Part 12

Glyndwr was driven into rebellion, if ever man was. He was no youth, but a man of forty-two years of age when matters came to this crisis. He was also one of skill and resource, and, before the provocative Grey could do much, had burnt his town and castle of Ruthin, and, turning towards England, advanced with fire and sword up to the very walls of Shrewsbury. Fortune smiled from that time, first upon one and then upon the other side. English expeditionary forces under the young Prince of Wales drove Glyndwr back, and burnt his ancestral halls at Sycherth and Glyndyfrdwy, and yet when stress of weather warned the English to retreat, Glyndwr, unconquered, was snarling at their heels. Later, he himself assumed the title of Prince of Wales, and in royal manner entered into a tripartite alliance with Hotspur and Mortimer to dethrone Henry IV. and divide England and Wales between them. And had the Battle of Shrewsbury been decided the other way there can be little doubt of their success.

The Welsh bards and seers had been very busy with prophecies and portents even at his birth, and Shakespeare—who thought Welshmen excellent subjects to make fun of—has used these forebodings and Glyndwr’s rising arrogance with effect in that scene of _Henry IV._ where the allies meet at Bangor. “At my birth,” says Glyndwr—

The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shak’d like a coward.

“Why,” retorts Hotspur, “so it would have done at the same season if your mother’s cat had but kitten’d, though you yourself had never been born.”

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” adds Glyndwr; to which the unromantic Hotspur observes:—

Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

It is plain, if we take the Shakespearean view, that there were never such ill-assorted allies as Hotspur and Glyndwr. The one boasts, in true Welsh style, that no man is his equal, and Hotspur is only ready to allow that no man speaks better Welsh.

Had this alliance been successful, Glyndwr’s sovereignty was to extend over Wales and to include all the territory comprised within a line drawn from the Mersey to Burton-on-Trent, and from thence to Worcester and the mouth of the Severn. But he distrusted Hotspur, even if he was frank with Mortimer, who had become his son-in-law; and when Hotspur advanced from the Scottish borders to give battle to Henry IV. at Shrewsbury, left him to fight a hopeless struggle against overwhelming numbers. Had Glyndwr been a true ally and joined forces Shrewsbury Fight would have had a different ending. But, cursed with those streaks of treachery and suspicion that mar the character of the Celt, Glyndwr let his ally be destroyed, and with that desertion wrought the eventual failure of his own ambitions. This is no place to follow his fortunes, rising and falling in a long and hopeless struggle. Successes he had in plenty, and he laid the greater part of Wales waste, but Saxon tenacity wore him down in the long run. After a romantic career, he at length became a beaten fugitive, and at the last fades out of sight, in 1416. No man knows where or when he died; but legends connect the little village of Monnington, in Herefordshire, with his obscure end.

The Welsh bards who twanged their harps in Owain’s halls, and ate his food and swilled his sack and metheglin, did him an ill service when they sang of the deeds he was to do and the glory that was to be his. His halls are gone, and only traditions and the researches of the antiquary preserve his story. His Mount stands still by the roadside, and vague stories of how he stood here and watched for the approach of his enemies are told; but one may have a shrewd suspicion that it is only your literary Welshman who nowadays knows or cares much about him.

XXXIX

More in accord with modern Wales is Llansaintffraid, across the Dee, with its trim lodging-houses and villas, and little railway-station which the railway authorities, alarmed at the name of Llansaintffraid, have christened by the simpler title of “Carrog.” More villas, more lodging-houses, and many tourists mark the approach to Corwen, a village or townlet that does not favourably impress the stranger fresh from Llangollen. No one could with truth say that the houses of Llangollen are beautiful, but the scenery there makes full atonement: at Corwen the scene is tame, the hills recede, and the Dee flows through a wide valley. Just here, where the town should be especially attractive, it is mean at the best, and at its worst downright ugly. Moreover, the railway company has deliberately chosen to place its coal-sidings and engine-sheds alongside the road and abutting upon the old Dee bridge.

Opinions upon Corwen are singularly unanimous through the course of over a hundred years. In 1797 Wigstead must have found it at its worst. The houses were then, he says, of clay and loam, and “most miserable hovels: the people, cows, asses, hogs, and poultry all live in one apartment, and all turn out at the same time in the morning.” The following year, another tourist finds Corwen a “disagreeable little town”; and in modern times the kindliest of itinerists has nothing better to say of the place than that “the tourist will not find much to detain him” in it.

The little that does suffice to detain him centres in the old church whence the name of the town derives, Cor Wen meaning White Choir. No longer white, but on the contrary, greyish-black and unlovely, the church stands behind the houses of the long street, and immediately under a huge pile of cliff-like rocks called Pen-y-Pigyn, crowned by a flagstaff, whence Owain Glyndwr is said to have cast his dagger, in some unexplained fit of anger. It is a legend stupidly invented to account for the rudely incised figure of a cross, resembling a short sword, seen in the granite slab now built as a lintel into the south porch. A battered old churchyard cross stands near the west door, and several old slate tombstones with two semicircular hollows, are to be seen, cut in this manner to receive the knees of those who came to pray by the graveside of their dead. On the southern side of this churchyard, more melancholy than most, a row of almshouses, called “Corwen College,” may be noticed; built in 1750 for six widows of Merionethshire clergymen, who may thus meditate among the tombs from morn to eve on the evil fate that left them widows before their husbands had attained to fat prebends, decanal dignities, or the culminating honours and riches of an episcopal throne.

The odd effigy of Iorwerth Sulien, an early vicar of the church, divides with the fine old timber roof the honours of the interior.

The “Owen Glendower” inn at Corwen has long since lost the “fierce gigantic figure like that of some Saracenic Soldan” that once served for a sign, and attracted the attention of every eighteenth-century traveller; and has in other ways altered since the time when the first tourists came, note-books in hand. It must be confessed that the first tourists in Wales are now become highly amusing where they intended to be improving, and not a little dull when their intent was jocular. One of them who says he was “Josephus Rex,” is not a little obscure at first, but presently we find that phrase to be a ponderous play upon words, and that, in short he meant he was Jo King—joking. You take him, do you not? How exquisitely pretty a wit!

Such an one as this must have been the Rev. Mr. Evans who, in 1705, toured the Principality. He found “decent accommodation,” and pointed civility at Corwen, where others had found nothing of the kind; but it was stupid of him to ask for a “tonsor” when he meant “barber,” and wanted a shave. Instead of bringing him a tonsor, they brought him a blind harper. He retained the harper, but still clamoured for his shave; whereupon, a “blooming damsel of twenty-five years” came with razors, soap and hot water, and deftly scraped his chin.

Most of Corwen’s business activity is centred in its railway-station at the further end of the town, where roads divide like the two arms of the letter Y; one, to the left, going to Bala, and the other for Holyhead. Here those two leviathans, the Great Western and the London and North-Western Railways, meet and go their several ways to Barmouth and to Rhyl. Beyond, for twenty-two miles, there is a vast expanse of country where no railway goes, and if Corwen wants to visit Bettws-y-Coed and Bettws desires to return the call, they have either to take the road or else embark upon a roundabout railway journey of fifty miles. The engineering works for a line that should connect the two along the Alwen, Geirw, and Conway valleys would not be so very great; the difficulty perhaps lies in the question, which of the rivals is to do it? Meanwhile, one passes over the ancient bridge that spans the Dee on six lichened arches, and bids good-bye to the modern world for awhile just as effectually as Borrow did when he tramped the road fifty-five years ago.

It is at first a tame road, by comparison with the scenes left behind, and it is not until the “Druid’s Head” inn—or what once was that hostelry—is passed that its character grows wild. The old toll-house of Macs Mawr and the “Cymro Goat Inn” mark the change in pleasant fashion by a bridge at the confluence of the Alwen and the Geirw. Their _curu_ at the “Goat” (whether it be a Billy or a Nanny is no matter) is better than their English, and the traveller is little likely to make himself understood, unless he be as clever a Saxon as Borrow himself, who lost no opportunity of showing the astounded Welshmen that he understood their language. Imagination pictures what he would have done, after several highly critical pulls at his tankard. “Maes Mawr,” he would have asked, “that means ‘great meadow’; that is it, I suppose, across the road?” pointing to a pasture under the lee of the hills; and, when he had been answered in the affirmative, telling his astonished host the history of it, carefully “got-up” before-hand.

Here you meet few people besides farm-hands and drovers. Of drovers plenty, urging their small Welsh sheep and their bony cattle to market. If you be at all curious you remark, perhaps, that the sheep are small. “Yess,” says the drover, “they wass ferry small sheeps whateffer. They wass take them from the mountains to makee the other sheeps petter. They will be”—here they break away suddenly, and the drover hurries after them with an opening “Tam!” swallowed up in a torrent of Welsh expletives.

XL

From Maerdy Post-office, half a mile onwards, commences a steady rise of nearly two miles, the uplands on the right presently culminating in the crags of Cader Dinmael, and the valley of the Geirw on the left gradually deepening and contracting into a profound and narrow gorge; the road running round cornices of rock, fenced by breast-high masonry on the one side, and overhung by rocky cliffs on the other. With boring-tools, pickaxe, and blasting-powder, Telford forced a way for his road round this shoulder of the mountain and converted what had been a narrow and dangerous track into a smooth highway, thirty-six feet in width. This is the spot rightly called in the old road-books “the romantic Pass of Glyndyffws,” and the bridge that seems to hazardously leap the gorge where the Geirw plunges and foams is identical with the “Pont-y-Glyn-Bin”—the Bridge of the Glen of Trouble—named by Borrow. Very justly he speaks of this as “one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes imaginable,” and of the bridge as “a kind of Devil’s Bridge, diabolically fantastical, flung over the deep glen and the foaming water.”

“Projecting out over the ravine,” he continues, “was a kind of looking-place, protected by a wall forming a half-circle, doubtless made by the proprietor of the domain for the use of the admirers of scenery. Cut on the top surface of the wall, which was of slate and therefore easily impressible by the knife, were several names, doubtless those of tourists who had gazed from the look-out, amongst which I observed, in remarkably bold letters, that of T******”

Borrow would have been more correct in his surmise if he had given the credit of this little balcony built out from the road to Telford. He it was who designed that little look-down into the depths, together with a few others along this road at particularly favourable view-points, thus proving his own appreciation of scenery and the possession of that artistic sense denied engineers by architects, who, as a body, are the most intolerant, opinionated, and barbarous set of professional men in existence, ready to ruin an old building for an idea, or to destroy the artistic work of one period to replace it with modern imitations of the especial style that suits their individual opinion.

Glyndyffws (how tearful and wonderful these Welsh names!) is lovely beyond expression. Nowhere else are the mountain-ashes and the scrub-oaks more exquisite than here, where they are seen clinging tenaciously to the jagged ledges of the ravine, soaked continuously in the moisture thrown up from the tortured water below, and clothed in every twig and wizard limb with moss and lichens. This, of course, was a spot that most powerfully impressed the imaginations of old travellers. Hear one of them. He speaks of the “deep and dismal chasm through which the hoarse-sounding torrent roars over the disjointed rocks beneath, and, lashing the rocky sides that check its impetuosity, rolls its angry waters to the Dee.” But we have not done with him yet. He goes on to describe the “stupendous fissure fully two hundred feet deep, overhung by large forest trees,” and continues in that strain to a wearisome length, until, in fact, we tear ourselves away, catching as we go such disjointed phrases as “awful scene,” “maddened torrent,” “profundity of horrible bed,” and so forth. That old tourist, fortunately for himself, did not visit Snowdon, after so recklessly expending all his adjectives on the way. Had he done so, he must surely, bankrupted in phrases, have, in presence of Snowdon’s grandeur, become a literary insolvent, paying the equivalent of a farthing in the pound.

Leaving Pont y Glyn and its “tremendous roar” behind, “the prospect,” according to a century-old wayfarer in these wilds, “becomes as uninteresting as Bagshot Heath.” But scarcely so. That Heath has no mountains enlivening the distance, nor a clear and beautiful stream trickling in little sharps and trebles through a solitary valley, such as this. Indeed, the hamlet of Tynant passed, where a shop, an inn, a chapel, and some scattered farmsteads in the cwms or on the hillsides comprise the whole, the rest of the way to Cerrig-y-Druidion is singularly beautiful in the open and unfenced sort. The name of Tynant alone, which means the “House by the Stream,” points to a solitude once greater than now, when the inn was the only house here.

It was to this quiet spot, by the sparkling trout stream, that Dick Vickers, who once drove the Holyhead Mail between here and Shrewsbury, retired, as Colonel Birch-Reynardson relates. He had been in early days a postboy, and had then performed the feat of driving “His Honour,” of Pradoe, from that place to London faster than the fastest. “His Honour” was posting up to town in a light barouche, and reached the “Lion” yard at Shrewsbury just as the “Wonder” was starting. “Dick,” said the squire, “I wonder whether I could beat the ‘Wonder’ into town; I should like to do it if I can.” And, in short, it was done, that celebrated coach coming in a bad second.

But steady and careful as old Time was little Dick when on the bench. “Little Dick” they called him because “he had to get on sixpennyworth of halfpence to look on the top of a Stilton cheese,” and those cheeses are of no great stature. In an evil hour he gave up the ribbons and set up as a farmer at Tynant, where, when his day’s work was done, he had been used to fish the little stream. But farming was a very different matter from driving four horses, and he lost his money in it, and so one ill day they found him hanging from a beam in one of his barns.

Flat for four miles to Cerrig-y-Druidion, with spreading moors ahead, the village itself stands prominent on a knoll, with an old road going to its bleak and hard-featured street, and the Holyhead Road just skirting its fringe. Cerrig-y-Druidion means “the rock of the Druids.”

“This place,” says Warner, “as its name imports, was connected with the awful superstitions of the ancient Britons, and exhibited some years since vestiges of Druidical worship.” These vestiges were British stone huts or tombs—the “kistvaens” of archæological literature. Warner and the peasantry thought them to be prisons, but, whatever they were, they have long since disappeared; only the rocky site—like a granite island rising from the surrounding level—remaining to give a reason for Cerrig’s name. It is curious to reflect that the village of Crick in Northants, was originally Cerrig, and that the name of Carrick, in Ireland, has a similar meaning. Only in England, where ages ago “the coiling serpent” (as the Welsh call the advancing Saxon) established himself and expelled the Celt, has the word been corrupted. When Borrow came to Cerrig-y-Druidion he says he stayed at the “Lion—whether the white, black, red, or green Lion I do not know.” It was, in fact, the “White Lion,” which still protrudes a battered and weather-beaten sign over the bye-street, while the “Saracen’s Head” stands boldly upon the main road. How he met the Italian who spoke Welsh, and on the morrow met the Irish fiddler with the game leg and the infernal cheek, let the pages of _Wild Wales_ relate.

XLI

The scattered cottages and old toll-house of Glasfryn bring one to Cernioge, the place to which the milestones have been insistently directing, since Corwen. What, the stranger wonders, is this place (“Kernioggy” the Welsh pronounce it) that it should be thus dignified? Well, here it is, just a farmhouse lying back from the road, with a pond beside it under the trees, a few outbuildings, and an older toll-house than the Glasfryn one. Not, nowadays, a very striking spot, except for its remote solitude; yet this, in the old days of road-travel, was a quite famous inn and posting-house, a stage between Bettws-y-Coed and the “Druid’s Head.” The inevitable reflection here is that if it was to such lonely places as this that travellers of old were glad to come, exclaiming with delight as to their comfort, how discomfortable must travelling then have been!

The older toll-gate standing close by, and early deserted, was found to be inconveniently close to the inn, and certainly no postboy, having been halted at the gate for toll, could in the few remaining yards drive his patrons up to the house with the flourish and circumstance that the times demanded. It is all very well nowadays, when even a first-class fare between London and Holyhead only costs a trifle over two guineas, for the traveller to leave the railway station in the decent obscurity of a cab; but, in times when a journey between those places might cost anything from thirty to fifty pounds sterling, travellers liked some pomp and circumstance for that expenditure. And they generally obtained it, for when travelling was so costly that few but the well-to-do were found upon the roads, and when the guest at an inn was wont to drink many bottles of the best port, it was eminently desirable he should be received and despatched with the greatest show of consideration.

“Cernioge Mawr”—or “Great Cernioge”—was the full name of the place. George Borrow conceived it to have derived from “Corniawg,” which means a place with many chimneys or turrets; certainly not descriptive of the existing house, but perhaps so in remote days when an old mansion stood here, its gables and clustered chimneys prominent to wayfarers in this solitude while they were yet far off, down the road.

The accommodation at Cernioge, whose sign, by the way, was the “Prince Llewelyn,” seems to have varied considerably at different times, and somewhat over a hundred years ago it appears to have been very bad. Some tourists in 1795, hearing that the inn kept three chaises and a post-coach, assumed a larder to match, but found “not a single article of food that even hungry appetites could relish.” Another, three years later, in speaking of the house as “a solitary inn, in the midst of a desert, chiefly intended for the accommodation of the coaches which run this road,” talks bitterly of the larder “in unison with the population of the country: nothing to be had but a leg of mutton, which it seems was tripping over the dark brown heath about three hours ago.”

By 1836, however, a change had come over the scene, for another tourist is found to speak of the “comforts and accommodations not being exaggerated”; but by that time its day was almost done. Another ten years saw the road exchanged for the rail, and Cernioge became what it is now, a farm.

Beyond this sometime inn the road descends, and “Snowdonia”—a term invented by Pennant a hundred and thirty years ago—opens up before the advancing explorer; a majestic disarray of tumbled peaks and lesser hills, smeared across with trailing mists. Then, in two miles, comes the hamlet of Pentre Voelas, with the “Voelas Arms,” a slate-fronted inn, by the way, displaying a very elaborately blazoned coat-of-arms over its door. “Toujours Prest” says the motto under that family scutcheon, and a very good motto too. Let us hope it has always been descriptive of the inn also, and that it, unlike Cernioge, was “Always Ready.”

From this point it is a seven-mile descent to Bettws-y-Coed and the Vale of Conway: a descent beginning gradually and gently, with pleasant scenery on either side, and culminating in a two-mile length of steep and winding road, with towering rocks overhanging on the one hand, and a deep wood-enshrouded valley on the other. Beside the road stands an inscribed stone that tells how Llewelyn ap Seicyllt, an obscure Prince of Wales, was slain in 1021.

Passing Henresea toll-house at five and a half miles from Bettws, the rocky chasm is skirted where the Conway boils and frets and splashes over obstructing boulders, or flows swiftly and with an unwonted calmness over some reach of smooth-slabbed rock. At the bridge of Glan Conway, where the road is taken across, is one of these quiet interludes. The water glides with a silent swiftness, infinitely impressive, over rocks clothed in moss, as it were in green velvet: the “Lincoln green” of Robin Hood and his merry men. Deep pools, a little aside from the main current, have the hue of dilute stout and porter; as though a raft freighted with Barclay and Perkins’ best had made grievous shipwreck here; shallower pools resemble brown sherry, and the sliding main stream, threaded with gold by the glancing sunlight, resembles some god-like brew of nectar or ambrosia, tipped into the kennel and run to waste by the fanaticism of some celestial Wilfrid Lawson.

The Conway presently plunges quite out of sight below the mountain road that winds on a cornice at Dinas Hill, lodged midway between the depths and the heights, and buttressed by sturdy masonry against sliding down into the woods whose tree-tops are seen far below. Away ahead, blocking a long valley, the great peaked mountain of Moel Siabod rises up and pretends to be Snowdon; imposing on many a confiding stranger with its 2,800 feet and bold outline, and discounting the real view of Snowdon, 700 feet higher, but not so effectively seen, at Capel Curig.