Chapter IV: Part 4

There are other pictures, too, in the “Mabinogion” of early Welsh household life, pictures which one must question because of their luxury and general magnificence, features evidently due to the strong Norman influence one finds at work almost throughout these stories. No picture could be more rich and more beautiful than that in the “Dream of Maxen Wledig,” where Helen is found by the Emperor’s messenger sitting in the old castle hall at Carnarvon. These are the tales of the splendid, barbaric youth of a people, filled with the vividness, the crowding, the vitality of youth, and touched to an even more magnificent beauty by another hand which was deliberate and Norman--stories divinely disregardful of what might have been intelligible; in their mystery and wonder full of the life of the young. Barbaric touches, magic, fantastic elements, crude life, gorgeous colouring,--all this and thrice more than this does one find in the “Mabinogion.”

At first dreaming,--for dream one must over the cottages of Wales if one is ever truly to enter them,--these homes of a more recent time would seem to have suffered a loss in vividness, in interest, so immeasurable that there could be no gain to balance against it. Gone are the mystery and the semblance of splendour; the sense of adventure and the strong, wild life of these earlier centuries are forever vanished. Yes, gone they are, and gone they were before ever a _rédacteur_ took down one of the tales of the “Mabinogion” from report that was already becoming but tradition. Purposely did I select the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” for not only in closeness to human reality, but also in architectural detail, do I believe it to be an exact picture of early Welsh home life. After the sordid picture of the hall, the description of the rainstorm comes but as a reinforcing touch of truthfulness: “And there arose a storm of wind and rain, so that it was hardly possible to go forth with safety. And being weary with their journey, they laid themselves down and sought sleep. And when they looked at the couch, it seemed to be made but of a little coarse straw … with the stems of boughs sticking therethrough, for the cattle had eaten all the straw that was placed at the head and at the foot. And upon it was stretched an old russet-coloured rug, threadbare and ragged; and a coarse sheet, full of slits, was upon the rug, and an ill-stuffed pillow, and a worn-out cover upon the sheet. And after much suffering from … the discomfort of their couch, a heavy sleep fell on Rhonabwy’s companion. But Rhonabwy, not being able either to sleep or to rest, thought he should suffer less if he went to lie upon the yellow calf-skin that was stretched out on the floor. And there he slept.” Undoubtedly here even the slit sheet is a touch of Norman elegance.

In the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” not in the far more beautiful “Dream of Maxen Wledig,” with its elaborate interior descriptions, do we find something like prototype for the Welsh cottage of to-day: the fire made against the gable end, even as it is now in the cottages, the sleeping accommodations at the opposite ends. This is the arrangement still of the vast majority of the cottages. Originally probably there were no windows other than, it may be, little slits--“wind-eyes” they were called with that relevant quaintness characteristic of early speech--such as we see to this day in old Welsh barns. In the “Mabinogion” story of Geraint, with its white stag, its divergent sense of the forest and of a bustling town life and the beautiful Gwenhwyvar, there is reference to glass windows: “And one morning in the summer time they were upon their couch, and Geraint lay upon the edge of it. And Enid was without sleep in the apartment, which had windows of glass. And the sun shone upon the couch. And the clothes had slipped from off his arms and his breast, and he was asleep. Then she gazed upon the marvellous beauty of his appearance, and she said, ‘Alas, and I am the cause that these arms and this breast have lost their glory and the war-like fame which they once so richly enjoyed.’” Are any lines in Tennyson’s “Enid” taken from this “Mabinogion” tale, that story upon which Tennyson’s widest popularity was founded, more vivid than this beautiful romantic touch? Undoubtedly these glass windows which revealed the manly beauty of Geraint in overthrow were glass lattices. They could not have been very common, and considerably later they were followed by wooden lattices in general use in the Welsh cottage, and still occasionally to be found to-day. I have found them several times in the dairy-rooms of old cottages in North Wales. Norman influence was at work in this story of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century from the “Mabinogion.” Sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century it was that the lattice window of the cottage came in, nor did it go out of use until the end of the seventeenth century. The window was a double frame--just as it is most frequently now--filled with woven diamond lattice. Within were wooden shutters opening inwards. A distant view or sketch of the leaded panes of to-day or of the diamond lattice of a long ago yesterday reveals no difference between the two, so closely has the type of window been kept, as, for example, the little, old-style windows of Beddgelert and Carnarvon.

And the beauty out upon which these old windows look is ever the same--Eryri, Eagle’s Eyrie, is this land of North Wales. Peak, precipice, lake, rushing stream, valley, forest lie always before one, sometimes shrouded for a while by the mist, again pricked out in indescribable altitude of mountain or whiteness of falling water before eyes that cannot fail to wonder at their beauty. In the fourteenth book of the “Prelude,” Wordsworth writes of the ascent which he and his Welsh friend made of Snowdon from Beddgelert at dawn, and we may, if we have not been in that mountain-cupped heart of Wales to hear it for ourselves, hear with Wordsworth the mounting

“roar of waters, torrents, streams,
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!”

And with the poet, too, behold an

“Emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity.”

The majestic beauty of these little Alps of Wales seems but to emphasize the cheerfulness and cosiness of the life man has made for himself. Indeed, nowhere are valleys greener, more sheltering, more homelike, more cosey. And the cottages, with their ascending spirals of peat smoke, the sweet fragrance of their homely life, speak a language of welcome no one can mistake. Gone are the old barbaric days, with their rough, strong life, their adventure; gone are the days of chivalry, with their bright pageant, their luxury, their courtly ways. Here we may turn a stone of those mediæval days, there touch a fretted memorial of still earlier times, even before Arthur had come to wake the world to a new romance and a new and selfless endeavour. Lessened, cheaper may this humble cottage heritage of the present seem than those times which have gone their “journey of all days” into the past. But not so does this sweet homeliness seem to me. Life is gentler, life is better, perhaps even kindlier within them by the bright hearth where, for the asking, any one may sit welcomed and at ease. Their purple roofs are but modest regal seal upon the happiness within. One feels singularly close to that great mother of us all in these tiny Welsh cottages, near to what is essential, what is real. Mortals who have not been dissevered from their proper feeling for houses will realize that these little homes have sprung, as it were, from the soil, that the cord binding them to the earth has never been cut.

_From a proof before letters by Turner_]

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was another day when I was in search of an old house still habitable, but of the same date of building as Buarthau. From Bettws-y-Coed I followed slowly up a long hill, from which I looked down into an ever-deepening valley, where lay the road leading up past the Conway and the Lledr to Dolwyddelan. After I passed Pentrevoelas, I picked up a little fellow carrying a school-bag. We passed a big empty graveyard place where five new graves were crowded against the wall,--the living were planning well for the jostling of the dead who were to come,--then I put the little fellow down by the chapel where his mother lived. The road to Giler grew more and more difficult. At last I came to a beautiful old house with a fortified gate and high surrounding walls. Outside the walls, mother and daughter, farmer and farm hands, were all milking the cows. They courteously led me through the ancient gateway, a friendly place within, for not only did the cats run to meet us, but also the pigs. I ascended the outside steps of the fortified gateway into a room where was the Pryce coat of arms and the date 1623 upon the walls. Then we went into the farmhouse through an old doorway that would be the joy of any antiquary who might behold it. Even this was fortified. Within, the oak panelling, the oak partitions, the seats around the walls, the deep, small-paned, narrow windows, the kitchen, the storeroom, the dairy, the mill--all were as they had been four hundred years ago--a little the worse for wear, but still staunch, still comely, still generous and hospitable. One fireplace I stood before was twelve feet long and four or five feet deep. On the way home I saw a flock of lapwings in the meadow. I passed the chapel corner where the little fellow was; I saw two rabbits rubbing noses in the field; and then, facing toward the sun, which was setting over Siabod and the Ogwen Valley, I followed home.

_From an engraving by Boydell, 1750_]

These Welsh cottages and granges are like a well-made person or a well-made life: they have nothing to conceal. They reveal their construction, and their beauty inheres in this revelation of what they really are. Instead of being all daubed over with plaster and smeared with unattractive paper, their joists and beams, their panelled oak partitions, the ingle-heart of the house, the warm, brown oaken dressers and tridarn, the grandfather clock and settles, the three-legged tables and three-legged chairs form a picture of simple harmony, which at its best it would be hard to rival either in dignity or homely beauty. I am not referring to the Welsh lodging-house which is all many an Englishman or American knows in Wales. The floor of the cottage may be but of beaten clay, neatly whitewashed around the edge. This, however, is surely a more attractive floor covering than many which cost, even before they leave the carpet factory, a good deal more. Beautiful rooms are these where, from the lustre-ware, the pewter, the copper and brass and latticed windows, many a lesson is still to be learned by some of us who think it impossible that we should be able to take anything from so humble a place. In these Welsh cottages life has continued more or less unchanged in a beautiful simplicity. It is not merely the simplicity imposed by poverty,--although that does exist to a depressing extent in Wales,--it is rather their sense of fitness, their love of what is beautiful, that innate instinct of theirs, not only for the right word, but also for the right beauty of a room, even of a kitchen. When they would imitate under the pressure of modern fussiness and vulgarities, something still holds them back. The lodging-house in Wales represents a concession to modernity, their mistaken and delicate tribute to the visitor. It is the Welsh farmhouse kitchen in all its dignity of use and beauty which represents the true life of the Cymri, the ineradicable æsthetic fineness of Gwalia. In Wales, and at a time when the world pays it but scant respect, poetry dwells everywhere and is at home. The grimiest coal centre, the dustiest slate quarry eating into the very bowels of the earth and the skin of the people, cannot drive poetry and music away from Wales. They dwell by the doorway of the whitewashed cottage in that group of oaks, or under that sheltering sycamore and the cottage roof of flowering thatch, in the water-split stains of the slates upon the roofs, in the gleam of the doorsill over which one steps. Here in these Welsh cottages is simplicity as compelling, because more human and not less unself-conscious, as that of the palace.

Practically every characteristic possessed by the Welsh makes for love of home. Their very shyness drives them through the house door to the fireside, before all that is best can be revealed. Sensitive, full of feeling, gay and melancholy by turns, they are like their own hills, now sombre and now bright. It is temperament that makes the music of the Welsh cottage, its picturesqueness, its romance. Without the Cymric temperament there could have been no Welsh revivals, no invincible Lloyd George, no Eisteddfodau. The delicacy of the woman, who is always the home-maker, inheres in the Celt. He feels the significance of the home with such yearning and such passion that it is almost incomprehensible to his fellows of coarser fibre. It was that feminine love of home which made Celtic chivalry what it was. And I dare to say that it is still that element which makes the humble Welsh cottage what it is to-day.

Those qualities which caused the Cymri to reverence their bards and esteem learning are the qualities at work in their lives now. The passionate admiration which in olden times made them follow a leader like Llewelyn the Great or a lost cause, is what makes them shout by the tens of thousands for Lloyd George to-day and a winning cause. Their low, quiet voices, their gentle ways, their spiritual intensity, all throw a glamour about the lives they lead. One does not expect to find a sage in yon little cottage where the village bread is baked. Yet he is there, his books two deep on every shelf of his little room, his lamp burning far into the night. Nor does one expect to find a Welsh Jenny Lind in this cot whose brass doorsill we have just left; but, busy about her work, a voice the world might well run to listen to follows us down these Welsh upland meadows. And behind that counter, over which we buy sweets for the children, is an historian and antiquary; in yon post-office a bard,--even the very farmer spends his leisure not as other farmers do; and nothing is as many, in their commonplaceness, their German _Gemeinheit_, expect and demand that it shall be.

It is a far cry, some may think, from the “Mabinogion,” one of the possessions of all the world, to a little Welsh cottage. No, it is not a far cry; it is a history, interrupted here and there by haunting words, broken by words not to be recovered, but still a history from those first (?) “cyttiau gwyddelod,” with their rude music of harp and their tales read from a revolving wooden book, down to this cot whose shelter we have sought in a valley or upland meadow, even as Wordsworth some one hundred years ago or Shelley sought such shelter at the base of Snowdon. It is a far cry, some may think, from that smoke curling out of the gable end of the hall in the “Dream of Rhonabwy” to this ingle by which we have sat. No, it is a development, a continuance marked only by the steps of man’s desire to strengthen and make more perfect his home here, forgetting that Chaucer has told us in his poem “Truth”;

“Her nis non hom, her nis but wildernesse:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!”

For the gray of a gray day outside, here by this hearth is the rose of fire, the tongue of flame by which we warm ourselves, the fluttering of those dreams beneath which we hide ourselves as under a sheltering wing. The passionate heart of a passionately sensitive people is this hearth and flame of a Welsh cottage. To have lived by it is to have lost the need to hear those tonic words of Matthew Arnold, for here, indeed, the Celt may still, in his dreams, his love, his song, react against the despotism of fact. And outside is a world of magic, sometimes hostile but more often friendly, a world of beauty and of enchantment. From the “Dream of Rhonabwy,” its women, its homes, its organized life, its beauty, down to the castle and cottage in Carnarvon or Conway, it is but one history, however many stages that history may have passed through; and until the traveller or the alien in Wales realizes this fact, he passes blindfold through its valleys and over its mountains and in and out of its cottage doors.

IX

Castles and Abbeys in North Wales

Old Time … gentlest among the Thralls
Of Destiny, upon these wounds hath laid
His lenient touches, soft as light that falls,
From the wan Moon, upon the towers and walls,
Light deepening the profoundest sleep of shade

WORDSWORTH, “Ruins of a Castle in North Wales.”

The more one lives in Wales the more one recognizes the need for nonconformity. The Established Church has frequently conformed too much, certainly to the bars found in all public inns, and probably to the “jorum” measure set by castle life and even by the abbey life that is now no more. No doubt, if there were less poverty, there might be less drinking; on the other hand, if there were less drinking, there would certainly be less poverty. Even now, as I write in the most respectable old inn in Denbigh,--the place where all the gentry go,--for an inn sign I am looking out on three liquor kegs crossed one above another with a bunch of grapes pendant.

But the hill on which this quaint, small, prosperous town of Denbigh is built does the best it can by its steepness to keep the people in good condition. In Welsh Denbigh Castle is called “Castell Caledfryn-yn-Rhos,” the “Castle of the Craggy Hill in Rhos.” From the “bottom,” as the natives call the foot of the town and hill,--they are identical,--it is a sheer climb to the top where the castle is situated, and in that climb one has traversed the entire village. Close by the castle is the Church of St. Hilary, more or less falling to pieces now, where once masses were said for the soul of Henry de Lacy. Within the castle enclosure, in a tiny cottage, John Henry Rowlands, or Stanley, the African explorer, was born. Very eager is Denbigh to claim this distinguished man, and but little can you get them to say about the brutal treatment which drove him away from home and made him a wanderer upon the face of the earth. Denbigh claims Twm o’r Nant also,--he is buried at the bottom of the town in Whitchurch,--but not content with claiming him, they canonize him with the absurd name of “Welsh Shakespeare.” Born in 1739, he developed, without any educational advantages whatsoever, remarkable skill in the writing of interludes, which for many years he himself played up and down the country, and by which, because he championed the cause of the people “against the evils of the day,” he got the ear of his popular audiences. Denbigh claims Dr. Samuel Johnson, too, and exaggerates his brief visit to Middleton at Gwaenynog. They have even photographed one cottage and called it Johnson’s.

A few miles west from Denbigh, at Rhuddlan, they have made the most of their history, but it is not recent; rather it is standardized and dignified by an antiquity which antedates even the ivy-covered ruins of the castle. There starlings flutter in and out,--perhaps a descendant of that starling which Branwen had taught to speak and who carried across the sea to Carnarvon, to her brother, Bendigeid Vran, the tale of her sufferings. There, too, are the fireplaces of an ample hospitality which is no more. I thought of the promise Edward had made in Rhuddlan that he would give the people a prince born in Wales and who could speak no English. I thought of that battle between Saxon and Welsh, in 769, on Morfa (marsh) Rhuddlan, which, before our eyes, stretched gently and mysteriously away to the sea, and of the song that had commemorated it and of the defeat of the Cymru:--

“Calm the sun sets o’er the hills of Carnarvon,
Deep fall the shadows on valley and lea,
Scarce a breath ripples the breast of old ocean,
Faint on the ear falls the roll of the sea.”

Also in the old song is heard again the din of weapons, the hissing of arrows, and the cries of those who fought and those who fell. Even in its English translation it is still a stirring old song.

On the coast, a few miles north of Rhuddlan, is one of the most famous castles in British history, Flint Castle; but a dolorous, sorrowful old place it is now, set down in the midst of belching smokestacks and a sooty modern life that cares nothing for it. At Flint the dismantling of Richard II was performed. Froissart, the chronicler, speaking of Richard’s departure from Flint Castle in the custody of the Duke of Lancaster, tells us a strange story. King Richard had a beautiful greyhound who loved him beyond measure. As the Duke and the King were conversing in the court of the castle, the greyhound was loosed and immediately ran to the Duke, paying him all the attentions he had always given to the King. The Duke asked what was the meaning of this fondness. “Cousin,” replied the King, “it means a great deal for you and very little for me.”

Above Flint, on the River Dee, is Hawarden Castle, the new residence and the old ruin made famous to us in recent years by the fact that William Ewart Gladstone lived there. And there, centuries ago, Llewelyn, the great Welsh prince, first saw his Eleanor. The people in this vicinity are called “Harden Jews.” In this connection an interesting story from legendary history is told. It was in the year 946 that Cynan ap Ellis ap Anarawd was king of North Wales and a Christian church stood there. In this church was a roodloft surmounted by a figure of the Virgin bearing a holy cross in her hands. The summer had been hot and dry and the people began to pray for rain. Lady Trawst, wife of Sytsylt, governor of the castle, was one of those who prayed most often to the image. One day while she was on her knees the cross fell and killed her. The weather continued hot and the indignant people decided to bring the rood to trial for the murder of Lady Trawst. This was done and the Virgin and cross sentenced to be hanged, but Spar of Mancot, one of the jury, thought drowning would be better. Finally the judgment was partially amended and the image was laid upon the beach and the tide did the rest. It was carried up to the walls of Chester, and the citizens of that town, ancient even in 946, reverently took it up and buried it, setting above it a monument with this inscription upon it:--

“The Jews their God did crucify,
The Hardeners theirs did drown,
Because their wants she’d not supply,
And lies under this cold stone.”

And from this time forth the river, which had been called the Usk, was called Rood Die or Dee.

_From an old print_]

It is not possible to re-create that olden castle life in Wales. A fragment here and a fragment there one finds, and when the broken life has been put together again, as in the “Mabinogion,” the Norman influence is more than a varnish to its ancient surface,--it is often colour, with occasionally an entirely new figure painted in. Glimpses of the palace life do we get, of the sleeping-rooms and halls and chambers, of beautiful buildings, of youths and pages, of vestures of silk and gold and yellow robes of shining satin. Pictures of maidens, too, there are, who live for us still as if they had not vanished from within walls which Time has partially destroyed. One maiden there was who was made from the blossoms of the oak and of the broom and of the yellow meadow sweet, and whom they called Blodeuwedd or Flower-face. Another, not Blodwen, but Olwen, she who was clothed in a “robe of flame-coloured silk … more yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain.… Four white trefoils sprung up wherever she trod. And therefore was she called Olwen.” Pictures, too, there are in the “Mabinogion” and elsewhere of the castles in which these maidens embroidered, sitting in golden chairs and clad in yellow satin. One description there is in “The Lady of the Fountain,” which is a vivid picture of a Welsh castle: “And at length it chanced that I came to the fairest valley in the world, wherein were trees of equal growth; and a river ran through the valley, and a path was by the side of the river. And I followed the path until midday, and I continued my journey along the remainder of the valley until the evening: and at the extremity of a plain I came to a large and lustrous castle, at the foot of which was a torrent.” The fair valley, the path by the riverside, the lustrous castle, the torrent--all are still a part of the life of Wales to-day. Again, for the mere opening of a book, we may see knights in their encounters as of old: the horse that pricks forward, the furious blows upon the faces of the shields, the broken armour and bursting girths, and then the battle on foot, their arms striking sparks, and blood and sweat filling their eyes. Nowhere in all literature is there a more beautiful picture of a horse than in Kilhwch and Olwen: “And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and upon him a saddle of costly gold. And in the youth’s hand were two spears of silver, sharp, well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to wound the wind, and cause blood to flow, and swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest. A gold-hilted sword was upon his thigh, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven; his war-horn was of ivory. Before him were two brindled, white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And the one that was on the left side bounded across to the right side, and the one on the right to the left, and like two sea-swallows sported around him. And his courser cast up four sods with his four hoofs, like four swallows in the air, about his head, now above, now below. About him was a four-cornered cloth of purple, and an apple of gold was at each corner, and every one of the apples was of the value of an hundred kine. And there was precious gold of the value of three hundred kine upon his shoes, and upon his stirrups, from his knee to the tip of his toe. And the blade of grass bent not beneath him, so light was his courser’s tread as he journeyed towards the gate of Arthur’s Palace.”

Charming pictures of friendship there are, too, lived within castle and abbey; and descriptions of the love of birds and journeys taken upon sea and land; and harsh and barbaric touches to remind us of a past still more ancient and of a cruelty still more primitive. Possible flashes do we get of the humour of this olden life: the refreshing gentleman in Branwen, the daughter of Llyr, whom no house could ever contain; Bendigeid Vran, the brother of Branwen, that good brother who sat upon the rock of Harlech looking over the sea, and all unconsciously welcoming those who were to break the heart of the sister he loved. Poetry and wisdom also there are in this ancient life: the Coranians, who, however low words might be spoken, if the wind met that speech, it was made known to them; and Arthur granting a boon in words which are a poem in themselves,--“as far as the wind dries, and the rain moistens, and the sun revolves, and the sea encircles, and the earth extends.” “There is no remedy for that which is past, be it as it may,” said Luned. And in the “Mabinogion,” as in every life, there was one door which when those who were bearing the head of Bendigeid Vran to London opened and looked through, “they were as conscious of all the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and companions they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen them, as if it had all happened in that very spot.”

South from Flint and south from Hawarden, yet near the windings of the river Dee, is Castle Dinas Bran, “Crow Castle,” as the English call it, mistakenly turning “Bran,” a word whose actual meaning is unknown, into “Crow.” Scarcely a stone of this very famous and ancient old castle situated on a high hill is left intact. The very rubble of its walls is exposed. Of the castle there is not enough left to repay any one for a visit, except a lover of desolation. Here, in another land, are walls like those of Balclutha, and desolate are they. Here the fox looks out of the window and the rank grass waves about its head, and here on the wind the song of mourning lifts itself bewailing the days that are gone. Yet from the valley below, with its quaint old town of Llangollen, its wonderful Abbey of Valle Crucis, and the shimmering of the running waters of the river Dee, the present is a reassuring one. Smoke curls up cheerfully from scores of household chimneys. The sun shines down upon the abbey walls, upon the chapter house, still intact, and upon the broken walls of the church itself.

“Ivy’d Valle Crucis; time decay’d
Dim on the brink of Deva’s wandering floods,
Your ivy’d arch glittering through the tangled shade,
Your gray hills towering o’er your night of woods;
Deep in the vale recesses as you stand,
And, desolately great.”

Inseparable from and a part of the spiritual beauty of this scene is the thought of the old blind rector, who is now custodian of the abbey and who still speaks lovingly of the beauty of the things he can no longer see. He has been there twenty-nine years, and through many of those years he has been going blind. Yet he told us cheerfully that he was greatly encouraged by our interest. “I never destroy anything that is old,” he said; “I stick to the old.” As we stood there talking, the lovely little white English daisies looking up from the grass at us, the venerable old man told us something of his work. He was much discouraged because people were not interested, and even as he leaned on his stick, doubtless hoping for other visitors, his ear-sight quickened by the eye-sight he had lost, people were passing by outside walking toward the Pillar of Eliseg and a wooded vale beyond.

In Llangollen, the village near the abbey, lived and died the ladies of Llangollen, two dear, quaint, sentimental souls, with personalities sufficiently marked and fearless so that they were unafraid to be themselves. Louisa Costello, in her account of a Welsh tour, gives them rather sharp treatment. She says that they were foolish, condescending, proud, vain, and pompous, yet she admits that they were charitable and considerate of their neighbours. Of their friendship she has nothing good to say. In a word, they were a couple of eccentric sentimentalists and both frightfully ugly. With the larger charity of the man, Wordsworth, who paid them a visit and wrote them a sonnet, described their appearance in the following words, “So oddly was one of these ladies attired that we took her, at a little distance, for a Roman Catholic priest, with a crucifix and relics hung at his neck. They were without caps, their hair, bushy and white as snow, which contributed to the mistake.” In the sonnet addressed to them there are, among others, two lines of pure tribute:--

“The Vale of Friendship, let this spot
Be named; there, faithful to a low roofed Cot,
On Deva’s banks, ye have abode so long;
Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
Even on this earth, above the reach of Time.”

Lady Eleanor Butler was the daughter of the Earl of Ormond. She was born in Dublin and was both wealthy and beautiful. The Honourable Miss Ponsonby, a member of an ancient family, was an early friend of Lady Eleanor. She, too, was born in Dublin, and both lost their parents at the same time. They loved independence and did not love their suitors. Many things drew them together and, as Wordsworth aptly phrases it, they retired into notice in the Vale of Llangollen. Now they lie buried there, their faithful servant, Mrs. Mary Carryll, lying in an equal grave beside them.

In this neighbourhood are many castles, among them Chirk the property of Lord Howard de Walden, and Ruthin Castle which is not very interesting. About northwest from Llangollen lies the old town of Conway, with its castle and its rare old Plas Mawr. Suetonius says that the chief motive assigned by the Romans for the invasion of Britain was that they might obtain possession of the Conway pearl fisheries. One of the Conway pearls, now no longer much thought of, was placed in the regal crown and presented by Sir R. Wynne to Richard II. The picturesqueness of Conway streets is greater than that of any other North Walian town. Little gable ends look out and down upon the streets like curious eyes. The houses are irregular and there are odd turns and twistings of the streets; cobblestones and old flagstones and an occasional black-and-white house; and everywhere glimpses through castle gate or over castle wall. The exterior of the castle is still singularly perfect; only one part of it seems to be falling, that nearest the river and looking out upon the sea. Overlooking the town, upon the river, is Queen Eleanor’s oratory:--

“In her oryall then she was
Closyd well with royall glas:
Fulfullyd it was with ymagery,
Every windowe by and by,
On each side had ther a gynne
Sperde with manie a dyvers pynne.”

It matters not now whether this was a place of prayer or place in which the Queen arrayed herself. Pennant, when he made his famous “Tour in Wales,” described Conway as castle of matchless magnificence, and a matchlessly magnificent Castle it still is.

It takes but a single effort of the imagination to see again the life within that ancient harp-shaped town as it must have been even so recently as seventy-five years ago: the varying colours of the peasants’ dresses, their large market-baskets and umbrellas, their bright handkerchiefs, the tall North Walian beaver hats and frilled caps peeping out beneath, the bright cheeks and even brighter pink cotton jackets worn by the girls. Healthy, well-made peasants those, neat of garb and gay of heart, good-looking, both men and women. Again the old market-place, beyond Plas Mawr and the church, rings with their laughter and their lively barter, and the clatter of their ponies’ hoofs; again the soft voices of the women are heard and the heavier voices of the men; again they mount their horses, sometimes double, and ride away out of the lively town to the silent hills beyond, through Gyffin, where the colours in the old barrel vault of the church must have been even brighter than they are now; perhaps they go as far as some hillside like that on which Llangelynin still keeps its gray sanctuary. Again down upon the old town settles a double silence. The day’s work is done; twilight has come, and over all reigns a stillness which is as that of a Welsh Sabbath.

Through the Vale of Conway, past Trevriw and Llanrwst with its Gwyder Castle, past beautiful Bettws-y-Coed and Capel Curig, and on to the Pass of Llanberis, a walk of unrivalled beauty, there appears at last, as one travels down to Pen-y-Pass (the head of the pass), the single tower of the ruined castle of Dolbadarn. A Welsh triad says there are three primary requisites for poetry: an eye that can see nature, a heart that can feel nature, and a resolution that dares follow nature. No one can come down from this road over the towering summits of Snowdon to the little green valley in which Dolbadarn lies without, for the time, becoming a poet, even to the resolution that dares follow the spiritual counsels which come from sky and mountain and rushing stream and the very rocks that fill this valley. “Nature has here,” says Camden, “reared huge groups of mountains, as if she intended to bind the island fast to the bowels of the earth, and make a safe retreat for Britons in the time of war. For here are so many crags and rocks, so many wooded valleys, rendered impassable by so many lakes, that the lightest troops, much less an army, could never find their way among them. These mountains may be truly called the British Alps; for, besides that they are the highest in the whole island, they are, like the Alps, bespread with broken crags on every side, all surrounding one which, towering in the centre, far above the rest, lifts its head so loftily, as if it meant not only to threaten, but to thrust it into the sky.”

_From an old print_]

The better one comes to know the castles of North Wales, the more is one impressed with the extraordinary ability shown in fortifying every access into the country. Dolbadarn itself is ancient; whether it dates from before or after the Roman Conquest is doubtful; it was with the thought of Llanberis Pass in mind that Tennyson wrote his “Golden Year”; it was there that he heard

“the great echo flap
And buffet round the hill from bluff to bluff.”

Here in this castle Owen Goch was imprisoned by his brother Llewelyn. To this prisoner a bard, Howel Voel ap Griffi ap Pwyll Gwyddel, composed his Welsh awdl, or ode, called “The Captive of Dolbadarn.” The feeling in this poem is still quick even after all the changes of the centuries and even with all the loss from translation:--

“His palace gates no more unclose,
No harp is heard within his hall,
His friends are vassals to his foes,
Grief and despair have vanquished all.
He, the defender,--he, the good and just,--
Is gone; his name, his honour, in the dust!

“He prized but treasures to bestow,
He cherish’d state but to be free;
None from his walls unsped might go,
To all he gave, but most to me!

“Ruddy his cheeks as morning’s light,
His ready lance was firm and bright,
The crimson stains that on it glow
Tell of the Saxon’s overthrow.

“Shame, that a prince like this should lie
An outcast, in captivity.
And oh! what years of ceaseless shame,
Should cloud the Lord of Snowdon’s name!”

Professor O. M. Edwards, in his book called “Wales,” describes Dolbadarn as the last home of Welsh independence.

Hundreds of years before the sad, peace-loving life of Llewelyn had played its great part in Welsh history, in the valley that runs from the head of the pass along the low margin of beautiful Gwynant Lake, by a little river that talks gayly in all weathers but most gayly in the stormiest, past Llyn (lake) Dinas to Beddgelert,--in this valley is situated on Dinas Emrys some fragments and traces of one of the oldest and most important strongholds in Great Britain. This was the fort of Merlin who “called up spirits from the vasty deep.” There is melancholy and romantic interest to be found on the summit of Dinas Emrys, tracing what still remains. Something there is, perhaps enough for the archæologist to re-create all that has been lost. On this same road, some thirteen miles beyond, lies Carnarvon Castle, of whose history and beauty I have written in “The City of the Prince of Wales.”

In the “Mabinogion” there are wild-wood touches showing aspects of the life the Cymru had lived. The redactor of the old story of Branwen says: “Then they went on to Harlech … and there came three birds and began singing unto them a certain song, and all the songs they had ever heard were unpleasant compared thereto; and the birds seemed to them to be at a great distance from them over the sea, yet they appeared as distinct as if they were close by.” And again, “In Harlech you will be feasting seven years, the birds of Rhiannon singing unto you the while.” Just as the “Dream of Maxen Wledig” is in a sense the story of Carnarvon Castle, so is this tale of Branwen, the “fair-bosomed,” full of pictures and suggestions of Harlech Castle, Bendigeid Vran (the blessed) sitting on a rock and looking out to sea,--across that enchanted bay, on the other side of which lies Criccieth Castle, while the King of Ireland, Matholwch, his ships flying pennants of satin, comes wooing the sister of Branwen. A strange story this which has come out of that old castle stronghold, its royal Irish lover, its good Bendigeid Vran, its beautiful Branwen, the tame starlings and the singing-birds of Rhiannon, and that cry of Branwen, “Alas, woe is me that I was ever born”; and after that cry, the heart that broke and was buried in the four-sided grave on the banks of the Alaw.

Harlech Castle was probably originally built about the middle of the sixth century by a British prince. Edward I constructed the present castle on the ruins of the former one. It was finished in the thirteenth century and became the seat of many conflicts between Owen Glendwr and the English. Thither heroic Margaret of Anjou fled, following the battle of Northampton. It was the last of the castles to hold out for Charles. The whole life of this stronghold has been heroic, stupendous in size, gallant in its human figures, impressive in its human sorrows, indomitable in its human courage. Here, and in the other castles of North Wales, many of those strange prophecies of Taliessin have been fulfilled or in part fulfilled, something at least of

“All the angels’ words
As to peace and war.”

THE END

_Appendix_

APPENDIX

_Suggestions for Some Tours_[2]

At the junction of the Llugwy and Conway valleys, embowered in trees, cut by rushing streams, surrounded by mountains, among them Siabod, the Glyders, and some of the lesser hills of Snowdonia, is Bettws-y-Coed, one of the most beautiful and, be it said, the most comfortable villages in all North Wales. There are good inns, good lodgings, excellent train-service, coaches,--all that mankind in a holiday humour can desire. This little “chapel in the woods” is a place rich in beautiful legend, near the sea, in the midst of mountains, for the sportsman blessed with good fishing and good hunting. Artists go there, and where artists go, others can afford to follow. The Lledr Valley, which meets the Conway just outside of Bettws, Ruskin called the most beautiful valley in the world. At Bettws-y-Coed, I think, are as fine headquarters as any in North Wales for a series of tours. The Waterloo Hotel, the Royal Oak, the Gwydir are all good hotels, well run, sanitary, and with excellent food. In Bettws, too, there is a first-rate garage from which you can get good cars at any time.

Repeated experience of life in North Wales in its most isolated, tiny hamlets, where the tourist had never been before and where it was impossible to secure lodging; experience in the small towns like Conway and Carnarvon, full of association, quiet and yet prosperous; and experience in the larger centres of Welsh life, have given me a perspective which is, perhaps, uncommon. The great advantage of Bettws is that you can not only get everywhere from that delightful place, but that you can also be most comfortable at a reasonable rate.

If you are touring in an automobile you will find each one of the tours which I suggest food merely for a day of comfortable delight. If you are walking, or driving, these tours can be broken up and shortened or extended indefinitely.

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