To call the town at the mouth of the Conway plain Conway is as absurd
as if we were to call the town at the mouth of the Tyne plain Tyne
instead of Tynemouth.
By whatever name we call it, however, Conway town itself is equally
interesting and equally beautiful. It still presents perhaps the best
specimen yet remaining in Britain of a mediæval borough, begirt to this
day with its Thirteenth Century walls, and overlooked by the towers of
its strong castle-fortress. Even Telford’s graceful suspension-bridge,
in admirable harmony of tone and plan with the surrounding buildings,
hardly detracts at all from the old-world character of the familiar
scene; nay, I am not sure that it does not even add somewhat to its
picturesqueness. As much cannot be said for the huge iron boxes of
Stephenson’s tubular bridge which carries the London and North-Western
line across the river on its way to Holyhead. But taken as a whole,
the mouth of the Conway, with its town and castle, has hardly an equal
perhaps in Britain, save the mouth of the Dart in the equally Celtic
Devonian uplands.
Yet to the Welshman, the towers of Conway, beautiful as they are from
every point of view, must long have seemed a badge of servitude. We
forget too often in looking at these picturesque relics of the lawless
days how stern and business-like they must once have appeared, how
suggestive of none but purely military and aggressive associations.
Time has softened the murderous effect of keep and bastion, and left us
nothing but the graceful tinge of poetic mediævalism. But when Edward
I. impressed into his service the unpaid labour of the conquered Welsh
to raise his great castles around the disaffected mountain land, he
did it with the distinct and deliberate purpose of holding in check
for the future all wild aspirations of the native race after Cymric
independence. The great triangle formed by the three strong castles of
Harlech, Caernavon, and Conway (like the famous Austrian quadrilateral
in North Italy) was a standing menace to the national movement and an
effectual curb upon the national desire to rise in revolt. The three
proud strongholds occupy the keys to the three chief routes into the
heart of Snowdonia. Harlech blocks the way by the Vale of Festiniog or
the Pass of Aberglaslyn: Caernavon guards the bare ravine of Llanberis:
Conway frowns down upon the Bettws road and stops the coast path by
Penmaenmawr and Bangor. Dominated and daunted by these three imposing
fortresses, so vastly superior in design and construction to the
little tower keeps of her native princelings, the mountain heart of
Gwynedd lay still for centuries, only galvanized for a moment once
into spasmodic life, during the troublous times of civil commotion in
England, by the adventurous spirit of that Deeside chief whose name
Englishmen travesty into Owen Glendower.
Nowhere is the genius of Edward’s great architect, Henry of Elreton,
more conspicuous than in this noble pile at Conway. Half castle,
half palace--for Edward meant to be king as well as conqueror--it
combined the military solidity of Anglo-Norman work with the domestic
magnificence of later Tudor mansions. Its great hall, in particular,
must have formed, when perfect, one of the most regal and splendid
reception rooms then existing in any part of England. The remaining
lancet windows of the royal private apartments, and the beautiful
early-decorated workmanship of Queen Eleanor’s oratory, survive to show
with what royal state Edward kept his court both here and at Caernavon.
For it is quite a mistake to regard the greatest of Plantagenets
as a mere savage conqueror--the “ruthless king” of Gray’s immortal
calumny. If Edward repressed sternly, he meant to reign peacefully.
The “massacre of the bards” and all the other poetical rubbish with
which Welsh legend has clouded the history of the national defeat, must
be relegated to the limbo of exploded fable. The plain truth is that,
when once Llewelyn and Dafydd were dead, Edward’s whole policy in the
Welsh question was a policy of conciliation. His object was to pacify
and Anglicize the disaffected uplands, to make communications safe
through what had once been the stronghold of Taffy, that typical robber
outlaw, and to reorganize the broken Celtic community on the familiar
model of the English kingdom. It was not in mere play, therefore,
that he presented to the Welsh his own eldest son, born by deliberate
arrangement an indigenous Welshman in Caernavon Castle, as the first
Prince of Wales of a new and more powerful line, or that he built and
decorated those great royal reception rooms in his Cambrian palaces,
where the chieftains of Gwynedd and the rude lords of Anglesey might
for the first time see and be duly impressed by the splendour and the
glitter of Anglo-Norman chivalry.
Viewed from this wider standpoint, the beautiful chain-bridge and the
ugly boxes of Stephenson’s iron monstrosity are themselves in a certain
sort the direct heirs and truest modern representatives of Edward’s
wise and necessary policy. So seen, they cease to interfere with the
unity of the view and merge into one with the great Plantagenet design
of the palace-castle. For both these important works, with their still
vaster and more wonderful sister-bridges over the Menai at Bangor,
form to this day the outer and visible sign of that coalescence of the
Celtic and Teutonic elements in Britain to which Edward devoted all
his life and energy. The first great roads made by the first great
road-makers in England were the roads that connected London, the centre
of the empire, with the Irish packets at Holyhead; and both those
roads, whether coastwise or internal, by Glan Ogwen or Penmaenmawr,
led through the wildest parts of Wild Wales. The greatest life task
of the greatest engineer before the railway period--Telford--was the
Holyhead road: the greatest life task of the inventor of the locomotive
and his still abler sons--George and Robert Stephenson--was the iron
line from London to Holyhead. In these gigantic undertakings, Celt and
Saxon were united for all, and the better day of fraternal friendship
was inaugurated in full sight of Edward’s threatening castle towers.
Dr. Arnold loved to look at the railway engine, snorting steam across
the midland acres, and think that feudalism was dead forever. It is
pleasant in like manner to look even at Stephenson’s hideous tubular
bridge, and think, that ill as it contrasts in beauty with the
Plantagenet turrets, it is nevertheless the symbol of that complete
fellowship between Saxon and Celt in this land of Britain which forms
the final goal and ideal of our national unity.
The vale of Conway does not stop abruptly at Conway town; it prolongs
itself seaward by gentle degrees far into the shallow waters of
Beaumaris Bay. On either side lie the wide tidal sandbanks, formed of
material which the river has washed down from the peaks of Snowdon,
Glyder, and the Carnedds, the very source from which they are derived
being often traceable in the mineralogical peculiarities of the
individual grains. About these sands the weird and melancholy Celtic
fancy has woven a variation on the common mournful Celtic legend of
the submerged country--the legend which meets us again under a hundred
disguises in the story of Sythenin Cardigan Bay, the floods of Sarn
Badrig, the lost land of Lyonesse, and the sunken city of Is on the
coasts of Brittany.
Wherever the Cymric Celt remains, there these stories survive and
accompany him. Perhaps they may inclose some true kernel of tradition
about the terrific submergence which undoubtedly once took place round
the coasts of the two Britains--the greater and the less--at the
period when the forest-bed of post-glacial date was swallowed up by
the devouring Atlantic. It seemed more probable, however, and it is
certainly far more comforting to believe that the vast earth-movement
took place so quietly, and was spread over so many peaceful centuries,
that it was no more recognized by the men who lived during its gradual
progress than the slow and gradual submergence of Scandinavia--an inch
at a time--is noticed in our own day by the Norwegian peasant. Rather
do these stories reflect and embody the gloomy fancy of a conquered
people, whose traditions of glory all referred to a remote and unreal
past, and who felt in their despair that the very elements themselves
had wrested from them those fertile lands which their fathers had never
really owned or cultivated.
Be this as it may, local legend declares that the Lavan sands--the
very name in Welsh means Banks of Lamentation--represent the relics
of a rich lowland hundred, engulfed by the sea at one wild swoop in
the early part of the Middle Ages. About a fathom deep, off Y Foel
Llus, lies a submarine bank still known as Llys Helig, or Helig’s
Palace. Here, according to tradition, stood the lofty castle of the
Cymric lord who owned for miles around the fertile plain; and Welsh
imagination still sees at low tide through the clear water of the bay
the boundary stones of the ancient road that passed from the British
stronghold at Rhuddlan to the fortress of Treganwy, now equally
overwhelmed beneath the sands of Beaumaris. It is a little unfortunate
for the truth of the tale that similar evidences of historical verity
are always produced in favour of Caer Is and all the other Celtic
buried cities--and that no Saxon eye has ever clearly beheld them.