Chapter I: The Dovey, the Dysynni, the Mawddach

Glories of A Wet Autumn in North Wales. The /Dovey/: Source of
the Stream--Dinas Mowddwy--Mallwyd--Machynlleth. The /Dysynni/:
Tal-y-Llyn--The "Bird Rock"--/Towyn/. The /Mawddach/: The
Estuary--The Wnion--Torrent Walk--Dolgelley--Precipice Walk--The
Estuary--Barmouth--Harlech Castle--Portmadoc--The Glaslyn--Tremadoc
and Shelley--The Traeth Bach.

There are times of the year when North Wales seems to be all rivers and mountain torrents and tumbling cataracts. The hills are seamed by thin, white streaks of foaming water. It is as if all the land were rushing down to the valleys and the sea. What was yesterday a slow dribble from pool to pool, a scarcely perceptible moisture among weeds, a narrow reflection of sky among stones and boulders, is to-day a broad, impetuous stream, or a wide expanse of bog-stained water, or a torrent swollen and turbulent. The cataracts which have disappointed the tourist in dry seasons come down in a way that wholly sustains their ancient reputation. But the mountains are, for the most part, hidden in mist, or whelmed in cloud; the white roads glitter like streams, and--

"The rain, it raineth every day;
Heigho, the wind and the rain!"

Yet, decidedly, it is in a wet autumn that one should see North Wales. "Then, if ever, are perfect days," when the whole glory of wild Nature reveals itself in some interval of dripping rains; when the brown foliage, dipping into the flooded rivers, glows like gold in some sudden outburst of the sun; and when the mountains fade upward from their heathery bases, and purple middle-distances, into shadowy peaks of faintest blue.

How fascinatingly the bells of Aberdovey have rung themselves into the popular consciousness! And all by means of some foolish verses that are as securely immortal as the famous and touching air in which Neil Gow has set the bells of Edinburgh town to music:--

"'Ae os wyt ti'n fy ngharu i
Fel 'rwyf fi'n dy garu di,
Mal un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, chwech,'
Go the bells of Aberdovey."

Seated in a boat in the middle of the estuary of the /Dovey/ river, one laments the fact that the bells exist in legend only. How sweetly they would sound through the distance and in the dusk, over this wide expanse of shallow water and glimmering sand! But the little town of Aberdovey, hugging the hillside at the south-westerly corner of Merionethshire, has certainly had no peal of bells at any date more recent than the time when Owen Glendower descended into the Dovey valley to procure his own proclamation as Prince of Wales. It is a humble little town, which, as somebody has remarked, seems to ask itself why it is not Liverpool. It has a wharf and a deep-water pier, and a railway at only a few yards from the beach. Large vessels could lie in safety near to the doors of the Aberdovey folk, and the maps insist strenuously on the directness of the sea-routes to Dublin, to Rosslare, and to Waterford. They are direct enough, no doubt; but who cares to travel by them? Only a few small schooners are to be seen in the harbour of Aberdovey. Two or three others are drawn up high and dry on the sands, so that one might almost leap on board from the thresholds of the cottages. If the world were more happily ordered, the chief trade of the place might be the exchange of rich merchandise; but, as one may perceive from the pier yonder, it is merely the exportation of slates.

The river Dovey--or Dyti, as it is called in the more ancient language--rises among the peaks of Aran Mowddwy, and, dashing down the mountain-sides with a pretty music, leaves Merioneth for a while to course through a jutting corner of Montgomeryshire. Then it becomes the boundary between Merioneth and Cardigan, making its way to the sea through an estuary 6-1/2 miles long--broad, noble, and impressive, with hills green, gentle, and round on its left, and on its right high mountains and purple heather, and "the sleep that is among the lonely hills." It is a river much beloved of angling folk, for there are "salmons" not only, as Fluellen said, in Monmouthshire, but also in Montgomery and Merioneth. Likewise there is abundance of sewin and trout; and the fisherman who visits Dinas Mowddwy, Mallwyd, or Machynlleth will be likely enough to store his memory with recollections not only of fine scenery but of glorious days.

Dinas Mowddwy is a small village with a large hotel; but it was nothing less than a city in the old days, and it calls itself a city still. Even up to so recent a date as 1886, it had all the honours of a borough, with a Mayor of its own, and a Corporation, and a Recorder, and the tradition of a charter dating from James I. It may be reached by means of a ridiculous but convenient railway from Cemmaes Road, the trains consisting of an engine and one carriage, with, possibly, a few truckloads of slates attached behind. Aran Mowddwy, on which the Dovey rises, is, next to Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales. It is the centre of a district full of vague traditions and curiously varied grandeur and beauty. After the death of Owen Glendower, "many powerful gentlemen of Wales" assembled at Dinas "for the purpose of making compacts to enforce virtue and order." Their success can scarcely have been very great, for it was at this place, not long afterwards, that the "Red-Haired Banditti of Mowddwy" were wont to hold their meetings and arrange their murders. It is pleasant to be able to record that in due course these gentry were as effectually suppressed as were the Doones of Exmoor, if the story of John Ridd is to be believed. How they found means to exist by rapine in a country so sparsely peopled is not now intelligible; but they were, clearly, a very savage and revengeful folk, for forty arrows were found in the body of a judge who had condemned some of their brethren to death.

Sparkling along through Dinas, and flowing under the ruins of an ancient bridge, with a more modern and substantial structure close beside it, the river Dovey shortly reaches Mallwyd, where there is a church that is much visited, occupying the site of an earlier edifice which is said to have been erected by St. Tydecho in the sixth century, and with an ancient yew-tree which the saint himself is believed to have planted. On the other side of the river stands the farmhouse of Camlan, associated by a tradition, into the veracity of which we need not now inquire, with Camelot, and that "battle long ago" in which King Arthur is said to have been overthrown. All this wide, winding Dovey valley teems with history of a sort. At the farmhouse of Mathafarn, below Cemmaes Road, "the great poet and scholar," David Llwyd ap Llewelyn, entertained the Earl of Richmond, who was afterwards to become King Henry VII., and was then on his way to Bosworth fight. At Machynlleth, with its fine, broad, mediæval street, much frequented by salesmen of cattle and sheep, you may see the house in which Owen Glendower held his Parliament after he had "defeated" the English by flying before them into the hills. Machynlleth itself was the Roman station of Maglona, and is now a fairly considerable town, situated almost as happily as Dolgelley, with the square ivy-clad tower of an ancient church dominating the centre of the valley. Here the beautiful river Dulas joins the Dovey, and hence one may travel by the tiny Corris railway to Tal-y-Llyn, through some of the most satisfying scenery in all Wild Wales.

Before reaching the estuary, the Dovey wanders through much wide marshland, over which a railway has been carried, where there is a railway station set amid desolateness, and where no tree or shrub breaks the flat, brown margins of the stream. From such scenery it is very agreeable to break away to where, at high tide, there is a sheet of water six miles broad--the sweetest, calmest, most restful estuary in all Wales, with Borth sunning itself by the sea far away, with hills at whose feet plantations flourish, and mountains with fir-woods climbing up their slopes.

Flowing from the sides of Cader Idris, which holds a gloomy lake in its lap, there is a complex network of streams. Several of these join themselves together to form the little river Dysynni, which, after wandering among the mountains for twelve miles or so, drowns itself in the sea beyond Towyn. One of the sources of the Dysynni is Tal-y-Llyn. Noble and beautiful and ever memorable is the valley through which the stream hurries downwards from that renowned lake, the object of innumerable excursions made from Dolgelley, from Towyn, from Machynlleth, and from all the wild, wonderful, fascinating places roundabout. Tal-y-Llyn is no more than a mile long, and a quarter of a mile broad; but it is like a small piece of Norway transported to Wales. Here alike come those who are intent on reaching the summit of Cader Idris, and those who desire to follow "the contemplative man's recreation," for the Dysynni, like the Dovey, is a famous fishing river. Salmon, sewin, and gwyniad are to be found therein, from May until after the autumn leaves are falling. There are white and sea trout, and bass, and in the estuary plentiful grey mullet, which make fine and exciting sport when a ring of nets is thrown around them, and the noisy and vigorous "beaters" drive them into the meshes.

One must go up the Dysynni to see the famous "Bird Rock," a great shoulder of mountain on which the hawk and the cormorant dwell. It is so precipitous that it may be climbed on only two of its sides, and it has one of those echoes for which Wales is almost unapproachable, so that the music of any instrument that is played upon it will be reverberated in a startling chorus from all the surrounding hills. Lower down the river, always amid such scenery as it were vain to describe, there is the site of a manor house from which Prince Llewelyn wrote important letters to ecclesiastical magnates in London, and which that stout soldier-king Edward I. visited, for he dated a charter thence. Older relics there are, like the Tomen Ddreiniog, which, maybe, is one of "the grassy barrows of the happier dead." It is a valley renowned for its birds and their songs, this of the Dysynni, and for its rare plants and mosses, and its rich store of maiden-hair fern. As we approach Towyn the mansion of Ynys-y-Maengwyn, the dwelling of an ancient Welsh family, presents a quaint and most picturesque mixture of architectural periods, for it combines all the styles of domestic architecture that prevailed between the period of Elizabeth and that of the Georges.

The Dysynni is a land-locked river as it approaches the sea, for the Cambrian Railway crosses its estuary. There is a spectacle on one hand of what seems a lake among purple mountains, and on the other of a stream winding amid dreary flats to the breezy waters of Cardigan Bay. Towyn, which is but a small place, has a certain fame for sea-bathing, and for its association with "a holy man of Armorica, who came to Wales in the sixth century to refute the Pelagian heresy." One does not inquire too curiously into these things; but there, not far from the estuary of the Dysynni, is St. Cadfan's Church, and St. Cadfan was one who performed miracles; and in the church there is a pillar which, as some aver, is inscribed in debased Roman characters, and once marked the site of St. Cadfan's grave.

* * * * *

"Neither the North of England, nor Scotland, no, nor Switzerland, can exhibit anything so tranquil, romantic, snug, and beautiful as a Welsh valley." These are the words of John Wilson, the "Christopher North" of the famous "Noctes Ambrosianæ" and the "Recreations"; the "rusty, crusty Christopher" of Lord Tennyson's early satire. He was thinking of Dolgelley and all the indescribable charm of its surroundings. Wilson was a Scot who had dwelt continuously and for many years amid the English Lakes. He knew his Switzerland, too; and it must have been reluctantly, one would think, that he gave this unstinted praise to the particular valley in which North Wales seems most to unite its grander and its quieter beauties, all its wonders of mountains and wood, torrent and waterfall, snug valley and scarred and towering height. The /Mawddach/ estuary, which has the appearance of a chain of lakes, winds among the mountains as far as Penmaenpool, where there is a long, low, sinuous railway bridge of innumerable arches. Here, where the Mawddach suddenly becomes a stream, flowing through green marshes, with its course indicated by lines of deep-driven stakes, Christopher North must often have been reminded of the head of his beloved Windermere, missing only the solemn and silent majesty of the Langdale Pikes. Following the river upward through the wide, marshy plain until it again hides itself among woods and hills, one comes upon the river Wnion, which is chiefly of importance among Welsh rivers because it is famous for its trout, because it winds through Dolgelley on its way, and because, two miles further upwards, it is joined by the tumultuous thread of water which tumbles from pool to pool, over cataract after cataract, close beside the steep, mile-long piece of sylvan beauty known as the Torrent Walk. Until it receives this tributary the /Wnion/ is, except in seasons of rain, but a thin and feeble stream; but it flows through beautiful and shady woods, fretting sometimes over a rocky bed, sometimes flowing in a peaceful, sunlit calm, and now and again reflecting one of those wide-arched, mossy bridges which indicate by their breadth of span how much way this little river claims for itself when the thin silvery threads of all the small streams that flow into it from the Arans on one side, and from the lower slopes of Rhobell Fawr on the other, are swollen into mountain torrents by continuous rain.

There are innumerable little rivers in North Wales, boiling down over tumbled rocks, in deep valleys, with trees swaying and arching overhead. The type of these is the turbulent brook, so narrow that one might leap across it, which descends through the Dwygyfylchi valley, and then quietly loses itself in the sea between Conway and Penmaenmawr. But in all Wild Wales there is no such mad, merry, laughing, and leaping piece of water as the long cataract which hastens down from the upper to the lower bridge of the Torrent Walk, to join the Wnion two miles above Dolgelley. It falls, like a white mist, amid riven cliffs; it pours itself, with a frolic music, between great masses of moss-grown rock; it dips under tree-trunks which have been thrown across it, like rustic bridges, by long-forgotten storms. The channel which this torrent has made for itself is a deep, dark, winding cleft through a beautiful wood on the side of a steep hill. It is in the late autumn that it is at its best, when the trees are of all rich tints, from russet to gold, and when there is a glorious, glowing carpet of brown leaves on either side of the Torrent Walk, and when the torrent itself, swollen by the unfailing rains, breaks into white spray amid the blue mist of the cataracts. The Wnion is tame enough after such a spectacle; but it makes some really striking loops and bends as it winds away to Dolgelley, broadening out in the ever-broadening valley, and then darting forward to the tall, grey arches of Dolgelley bridge, where it dreams along for a while over its multitudinous pebbles, and then wanders away into the green shadow of trees.

BARMOUTH BRIDGE AND CADER IDRIS (_p. 203_).]

Dolgelley is the capital of Merioneth, and the curfew is still rung there; and some of its houses retain all the quaintness of the Elizabethan age, and its streets are so odd, and winding, and confused, that one thinks of the legend of the giant's wife who dropped a heap of stones from her apron, the which in due course became a town. In the distance, Dolgelley looks like a grey nest amid green branches, sheltering in a basin of the hills. It is walled round by the mountains, Cader Idris being its loftiest and its grandest bulwark. Owen Glendower had a Parliament House here, pulled down only a few years ago; and that is almost the whole history of the place, which is attaining some small additional importance in these days because the gold mines are not far away, and also by reason of its manufacture of excellent Welsh cloth.

SNOWDON, FROM CRIB-GOCH.]

It is a land of cataracts all round about; but to reach the finest of those one must leave the river Wnion and ascend the Mawddach valley, up the beautiful Ganllwyd Glen, and so to the gold mines. Rely not too implicitly on those learned books which would instruct the confiding stranger wandering amid these mountainous wildernesses. "There are three fine Falls on the Mawddach," one reads in a book of considerable geographical pretensions--"one of 60 feet in Dolmelynllyn Park, another of 60 feet called the Mawddach Fall, the third, of 150 feet, called the Pistyll-y-Cain." "I wonder," said an American humorist, "whether it is worth while knowing so much that is not so." The Rhaiadr-y-Mawddach--over which, at this stage, flows the river that is shortly to broaden out into the grandest estuary in Wales--descends, in two leaps, into a large and magnificent basin, about which the rocks and trees have arranged themselves into a noble amphitheatre. The Precipice Walk is not far away. One may behold all the Snowdon region from this dizzy height on the open hillside; the Ganllwyd valley opens out below; the Arans tower upwards to the right; and beyond the village of Llanfachreth, looking northward, rises the grand mass of Rhobell Fawr, its head half-hidden in a cloud, "that moveth altogether, if it move at all." And as for the Pistyll-y-Cain and the Rhaiadr-Du, "the black cataract," the one, as its name indicates, is the fall of the river Cain, and the other is the fall of the Camlan, less broad, less precipitous, at the first glance less impressive, than its more renowned rival, but quite wonderfully beautiful in its surroundings, its rocks and woodlands, its dual leap, and many windings, and numerous tumbling streams.

Says a Welsh proverb: "There is only one prettier walk in Wales than the road from Dolgelley to Barmouth. It is the road from Barmouth to Dolgelley." The adjective is ill-chosen. Not prettiness, but a calm majesty, is the characteristic of the rich scenery of the valley of the Mawddach. When the tide is up, the river between Penmaenpool and Barmouth is like a chain of lakes among bold and craggy heights, sloping brown moorlands, and terraced woods. One is reminded sometimes of Switzerland and sometimes of the Rhine. It is advisable to ascend the river, as Wordsworth did, in a boat. The poet was at Barmouth in 1824, when he rowed up "the sublime estuary, which may compare with the finest in Scotland." One is always driven back upon these comparisons. The estuary of the Mawddach arouses sensations of strangeness and unexpectedness. Even amid the grandeur and the beauty of North Wales, it seems to belong to some other country, and almost to a land of dreams. It may have been some recollection of rowing upwards towards Penmaenpool that inspired the first and greatest of the Lake poets with two of his most splendid lines:--

"I hear the echoes through the mountains throng;
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep."

And the scenery here is everything. There is little history to engage the mind. One merely shudders at the story of how, in what are now the grounds of Nannau House, Owen Glendower fought with his cousin, Howel Selé, slew him, and hid the body in a hollow tree. The Abbot of Cymmer is credited with having brought about the meeting, in the hope that the two kinsmen might be reconciled; but who knows anything about the Abbot of Cymmer? So much of the abbey as remains is mixed up with farm buildings, amid beautiful sylvan scenery, about two miles from Dolgelley, and near to the banks of the Mawddach. Griffith and Meredydd, lords of Merioneth and grandsons of Owain Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales, founded the abbey in 1198. The architecture suggests Irish influences, and an Irishman by whom such influence is likely to have been exercised is known to have emigrated to Wales at about the time of the foundation. The monks were of the Cistercian order, and the abbey was dedicated to St. Mary. The ruins of the church are the principal portion of what now remains. The abbot's lodgings and part of the refectory have been incorporated into the present farmhouse. The emissaries of Henry VIII. penetrated even to this remote spot, and so the abbey was despoiled.

Barmouth, which, in Welsh, is Abermaw, or the mouth of the Mawddach, is built in strange fashion about the foot of a mountain which is surpassingly noble in its contour. Some of the houses cling high up among the perilous slopes. In one direction they look out to sea, and in the other across the "sublime estuary" at its widest part. The rich, glowing woods of Arthog climb up the opposite slopes, with the side of Cader Idris rising like a vast cliff above their topmost branches. The little town, with its tremendous background of rugged mountain, has been likened to Gibraltar. The oldest of its dwellings is alleged to date back to the reign of Henry VII. For us of to-day the place has the interest of having been selected as the earliest of the settlements of Mr. Ruskin's Guild of St. George. "I have just been over to Barmouth," the Master wrote many a year ago, "to see the tenants on the first bit of ground--noble crystalline rock, I am glad to say--possessed by St. George on the island." Grandly impracticable was the idea of settling a community of this kind in such a place, and one looks at the small cottages, high on the hillside, with a feeling that they are a stray and stranded fragment of Utopia.

It is a bare, ordinary-looking town, this Barmouth, when surveyed from the level of its lower streets; but there is an unapproachable dignity, beauty, and charm in the wide, level stretch of sand and water which lies between here and Arthog, which winds inland among the brown mountain-slopes, which broadens outward to Cardigan Bay. The bridge is a curious and useful rather than a pleasant feature of the landscape. It carries a railway that branches off to Dolgelley on the one hand, and to Glandovey and South Wales on the other. Fortunately, it lies low down, and close to the water, as it were, its central portion being occasionally raised for the admission of ships, of a tonnage, however, that is marvellously small. From its further side, where the sand has gathered into hillocks, crowned by long, waving, rank grass, the town of Barmouth, with its vast hill of Craig Abermaw, brings into mind the castle of Chillon and its surroundings. It seemed poor and common enough, away there on the other side of the bridge; but from this point it is graceful, noble, almost sublime.

* * * * *

The grand castle of Harlech looks out on to the waters about midway in that waste of shore which divides Barmouth from Portmadoc. The castle has long been a ruin, but, all things considered, it has been magnificently preserved. It had the fortune to escape the dismantling which was so nearly universal during the Civil Wars. Later times have been less considerate, for many of the houses roundabout have been built from the stone and timber of the fortress; yet, looking at it from a distance, the place still seems to be intact, and grandly formidable in its strength and its situation. From Portmadoc it is the principal feature of the landscape as the eye sweeps round the fine curve of the bay. The interest of Portmadoc itself lies in the incomparable view of the Snowdon range which is to be obtained therefrom, and in a curious association with Shelley. A huge alluvial plain, the Traeth Mawr, or Great Sand, sheltered by an irregular semicircle of hills, makes an impressive foreground. Here one might expect to hear tales of that Prince Madoc who is alleged to have preceded Columbus, by a huge interval, in the discovery of America; but Portmadoc, with its long, low line of railway across the Traeth Bach, its small schooners laden with slate, its rows of houses struggling about the hillside, its active industry, its bridges and quays, is a town of quite modern date, its history extending backward only to the end of the last century, and its name being derived, not from the adventurous prince whom Southey has made the subject of an epic, but from an energetic Mr. Maddocks, who reclaimed 2,000 acres of good land from the sea, and carried a mile-long mole of stone across the great estuary into which the little river Glaslyn flows. Portions of Portmadoc are at this day some two or three feet below the sea-level. One may obtain from here one of the best views of Snowdon; and on the south side of the valley, over which his shadow seems to be cast, the Cynicht--the Matterhorn of Wales, as it has been called--rises up in noble and entrancing proportions. Hence, too, come into impressive prominence the green and grassy sides of Moel Wyn. A walk of a few miles would bring us to Beddgelert, or to the lovely Pass of Aberglaslyn, with its unforgettable admixture of mountain and of sylvan scenery; or, by climbing the hill at our back, we may come within sight of Tremadoc, and the house in which the poet Shelley alleged that he was assailed by a mysterious and murderous visitant. Into the Traeth Bach, which is an unreclaimed extension of the Traeth Mawr, pours down the stream which accompanies the traveller on the "baby railway" from the heights of Blaenau Festiniog. Westward lie Criccieth and Pwllheli, and the sharp bend of the Lleyn peninsula, and Bardsey Island and its lighthouse, round which one may sail into Carnarvon Bay.

RIVERS OF NORTH WALES.