Part 14

Telford’s road takes an infinitely better course, although, to be sure, the four miles onward to Lake Ogwen are on a steady and uninterrupted rise, almost impossible to face with a steady head-wind, and wholly so when storms scour through the pass. Here is the summit-level of the road, 957 feet above the sea, with mountains 3,000 feet higher surrounding the lonely moorland. Infrequent farmsteads of the smallest and most cabin-like kind are scattered about the almost barren space, among the bogs and the tremendous boulders that have at some time or other come hurtling down from the mountain-sides, where there remain many more of the same sort, ready to descend. Peat-stacks to every farm tell of what fuel they use here, just as the great stones placed on the roofs of stacks and cabins alike hint of the fury of the winds.

Llyn Ogwen comes at the end of this moor, where the mountains close in and narrow the passage. It borders the road for a mile; a shuddery lake of ice-cold water, sombre and austere as Trifaen the three-headed himself, or Braich Du and Carnedd Dafydd on the opposite shores; all of them mountains of the most craggy and stupendous sort.

Trifaen, an abrupt mountain of 3010 feet, is incomparably the finest in Wales, after Snowdon. Its three peaks, with tattered shreds of mists clinging about them, seem to hang immediately overhead, and the huge fissures up its mighty sides, with moisture sparkling here and there on the slaty rocks, like jewels in the sunshine, forbid all but the most determined climbers.

The anglers who fish for trout in Ogwen, the cyclists, and the brake-parties from Bangor, all help to make the little refreshment house that was once a toll-house, a busy enough place. It stands where the overflow from the Llyn dashes down more than a hundred feet, in a series of cascades, into a deep valley. These are the Falls of Ogwen, and the valley that opens out below and stretches for miles onward, with a glimpse of the sea in the distance, is the far famed Nant Ffrancon—“the Glen of Beavers.” Until Telford reconstructed the road from this point, the way—“the most dreadful horse-path in Wales” as Pennant describes it in 1759—led over the Falls by an extremely narrow bridge without parapets, and descended in break-neck fashion into the other side of the valley. Telford wholly abandoned that suicidal drop and set his workmen to quarry and blast out a gradual three miles’ descent on the hither side, along the shoulders of the hills: a gradient so gentle that, although the road is situated in the midst of the most rugged scenery, it never exceeds 1 in 22. He built a new bridge over the Falls, and propped up his road from falling into the valley by a massive length of retaining-wall; carrying underneath the carriage-way by cross drains, the little spouts of water that fall at every few yards from the mountain sides.

The old bridge may still be seen, a moss-grown and decrepit arch, beside the modern, and the old road still descends the vale; but no one save the peasants and the wandering shepherds ever trace the deserted way. David Cox has left a line view of the modern road, with Carnedd Dafydd and Trifaen in the background, and the scenery to the right, where the black and frightful precipice called the “Devil’s Kitchen” gapes; vapours overhanging it like the steam of some infernal cookery.

XLVII

The Glen of Beavers is a beautiful spot from the standpoint of the tourist, if not of the farmers, who have with infinite labour collected the scattered boulders, and built boundary walls with them; and essay to grow corn and hay in the bottom, where the Ogwen stream goes prattling in summer on its winding course. The Ogwen is no friend to the farmer, for walls and stacks and earth are often carried away in winter by the innocent looking brook, that arises at such times and, clearing the fields far and wide in an irresistible flood, deposits stones where the good earth bad been, and carries the earth itself in solution down to Bangor, and so out to sea. Before agriculture can feel secure here, locks and dams should regulate the tricksy watercourse, just as was done by the dams the beavers built in the unrecorded ages, before ever the farmer came.

At the foot of the descent is Tyn-y-Maes——the House in the Meadow, a hamlet where an inn stood in coaching days to supply relays for the last stage into Bangor, and where, one may be quite sure, the coachmen and passengers coming down or going up, partook of those creature comforts the rigours of the journey demanded. A coachman was said to have lost his eyesight from the effects of a snowstorm at Nant Ffrancon.

It is a woeful exchange from the quiet streams and the rural sights of the last few miles to Bethesda and the hideous slate quarries that gash the hillsides. “A Scriptural name,” said Borrow, when a chance acquaintance on the road told him the name of the village.

“Is it?” said he; “well, if its name is Scriptural, the manners of its people are by no means so.”

If the appearance of Bethesda (now a town, and a very mean and ugly one) were any criterion of the character of its inhabitants, then, the Bethesda people would be past praying for. It is a long, long street of the most furiously ugly houses that ever roof was put to, and the whole of its surroundings are pitifully sordid. Whether cheap stucco or slate be the building materials, the result is the same, and the generations of quarrymen who have laboured to enrich Lord Penrhyn and his ancestors are doomed to dwell in a most squalid place, within sight of some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

For Lord Penrhyn is the owner of land far and near. Not, for the most part, land that would enrich its possessor, but in the slate quarries of Bethesda a veritable mine of wealth, far surpassing the riches derived from many a goldfield. Slate rock that can be quarried and split into the thin sections required for roofing is of the rarest occurrence, and most of it is situated within the bounds of the Penrhryn estates, that for centuries have produced more than three-quarters of the slates coming into the market. Not only the home market is supplied from here, but foreign also. Unlike the working of most mineral estates, the quarries are not let out to some middleman, but worked direct for Lord Penrhyn, and have been notorious from time to time for the bitter and long-drawn strikes that have taken place. The middleman is not generally regarded with favour, but it is safe to say, without following the wretched story of the Bethesda quarrymen, that if such an one had the control of the quarries, such occurrences, although possible, would not have been of so protracted a character. A man who should lease the quarries could not afford to lock them up, and, putting the key in his pocket, let the strike go on for ever, or until the workmen and their families were starved into accepting terms; but the Lords Penrhyn can. The Penrhyns have been so greatly enriched by the quarries that their wealth is colossal, and current income from that source can be cut off without any discomfort. The whole pitiful business would be impossible under that enlightened statesmanship which some day will make all mineral wealth public property.

The chief features of the Bethesda scenery are the long series of rubbish-heaps, or rubbish-mountains, and the terraced clefts in the hills whence the slates have come. Whole hillsides have been cut and blasted away, to be fashioned into slates that have roofed half the little suburban villas of the world. The great success of Welsh slates is due to their cheapness, and to the thinness to which it is possible to split them, so that the cheap builder of cheap houses need not provide a very substantial roof to bear their weight. It is very different with the Cumberland slates; smaller and thicker and a great deal more expensive, they are only to be found on buildings where cheapness has not been the first object. Between the Welsh and the Cumbrian products there can only be one choice on the score of appearance and strength. Welsh slates have a disagreeable colour, something between a blackish-blue and dark purple: those from Cumberland are a delicate grey-green, beautiful when new, and improving with age. Their comparative thickness, too, is an advantage from many points of view.

The gates of Penrhyn Park confront the traveller when he has at last left Bethesda in his wake. They are appropriately feudal and threatening, in a revival of the old castellated style, just as though the owner of the quarries had shut himself within, and was prepared to defend himself and his hoards to the last extremity against the starving thousands of the quarry-town. The little village of Llandegai stands near, and beyond stretches the Park, with Penrhyn Castle in its midst: a lovely scene of dense woodlands falling towards a blue expanse of sea, with an island and a lighthouse and white-winged yachts. The Castle turrets dominate the whole, an elaborate and highly successful piece of make-believe, compelling the reverence of the wayfarer, until he draws near and discovers that the Norman keep, own brother in appearance to that of Rochester Castle, was built about a hundred years ago by a certain “judicious Hopper” (not our old theological friend, the judicious Hooker), “who with his usual taste and science has preserved in his improvements the characteristic style of the military Gothic.”

Positively the last toll-house before Bangor is found at Lonisaf, standing not far from the spot where the old road from Ogwen Falls joins the modern. Some toll-gates were provided with weighbridges, and Lonisaf was one of them, the little weigh-house still remaining. The especial function of these weighbridges was to detect overloading. Fines for carts and waggons laden beyond their proper weight were very heavy, and their severity and frequent application fully reimbursed the trustees the cost of installing a check of this kind.

XLVIII

The road makes an abrupt turn to the left to enter the city of Bangor. The grim stone walls on either side of the forbidding edifice in front do not represent a prison, workhouse, or lunatic asylum, but have at present the honour of housing the University College of North Wales, founded in 1884. Years before that date this was the “Penrhyn Arms” hotel, one of the largest and best on the road, with great resources in the way of reception-rooms, extensive private suites for the considerable personages who travelled to and from Ireland, and stabling for over a hundred horses. A private inclined road leads up to the pillared doorway, and an arch over the public road conducted in those days to the hotel farm and dairy. It is frequently found to be too low to permit the passage of hay and straw waggons and other mountainous loads, with the result that the so-called “private” road is used, and is almost as public as the other. The best side of the building is turned away from the road, and looks from amid wide lawns and beautiful gardens across the Menai Straits to Beaumaris. Here they show with reverence the stump of a fir tree planted by the Princess Victoria in 1832. The tree died in 1899. The interior of the house is, of course, divided into class-rooms, lecture-rooms, and the like. The kitchen and scullery are now a library, and students now swat where fat cooks once sweated before roasting fires. The change is one that would have horrified Colonel Birch-Reynardson, equally with the coachmen and guards of the Holyhead Mail that used to change here in the palmy days of Host Bicknell.

The Colonel, as an amateur whip, often drove the Mail between Oswestry and Bangor, and tells how others occasionally did the same. There was, for example, one who took a glass or a bottle too much at the “Owen Glendower” at Corwen, and wrought havoc with the mail and other things along the road, with the result that the bags were too late for the packet at Holyhead, and the Post Office authorities heard of it. Result number two was that horse proprietors were severely admonished not to allow any one but the authorised coachman to drive. They did so all the same, but the reins were prudently made to change hands when nearing “the change.” Charlie Harper, who about that time had been promoted from the slower Chester and Holyhead to the fast direct Holyhead Mail, had resigned his ribbons one day to the Colonel, but took them over on nearing Bangor. The Colonel, however, good-humouredly took Bicknell to task for giving _him_ the sack. The hotel-keeper was sorry, but no amateur could drive the Mail again after the wigging he had got from the Post Office.

Some little while later, one stormy evening, the Colonel was on the Mail at Bangor. Harper, at the end of his day’s work, got down and went home; the new team was put to, and the Mail stood waiting for Jack Williams, the coachman who was to take it across the bridge and on to Holyhead. Five minutes passed; time was up, and no coachman appeared. “What the devil are you waiting for?” asked Hodgson, the guard, coming back from the Post Office with the bags. “Where is Jack Williams?”

No one had seen Jack Williams, and no one seemed to know whether he was dead or alive. At last one of the horsekeepers seemed to remember all of a sudden that Williams had been summoned to attend a magistrates’ meeting on the other side of the Menai Bridge; that Harper was to have taken the Mail over the bridge, and Williams to get up at the public-house where the worthy beaks who had summoned him were to hold their conclave. “Yess, inteet, I remember it wass summoned to attend the magistrates’ meeting” (_it_ standing, of course, for ‘Chack’ Williams).

“Now then,” said Hodgson, growing impatient, “we can’t wait here all day; somebody must drive. Mr. Reynardson, will you be so good? We shall be late for the packet.”

“I don’t care,” said the Colonel, “whether you are late or not; I am thankful to say I am not going to cross such a day as this. Jump up and drive yourself, and I’ll take charge of your bags. Bicknell has said that I am not to drive his horses, and if you take root here I don’t care; I’ll not touch them.” “Well, sir, we shall be late for the packet if you _won’t_,” said Hodgson. “I don’t care,” he replied, “I dare say I shall be able to get to where I am going in time for dinner, or at all events before bedtime, so I’ll have nothing to do with either the mail or Mr. Bicknell’s horses, and if the mail stays here all night it’s nothing to me.” “Now, Hodgson,” said Bicknell, who just then appeared at the door, “what’s the Mail standing there for.” “That’s _just_ what I should like to know,” answered Hodgson; “but the Mail can’t go, sir, without some one to drive it. Jack Williams is not to be found, Charlie Harper has gone home long ago, and Mr. Reynardson says you said he was not to drive your horses any more, and he won’t have anything to do with them; so what’s to be done I don’t know. We shall be late for the packet, and then you know there’ll be a row again with the Post Office people.”

Things seemed to be in something of a fix, and Hodgson, though in a fuss to be off, was rather enjoying the joke, which began to be a serious one; for there seemed to be no chance of any one to drive. It was blowing great guns, and the Menai Bridge would be rocking about like a cradle, and the team of greys were not the handiest in the world, if they had not got up the right way in the morning, and if things went a little wrong.

“Well,” said Bicknell, “this won’t do. Will you drive them, Mr. Reynardson, till you find Jack Williams on the other side of the bridge?” “No,” said the obstinate Colonel, “you may drive them yourself, if you like; I won’t touch them.” Things looked bad; Bicknell was no coachman; Hodgson said he could not, and Reynardson that he would not, drive, and there seemed none of the horsekeepers competent to perform the feat. So at last, Mr. Bicknell, putting on his most affable face, said: “Mr. Reynardson, Sir, will you be so kind as to take them across the bridge? I shall be very much obliged to you if you will.” “Oh! Oh!” said the pacified amateur, “if you are going to be obliged, or anything of that kind, I don’t mind obliging you, Mr. Bicknell,” and the thing was done.

XLIX

Bangor is a forbidding place—a squalid and uninteresting mile-length of street, extending from this spot to the railway station, where a more recent and less objectionable continuation of it, called Upper Bangor, climbs for another half-mile towards the Menai Bridge. The long, long street of Bangor, narrow and dirty, gives an indescribably second-hand appearance to everything exposed for sale in its shop-windows; and the stranger, newly arrived from the champagne-like air of Capel Curig, has not been in Bangor half an hour before he, too, feels second-hand and soiled. He goes weak at the knees, totters, and feels utterly undone. The town lies as it were in the bottom of a funnel, and, tucked away from actual contact with the vivifying breezes of the Menai Strait, has air neither from one side nor the other. It is, by consequence, a town of the sickliest. Let these things, however, be said rather in sorrow than contempt, for of contempt Bangor has already had sufficient at the hands of generations of travellers. Many are attracted to Bangor by reason of its cathedral, but it were better the building had not that proud title, because those who have already made acquaintance with the famous cathedrals of England see a lack of proportion in thus dignifying a church that, for both size and beauty, is surpassed times without number by parish churches in the shires. For its present want of interest, such individually remote and entirely dissimilar persons as Owain Glyndwr and Sir Gilbert Scott are responsible. Owain in 1402 laid it in ruins; and Scott, who, at a cost of £35,000, was engaged from 1866 to 1875 in “restoring” the debased Perpendicular building he found here, has impressed his own architectural nostrums upon it in a very disastrous manner. It is a long, low structure, with a dwarf central tower, and its own inherent disadvantages are greatly worsened by its site being in a hollow beside the shabby street.

Doctor Johnson, who, touring North Wales in 1774, found the “quire” of Bangor to be “mean,” could quite honestly repeat that criticism to-day. The service in his time was also “ill-read.” A “very mean inn” in the town further helped to jaundice his views—an inn with little accommodation, for he records: “I lay in a room where the other bed had two men.”

De Quincey is one of the very many who have not liked Bangor. He says it has “fewer attractions than any other spot in Carnarvonshire”—a very mild and negative way of putting Bangor’s disabilities, and much milder than it might have been, considering the provocation received. It was in 1802 he was here, following his “elopement” from school at Manchester. With the weekly allowance of a guinea, he was free for a while to roam Wales as he pleased, and came (of all places!) to Bangor, where he hired “a very miniature set of apartments—one room and a closet.” His landlady had been a servant in the household of the Bishop of Bangor, and, one day, calling at the Palace, happened to mention to the Bight Reverend how she had let her rooms. Thereupon that dignified cleric thought it incumbent upon him to caution her as to her selection of inmates. “You must recollect, Betty,” he said, “that Bangor is the high road to the Head (_the Head_ was the common colloquial expression for Holyhead); so that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from their debts into England; and of English swindlers, running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route.”

This was excellent advice for judicious ears; but Betty unhappily repeated the Bishop’s words to De Quincey, together with her reply, which was, “Oh, my lord, I really don’t think this young gentleman is a swindler, because——” But the clause that was to have justified him that young gentleman never knew. “You don’t _think_ me a swindler,” he interposed; “I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it”; and so departed, in a righteous fury.

L

It is at Bangor that the old Chester route to Holyhead, by way of Penmaenmawr, falls into the great Holyhead Road. Although we have not come by Chester, it may be worth while to glance at Penmaenmawr, that gigantic headland over whose perilous heights old-time travellers went, trembling for their safety. Its Welsh name, meaning literally the “great stone head,” sufficiently describes this old obstacle and stumbling-block, looking over the water to Anglesey. Nowadays the railway tunnels through it, and travellers by the Wild Irishman, warned by the locomotive’s shriek, are plunged into a momentary darkness, fifteen hundred feet beneath the windy height where the horsemen of two hundred years ago stumbled along an indistinct track. Swift was of that company, and it is still told how the inns at either end of this laborious route used to display on their signs the couplets written by him:—

Before you venture here to pass, Take a good refreshing glass.

And—

Now this hill you’re safely over, Drink, your spirits to recover.

By 1774, when Dr. Johnson toured in Wales, matters had somewhat improved. “We came to Penmaenmawr,” he says, “by daylight, and found a way, lately made very easy and very safe. It was cut smooth and enclosed between parallel walls, the outer of which secures the passenger from the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. This wall is here and there broken by mischievous wantonness. The inner wall preserves the road from the loose slates, which the shattered steep above it would pour down. That side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones which every accident may crumble. The old road runs higher, and must have been very formidable. _The sea beats at the bottom of the way._”

Those italics are not due to Johnson, but are placed here to duly emphasise the romantic note struck, perhaps unconsciously, by him at the close of those too-staccato sentences, studded all too plentifully with that often necessary but harsh word “which.” “The sea beats at the bottom of the way:” there you have a picture of the place that hints in a sentence all manner of disasters; ships blown against the rocky coast, coaches swept off the road into the waves, and obscure catastrophes, the more dreadful because left to the imagination.