Part 8

The “Cyttiau Gwyddelod” or circular huts were the earliest forms of dwellings of which there are still remains. One finds them in various places on the meadows lying between and in front of Pen-y-Pass and Pen-y-Gwyrd where Charles Kingsley loved to stop. There are many other places, too, one not far out of Barmouth where Tennyson stayed and where some of the stanzas from “In Memoriam” were written; and some near Bettws-y-Coed, one of whose valleys, the Lledr, Ruskin called the most beautiful in the world. The little circular rings of foundation stones are curiously disappointing, scarcely worth the seeing, except that, in touching them, it may be one presses a hand’s breadth nearer to a vanished past. These circular huts lasted through a Roman-British period, and looked, probably, much like a wigwam, with a circular foundation wall of stone, wood, or wattle, from four to six feet high, capped with woven boughs of thatch, and within, a floor diameter from twelve to twenty-four feet. Gradually the circular hut gave place to the rectangular, at first with slight improvement in comfort, as I think the picture of “Rhonabwy” suggests. There was still no chimney or ingle and the smoke poured out of the open doorway. Yet in the arrangement described in “Rhonabwy” we have embryonically the arrangement of to-day. The subdivision of the interior space was still to come.

The earliest examples extant of the rectangular type are of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Up till three years ago, when it was destroyed to make room for an extension of the Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, such a little cottage there still was in Beddgelert, Ty Ucha. Such a cot there still is in Bettws-y-Coed, Dol y Waenydd; also Tyddyn Cynal, near Aber Conway, as well as Old Plas, Llanfair Fechan, to give but a few examples which any lover of Welsh life may consult for himself. These little cottages are to be distinguished by their roof principals, which start from the floor, heavy curved pieces of oak meeting at the ridge in the roof. No doubt the earliest churches were built in this fashion and the cottages were copied from them. The churches of old foundation which survive, however, are, as I have said in the chapter on the little churches of Wales, in the style the Latin monks dictated and Llewelyn the Great introduced into Wales,--twelfth-century churches such as those at Llanrhychwyn, Gyffin, and Caerhûn. Beyond question, Welsh cottages represent a native influence which antedates that of the oldest churches now extant in Wales.

In the Welsh women who sit by the ingle fire of this cottage life one feels an age-old continuity of home, of the heart of things, of association, of service, of beauty; the pale slender woman of the “Dream of Rhonabwy” who entered the hall with the ruddy man; the maiden with “yellow curling hair” whom, in the “Lady of the Fountain,” Owain sees through an aperture in the gate, a row of houses on either side of the maiden; and others who kindle fires and perform the household tasks, who accoutre the knights, who embroider with gold upon yellow satin. Much of the colour of that mediæval world is a thing of the past, but not its women: they are essentially the same, though of a democratic to-day, simple as Enid in her worn habiliments when Arthur asked her what expedition this was and she replied, “I know not, lord, save that it behoves me to journey by the same road that he journeys.” The woman of to-day knows now what that journey of her mate is, and still she goes with him, not driven before him, but by his side.

It was on the road that, as I studied these little cottages from week to week, I encountered the Welshwoman of both an olden romance and a present world of fact. Very humble little pilgrimages were these of mine, not made without their diverse experiences of joy and fatigue. Sometimes it was a little lane I travelled on foot, off the highroad and through the heart of a farmland, the hedges eight feet high with honeysuckle and heaven-deep with fragrance; again I dropped down a hill, heather and foxglove making a royal display in bare places, and in the distance the bells of Llanycil ringing; or I climbed a hill on the way to Llangynog, a ridge which seemed the top and the edge of the world, treeless upland pastures like deep agate rich with ruby, lavender, brown and freaked with emerald green, purple and pink, and all opalescent with sunshine, dotted with black sheep and white sheep and little lambs, some straddling with surprise as they rose stretching and curling their tails with the delicious energy of awakening. Or, like Moses, I came down from Nebo, only it was a Welsh Nebo and my hands were full of peppermints bought for twopence, and children, rosy-cheeked youngsters in a frenzy of joy, were running about me. Into strange places may even a cottage gleam lead. Once it took me to that most primitive of all shelters, a cromlech, where gorse made sunshine on the hill and heather made a glory, and in a near-by oat-field pansies bloomed, and, above, a crown of pines sung in the ever-blowing winds. Or the gleam led me beside some tiny stream, almost invisible, that found its way like a thread downhill.

“Down from the mountain And over the level, And streaming and shining on Silent river, Silvery willow, Pasture and plowland, Innocent maidens, Garrulous children, Homestead and harvest, Reaper and gleaner, And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labour I followed the gleam.”

A gleam that led me on and on was this bright-shining, fragrant, humble cottage life of Wales, with its much-needed assurance, amidst the sorrows of our present times, that some magic of a life still full of faith is lived among these solitary hillsides, among busy towns and in sheltered Welsh valleys. Into human difficulties, too, did my gleam lead me, as gleams have a way of doing. My first adventure was to find a cottage called “Buarthau” (pronounced _Bee-ar-thai_). I knew that it was on the hillside beyond Hendra Farm outside of Dolwyddelan, at the head of that valley, the Lledr, which Ruskin has called the most beautiful in the world. A child who spoke very little English summoned her mother, a pale, slender woman with a baby in her arms, to point out the cottage to me. The little girl led me and we climbed the steep hillside. Beside it were wild roses, cool in pink and green; beyond us was a magnificent view of Siabod, Snowdon, Aran, and Moel Hebog, becoming with every upward-mounting step more grand. The old roof of the sixteenth or seventeenth century which I had come to see was partly destroyed, the large curved principals which came almost to the ground had been well rubbed and gnawed by the teeth of kine. Under a tree near a little cottage we ate our luncheon, a tree which accommodatingly turned itself into a harp. Then we came down, across the Lledr River, and turned and entered the village where the heart of the place is St. Gwyddelan’s Church, built about 1500 A.D., with a rood screen removed from some earlier church, a knocker to claim sanctuary still upon the door, and warm hay piled high and spread in the sun over the old graves.

There was another day when I was in search of an old house still 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.

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.