Part 15

But not every one found Penmaenmawr so safe, even though the new road had replaced the old. They had not Johnson’s robust nature, or else desired to make some literary capital out of the scene. Thus, more than twenty years later, the Rev. Richard Warner describes “the rocky mountain of Penmaenmawr,” in what he evidently intends to be blood-curdling terms. “Formerly extremely rude and dangerous,” he says, “it has been entirely altered and divested of a considerable degree of its horror. Still, however, it cannot be travelled without shuddering. Creeping round the side of the mountain, it hangs, as it were, in mid-air, with a frowning precipice above and a steep descent immediately under it. The rocks on the right are nearly perpendicular, sometimes beetling over the road in a terrific manner, at others retiring into deep declivities of nine hundred or a thousand feet, from whose rugged sides project fragments of incalculable magnitude, so capriciously placed, and having such a disjoined appearance that it is impossible for the traveller to lose the perpetual dread of his being every moment crushed to atoms under a torrent of huge stones.” That such stormy torrents _did_ sometimes flow is evident from Wigstead, who, coming to “where Penmaenmawr awfully raises its aspiring head,” found a mass of rock recently fallen into the road in a storm; a huge fragment of cliff that, if broken up, could not have been cleared away by ten large waggons.

When the union of Great Britain and Ireland was effected, the Irish members clamoured for the immediate improvement of this dangerous road. Indeed, the city of Dublin had already contributed something towards such a work, but the present fine highway round the base of the headland did not come into existence until Telford came upon the scene, blasting and levelling the way that Turner has pictured so well.

Having passed Penmaenmawr, the old travellers to Holyhead often crossed into Anglesey by the Lavan Sands to Beaumaris: a dangerous passage only to be attempted by those correctly informed of the tides. Horsemen would ride the three-mile stretch of sands exposed at low water, and, hailing the Beaumaris ferry, be readily landed on the island; but if they by any chance ventured out half an hour too late, the rising tide swept them away, or the treacherous sands engulfed them. It was here that Sir John Bramston and his son were nearly lost in 1641. They had ridden across the sands to the verge of the channel and hailed the ferry; but the ferrymen were drunk, and it was long before any notice was taken of them. Meanwhile, the tide was rising fast, and was swirling about them before aid arrived, and they were rescued in the nick of time.

LI

The ferries into Anglesey, five in all, from end to end of the Straits, were all more or less perilous. Crossing by them, according to evidence produced at an enquiry on the subject, 180 persons lost their lives between 1664 and 1842. The mail route was by Bangor Ferry, called by the Welsh Porthaethwy, or the “Ferry of the Narrow Waters,” close by where Telford’s suspension bridge now spans the channel. Up out of Bangor drove the Mails, and many of the stage-coaches, post-chaises, and chariots, to the ferry-house. Thence passengers and their luggage were ferried across to the opposite side in boats and lighters, each manned by four ferrymen. Coaches and chaises were in waiting when they landed, to whisk them off to Mona and Holyhead. Swift crossed here in 1727, and refers to the inn, “which, if it be well kept, will break Bangor.” There he lay the night, and was up at four o’clock the next morning. This inn was the “George,” still standing, with an addition built on, in what was intended to be a grand and imposing style, about 1850. The huge, buff-coloured pile, standing in midst of lovely gardens, faces the Strait. There still hangs on the wall of the coffee-room an autograph of the Duke of Wellington, taken from the visitors-book and proudly framed: “I passed the night of the 21st August, 1851, at the George Inn, and was very well accommodated. Wellington.”

In the terraced gardens is preserved the ferrymen’s horn, but the ferrymen are dead and gone, and even their huts, built on the rocks of the Anglesey shore, are in ruins. There stands on that rocky landing-place an old inn, now called the “Cambria,” but in the days of the ferry known as the “Three Tuns.” It is a romantic spot, romantic with all the pathos of a tale that is told. From the wrought-iron bracket of the inn, long without a sign, to the deserted and roofless huts and the slippery, sea-weedy rocks, everything tells of a vanished order of things. A few ancients gossip of what their fathers and grandfathers told them of the times when exhausted passengers climbed from the slimy rocks at the water’s edge to the shelter of the inn, and of the old custom of swimming the cattle across the Straits at low water, from the island of Ynys-y-Moch that now supports one of the bridge-towers; but even the bridge is now become something of an antiquity, and the ferry well-nigh forgot. A well-authenticated story of it is still remembered. It tells how an attorney, on the ground of having booked through to London, refused to pay the penny demanded by the ferrymen for taking his portmanteau across, and how it was accordingly detained until the Mail had left. The lawyer then paid the disputed penny and ordered out a chaise and four to London. Arrived there, he brought an action against the proprietors of the Mail, and recovered all his expenses and compensation for loss of time. The Judge expressed his opinion that the plaintiff was a benefactor to his country, a view not likely to be taken in these times of one who would spend £50 and perhaps five times that amount in litigation rather than pay a penny.

The ferry was not superseded without some little contention. It had been the property, time out of mind, of the Williams family, of Plas Issa, Conway. Leased to an ancestral John Williams by Queen Elizabeth, for £3 6_s._ 8_d._ a year, there is no knowing how far back beyond that time the family interest had reached. Government offered a sum in compensation when the bridge was building, but the amount was not considered sufficient, and the question was referred to the Beaumaris Assizes, where the average takings of the last twelve years were stated to have been £885 18_s._ per annum. In the result, Miss Williams, the representative of the family, was awarded £26,557, representing thirty years’ purchase, and she, or rather her husband, for she married in the meanwhile, was paid that sum on the day the Bridge was opened.

Telford was not the first who had proposed to bridge the Menai. Forty-two years before he had prepared his plans a Mr. Golborne sketched a design, and Rennie had at a later period proposed a cast-iron bridge to span the water in one arch. Even Telford’s first proposals differed wholly from the design he eventually adopted; and he, like Rennie, favoured more than any other type of bridge the single cast-iron arch. Difficulties in the way of construction, in some degree, but in greater measure the objections of the seafaring interest engaged in navigating the Straits, led to this type being abandoned and the suspension principle adopted. A legend, much in favour at Llangollen, tells how the engineer, at a loss for ideas, obtained the suggestion for his Menai Bridge from a small bridge on the suspension principle that then crossed the Dee at Berwyn. However that may be, suspension bridges of practical use, if of no very great size or scientific construction, were already known to the world. Telford produced his design in 1818, and it was submitted to the Commissioners and authorised by Parliament in the following year. The design, carried out exactly as proposed, was to provide a level roadway across the Straits at a height of 100 feet above high water, with a clear opening between the main suspension towers of 579 feet, thus providing an ample fairway for mariners, and silencing the objections of the shipping interest. The spot chosen was at a narrowing of the channel, where the rocky shores, rising on either side abruptly to a considerable height, afforded this clearance, and where an island called Ynys-y-Moch gave a ready site for one of the great towers. Between these main supports of the chains and the shores, a series of arches—four on the Anglesey side and three on the Carnarvonshire approach—were to support the rest of the roadway, to be 52 feet wide, divided into two carriage ways of 12 feet each, with a central footpath between of 4 feet width. The total height of the two great towers, above high water mark, was to be 153 feet, and the entire length of the bridge 1000 feet.

The first stone of this great work was laid on the 10th of August, 1819, when the tower on Ynys-y-Moch, on the Anglesey side, was begun. In the course of four years the whole of the masonry work was completed, and the series of piers and arches, built of Anglesey limestone, ready to receive the iron chains, weighing close upon 2,200 tons. The first of these was hauled up to its place on the 26th of April, 1825, in the presence of thousands of spectators, come, many of them, in expectation of seeing a colossal failure. When the hauling was completed, and the first of the sixteen great chains that carry the central span safely bolted in position, the friends who rushed to congratulate the anxious engineer found him on his knees, in prayer.

The last chain was in position by the 9th of July, the driving home of the final bolt, followed by the playing of “God Save the King” by a brass band placed in the centre of the bridge, and a triumphal march across it of workmen, amid volleys of cheers from those assembled thousands who seem to have been constantly on the spot for more than two months, and were still there on the following 30th of January, when “this stupendous, pre-eminent, and singularly unique structure,” as an old writer calls it, was opened “at thirty-five minutes after one o’clock a.m., to allow the Royal London and Holyhead Mail coach, conveying the London mail-bags for Dublin, to pass; David Davies, coachman, Wm. Read, guard.” The Mail was followed by the Bangor Pilot, and the London, Oxford and Holyhead “Oxonian”; the Holyhead Road Commissioners, the engineer, and several thousands of persons.

The total cost of the bridge and approaches was £120,000; a very moderate sum in comparison with many other bridge-building works, and something less than one-fifth the cost of its huge neighbour, the Britannia railway bridge, two miles distant, down the Straits. Four workmen were killed during its progress.

Tolls are still taken at the Bridge. Foot-passengers and cyclists are alike charged a penny each, and flys and cabs a shilling; the charges running up curiously to half-a-crown for a stage coach, and three shillings for a “post-chaise, coach, landau, berlin, or barouche, or other vehicle with four wheels and four horses.” These charges are arranged so as not to press too heavily upon the inhabitants of either side, and one payment frees the bridge for the rest of the day, the payer of one toll being allowed to come and go as often as he pleases up to twelve o’clock, midnight.

As a business speculation, if it had been built solely to that end, the Menai Bridge would be pronounced a failure, for the interest on capital originally expended comes, at five per cent., to £6,000 per annum, and the annual income from tolls, returned in 1837 as £1,200, when the coaches were still running, must now be less rather than more. In addition to the original cost, the charge for upkeep must be taken into consideration, although, as the ironwork has not been painted for many years past, that, perhaps, does not bulk very largely.

Proposals made by the County Councils of Carnarvon and Anglesey to purchase the bridge from the Government and to open it toll free have failed, the price asked being beyond the resources of those bodies.

LII

Across this monument of early engineering skill, with roadway swaying and vibrating to the passage of every vehicle, and bird’s-eye views up and down the glittering waterway, Anglesey is entered. On its shores to the right sprawls Menai village, with Beaumaris in the distance, and down beneath, on the left, lies the Isle of Benglas, with the oddly placed church of Llantysilio on it.

You cannot unmoved set foot in Mona, as this was called before ever it obtained its name of Isle of the Angles. It was the last retreat of the Druids before the advance of the Roman power, and from it they incited the Welsh tribes to resistance. It was in A.D. 61 that Suetonius Paulinus, the Roberts of that distant past, made his great march across Britain, with a resolution to finally crush their mystic power. His line of march followed the Watling Street, bringing him to the shores of the Menai Straits at _Segontium_, now identified with Carnarvon. Arrived there, his first care was to provide a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats where the Straits narrow, at a point now known as Port Dinorwic. When this was done, and all in readiness for crossing, he found the passage energetically disputed, and the unknown shores of the island lined with a terror-striking army of blue-stained Britons, white-robed Druids, and shrieking women clad in dark and dismal garments, with hair streaming wildly over their faces, and carrying torches. These ministering angels ran like furies up and down the rocks, and cursed; while the Druids prayed and cursed in one breath. These unusual sights and sounds so astonished the Roman soldiery that they gaped with dismay, and stood unnerved, an excellent mark for the javelins the enemy began to throw at them. They would probably have fled had it not been for their own general, who encouraged them by promising death to all who flinched. Death, therefore, being rather more of a certainty in the rear, they made a wild rush, closed with the howling mob, and completely defeated them. Many Druids were roasted on their own sacrificial altars that day, as just burnt-offerings to atone for the cruelty of a blood-stained religion that demanded living victims and divined events from the inspection of human entrails. The sacred groves of Mona were cut down, the altars demolished, and the island reduced to a conquered province.

Having said thus much, and given the views of the Druids and their practices popularly received, it is only fair to those ancients and to the respectable old gentlemen who, in these days of Celtic revivals and Eisteddfodau, become Arch Druids and things of that sort, and attend gatherings in mystic garments like nightshirts over their highly respectable tweed trousers and broadcloth frock-coats—it is only just and fair to say that Julius Cæsar, in his _Commentaries_, gives the Druids a very high character. The priests, he says, taught the immortality of the soul, and held truth to be the highest virtue. They were sound as priests, as legislators politic, and as philosophers enlightened and humane. We have nothing in the way of public men so good as this nowadays, and therefore we cannot but deplore the action of Suetonius Paulinus in wiping them off the face of the earth; and at the same time may hope that the Arch Druids and lesser Druids of modern summer gatherings in Wales, who look so supremely silly with laurel wreaths round their respectable old bald heads, and white whiskers and collars beneath—and would certainly not dream of auguring over any fellow-creature’s entrails—may get equal wisdom and political soundness.

There is on the Anglesey side, near Llanedwen, a field called “Maes Mawr Gad,” or the Field of the Great Army, marking the spot where Paulinus and his victorious host landed. The Roman general rested but a short while here, for the Druids had scarce been blotted out when the terrible news reached him of the revolt of the Iceni, and the massacre at Camulodunum. He hasted back, collecting an army of ten thousand on the way, and, leaving the young and old and defenceless of Verulamium to their fate, advanced into Essex and utterly defeated Boadicea.

LIII

Very few are the old travellers or modern writers who have a good word to say for Anglesey. It is “flat, dull, monotonous, barren, treeless, wind-swept,” and many more things expressed by adjectives in the uncomplimentary sort; but will the present historian be credited when, with his hand upon his heart, and if necessary—should his bare word not be held to deserve credit when opposed to that bulk of damnatory evidence—his lips upon the Book he declares that Anglesey is none of these things? A recent traveller finds in the word “Mona” what he calls a “soft-sounding name, well suited to the present aspect” of the island. What does he mean? “In all the bare, flat fields,” he continues, “you scarcely see a tree.” To this the returned traveller from Anglesey may reply, in the inelegant but expressive schoolboy phrase, “What rot!” But then that writer traversed Anglesey by train, as he confesses, and therefore has no _locus standi_ in topographical criticism. Probably the others explored the island as little as he.

It is a high table-land of an island, mounted atop of rugged cliffs for a goodly part of its jagged and irregular circumference, and divided athwart by the Malldraeth Marsh, a valley almost deep enough to admit the sea, which would in that case divide the isle in two unequal parts. Even the modern and easy high road, made by Telford in 1825 for a direct line from Menai Bridge to Holyhead, is by no means flat; while the old coach road is not only hilly but mountainous. Along its course lies Penmynydd, whose very name, meaning “mountain-head,” should have checked the pen that talked of flatness in Anglesey. This was the place where the mails and the stages were commonly upset: the place that so alarmed London coachmen imported for the duty of driving the mails, that they refused to remain. Penmynydd is the worst spot on that old road, but hills along its course are the almost invariable rule, and flat stretches the very infrequent exceptions.

Now as to the barrenness of Anglesey. That is a contention no Anglesey farmer will support, for the island is a quite celebrated dairying district; and the best of butter and milk are not usually obtainable from barren wildernesses. From one or other of the numerous tor-like granite-crowned hillocks that plentifully stud the Anglesey landscape, and give it a close resemblance to Cornwall, fertile farms and numerous scattered white farmsteads and cottages are seen. They paint prosperity in the mind’s eye, small though many of the holdings and cottages be, and although in a proportion of them lives a mining class. These whitewashed granite cottages and the stone walls that fence the fields render the resemblance to Cornwall very close: and no one yet has been found to apply such disparaging remarks as those quoted above to that county. As in Cornwall, too, the myrtle, the hydrangea, and the tree-fuchsia flourish all the year round in the cottagers’ gardens, and few sights are so lovely as that of a lowly, granite one-storeyed cottage, its walls and garden-walls alike whitewashed, and its garden luxuriating with the myriad red and purple blooms of the fuchsia, the pale mauve or pink blossoms of the hydrangea, or the more delicate petals of the myrtle. Wind-swept the hills of Anglesey are in winter, but in the warm and sheltered valleys these alien creatures of the garden live unharmed.

Nor even is the isle treeless. So little so is it that the pine-woods of Menai village might reasonably for their beauty and extent be envied by Bournemouth itself; while peculiarly characteristic of Anglesey are the strange groups of trees, looking like lineal descendants of Druidical groves, that are everywhere to be seen; generally very line umbrageous trees, and often hiding in their midst some old mansion or farmstead of the larger kind.

LIV

The first two miles into Anglesey command the whole range of the Snowdonian mountains; but nothing could be more monumentally striking than the Anglesey Column that shoots up from the wooded, rock-strewn hill of Craig-y-Dinas on the way to the village of “Llanfairpwllgwyngyll,” as a board on the post office amiably shortens that terrific place-name. The column, itself 100 feet in height, designed in the Doric style, rises from a crest 260 feet above the waters of the Straits, and commemorates the first Marquis of Anglesey; he who, as “Lord Paget” and “Lord Uxbridge,” warred with Wellington in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, where he left a leg, shot off towards the close of that famous victory. He was created Marquis of Anglesey three weeks after the battle, and lived to enjoy his title until 1854. He saw the column rise, long years before, but the bronze statue of him was not erected until 1860. It represents him in hussar uniform, standing with contemplative gaze across the water, towards England. The curious old uniform and the green stains with which the storms and rains of over forty years have coloured the metal give the bronze Marquis quite an awful Arabian Nights kind of blood-curdling uncanniness in certain conditions of light and shade. It is possible to make closer acquaintance with him by climbing the staircase within the column, and to see from that eyrie the family seat of Plas Newydd down below, by the waterside—the name of it latterly altered by the present Marquis, of jewel-robbery fame, to “Anglesey Castle.” It was there that George IV. stayed in 1821, and heard of the death of his Queen. Doubtless the bluff Marquis congratulated him on the event, for he was no adherent of Caroline, having, indeed, the worst opinion of that more or less injured lady. Time was, indeed, when his house in London had been assailed by a mob clamouring in her favour. They insisted upon his drinking the Queen’s health, and he did. “The Queen,” he said, with bitter sarcasm, “and may all your wives be like her!” What more could champions desire? Yet it is possible that they were not satisfied.

The full name of the village that now comes in view at a bend of the road presents an unparalleled array of grotesquely assorted letters to the bewildered Saxon. It is without doubt by far the longest place-name in the United Kingdom, and can probably challenge the whole world. It is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch. The stationers and booksellers of Bangor and Menai Village sell for the modest price of one penny what is described as the “Englishman’s cure for lock-jaw”—a printed sheet with this fearsome word divided into its proper syllables, and the translation into English underneath. Enterprising tourists, at pains to master the pronunciation of Welsh, go forth into Anglesey, and, having caught a Welshman who can be made to understand a little English, parade their version; but when the native can be induced to pronounce it at all the name sounds very different. He generally, however, calls it “Llanfairpwllgwyngyll”; while the signposts, not provided with longer arms than usual, are models of compression, with “Llanfair P G”; the London and North-Western Railway recklessly naming the station “Llanfair,” careless of the fact that Llanfair, meaning “St. Mary’s Church,” is as common a Welsh place-name as Jones is among Welshmen.