Part 10

The Great Western Railway crosses the road on the level, three miles out of the town, at Gobowen, on its way to Chester. Gobowen village itself is utterly commonplace, but marks the beginning of one of Telford’s important alterations in setting out a new line of road, in place of the three miles of steep, circuitous, and narrow old road leading from here to the “Bridge Inn” at the crossing of the river Ceiriog. The old road is still in existence, and can be easily explored. It goes off to the left soon after the “Cross Foxes” is passed, beginning where a narrow lane, entered by a turnstile, runs between the “Railway Tavern” and a hideous Wesleyan Chapel: an atrocity in red and yellow brick and blue slates.

Having found the old road, you “dinna turn none,” as the Shropshire country folks say, but go straight ahead, up hill and down dale, along a track that in every rut proclaims “old road,” and “disused” in the grass and rubbish plentiful everywhere along its course. At its further end, where the Ellesmere Canal is crossed, the rotting quays by the waterside are faced by a row of cottages and a little general shop, pushed suddenly into the background, as it were, when those two successive blows of fate—the making of the new road and the coming of the railway—took away both the wayfaring and the canal traffic. It is a picture of bygone prosperity and present ruin as complete as ever drawn of any deserted mining town in California.

The new road is the model of what a road should be; broad, level, and straight. It passes the estate of Belmont, and was indeed cut through a portion of the Park, sold to the Commissioners for the Parliamentary Road in 1820. To the ground sold for this purpose the Lovetts, who owned Belmont, agreed to add, as a gift, the site for a toll-house, afterwards erected and known as Belmont Bar. One condition was attached to this gift: that if within seventy years the toll-house should no longer be required, the ground should revert to the estate. The Shropshire gates were abolished towards the close of 1883, and the toll-house has, therefore, again become private property.

There is not a single dwelling near, or within sight of, that old toll-house, lonely by the wayside at the edge of a dark plantation: and the life of the old man who lives there rent-free on a small weekly allowance must be dull indeed. It would be lonelier and duller still were it not for the tramps, whose footsteps can be heard stealthily crawling round the house and trying the doors and the shuttered windows at all hours of the night. They add a little spice of excitement to life in such a place; but an occupant who had anything to lose would be nervous. One night the old man discovered two navvies and a woman in his garden, preparing to camp out there. As they seemed to be genuine travellers on the way to a job of work, he brought them in, warmed them at his fire, and let them sleep by the hearth. Early in the morning they prepared to go, and made their breakfast before he rose. “God bless you, Daddy!” said the woman as they went, “we’ve left you something”; and he found a pound of sugar, a loaf, and some tea.

At the “Bridge Inn,” where the old road comes down in a steep bank, all ruts and loose stones, to meet the new, the Ceiriog foams and splashes in its ravine. Across the bridge that spans it, and we are in Denbighshire and Wales. In Wales, after a fashion; but the steep road winding upwards to Chirk has to be traversed before the narrow opening into the valley of the Dee and the Vale of Llangollen is gained; and there were those at this strategic point in olden days who saw to it that unauthorised passengers did not pass. For as the village of Chirk crowns the plateau, so also does the Castle of Chirk command a cleavage in the hills, where Castell Crogen stood in days before the existing fortress and the Norman builders of it were thought of.

Seven hundred years ago, this was just as it is now, the readiest road by which to enter North Wales. Accordingly, when Henry II. set himself to conquer the Welsh, and to stamp their national life out of existence, he led his army to the Ceiriog. There was fought the battle of Crogen, and when Henry had won it he pushed on across the rough country of the Berwyn mountains to Corwen. He had been better advised to advance by the more ample valley of the Dee, and the Vale of Llangollen; but Henry Plantagenet was the Buller of his age, and his rank bad luck and ill generalship combined caused him to lead his army the hardest way. Arrived at Corwen, amid the dense woods and thickets that then covered the hillsides, he found the chieftains of all Wales, having sunk their own quarrels for a time, assembled with a host of followers to bar his passage. They knew their wild country, he did not, and so, in fearful weather, commenced a disastrous retreat, and was not safe from pursuit until the walls of Oswestry were in sight. Not for him was the conquest of Wales. To a greater than he, in a hundred and twenty years’ time, was to fall that achievement, and even when Llewelyn, the last independent Prince of Wales, was slain in 1282, and his country subdued, there yet remained the long-drawn rebellion of Owain Glyndwr that was to break out a hundred and twenty years later, and for ten years to imperil the English rule.

Castell Crogen gave place to the present castle of Chirk, built by Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, who murdered his ward, Gruffydd ap Madoc, to obtain possession. From that time this was one of the strongest fortresses on the Borders. In long years after the Mortimers, and many another family who had held it, had gone their ways, Chirk came into the possession of the Myddeltons. The first was a Sir Thomas, of Queen Elizabeth’s time, who, from being a wealthy London citizen and Lord Mayor, became in 1595 the purchaser of this estate. His brother was the famous Sir Hugh Myddelton who brought the first water supply to London by the New River, and whose paltry stone statue, set up in modern times, stands at the beginning of this very road to Holyhead, on Islington Green. The son of the first Sir Thomas had some stirring experiences in the castle his father had bought. The spacious days of Elizabeth were done, and the bitter years of civil war had come to shake the country from end to end. This Sir Thomas was a man of changeable views. He at first took arms for the Parliament, and in his absence found his castle of Chirk seized and held for the King. He lay siege, and unsuccessfully, to his own house, then changed sides, and was himself besieged in it by his former allies to such effect that he was obliged to surrender. It cost this injudicious trimmer £80,000 to repair the damage done. That Cromwell suffered his fortress to stand is sufficiently remarkable; but here it frowns to-day a splendid specimen of feudal architecture without, and a princely residence within.

XXXII

Chirk village in summer-time is enlivened by innumerable excursion parties on those days of the week when the Castle is thrown open; otherwise it is a dull little place, its only outstanding features that sometime coaching inn, the “Hand,” and the church. The church is made, by the huge and numerous monuments within, to redound greatly to the honour and the glory of the Myddeltons, and the Myddelton-Biddulphs. Among others, two occupy the place on either side of the altar commonly reserved for the Decalogue, those ordinances being stowed away out of sight. The most amazing memorial of all is that to “Sir Richard Myddelton, Bart.,” described as “great in his descent, great in his possessions,” and, it may be added, greatest in his monument.

Here we bear sharply to the left, and, crossing an elevated ridge, come to the fringe of the Denbighshire coal-fields at Black Park toll-house, superseded in 1824 by Whitehurst Gate just beyond, commanding not only the Holyhead Road, but that to Cefn, Ruabon, and Wrexham as well, branching off to the right. The Road Commissioners sold the toll-house at Black Park for £10.

Crossing the Holyhead Road, just beyond Whitehurst, is Offa’s Dyke itself, that famous boundary called by the Welsh _Clawdd Offa_, and regarded by them for centuries as an insulting mark of Saxon power. This is the point where the early frontiers marched; and England is English still on the hither side, and Wales Welsh on the other, in almost as striking a degree as when the earthen ditch and rampart were raised eleven hundred and fifty years ago. Chirk is thoroughly English; Vron, the next village, no less thoroughly Welsh. The merest trifles serve to show this. Ask the first person on the road what is yonder great structure straddling in the distance across the valley, and, if he be not actually a Welshman come from that direction, he will tell you it is “The Aqueduct.” At Vron, on the other hand, the reply will be that it is “Pont Cysylltau.” English, too, is the roadside conversation heard; immediately exchanged for Welsh on the other side of that old boundary.

Offa’s Dyke, cut through as it is by the road, might very easily be missed in this land, where smooth fields are the exception and rugged pastures the rule. Its site is marked distinctly, however, by a farmhouse, named after it, “Plâs Offa,” standing near the road. On the one hand, the Dyke, very like an ordinary hedgerow, with great trees growing on the embankment, may be seen going uphill towards Chirk Castle; on the other it plunges, straight and resolute, steeply down to the river Dee. It is on this side that the Dyke shows at its best, with an embankment in places over ten feet high, and a ditch on its outer side, six feet deep and twelve broad. Offa here built himself a monument more lasting than many of bronze or marble have proved.

But to return to Whitehurst Toll-house awhile. There the “fertile and happy” Vale of Llangollen first opens out before the traveller in a deep, long, and narrow vista closed by mountainous hills. It is the gate by which one enters the romantic land of Wales, that lies there in the setting sun like a Promised Land flowing with milk, honey, and _cwrw_; the river Dee sparkling in the distance, and the last sunrays lighting with a magic glow the hillsides and the precipitous Eglwyseg Rocks. A mediæval knight coming upon this profound valley and these crannied precipices would have halted and offered up the prayer, _In manus tuas Domine_, before going on his way, for the Unknown hid many terrors in those days, and Loathly Worms and unimaginable horrors might then have peopled the rocks. To the modern stranger, with none of these terrors, the scene also calls a halt. He sees the sun go down, lighting the hill-top roofs of Cefn and Acrefair with a mysterious glow, and glinting redly in the serried windows of Wynnstay; lights come out in cottage windows as day draws in, and signal lamps shine red and green on the great railway viaduct crossing the valley immediately beneath him; and it is well if he comes to this spot ignorant and unprepared, for then those colliery villages of Acrefair and Cefn, and the distant smoky shafts of Ruabon, hold many mysteries; the histories of the great railway viaduct and the canal aqueduct of Pont Cysylltau in the middle distance do not put a curb to his imagination, and the dim outline of Wynnstay, majestic in the crepuscule, might be not merely the French Renaissance and very Mansard-roofy, Alexandra-Palace-like residence of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, the local magnate, but a fairy palace. Nor need the fiery dragon that should inhabit the fairy-like and mysterious landscape be missing, for the lighted trains that come down the valley and cross the viaduct in thunder can well sustain the part to the eye.

It is surely in some early autumn evening, when stormy weather threatens not too insistent, and when kindly mists hide the hill-tops, rendering unlimited their possibilities of height and cragginess, that the exploring cyclist, say, should come to the Vale of Llangollen, previously uninstructed in what he is to find there on the morrow. It is to be premised, however, that he be not an unimaginative man. Let all such reach Llangollen by train in the glaring sun of a July afternoon, when everything is revealed, and imagination finds its occupation gone.

The stranger coming down the darkling road, past the little hamlet of Vron Cysylltau, and winding midway between the hills and the valley, obtains the true exploratory thrill. It is true that he will find, on after and daylight experience, that the road is a sandpapered one, on which the puzzle would be to find a rut or a loose stone; but he will proceed with the caution proper to a Livingstone or a Speke in unknown African wilds, and, when at last the lights of Llangollen begin to twinkle before him, will sigh with a great content for perils overpast, and rest at his inn.

Let us forbear in these pages to discuss the accommodation that Llangollen now affords. Is it not the business of the town—the town, mark you!—to find accommodation for tourists of every sort, with the result that it is become a place of many hotels and boarding-houses, and very different from the tiny village of Llangollen that disgusted the travellers of a century ago, of whose one and “only tolerable” inn (he names the “Hand”) Wigstead severely remarks: “Of the accommodation of that—_Cætera desunt_—” which, by some little freedom, may be translated “the less said the better”?

XXXIII

Our imaginary and imaginative traveller, waking at Llangollen to morning sunshine and matter-of-fact, will, if his mind is of the proper critical kind, be at once disappointed with the town and enthusiastic on its setting. Around it, shutting out the noisy world, rise the great heights of Barber’s Hill and Castell Dinas Bran, the last-named a mighty eminence rising to a height of over a thousand feet, and diademed with a circlet of very ancient and time-worn ruins. If any one were known to have visited Llangollen and not to have climbed the steeps leading to “Crow Castle”—as it is called in English—on him or her would fall the righteous wrath of those who, much enduring, _have_ made that toilsome pilgrimage. From this height you command not only the town of Llangollen at its foot, diminished as though looked at through the wrong end of a telescope, but mile upon mile of heaped-up or overthrown mountains, tumbled and fantastic masses, growing at last indistinct in the direction of Snowdon; or, looking eastwards, see the Eglwyseg Rocks, a long range of mural precipices, curiously stratified, stretching towards Ruabon, with the Vale below their unscalable crags. The slate-works of bygone years have made little impression upon the scene, but they sufficiently impressed Ruskin, who speaks of “the Works (whatever the accursed business of them) on the north hillside.”

In the rear of this fortified hill extends the region eloquently called the “World’s End,” where infrequent tracks lead to nowhere in particular, and the craggy descent of one hill but to the immediate toilsome ascent of another. Those who named the “World’s End,” named it well. The ruined Castle itself on this blusterous height is only a matter of rude walls; shapeless but for a tall fragment that shoots up above the rest and shows against the sky as you near the summit, like some gigantic cockerel in the act of crowing. Who built the Castle and who destroyed it are equally uncertain matters. Eliseg, Prince of Powis, occupied it in the eighth century and Gruffydd ap Madoc five hundred years later; that false Gruffydd who sided with the English under Henry III., and, later, founded Valle Crucis Abbey for the expiation of that and many other sins and wickednesses. But when these walls were unroofed, and by whom, no man knows.

The only architectural gem in these surroundings is that Abbey, two miles away in the Vale of the Cross, a transverse valley opening on to the Dee. There its ruins still nestle among the trees, just as Turner has pictured them, surrounded by the most fertile land within many miles. Men of Wrath might build themselves impregnable castles on shivery hill-tops, but holy monks knew a better way, and mortified the flesh in the fruitful and sheltered lowlands, where the fishponds were unfailing, the kine came lowing into byre at eventide, the corn was gathered in its season, and the fruit ripened early on sunny walls. But the habitations of wrathy and peaceable are alike overthrown, and both are the sport of the excursionist and the amateur photographer.

But now for more intimate grips with Llangollen, that “dirty, ill-built, and disagreeable town,” as the Reverend Mr. Bingley described it in 1798. Many at that time told the same unflattering tale, and though it be out of date to-day, Llangollen as a town cannot, with the exception of the bridge across the Dee, be said to contain anything in the least beautiful or interesting. Only the lovely vale and the encircling mountainous hills render Llangollen endurable. One forgets the mean houses in the beauty of the scenery. Dividing the place in half, the Dee flows noisily over a bed of rocky slabs and under that old bridge once regarded as one of the wonders of Wales. Engineering wonders are so plentiful nowadays that the mind, supersaturated with them, and the eye, accustomed to works on a gigantic scale, refuse to marvel at anything more. Only one wonder is left to the modern visitor to Llangollen—the wonder that Llangollen Bridge should ever have been considered a wonder. One has mentally to project oneself into the period when the bridge was built, over five hundred and fifty years ago, to understand why it was so considered. It was built when times were always disturbed, and when nothing in the nature of a town or a hard road existed here; and certainly they wrought well who built, for though the Dee has come down in floods innumerable, it still stands. It was doubled in width in 1873, and modern times have witnessed the coming of the railway up the vale along the course of the Dee, causing it to be lengthened by another opening. Four old pointed stone arches and a stone and girder span now make the total sum. Let the number here be specified, for the many travellers who have written on Llangollen exhibit a curious inability to give them correctly. Turner, whose view of Llangollen may be referred to, gives six, and in addition, places a viaduct on a hillside possibly intended for Castle Dinas Bran, in a place where no viaduct or aqueduct ever was or could be. Those are, however, the merest trifles compared with his dealings with the Dee, represented as flowing in the opposite direction it takes in Nature, and upwards towards its source.

XXXIV

Llangollen owes its name to St. Collen, the patron saint of the parish church. “The name,” says the Reverend W. Bingley, “is pretty enough, and of no great length.” Sarcastic Mr. Bingley! Here is a portion of St. Collen’s name, quoted by him:—“Collen ap Gwynawc, ap Clydawc, ap Cowrda, ap Caradawc Freichpas ap Lleyr Meirion, ap Einion Urth, ap Cunedda Wledig,” and so forth, like recurring decimals. “Ap” being Welsh for “son of,” it becomes quite evident that Collen’s ancestry was, speaking in the decimal manner, corrected to at least six places. Welshmen, happily, have long ceased to thus trail their genealogical trees after them, and life in the Principality becomes simplified by so much. Nay, the “ap,” for all the tenacity with which the Welsh cling to their nationality, is rarely in use nowadays, and has long been used as a kind of alloy, wherewith to coin new family names. From this source come the patronymics of Price, Prichard, Probert, and other common Welsh surnames, once Christian; originally Ap Rhys, Ap Richard, and Ap Robert. “Prothero,” too, derives from Ap Rhyddero, “Pugh” from Ap Hugh, and Bevan and Bowen from Ab Evan and Ab Owen. In the case of the Thomases and other names where the combination is impossible, the prefix has been generally abandoned, and so while the Scot and the Irishman retain their “Mac” and “Mc,” Taffy has in this respect at least Anglicised himself.

St. Collen’s Church is by no means beautiful or interesting, and its crowded churchyard is damp and dismal. It is the first on the journey along the Holyhead Road in which the Welsh language usurps the place of English, and here certainly, if even other signs were wanting, the Englishman—the “Saxon” as the Welsh called him—will find himself, to all intents and purposes, in a foreign land. The average educated Englishman, from whom the general sense, at least, of Latin epitaphs and those in two or three Continental languages is not hidden, stands mystified before these Cymric tombstones and, if he be of a reflective nature, finds it not a little humiliating that even the ragged little urchins in the streets of Welsh towns and villages are often bi-lingual, and in this respect better educated than he.

Among the few English epitaphs is one not often met:—

Our life is but a winter’s day, Some breakfast and away: Others to dinner stay and are full fed; The oldest man but sups and goes to bed. Large is his debt who lingers out the day; Who goes the soonest has the least to pay.

The subject of those lines had a short reckoning. He went (to pursue the simile) after lunch, dying in his nineteenth year.

The chief monument in the churchyard (ornament it is not) is the triangular pillar to those fantastical old frumps, the Ladies of Llangollen, and their servant. On it you may read of the “Amiable Condescension” of the one, the friendship of the other, and the faithful service of the servant. “It is believed,” continues the epitaph, “they are now enjoying their Eternal Reward.” Let us hope so—but what may be the most appropriate reward in the hereafter for collecting old oak and entertaining society travellers along the Holyhead Road to tea and small-talk, it is not easy to imagine. Let us hope the Bricklayers, Cabinet-makers, Blacksmiths, and Bakers who lie around, with their trades all duly specified on their tombstones, also have _their_ reward for well and truly bricklaying, cabinet-making, blacksmithing, and baking.

That Llangollen is not only geographically but socially in Wales is very evident, in the churchyard, in the names over the shops, and in the talk of the streets. Griffiths, Jones, Williams, Roberts, and Evans have it all their own way, and are repeated over and over again, recalling the humorous story of how the Welsh originally got their names. Llewelyn—was it?—had spent a long time in naming the clans, and at last, growing weary of the work, said: “Let all the rest be called Jones!”