[Illustration: PETERS, ENGRS., BOSTON]
By Jeannette Marks
GALLANT LITTLE WALES. Sketches of its
People, Places, and Customs. Illustrated.
THE END OF A SONG. Illustrated.
THROUGH WELSH DOORWAYS. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
_Gallant Little Wales_
[Illustration: THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN]
_Gallant Little Wales_
_Sketches of its People, Places
and Customs_
BY JEANNETTE MARKS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912
COPYRIGHT 1912, BY JEANNETTE MARKS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1912_
CALON WRTH GALON
[Illustration]
_Preface_
As a guide-book this volume will be found to contain too few
unpronounceable Welsh place-names to be adequate, but as an
introduction to the North Welsh land, its customs, its village life,
its little churches, its holiday possibilities, its history and
associations, its folk-lore and romance, its music, its cottages and
castles, GALLANT LITTLE WALES should be useful. It is my intention to
follow this book with a companion volume on South Wales.
I wish to express my debt to Mr. Henry Blackwell, who has always been
quick to lend me volumes from his priceless Welsh library and who went
over some of my manuscript for me. I am under obligations also to Rev.
Gwilym O. Griffith of Carnarvonshire, North Wales. Thanks, too, I owe
to Miss Dorothy Foster for her work upon the map which appears as a
separate page in this volume.
The English know where beauty and comfort, good care, and good
Welsh mutton are to be had for a moderate tariff. But long before
the Englishman went for his vacations to these British Alps and the
American followed him, excursions were made into Wales. The Roman spent
a summer holiday or so both in North and South Wales, and left there
his villas and his fortresses and his roads. The Roman, having set or
followed a good example--and who shall say which it was?--and having
with Roman certainty got what he wanted, departed, leaving the country
open to other invaders who pillaged and plundered. Nor, since that
time, has the country ever been without an invader.
I, too, have gone my wonder-ways in Wales, plundering where I could.
I, too, Celt and Celt again, have followed its beauty and felt a
biting hunger for a land which, once loved, can never be forgotten.
As did another Celt, William Morris, in his poems, so in prose this
little book and I have wrought in an old garden, hoping to make “fresh
flowers spring up from hoarded seed” and to bring back again--“back to
folk weary”--some fragrance of old days and old deeds. Friendliness,
solitude, memories, beauty for the eye and beauty for the ear,--he who
would have one or all of these, let him go and go again to gallant
little Wales.
JEANNETTE MARKS.
ATTIC PEACE, May 13, 1912.
_Contents_
I. WELSH WALES 3
II. A VILLAGE IN ERYRI 17
III. HILLTOP CHURCHES 30
IV. DR. JOHNSON’S TOUR OF NORTH WALES 59
V. WELSH FOLK-LORE 86
VI. THE CITY OF THE PRINCE OF WALES 105
VII. THE EISTEDDFOD 117
VIII. CAMBRIAN COTTAGES 133
IX. CASTLE AND ABBEYS IN NORTH WALES 155
APPENDIX: SUGGESTIONS FOR SOME TOURS 177
_Illustrations_
THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN _Frontispiece_
CONWAY CASTLE 10
From an old print.
THE QUEEN’S TOWER, CONWAY CASTLE 24
From an engraving by Cuitt, 1817.
THE GREAT HALL AT CONWAY CASTLE 32
From an engraving by Cuitt.
ST. WINIFRED’S WELL, HOLYHEAD 40
From an engraving by Cuitt, 1813.
THE EAGLE TOWER OF CARNARVON CASTLE 52
From an engraving by Cuitt.
GATEWAY OF CARNARVON CASTLE 66
From an engraving by Cuitt.
A VIEW OF DENBIGH CASTLE 80
From an engraving by Boydell, 1750.
RUTHIN CASTLE 92
From an engraving by Buck, 1742.
THE COMPLEAT ANGLER IN WALES 100
THE TOWER OF DOLBADARN ON LLANBERIS LAKE 112
LLANBERIS 124
From an old print.
BEAUMARIS 140
From a proof before letters by Turner.
A WELSH WATERFALL NEAR PENMAEN-MAWR 148
From an engraving by Boydell, 1750.
BEDDGELERT 160
From an old print.
THE SUMMIT OF SNOWDON 172
From an old print.
MAP _Inside front cover_
_Gallant Little Wales_
I
_Welsh Wales_
It is a vanished past that haunts the imagination in Wales, so that
forever after in thoughts of that country one goes spellbound. It is
the beautiful present, the cry of the sheep upon the mountain-sides,
the church bells ringing from their little bell-cots and sounding
sweetly in valleys and on highland meadows, the very flowers of the
roadsides,--foxglove, bluebell, heather,--that keep one lingering in
Wales or draw one back to that land again. There are little churches
of twelfth-century foundation, gray or washed white,--their golden
glowing saffron wash of long ago unrenewed by the Welsh of to-day.
There are little cottages, white or yellow or pink, with their bright
doorsills of copper, their clean, shining flagstones, their latticed
windows, and all the homely and dignified tranquillity within. There,
towering above, are bare rock-strewn summits upon which the yew still
stands, and, by its side, springing from the tuft of grass which the
wind has not swept away, grows the white harebell; the yew monument
to a thousand years, the harebell a fragile thing of yesterday. And
above these church-crowned hills are mountain summits, gray and craggy,
stripped of everything verdant, places where there are “shapes that
haunt thought’s wilderness,” and suggestions of an endless, unending
journey.
It was Bishop Baldwin, I think, accompanied on his famous
twelfth-century journey through Cambria by Gerald of Wales, who said,
getting his breath with difficulty as he surmounted a Welsh hill, “The
nightingale followed wise counsel and never came into Wales.” Were this
true, the reply might be that Wales has no need of nightingales, so
many and so beautiful are the wind-played songs over the rocks, and so
incomparably lovely are the voices of the Welsh people themselves. In
any event, _had_ the nightingales come into Wales, a plump one--as it
seems Bishop Baldwin himself must have been--would never have remained
long in the mountain fastnesses of northern Wales,--at least not in
the neighbourhood of Snowdon or Nant Francon or Twll Ddu,--the “black
hole” of Wales. Neither, if Bishop Baldwin ever climbed to a Welsh
mountain-top, would this princely prelate have liked the views there.
A comfortable, fat living in some Welsh community like Valle Crucis
Abbey, near the river Dee, by Llangollen, would probably have been
far more to his liking. Even now these mountain inns are not of the
accepted kind, but merely a cromlech over which the wind still plays
its devil tunes, a cave or the ridgepole of a long sharp mountain
crest, broken by crags down to the very edge of the sea.
Wales is a land of mountains, of little alpine heights ranged on
the western coast of Great Britain. Set between plain and sea, full
of hill fastnesses, its turbulent history is partly explained by
the topography of Gwalia. Independence, lack of unity,--these words
summarize most of the early history of Wales. To the different parts of
Cambria, alpine Snowdonia, the pasture lands of Berwyn, the moorlands
and vast coal-fields of the south, came two races: one short and dark,
the Iberian; the other tall and fair, the Celtic. These are still the
two peoples of Wales. And after them came Rome; but Rome is gone, has
vanished, except for her walls and foundations and roads, and these
dark and fair races are still there, mingled, their racial traits still
impregnable, still intact.
When you add to what might be called the natural and inherent
difficulties of the necessary mountain climbing in Wales, those of
the Welsh language, you have a combination that is beyond words to
describe. Even the veriest tyro a-visiting Wales will tell you that the
language defies all description and the most conscientious efforts to
master it.
One warm day we were making a melancholy progress up a mountain-side
when steps passed swiftly and a voice said in Welsh, “Stepping
upwards?” The young man, an itinerant Welsh minister, was travelling in
the same direction with us and it did not seem polite to say “Goodbye,”
although I could think of no other Welsh words. Finally two inept ones
came to me, “Da iawn” (very good), and I spoke them. But then, not
content to let well enough alone, something more had to be said and I
kept on repeating those words like a parrot. The Welshman looked around
doubtfully, as if he wondered what the “Very good” was all about, and
I heard him murmuring to himself and saw him hasten upwards a little
faster.
“Say something else,” my companion whispered.
“I am going to if you will just give me time,” I snapped back.
But I didn’t say anything else; I couldn’t, for not another thing
would come. If any one feels disposed to criticize an alien because he
is unable to speak Welsh, then let him go test its difficulties for
himself, its long words, its savage consonants, its poor little vowels
lost like some bleating lamb upon rocky mountain-sides. You just get it
satisfactorily settled in your own mind that “Dad” means father,--very
natural and proper,--when suddenly you discover that “Tad” and “Nhad”
and “Thad” also mean father and are one and the same word. With mother
or “Mam” you suffer a similar though not the same fate. To begin with,
the Cymric alphabet differs from ours: it consists of thirty-one
letters, some of which, “mh,” “ch,” “dd,” “ff,” “ng,” “ngh,” “ll,”
“nh,” “ph,” “rh,” “th,” never occur in the English alphabet as letters
_per se_. Your honest grammarian will tell you flatly that in the case
of “ll” there is no sound in any language corresponding to it. Most
like it are the Spanish “ll” and the Italian “gl.” Then what to do? Do
as you would have to do in rope skipping: watch the rope, run and jump
in if you can. The “c” is hard in Welsh, never soft like “c” in “city”;
“ch” is like the guttural German “ch”; the “dd” sometimes like “eth”;
“f” like “v”; “ff” like “f”; “g” is never soft as in “giant,” but like
“g” in “get”; “i,” both long and short, as “i” in “pin” and “ee” in
“fleet”; “o” is short like “o” in “got” or long like “o” in “note”; “p”
as in English; “s” is like “s” in “sin”; “u” is sometimes like “i” and
sometimes not; the “w” is like “u”; “y” has two sounds, first like “u”
in “fur,” second like the Welsh “u.” A few words will illustrate Welsh
pronunciation. “Cymru” is pronounced, as nearly as one can suggest
its pronunciation, as if spelled “Kumree”; “Gwalia” as if “Gooalia”;
“Mawddwy” as if “Mauthooy”; “Wnion” as if “Oonion”; “Pwllheli” as if
“Pooltheli”; “Dolgelley” as if “Dolgethley.”
I have had some experiences with my “small” Welsh which I would
not exchange for those of “big” German in the past, or of any other
language in which I have been trained to read or speak. I remember one
experience that happened when we were in search of a certain little
church of ancient foundation, set upon a hilltop. In Wales there are
many of these little churches on the hilltops, like Llanrychwyn and
Llangelynin, and also little churches by the sea, like Llandanwg,
almost at the foot of Harlech. Within their mediæval lychgates and
high stone walls the dead are crowded close in their last sleep. Sweet
places are those old churches, with the yew standing sentinel near
them, and about them the shelter of the valley or the wide sweep of
the hilltop view. This time it was a hilltop church for which we were
searching. Again it was “Da iawn” which graced the conversation, but in
how different a manner!
We were in need of tea, and at the cottage next to the church, the only
cottage upon that summit, I rapped with my stick and said to the old
woman who came, “Dyma le da i gael te” (this is a good place to have
tea).
“Yiss,” was her reply, her face brightening; “Te?”
“Yes,” said I; “tea and bread-and-butter.”
“Jam?” asked she, remembering what I had forgotten.
“Yes,” I answered.
She spread the cover in the place on the turf to which we pointed and
smiled brightly at me, as if she, too, appreciated the beauty of that
place with its wide mountain and valley landscape, the trustful sheep
browsing near me, and down at our feet the magnificent pile of Harlech
Castle looking across the wide flat marsh at its feet and over the sea
toward the palace of King Mark.
“Da iawn” (very good), said I emphatically.
And her answering smile told me that we understood each other, even if
we could not speak each other’s language very well.
[Illustration: CONWAY CASTLE
_From an old print_]
Changeling Welsh words are begot of elves and fairies. Even as those
words are full of poetry, of romance, of a wild emotionalism,--the
“Scream of the Celt” it has been called, but in Wales it is a subdued
scream,--so, still, are the superstitions about fairies and elves
living among these Welsh hills and valleys. Childish tales they may
seem to you, if you are fortunate enough to be told anything about them
at all by the Welsh peasants, who are both suspicious and shy of the
“foreigner.” The tales one may hear even now in Wales are full of a
haunting race life. The Welsh speak of the fairies as the “little folk”
or the “fair folk” or “family”--“y Tylwyth Teg.” And well do these
little creatures deserve the name, for they are friendly in Wales.
Ghosts there are, too, and the death portents, the old hag of the mist
and others that groan or moan or sing or stamp with their feet. And
there are “Corpse Candles” and “Goblin Funerals.” Shakespeare knew a
deal about Welsh folk-lore, but where he got it from no one has yet
discovered. With Shakespeare “mab” meant a little thing, just as in any
Welsh village to-day “mabcath” means a kitten.
No matter where I have been I have found the Welsh conscious of the
beauty and significance of their land, its legendary lore, its history,
its marvellous natural attraction. They have always been eager to
give me information about some landmark, some incident about which I
might be inquiring. Over their shop counters, across the doorsills of
the humblest of Welsh cottages, by some kitchen fire where the brass
tea-kettle sang and glowed in the subdued light of the ingle, they
have poured forth titles of books and data,--things for which I was
searching, or needed to know. One old man, eighty-six years old and
bedridden, held my hand in an eager, childish clasp, while he tried
to tell me something about a church, the poor tired mind working like
a rundown clock, the half-sightless eyes looking at me in petition to
help him recall the days that had slipped so far away. He asked me
about friends of his,--people who had died before I had thought of
being born. He corrected my few words of Welsh, a ghost of a smile
about the old mouth, but he could not recollect what I wanted to know.
Without the information I was seeking, I went away saying “Nos da” to
him, which was, indeed, good night.
When Dr. Samuel Johnson made his memorable tour of Wales, he wrote,
“Wales is so little different from England that it offers nothing to
the speculations of the traveller.” He seemed wholly oblivious to the
strong racial difference between Welsh and English, which alters not
only the visage of the people, but also the visage of the very country.
He was so indifferent to the grandeur of Snowdon scenery that, going
around the base of that mountain of eagles in a chaise, he spent his
time keeping account of the number of sheep for “Miss Thrale,”--his
little favourite “Queenie.” I do not believe that Johnson’s disgust
would have been the least appeased by knowing that in the years to come
other great people were to go and go again to Wales, as to a beloved
lap of rest: Wordsworth, Shelley, Kingsley, Froude, Newman, Huxley,
Tyndall, Tennyson, Arnold, Tom Taylor, John Bright, Carmen Sylva, and
many another. The good Doctor scorned Welsh rivers, called them brooks
and offered to jump over them. He would have despised such a cottage
kitchen as I have lingered in many a time impressed by its beautiful
and dignified simplicity. Sweet places are these old kitchens,
hospitable, warm, cheerful. Sunlight or firelight, one or the other,
you may have always in them. Bright they are with fuchsias and little
gleaming leaded window-panes, with polished oak and polished brass and
copper, with the shining face of a grandfather clock, with pewter,
with lustre pitchers and creamers, with gleaming pots and kettles, and
the salt glistening on bacons and hams hanging from the blackened oak
rafters. Gay are they, too, with the life and laughter of children,
with the good cheer of contented older people, with the purr of the
house cat and the bubbling of the tea-kettle. More homelike, more
motherly, more charming old kitchens, it has never been my good fortune
to see.
There was only one thing in Wales which profoundly satisfied the
great Doctor and that was its castles, Harlech and Conway, and
Carnarvon Castle most of all. Almost every Welsh town has its
historical traditions of importance, but Carnarvon, the city of the
Prince of Wales, even more than others. There Elen, the Great Welsh
road-maker, was sought and won by the Emperor Maximus. Of that little
city, once the Roman city of Segontium, there is a description in the
“Mabinogion,” the classic of Welsh literature and one of the classics
of the world. The Roman Emperor saw in his dream but what we see now, a
fair and mighty castle, rocks, precipices, mountains of great height.
The Prince of Wales was born, according to legend, in Carnarvon Castle,
and there investiture ceremonies are still held. But veracious history
assures us that he was born in the town, outside the castle of which
he himself had built the very tower where he was supposed to have been
born. Tumultuous, confused, legendary is Welsh history, full of the
more or less mythical deeds of their great King Arthur, their brave
Prince Llewelyn, the fate that overtook the hopes and ideals of this
prince, their last fight for independence and their loss of it; their
submission to the yoke of conquerors and the history of English princes
who were put over them. It is a wild, sad, eventful history whose
sorrows and tragedies seem only to have bitten all that is most Cymric
in Welsh Wales deeper into Welsh lives and hearts, so that to-day,
despite all that conqueror or civilization can do, their language,
their lives, are still separate.
And the Welsh Eisteddfod, a festival of song and poetry, is a
revelation of the unique national Welsh spirit. From every hamlet in
Wales, even those reached only by Welsh ponies, visitors travel on
foot or by train to this feast of song and to witness the Gorsedd, a
druidical ceremony old as the Eye of Light itself. “Gallant little
Wales” shows itself to the least and last participant in the Eisteddfod
as Welsh Wales. Educationally this Eisteddfod ceremony is of great
value to Wales, democratic, representative, instructive; and nowhere
could the fact that Welsh educational ideals are quite different from
those of England--popular and progressive, with something of the
so-called American spirit in them--reveal itself more completely than
in this assembly of the people. Wales is essentially a democracy--a
democracy of song, a democracy of poetry, a democracy of education and
religion, and the Eisteddfod is the popular university of the people.
To comprehend what is deepest and best in Welsh Wales one must go to
the Eisteddfod and hear the Welsh, sensitive, capable of the “Hwyl,”
imaginative, passionate, fervidly patriotic, sing,--
HEN WLAD FY NHADAU (OLD LAND OF MY FATHERS)
“Old mountain-built Cymru, the bard’s Paradise,
The farm in the cwm, the wild crag in the skies,
The river that winds, have entwined tenderly
With a love spell my spirit in me.”
_Chorus_: Land, Land,
Too fondly I love thee, dear Land,
Till warring sea and shore be gone,
Pray God let the old tongue live on.”
II
_A Village in Eryri_
“Curates mind the parish,
Sweepers mind the court,
We’ll away to Snowdon,
For our ten days’ sport.”
_Kingsley’s Letter to Tom Hughes._
At the centre of a wide meadow with valleys running in towards the
centre from east and south and west lies a little village of North
Wales. All the cottages are gray, gray as the stones of St. John’s, but
they are of the crisp, compact gray of slate, and not the crumbling,
fretted stone of Oxford. Occasionally some cottage nestling to the
craggy side of one of the valley roads is whitewashed with white or
pink, or fitted so neatly into the jutting rocks of the mountain-side
that only the humble façade, a screen of blooming roses, is visible.
Whitewash, roses, gleam of copper doorsills, running water, flash gaily
in the midst of the gray of Beddgelert. Above the houses is the blue
roadway of sky walled in by craggy mountain-summits, the sides of the
mountains carpeted with myriad tufts of heather, lavender or purple or
pink, and in autumn with the vivid yellow of the prickly gorse. Bees
desert tiny gardens of well-hedged roses for this wide principality
of bracken and heather, where around tufted blossoms they hum to the
tossing of some stream casting itself down the hills. Up the rocks
clamber ivy and sheep; about the moist edges of the pools and over the
cushions of damp moss, black and brown watered-silk snails measure
leisurely in well-fed content; and in little terraced glens of thick
sod and along the roadways grow bluebells and columbine and foxglove
and elfin white birches. But above these troops of upland bluebells and
slender, swaying birches hang rocks, wild, rugged, whipped bare even
of heather. And from the rough spine of Craig-y-Llan stretches away
towards Snowdon and Pen-y-Pass, a wilderness of naked rocks, weird,
jagged, shining gray and black in utter desolation.
At the meeting of the Colwyn and Gwynen rivers, with the hollow
sound of rushing water in its village lanes and the tinkling of sheep
bells scattering from the overhanging hills, the meadow strips lie
beside the valley roads, deep green with abundant grass or yellow with
grain. Life, however, has been strenuous in this village of fourscore
mountain huts, and many fathers and sons have had to labour to clear
the grassy fields. For these honest, independent, thrifty Welshmen,
slate and sheep are the chief means of support. The rivers yield, too,
a fair quantity of salmon as pink as some of the mountain huts, salmon
weighing from one to eighteen pounds. In a flood, although the torrent
sometimes reduces the number of inhabitants, the catch of salmon is
greater, and the villagers face the delicate task of balancing an
all-wise but unscrupulous Providence.
The way to a Welshman’s heart, nevertheless, is not through his
stomach; the Welsh think but little of what they eat. Before English
tourists came to the village the inns of the place, Ty Ucha--now the
Saracen’s Head--and Ty Isaf, provided a bill of fare consisting of oat
and barley bread, ale, porter, and eggs. English and Americans, unlike
the Welsh, do not go lightly on a holiday without consideration of
what there will be to eat. And our lodging-table, set by as kindly and
generous a hostess as three wanderers ever found, bore slender chickens
whose proportions suggested mountain climbing, mutton tender as the
ivy the poor sheep had been nibbling, salmon trout fresh as the stream
pouring by the corner of our cottage, Glan Afon, pound-cake filled
with plums, and tawny mountain honey. And, too, there were vegetables
for whose mere names we felt a careless indifference. Even the loaf of
bread Baucis and Philemon set before their wanderers was no better, I
am certain, than the bread of Beddgelert, light, sweet, with crackly
golden-brown crust. Often have we done nothing but watch--and joy
enough it was--the mammoth loaves coming home from the village bakery
across the village bridge, little children staggering under them, small
boys bearing them jauntily, mothers grasping them firmly under one arm,
a baby tucked away under the other.
At the inns, of which the Royal Goat is most pretentious,--it has a
piano,--there is much quiet holiday life led by quiet holiday people.
The simple folk who come to stay are for the most part the Welsh people
themselves, for whom Beddgelert is in the nature of a shrine, a place
canonized by the brave deed of one of their own Welsh greyhounds,
Prince Llewelyn’s Gelert. The visitors who travel through the valley
during the holiday month of August are English and Welsh tourists on
the coaches driving over Llanberis Pass, said to be the highest coach
drive in the world, and going to Carnarvon, the ancient Roman city of
Segontium, fourteen miles distant from Beddgelert.
In the last hundred years the village has harboured many a
distinguished man who, giving thanks for his undiscovered seclusion,
has come and gone unknown. Wordsworth came there with his friend,
Robert Jones; Shelley, living at Tan yr Allt, a few miles out of
Beddgelert, must often have passed through its lanes, his ragged brown
hair whipped by the valley wind, his great eyes blue as the roadway of
sky overhead; Kingsley, with a quick smile for the jolly little urchins
perched venturesomely on the sharp slate coping of the bridge, Frederic
Temple, Derwent Coleridge, J. A. Froude, Professor F. W. Newman,
Huxley, Tyndall, all found holiday rest in this quiet meadow sheltered
by its rampart of mountains. Gladstone came there, too. A village cow
with an eye for distinction endeavoured to hook the Prime Minister and
had afterwards the satisfaction of being sold for a large sum of money.
There also in the valley was born “Golden Rule” Jones, of Toledo fame,
a good man, and but one of many good men who have gone forth from this
fastness of peace to dream ever afterwards of a return to its gray
houses, its streams, its hills and heather and wilderness of crags.
Ty Isaf and Ty Ucha are the oldest inns of the village. Ty Isaf is
at the entrance of the lane leading to the church, and it was there,
not so many years ago, that the minister was still expected to drink a
cup or two of ale before entering the pulpit or fail in due prelusive
inspiration. At Ty Isaf was kept the Large Pint of Beddgelert (“Hen
Beint Mawr Bedd Gelert”), a pewter mug which held two quarts of old
beer. Any man who could drink this quantity at a breath might charge
the amount to the lord of the manor; if he failed, he paid for it
himself. But so often was the heroic deed accomplished by capacious
Welshmen that it is recorded the tenants paid but half their rent in
money. It would be interesting to know for how many goblins, fairies,
“Lantern Jacks,” flickering “Candles of the Dead,” Hen Beint Mawr was
responsible! Now over every little inn is the sign “Temperance,” for
Welsh revivals have played havoc with these noble drinking-feats.
One signboard, I can never pass without a smile, has gone so far as
rather to insist upon the temperance issue in the words, “Rooms and
Temperance.” Incidentally, the rector of the Episcopal Church has
given up his potation, and next door the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist
minister, also unsupported by home-brewed beer, wrestles with his
flock. Beddgelert Sabbath-keeping has all the force of an unbroken
tradition. A gentleman riding a-hunting on Sunday was confronted by
an old woman who shook her Welsh Bible at him and showered vindictive
Welsh _l’s_ on his worldly head. Nor was our own experience much
happier. Our drinking-water was fetched from Ty Ucha, and we had good
reason to believe it was responsible for wretched feelings. One Sunday
morning I consulted our Welsh hostess, explained to her what we thought
of the water, and asked whether we might have some brought from another
spring. We were told that it could not be drawn on the Sabbath, but
would be brought to us on Monday morning! In every cottage there is
a mammoth Welsh Bible, and groups of smaller Bibles both Welsh and
English. We went into one deserted mountain hut to take pictures of the
interior; inside, together with an old trunk, a rusty fluting-iron,
kettles, pans, a portion of the woven couch strung over the wide
fireplace, and old clothes, we found two Welsh Bibles, one English
Bible, and a torn portion of “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
[Illustration: THE QUEEN’S TOWER, CONWAY CASTLE
_From an engraving by Cuitt, 1817_]
Indeed, the religious spirit of the place is a tradition but
infrequently broken in the past thousand years. Edward I had burned
the priory (now St. Mary’s Church), which was erected as a hospitium
in connexion with a small chapel and schoolhouse in the second half of
the sixth century; Henry VIII endeavoured to crush its power, and then
in 1830 the good villagers themselves entered upon the pious task of
renovation. In order to make the renovation as thorough as possible,
they tore down all the rare wood-carving, using it for kindling-wood,
and in some instances making pieces of household furniture from it;
they put in a false ceiling of clapboards hiding the fine Gothic arch
of the roof; the ceiling, together with the walls, they whitewashed,
and completed their pious task by boarding up several exquisitely
shaped lancet windows. Fortunately the renovation has been followed by
a restoration, and now the priory may be seen in some of its ancient
beauty, with the old yew tree spreading low over the gravestones and
the Gwynen pouring by its northern walls, singing the same mountain
song it sang when the canons regular of St. Augustine, barefooted,
gray-habited, with crucifix and rosary, marched solemnly from chapel to
hospitium.
The name Beddgelert, the Grave of Gelert (?), brings hundreds of Welsh
people to see this town each year. It is not an uncommon spectacle
to see a man, as he stands by the dog’s grave, brushing away tears,
or a little child crying bitterly. The story is of Prince Llewelyn’s
greyhound, who saved his master’s baby by killing a fierce wolf, and
then was slain by his master’s sword, for the Prince, entering, saw the
cradle overturned and the greyhound’s mouth covered with blood. The
name of the place, however, has nothing to do with the myth of Gelert;
the little hill on which the grave stands had for hundreds of years
been called “Bryn-y-Bedd,” the “Hill of the Grave,” a mound where the
Irish chief Celert, a far earlier hero than the dog, may have been
buried. There are parallels in other folk-lore for this tale, and one
even in the Sanscrit has been discovered in which, in place of Northern
wolf, a snake is the evil agent. There is an unmistakable twinkle in
a Beddgelert eye whenever the story is told. Alas! that the greyhound
buried there was not presented to Prince Llewelyn by his father-in-law,
King John, in the year 1205, but, the petted possession of two
Beddgelert spinsters, was presented by them at the beginning of the
nineteenth century to the sagacious David Prichard, the first owner of
the Royal Goat Hotel, and promptly interred by him in the famous mound.
Every one of the three valley roads of Beddgelert is filled with
incidents of Welsh legend and folk-lore. Even in our materialistic
age the credulous spirit abides here in this mountain-bred people,
quick, lively, romantic. The village is filled with lovely legend and
quaint lore; in the farmhouses among the hills heroic stories are still
told about Arthur and songs sung to Welsh melodies. There are tales
of ghosts, and of goblins, brown road goblins, and gray goblins of
the mist; of water sprites in the mountain torrents, now a beautiful,
half-naked maiden, now a fleshless old man; of the “Candle of the Dead”
with its clear white flame; of the little red-eyed, red-eared “Hounds
of Hell” flocking like sheep down some mountain-path; of the pranks
of “Lantern Jack” on dark winter nights; of the fairies living in the
summer among the bracken, in winter among heather and gorse, coming out
of their haunts to dive thievishly into the farmers’ pockets, or to
steal butter and milk and cheese from the careful housewives. There are
stories, too, of amiable, kindly fairies who carol and dance nightly.
Driving up from Tremadoc past Tan yr Allt, where Shelley lived for a
year, one comes to the bridge at the mouth of the pass. This bridge
is said to have been built by no less a person than the Devil, who
for his trouble got nothing in toll but a poor little dog that was
first to scamper over it. Down the Nant Gwynen Valley, a narrow river
valley running east out of Beddgelert, is Dinas Emrys, the home of
the magician Merlin and at many times the abiding place of King
Arthur. Merlin’s well, on the very summit of Dinas Emrys, is still a
discoverable well. There, too, surrounding the crown of this singular
hill, are traces and remains of the walls of an old Roman fortress; and
the entrance over the narrow ridge to the crown of Dinas Emrys bears
marks of stone hewn hundreds of years ago. Not more than three miles
further in the same valley is a precipitous pass leading up towards
Lliwedd by Snowdon, where some legends say Arthur fell and lies buried.
Up this valley road over Pen y Pass, in a wilderness of boulders
and crags tumbled hither and thither, is an interesting specimen of
cromlech, and near by some gigantic rocks so fitted together that they
form a hut in which an old woman is said to have lived many, many
years. I hope life was pleasanter to her during all those years than
it was for us during even the few minutes we were within the strange
enclosure.
The third valley running out of Beddgelert is the valley of the Colwyn.
This leads past Moel Hebog--in a cave on whose perpendicular side Owen
Glendwr lay in hiding for months--towards Carnarvon, a city of a castle
with casements:--
“Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”
There lying before one over the summer sea is the rim of Anglesey,
quiet in its mirage of white sand and the green land stretching
away into gray distance. Still many portions of the old Roman road
connecting Segontium and Heriri Mons may be seen in this valley,
bridle-paths the Welsh call “Ffyrdd Elen,” “Elen’s Roads.” Towering
above, Snowdon looks down, untroubled, from its splendid reach, upon
these paths, from which, in sunshine and in mist, Druid and Roman,
henchman of Edward and John, prince and poet and painter, have made
the steep ascent and seen swimming before them, like the sea of time,
a hundred hills; beyond, the wide glimmer of the ocean; and heard
rising through the air the roar of torrent and stream. Halfway up
Snowdon are the remains of a druidical temple. There, kneeling on some
of the stones, I listened to the song of wind and sea, the Harp of
Eryri, and tried to catch a little of the vast panorama, which was,
somehow, strangely, mournfully human, holding in sky-line and sea-line
dim shadow of the hearts which had knelt here before--the immemorial
worshippers of untold beauty.
III
_Hilltop Churches_
“Ah,” said Bishop Baldwin, recovering his breath, “the nightingale
followed wise counsel and never came into Wales.” So, jocund as the
most unordained, Baldwin’s holy company of the twelfth century moved
on its way, gathering ever more and more to it cloaks signed with
the crusading cross of red. To mind come other figures and to mind
come other pictures--wild, powerful, beautiful, pathetic--of a past
that is a thousand or two thousand years old. In some rock-strewn
valley, bleak and barren as the uttermost parts of the earth or
terrible as the valley of the shadow of death, rises the cry of human
sacrifice. Hundreds of years later, down a roadway bordered then as
now with foxglove and bluebells and heather, rides a gallant company,
gentle-mannered, on pleasure bent. Or by the walls of Conway Castle,
Edward I bears the body of his Eleanor to its far resting-place in
Westminster Abbey, where the stones are still fresh from the chisels
of the builders. Here is “the unimaginable touch of Time,” a Past that
as it slips away joins the mystery of a Future even at this instant in
retreat.
But the traveller does not go on foot week after week many scores of
miles, with these thoughts always present, like Christian with a pack
upon his back, and meeting as did Christian many difficulties. True, a
good heart faces the open road expecting many obstacles, and can find
its wonder-ways even if it loses a night’s rest. Giraldus Cambrensis,
on the forward march with the Bishop through Wales, could vouch for an
island in which no one dies, for a wandering bell, for a whale with
three golden teeth, for grasshoppers that sing better when their heads
are cut off. He tells the story of a lad, Sisillus Long Leg by name,
who suffered a violent persecution from toads that in the end consumed
the young man to the very bones. And like most ecclesiastics, Giraldus
allows himself the relaxation of a good fish story.
This credulity, charming as it is and panacea for the physical
tedium of the open road, is the faculty of which the pedestrian of
to-day must strip himself. No other pilgrimages of which I know have
been made to these little churches, except by Mr. Herbert North, of
Wales,--who has studied the old churches of Arllechwyd simply, and to
whose architectural insight I am greatly indebted,--and by myself.
During many weeks my journey took me from hillside to hillside and
mountain-top to mountain-top, studying these ancient foundations. My
work was grounded upon incredulity; everything was recorded, nothing
concluded. As a motto the remark of the only thoughtful sexton I have
met out of literature might have been taken. Contemplating an old stone
at St. Mary, Conway, inscribed “Y 1066,” he said, “Hit wants a wise
’ead to find hit out.” At Gyffin beyond Conway we pointed to one object
after another in the church with the single question--an American
question:--
“How old is it?”
“It’s very old, mum,” came the reply.
“How old?”
“Oh, very old, mum,” in an impressive voice.
[Illustration: THE GREAT HALL AT CONWAY CASTLE
_From an engraving by Cuitt_]
Having tested barrel vault, paintings, chancel, windows, rood screen,
roof, walls, doors, in this fashion, we had worked ourselves out of the
church, so to speak, and I pointed up to a shiny tin rooster crowing
upon the bell-cot.
“How old is it, the rooster?” I said.
“Oh, very old, mum,” came the solemn reply.
At another place we were told that the bell swinging in the cot, and
sounding sweetly after the long journey uphill, dated from the fourth
century. It was useless to inform the poor soul that there were none
but hand-bells then in North Wales, and that she was in this case only
a little matter of one thousand years out of the way. After a mount
up to Llangelynin, taken hastily, and much investigation of objects
genuinely ancient, the woman who had us in thrall said, pointing
to a dark recess under a narrow, fixed pew, black as darkness, and
not more than one foot from the pew in front of it, “There’s a very
old tablet there, mum, my son says.” Perhaps she had calculated the
discrepancy between the width of the pew and myself; however, I got
through to the floor, wiped off the dust with a handkerchief, and
out blinked, as sleepily as if it were the very Rip Van Winkle of
stones, the young date 1874! Wild steeple chases there were in plenty,
with minor fatalities to limb and courage. It is useless, when one
mountain-top has been achieved, to find that after all there is nothing
left except the inconsiderable mountain itself,--it is useless then
to discover upon an opposite summit, whose peak could be reached by a
well-modulated voice, an extant church of indubitable antiquity, for to
meet with that church would require an all-day’s walk. There was one
steeple chase without even the comfort of another church in view.
Once reconciled to these surprises, for which no one can be held
accountable, and to the ineffectiveness of the sextons whom no one must
suppose responsible, there are no chances for disappointments except
such as are self-created. The attendants in most cases are women,
and wretched creatures some of them are. In one place a woman with a
goitre, and one eye gone, kept the keys. She was admirably proud of her
son because he did know something, but as the son spent all his days
in a mine we were not in a way to inherit his wisdom. Another woman
was deaf and dumb and foolish. A lad who took us through a church of
considerable importance, if antiquity can make these deserted churches
important, was so stupid he received a lecture upon his ignorance.
His unanswerable sectarian reply was that he did not belong to that
church anyway. We met with some smart young girls who, with their
twenty years of wisdom, were above knowledge concerning anything so
rusty and tumble-down as the church by means of which they hoped to win
sixpences for ribbons. There were two or three apple-cheeked old women
clad in caps and bobbing their curtsies. To one, a sweet old soul, I
was explaining that a certain door could not be very ancient and have
the big nails it had in it. “Uch,” she replied, in distress. “Well,
indeed, mum, perhaps they were put in later to hold it together.” It
may be said, I think, that the keys are kept as far away as possible,
why I cannot say. So is the vicar kept as far away as possible: even
the curates get the habit and stay away when they can. As a rule, the
churches are not set down in the midst of habitable villages, but most
often upon remote hillsides or hilltops. There is another difficulty
to be encountered also, in the person of the kindly individual who
could show you what you wish, but wishes to show you something else.
One old woman--the Ancient Mariner himself could not have been more
irresistible--detained us endlessly while she searched for and
displayed the Duchess of Westminster’s photograph.
These are some of the troubles in a progress otherwise enchanting;
once realized, it is well to forget them, together with the feet that
were sometimes too weary to travel five miles further and the shoulder
that ached under the strap. With its ache of all the ages the dream
of ancient beauty has no place in it for an hour’s weariness. As if
the riddle of existence could be explained by a wall rain-washed and
worn, upon which grow lichen, moss, rustling grass, and even trees,
and by lintels tipping earthward, golden flowers blowing upon them!
The eye travels thirstily from stone to stone, or to some peaceful
bell-cot pointing the bare ridge of a bleak, sheep-covered hill,
or to the far-away hills and gray sky and solemn, dreary places.
Spiritually it is easy to understand why these churches are on the
hills, and the controversy about their position seems a matter of no
further moment. There are other pictures, too, of churches by the
sea, in the main not as old as those upon the mountains, enclosures
where even the tombstones are crowded together in their last sleep.
Beyond these churchyards lies the encircling shore with ever the white
lip of the sea at its edge; above, low-lying regiments of clouds
march Snowdon-wards. Upon one eminence is the church, upon another,
nearer the water, a castle, and in the valley between these crumbling
sanctities of power and spirit is the little town, busy still, its
roofs making a joyous show of colour beneath the blue sky. Within
these churches by the sea there is ever the tideless roar of the
waters ringing upon the shores, and from these church doorways the
eye dreams upon the castle wasting with the land at its feet, or the
“llys” of King Mark, or upon the faint blue rim of some island, holy
as the mother of good men. Along the road on one side is the sea; on
the other, green hills rise into the blue of the sky, their slopes a
mosaic of gray sheep walls. And here out of the village at the end of
a grass-grown road, by the sea, lies a little church, around which
the sands have blown through so many centuries that the windows show
just the caps looking like sleepy eyes out of the huddled graves. One
minute time rolls like a chariot wheel crushing all things, another
moment and it is a mystic circle without beginning and without end. The
graves upon the hillsides, young in their hundreds of years, look down
upon the mounds of the British undisturbed in a millennial repose, and
upon a stone lying as hands two thousand years ago placed it. And past
the ears rush the centuries of all eternity, as in the travelling of a
mighty wind.
Seeing with the eye of visions it is not hard to re-create a
vanished past, to construct again the primitive British church of wood
and wattle, with its beauty of oaken rafter and carved wood which stone
now encloses. There is still an ancient wooden church in Greenstead,
Essex, in plan much like little churches of North Wales,--the walls
six feet high made of half trees side by side, the roof a tie beam,
with struts, less than six feet from the floor. This parallelogram
follows out the double square of what was undoubtedly the plan of
the ancient British church, something that was still geometrically
the square sanctuary with its square altar typifying the heavenly
Jerusalem. Bede, in his “Ecclesiastical History,” speaks of “a church
fit for an Episcopal See; which, however, after the manner of the
Scots, he [Finan] did not erect of stone, but of sawn timber, covering
it with reeds.” It is worth remembering that the little churches being
discussed are unique examples of a national type based, not upon the
Roman basilica, but upon the Temple, with its square Holy of Holies,
and illustrating certain features; a square east end with east window,
an altar concealed behind screens, and a south door instead of a
western portal. The wood and wattle churches have disappeared, but upon
the foundation lines have arisen the present stone churches of North
Wales, dating back in general to the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Their walls of stone are daubed at the joints with mud, similar to the
treatment the wattle buildings had received, and the whole whitewashed
inside and out. The roof, later covered with oaken shingles and now
with soft-coloured slates, was in the Middle Ages thatched deeply
with reed or straw. At the east end was the small slit window, and
at the south end a door so low that even a short person must stoop
to enter it. Originally there were no bell turrets or porches, and
at the eastern gable merely a wooden cross. Inside, a screen divided
the building in half, the squints covered by veils, and several doors
opening into the altar space. Probably the screen was decorated with
painting as the barrel vaults came to be. Within and without, the
sanctuary gleamed pure white. The Saxons learned the use of whitewash
from the British, and St. Wilfrid gloried in having washed the York
Minster of his day “whiter than snow.”
[Illustration: ST. WINIFRED’S WELL, HOLYHEAD
_From an engraving by Cuitt, 1813_]
As the cottages, coloured white or yellow or pink, are seen nestling
against the hills of Wales, one regrets that the church no longer
receives as in olden days the same treatment. With the wash worn from
the churches and never renewed, the country has lost in picturesque
beauty. How pretty these buildings must have looked, with their steep
thatched roofs and white bell-cots gleaming in the midst of dark
yews, or perhaps some golden-tinted church glowing like a crocus in
the midst of pines. Not only have the colours faded, as if the land
were some bright missal turning gray, but the odd circular huts with
their conical thatched roofs, in which the natives once lived, have
tumbled down. In those days was a beautiful hospitality, the host and
hostess serving until all were served, and in these rude dwellings
the ancient harp was played; and from the wooden book, its revolving
square crossbars inscribed with letters or notes of music, were read
the ancient song and poetry of Wales. When the rectangular cottage
came in it did not differ greatly from the circular hut. There were
windows--“wind-eyes”--covered with a wooden lattice and shutter, the
walls smoothly plastered, and the interior made less primitive by the
use of three-legged tables and chairs. Still later, in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the one space was divided off into kitchen,
chamber, and loft, the kitchen open to the roof and airy, healthful,
and clean. Hospitality was sacred then; any man might enter a dwelling,
and delivering up his arms stay as long as he would.