirch of industrial life from the Forest of
Dean. But this quickly passes, and the vale again opens. The lush
wandering hedgerows again climb the steeps; the little white houses
blink through orchards upon high-pitched terraces. Here still are the
rich red patches of tillage, the woodland drapery, the country-seats,
conscious no doubt that they have an atmosphere to live up to. All these
are grouped with an effect peculiar to the Wye, for the simple reason
that no other English river valley combines the luxuriance of a soft and
forcing climate with a physical environment so consistently
distinguished in scale and altitude as does the Wye for the 30 odd miles
between Ross and Chepstow. There are interludes, of course, where both
lofty sides of the vale are clad with an unbroken mantle of wood, and it
is this variety of decoration that is so alluring. What is left of the
great Cistercian Abbey Church of Tintern stands in a somewhat ampler
opening in the vale, just wide enough to spread a generous carpet of
meadow, as it were, on which to lay so beautiful a fabric.
Tintern has been so celebrated in prose and
[Illustration: THE WYE, SYMOND'S YAT, HEREFORDSHIRE]
[Illustration]
verse and by the artist's brush, it would seem almost futile to deal in
paragraphs with this glorious specimen of the Decorated period, raised
by the great Border House of Clare for the Cistercian Order, whose
genius for selecting a site seems to have been in no way inferior to the
lavish splendour of their architectural conceptions. Just beyond Tintern
this wonderful valley makes its greatest and almost its final effort.
Whether the Wyndcliff or Symond's Yat be its greater achievement matters
nothing. The latter, of course, combines its scenic splendours with
extraordinary physical conditions. The Wyndcliff is simply a most superb
wall of woodland and outstanding limestone crag upon a large scale,
which from its summit displays a noble prospect of the final passage of
the Wye out on to the Severn levels; a glittering, sinuous trail through
a fold of precipitous wood-clad hills opening on to shining flats and
infinite distances beyond. Fortunate is the wight who is privileged to
enjoy the Wyndcliff on some still, sunny morning when that stupendous
curtain of foliage is fully lit by the fires of autumn, into a blaze of
gold and russet, broken here and there by columnar limestone crags, and
those sombre patches of yew that upon all the cliffs of the Wye seem
purposely introduced to set off the contrasting brilliance of the
autumnal foliage.
But the glories of the Wyndcliff in only a modified form extend the
whole way upon one bank or the other to Chepstow, and here on the very
verge of a low precipitous cliff, washed by the Wye, are the still
considerable ruins of the great Castle of Chepstow or Striguil; and a
more appropriate and significant ornament to what is practically the
mouth of the river could not be imagined. In these few pages we have had
to concern ourselves mainly with the physical aspects of this the most
consistently beautiful of rivers. But to those, few enough it is to be
feared, who care for the stirring story of this Borderland, the Wye is a
great deal more than a long procession of ever-changing and enchanting
scenes. Every stage of its course from its wild fountain-head, above
which Glyndwr first flew his dragon flag to the castle of the Clares on
this frontier of the Lordship of Lower Gwent, resounds, for those that
have ears to hear, with the long clash of arms, rich in the memories and
traditions and legends that are always thickest where two contentious
and hostile races have for centuries kept each others'
[Illustration: THE WYE, TINTERN, MONMOUTHSHIRE]
[Illustration]
wits and limbs alert, and each others' swords from rusting. The
Guide-book may lead you to infer, with perhaps a shrewd estimate of its
public, that the principal interest of Chepstow Castle lies in the
incarceration there of one of the many regicides in the matter of
Charles I. These hoary walls, whose shadows fall on the now tidal stream
of the Wye, were something more than a seventeenth-century jail, by
which time, indeed, their mission and their story was long done with.
But we will let that pass, and reverting once again to those physical
and visible charms of a river that may well abide by those alone, close
this chapter with the reminder that Wordsworth, steeped to the heart and
lips in an atmosphere that might well make such a part and parcel of it
as he was, hyper-critical as regards all others, succumbed absolutely
before the glories of the Wye:
How oft--
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart--
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee?