habitable, but of the same date of building as Buarthau. From
Bettws-y-Coed I followed slowly up a long hill, from which I looked
down into an ever-deepening valley, where lay the road leading up past
the Conway and the Lledr to Dolwyddelan. After I passed Pentrevoelas,
I picked up a little fellow carrying a school-bag. We passed a big
empty graveyard place where five new graves were crowded against the
wall,--the living were planning well for the jostling of the dead who
were to come,--then I put the little fellow down by the chapel where
his mother lived. The road to Giler grew more and more difficult. At
last I came to a beautiful old house with a fortified gate and high
surrounding walls. Outside the walls, mother and daughter, farmer and
farm hands, were all milking the cows. They courteously led me through
the ancient gateway, a friendly place within, for not only did the cats
run to meet us, but also the pigs. I ascended the outside steps of the
fortified gateway into a room where was the Pryce coat of arms and the
date 1623 upon the walls. Then we went into the farmhouse through an
old doorway that would be the joy of any antiquary who might behold it.
Even this was fortified. Within, the oak panelling, the oak partitions,
the seats around the walls, the deep, small-paned, narrow windows, the
kitchen, the storeroom, the dairy, the mill--all were as they had been
four hundred years ago--a little the worse for wear, but still staunch,
still comely, still generous and hospitable. One fireplace I stood
before was twelve feet long and four or five feet deep. On the way home
I saw a flock of lapwings in the meadow. I passed the chapel corner
where the little fellow was; I saw two rabbits rubbing noses in the
field; and then, facing toward the sun, which was setting over Siabod
and the Ogwen Valley, I followed home.
[Illustration: A WELSH WATERFALL NEAR PENMAEN-MAWR
_From an engraving by Boydell, 1750_]
These Welsh cottages and granges are like a well-made person or
a well-made life: they have nothing to conceal. They reveal their
construction, and their beauty inheres in this revelation of what
they really are. Instead of being all daubed over with plaster and
smeared with unattractive paper, their joists and beams, their
panelled oak partitions, the ingle-heart of the house, the warm, brown
oaken dressers and tridarn, the grandfather clock and settles, the
three-legged tables and three-legged chairs form a picture of simple
harmony, which at its best it would be hard to rival either in dignity
or homely beauty. I am not referring to the Welsh lodging-house which
is all many an Englishman or American knows in Wales. The floor of
the cottage may be but of beaten clay, neatly whitewashed around the
edge. This, however, is surely a more attractive floor covering than
many which cost, even before they leave the carpet factory, a good
deal more. Beautiful rooms are these where, from the lustre-ware,
the pewter, the copper and brass and latticed windows, many a
lesson is still to be learned by some of us who think it impossible
that we should be able to take anything from so humble a place. In
these Welsh cottages life has continued more or less unchanged in
a beautiful simplicity. It is not merely the simplicity imposed by
poverty,--although that does exist to a depressing extent in Wales,--it
is rather their sense of fitness, their love of what is beautiful, that
innate instinct of theirs, not only for the right word, but also for
the right beauty of a room, even of a kitchen. When they would imitate
under the pressure of modern fussiness and vulgarities, something still
holds them back. The lodging-house in Wales represents a concession
to modernity, their mistaken and delicate tribute to the visitor. It
is the Welsh farmhouse kitchen in all its dignity of use and beauty
which represents the true life of the Cymri, the ineradicable æsthetic
fineness of Gwalia. In Wales, and at a time when the world pays it but
scant respect, poetry dwells everywhere and is at home. The grimiest
coal centre, the dustiest slate quarry eating into the very bowels
of the earth and the skin of the people, cannot drive poetry and
music away from Wales. They dwell by the doorway of the whitewashed
cottage in that group of oaks, or under that sheltering sycamore and
the cottage roof of flowering thatch, in the water-split stains of
the slates upon the roofs, in the gleam of the doorsill over which
one steps. Here in these Welsh cottages is simplicity as compelling,
because more human and not less unself-conscious, as that of the palace.
Practically every characteristic possessed by the Welsh makes for love
of home. Their very shyness drives them through the house door to the
fireside, before all that is best can be revealed. Sensitive, full of
feeling, gay and melancholy by turns, they are like their own hills,
now sombre and now bright. It is temperament that makes the music of
the Welsh cottage, its picturesqueness, its romance. Without the Cymric
temperament there could have been no Welsh revivals, no invincible
Lloyd George, no Eisteddfodau. The delicacy of the woman, who is
always the home-maker, inheres in the Celt. He feels the significance
of the home with such yearning and such passion that it is almost
incomprehensible to his fellows of coarser fibre. It was that feminine
love of home which made Celtic chivalry what it was. And I dare to say
that it is still that element which makes the humble Welsh cottage what
it is to-day.
Those qualities which caused the Cymri to reverence their bards and
esteem learning are the qualities at work in their lives now. The
passionate admiration which in olden times made them follow a leader
like Llewelyn the Great or a lost cause, is what makes them shout by
the tens of thousands for Lloyd George to-day and a winning cause.
Their low, quiet voices, their gentle ways, their spiritual intensity,
all throw a glamour about the lives they lead. One does not expect to
find a sage in yon little cottage where the village bread is baked.
Yet he is there, his books two deep on every shelf of his little
room, his lamp burning far into the night. Nor does one expect to
find a Welsh Jenny Lind in this cot whose brass doorsill we have just
left; but, busy about her work, a voice the world might well run to
listen to follows us down these Welsh upland meadows. And behind that
counter, over which we buy sweets for the children, is an historian
and antiquary; in yon post-office a bard,--even the very farmer spends
his leisure not as other farmers do; and nothing is as many, in their
commonplaceness, their German _Gemeinheit_, expect and demand that it
shall be.
It is a far cry, some may think, from the “Mabinogion,” one of the
possessions of all the world, to a little Welsh cottage. No, it is not
a far cry; it is a history, interrupted here and there by haunting
words, broken by words not to be recovered, but still a history from
those first (?) “cyttiau gwyddelod,” with their rude music of harp and
their tales read from a revolving wooden book, down to this cot whose
shelter we have sought in a valley or upland meadow, even as Wordsworth
some one hundred years ago or Shelley sought such shelter at the base
of Snowdon. It is a far cry, some may think, from that smoke curling
out of the gable end of the hall in the “Dream of Rhonabwy” to this
ingle by which we have sat. No, it is a development, a continuance
marked only by the steps of man’s desire to strengthen and make more
perfect his home here, forgetting that Chaucer has told us in his poem
“Truth”;
“Her nis non hom, her nis but wildernesse:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!”
For the gray of a gray day outside, here by this hearth is the rose
of fire, the tongue of flame by which we warm ourselves, the fluttering
of those dreams beneath which we hide ourselves as under a sheltering
wing. The passionate heart of a passionately sensitive people is
this hearth and flame of a Welsh cottage. To have lived by it is to
have lost the need to hear those tonic words of Matthew Arnold, for
here, indeed, the Celt may still, in his dreams, his love, his song,
react against the despotism of fact. And outside is a world of magic,
sometimes hostile but more often friendly, a world of beauty and of
enchantment. From the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” its women, its homes, its
organized life, its beauty, down to the castle and cottage in Carnarvon
or Conway, it is but one history, however many stages that history may
have passed through; and until the traveller or the alien in Wales
realizes this fact, he passes blindfold through its valleys and over
its mountains and in and out of its cottage doors.
IX
Castles and Abbeys in North Wales
Old Time … gentlest among the Thralls
Of Destiny, upon these wounds hath laid
His lenient touches, soft as light that falls,
From the wan Moon, upon the towers and walls,
Light deepening the profoundest sleep of shade
WORDSWORTH, “Ruins of a Castle in North Wales.”
The more one lives in Wales the more one recognizes the need for
nonconformity. The Established Church has frequently conformed too
much, certainly to the bars found in all public inns, and probably
to the “jorum” measure set by castle life and even by the abbey life
that is now no more. No doubt, if there were less poverty, there might
be less drinking; on the other hand, if there were less drinking,
there would certainly be less poverty. Even now, as I write in the
most respectable old inn in Denbigh,--the place where all the gentry
go,--for an inn sign I am looking out on three liquor kegs crossed one
above another with a bunch of grapes pendant.
But the hill on which this quaint, small, prosperous town of
Denbigh is built does the best it can by its steepness to keep the
people in good condition. In Welsh Denbigh Castle is called “Castell
Caledfryn-yn-Rhos,” the “Castle of the Craggy Hill in Rhos.” From the
“bottom,” as the natives call the foot of the town and hill,--they
are identical,--it is a sheer climb to the top where the castle is
situated, and in that climb one has traversed the entire village. Close
by the castle is the Church of St. Hilary, more or less falling to
pieces now, where once masses were said for the soul of Henry de Lacy.
Within the castle enclosure, in a tiny cottage, John Henry Rowlands,
or Stanley, the African explorer, was born. Very eager is Denbigh to
claim this distinguished man, and but little can you get them to say
about the brutal treatment which drove him away from home and made him
a wanderer upon the face of the earth. Denbigh claims Twm o’r Nant
also,--he is buried at the bottom of the town in Whitchurch,--but
not content with claiming him, they canonize him with the absurd
name of “Welsh Shakespeare.” Born in 1739, he developed, without any
educational advantages whatsoever, remarkable skill in the writing
of interludes, which for many years he himself played up and down
the country, and by which, because he championed the cause of the
people “against the evils of the day,” he got the ear of his popular
audiences. Denbigh claims Dr. Samuel Johnson, too, and exaggerates his
brief visit to Middleton at Gwaenynog. They have even photographed one
cottage and called it Johnson’s.
A few miles west from Denbigh, at Rhuddlan, they have made the most
of their history, but it is not recent; rather it is standardized
and dignified by an antiquity which antedates even the ivy-covered
ruins of the castle. There starlings flutter in and out,--perhaps a
descendant of that starling which Branwen had taught to speak and who
carried across the sea to Carnarvon, to her brother, Bendigeid Vran,
the tale of her sufferings. There, too, are the fireplaces of an ample
hospitality which is no more. I thought of the promise Edward had made
in Rhuddlan that he would give the people a prince born in Wales and
who could speak no English. I thought of that battle between Saxon
and Welsh, in 769, on Morfa (marsh) Rhuddlan, which, before our eyes,
stretched gently and mysteriously away to the sea, and of the song that
had commemorated it and of the defeat of the Cymru:--
“Calm the sun sets o’er the hills of Carnarvon,
Deep fall the shadows on valley and lea,
Scarce a breath ripples the breast of old ocean,
Faint on the ear falls the roll of the sea.”
Also in the old song is heard again the din of weapons, the hissing of
arrows, and the cries of those who fought and those who fell. Even in
its English translation it is still a stirring old song.
On the coast, a few miles north of Rhuddlan, is one of the most famous
castles in British history, Flint Castle; but a dolorous, sorrowful old
place it is now, set down in the midst of belching smokestacks and a
sooty modern life that cares nothing for it. At Flint the dismantling
of Richard II was performed. Froissart, the chronicler, speaking of
Richard’s departure from Flint Castle in the custody of the Duke of
Lancaster, tells us a strange story. King Richard had a beautiful
greyhound who loved him beyond measure. As the Duke and the King were
conversing in the court of the castle, the greyhound was loosed and
immediately ran to the Duke, paying him all the attentions he had
always given to the King. The Duke asked what was the meaning of this
fondness. “Cousin,” replied the King, “it means a great deal for you
and very little for me.”
Above Flint, on the River Dee, is Hawarden Castle, the new residence
and the old ruin made famous to us in recent years by the fact that
William Ewart Gladstone lived there. And there, centuries ago,
Llewelyn, the great Welsh prince, first saw his Eleanor. The people
in this vicinity are called “Harden Jews.” In this connection an
interesting story from legendary history is told. It was in the year
946 that Cynan ap Ellis ap Anarawd was king of North Wales and a
Christian church stood there. In this church was a roodloft surmounted
by a figure of the Virgin bearing a holy cross in her hands. The
summer had been hot and dry and the people began to pray for rain.
Lady Trawst, wife of Sytsylt, governor of the castle, was one of those
who prayed most often to the image. One day while she was on her knees
the cross fell and killed her. The weather continued hot and the
indignant people decided to bring the rood to trial for the murder of
Lady Trawst. This was done and the Virgin and cross sentenced to be
hanged, but Spar of Mancot, one of the jury, thought drowning would be
better. Finally the judgment was partially amended and the image was
laid upon the beach and the tide did the rest. It was carried up to the
walls of Chester, and the citizens of that town, ancient even in 946,
reverently took it up and buried it, setting above it a monument with
this inscription upon it:--
“The Jews their God did crucify,
The Hardeners theirs did drown,
Because their wants she’d not supply,
And lies under this cold stone.”
And from this time forth the river, which had been called the Usk, was
called Rood Die or Dee.
[Illustration: BEDDGELERT, A VALLEY-SHELTERED HOME
_From an old print_]
It is not possible to re-create that olden castle life in Wales.
A fragment here and a fragment there one finds, and when the broken
life has been put together again, as in the “Mabinogion,” the Norman
influence is more than a varnish to its ancient surface,--it is often
colour, with occasionally an entirely new figure painted in. Glimpses
of the palace life do we get, of the sleeping-rooms and halls and
chambers, of beautiful buildings, of youths and pages, of vestures of
silk and gold and yellow robes of shining satin. Pictures of maidens,
too, there are, who live for us still as if they had not vanished from
within walls which Time has partially destroyed. One maiden there was
who was made from the blossoms of the oak and of the broom and of the
yellow meadow sweet, and whom they called Blodeuwedd or Flower-face.
Another, not Blodwen, but Olwen, she who was clothed in a “robe of
flame-coloured silk … more yellow was her head than the flower of the
broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer
were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone
amidst the spray of the meadow fountain.… Four white trefoils sprung up
wherever she trod. And therefore was she called Olwen.” Pictures, too,
there are in the “Mabinogion” and elsewhere of the castles in which
these maidens embroidered, sitting in golden chairs and clad in yellow
satin. One description there is in “The Lady of the Fountain,” which
is a vivid picture of a Welsh castle: “And at length it chanced that I
came to the fairest valley in the world, wherein were trees of equal
growth; and a river ran through the valley, and a path was by the side
of the river. And I followed the path until midday, and I continued
my journey along the remainder of the valley until the evening: and
at the extremity of a plain I came to a large and lustrous castle, at
the foot of which was a torrent.” The fair valley, the path by the
riverside, the lustrous castle, the torrent--all are still a part of
the life of Wales to-day. Again, for the mere opening of a book, we
may see knights in their encounters as of old: the horse that pricks
forward, the furious blows upon the faces of the shields, the broken
armour and bursting girths, and then the battle on foot, their arms
striking sparks, and blood and sweat filling their eyes. Nowhere in all
literature is there a more beautiful picture of a horse than in Kilhwch
and Olwen: “And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled
gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoofs,
having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and upon him a saddle of
costly gold. And in the youth’s hand were two spears of silver, sharp,
well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to
wound the wind, and cause blood to flow, and swifter than the fall of
the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew
of June is at the heaviest. A gold-hilted sword was upon his thigh,
the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the
hue of the lightning of heaven; his war-horn was of ivory. Before him
were two brindled, white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of
rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And
the one that was on the left side bounded across to the right side, and
the one on the right to the left, and like two sea-swallows sported
around him. And his courser cast up four sods with his four hoofs, like
four swallows in the air, about his head, now above, now below. About
him was a four-cornered cloth of purple, and an apple of gold was at
each corner, and every one of the apples was of the value of an hundred
kine. And there was precious gold of the value of three hundred kine
upon his shoes, and upon his stirrups, from his knee to the tip of his
toe. And the blade of grass bent not beneath him, so light was his
courser’s tread as he journeyed towards the gate of Arthur’s Palace.”
Charming pictures of friendship there are, too, lived within castle
and abbey; and descriptions of the love of birds and journeys taken
upon sea and land; and harsh and barbaric touches to remind us of
a past still more ancient and of a cruelty still more primitive.
Possible flashes do we get of the humour of this olden life: the
refreshing gentleman in Branwen, the daughter of Llyr, whom no house
could ever contain; Bendigeid Vran, the brother of Branwen, that good
brother who sat upon the rock of Harlech looking over the sea, and all
unconsciously welcoming those who were to break the heart of the sister
he loved. Poetry and wisdom also there are in this ancient life: the
Coranians, who, however low words might be spoken, if the wind met that
speech, it was made known to them; and Arthur granting a boon in words
which are a poem in themselves,--“as far as the wind dries, and the
rain moistens, and the sun revolves, and the sea encircles, and the
earth extends.” “There is no remedy for that which is past, be it as it
may,” said Luned. And in the “Mabinogion,” as in every life, there was
one door which when those who were bearing the head of Bendigeid Vran
to London opened and looked through, “they were as conscious of all the
evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and companions
they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen them, as if it
had all happened in that very spot.”
South from Flint and south from Hawarden, yet near the windings of the
river Dee, is Castle Dinas Bran, “Crow Castle,” as the English call
it, mistakenly turning “Bran,” a word whose actual meaning is unknown,
into “Crow.” Scarcely a stone of this very famous and ancient old
castle situated on a high hill is left intact. The very rubble of its
walls is exposed. Of the castle there is not enough left to repay any
one for a visit, except a lover of desolation. Here, in another land,
are walls like those of Balclutha, and desolate are they. Here the fox
looks out of the window and the rank grass waves about its head, and
here on the wind the song of mourning lifts itself bewailing the days
that are gone. Yet from the valley below, with its quaint old town of
Llangollen, its wonderful Abbey of Valle Crucis, and the shimmering of
the running waters of the river Dee, the present is a reassuring one.
Smoke curls up cheerfully from scores of household chimneys. The sun
shines down upon the abbey walls, upon the chapter house, still intact,
and upon the broken walls of the church itself.
“Ivy’d Valle Crucis; time decay’d
Dim on the brink of Deva’s wandering floods,
Your ivy’d arch glittering through the tangled shade,
Your gray hills towering o’er your night of woods;
Deep in the vale recesses as you stand,
And, desolately great.”
Inseparable from and a part of the spiritual beauty of this scene is
the thought of the old blind rector, who is now custodian of the abbey
and who still speaks lovingly of the beauty of the things he can no
longer see. He has been there twenty-nine years, and through many of
those years he has been going blind. Yet he told us cheerfully that
he was greatly encouraged by our interest. “I never destroy anything
that is old,” he said; “I stick to the old.” As we stood there talking,
the lovely little white English daisies looking up from the grass at
us, the venerable old man told us something of his work. He was much
discouraged because people were not interested, and even as he leaned
on his stick, doubtless hoping for other visitors, his ear-sight
quickened by the eye-sight he had lost, people were passing by outside
walking toward the Pillar of Eliseg and a wooded vale beyond.
In Llangollen, the village near the abbey, lived and died the ladies
of Llangollen, two dear, quaint, sentimental souls, with personalities
sufficiently marked and fearless so that they were unafraid to be
themselves. Louisa Costello, in her account of a Welsh tour, gives them
rather sharp treatment. She says that they were foolish, condescending,
proud, vain, and pompous, yet she admits that they were charitable and
considerate of their neighbours. Of their friendship she has nothing
good to say. In a word, they were a couple of eccentric sentimentalists
and both frightfully ugly. With the larger charity of the man,
Wordsworth, who paid them a visit and wrote them a sonnet, described
their appearance in the following words, “So oddly was one of these
ladies attired that we took her, at a little distance, for a Roman
Catholic priest, with a crucifix and relics hung at his neck. They were
without caps, their hair, bushy and white as snow, which contributed to
the mistake.” In the sonnet addressed to them there are, among others,
two lines of pure tribute:--
“The Vale of Friendship, let this spot
Be named; there, faithful to a low roofed Cot,
On Deva’s banks, ye have abode so long;
Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
Even on this earth, above the reach of Time.”
Lady Eleanor Butler was the daughter of the Earl of Ormond. She was
born in Dublin and was both wealthy and beautiful. The Honourable Miss
Ponsonby, a member of an ancient family, was an early friend of Lady
Eleanor. She, too, was born in Dublin, and both lost their parents at
the same time. They loved independence and did not love their suitors.
Many things drew them together and, as Wordsworth aptly phrases it,
they retired into notice in the Vale of Llangollen. Now they lie buried
there, their faithful servant, Mrs. Mary Carryll, lying in an equal
grave beside them.
In this neighbourhood are many castles, among them Chirk the property
of Lord Howard de Walden, and Ruthin Castle which is not very
interesting. About northwest from Llangollen lies the old town of
Conway, with its castle and its rare old Plas Mawr. Suetonius says that
the chief motive assigned by the Romans for the invasion of Britain
was that they might obtain possession of the Conway pearl fisheries.
One of the Conway pearls, now no longer much thought of, was placed
in the regal crown and presented by Sir R. Wynne to Richard II. The
picturesqueness of Conway streets is greater than that of any other
North Walian town. Little gable ends look out and down upon the streets
like curious eyes. The houses are irregular and there are odd turns
and twistings of the streets; cobblestones and old flagstones and an
occasional black-and-white house; and everywhere glimpses through
castle gate or over castle wall. The exterior of the castle is still
singularly perfect; only one part of it seems to be falling, that
nearest the river and looking out upon the sea. Overlooking the town,
upon the river, is Queen Eleanor’s oratory:--