Chapter II: The Seiont, the Ogwen, the Conway

The /Seiont/: Llanberis Pass--Lakes Peris and Padarn--Dolbadarn
Castle and Ceunant Mawr--Carnarvon and its Castle. The /Ogwen/:
Llyn Ogwen and Llyn Idwal--Bethesda--Penrhyn Castle. The /Llugwy/:
Capel Curig--Moel Siabod--Pont-y-Cyfing--Swallow Falls--The Miners'
Bridge--Bettws-y-Coed. The /Lledr/: Dolwyddelen--Pont-y-Pant. The
/Machno/ and its Fall. The /Conway/: Fairy Glen--Llanrwst--Gwydir
Castle--Llanbedr--Trefriw--Conway Marsh--Conway Castle and
Town--Deganwy--Llandudno.

The river /Seiont/ is only about thirteen miles long. One seldom hears mention of its name, except by the trout-fisher, it may be. It is treated, in general, as of small account. And yet, surely it is one of the most distinguished rivers of North Wales, for does it not drain the north-eastern side of Snowdon, and flow through the Pass of Llanberis, and broaden out into Llyn Peris and Llyn Padarn, and finally, after devious wanderings, and much merry tumbling among rocks, boulders, and little reedy islets, culminate in a port, with the great castle of Carnarvon guarding its exit into the Strait across which one looks to the lovely island of Anglesea? But if few speak of the Seiont, there has been unlimited eloquence concerning the grandeur--what the descriptive writers of the last century would have considered the awfulness--of the Llanberis Pass. The point of view has changed whilst the century has been passing away. Where our great-grandfathers spoke of "horrid scenes" we find nowadays glory of colour, and magnificence of form, and all the finer characteristics of mountain beauty. But something, after all, is to be said from the point of view of our great-grandfathers. We travel through the Pass of Llanberis by coach on good and safe roads, and they ventured, perforce, along "a horse-path so rugged that much of it was like going up and down rough stone stairs."

It was between the two lakes Peris and Padarn, and at the new village of Llanberis, that the late Poet Laureate foregathered, in his youth, with his friend Leonard, who sang of "all the cycle of the golden year":--

"We crost
Between the lakes, and clambered half-way up
The counter side....
... and high above, I heard them blast
The steep slate quarry, and the great echo flap
And buffet round the hill from bluff to bluff."

The first recorded ascent of Snowdon seems to have been made from the same spot in 1639. "At daybreak on the 3rd of August," says the seventeenth-century mountaineer, "having mounted our horses, we proceeded to the British Alps."

After the mountains, Dolbadarn Castle and Ceunant Mawr--the Waterfall of the Great Chasm--are the principal attractions of Llanberis. The cataract is upwards of 60 feet in height. It tumbles over a few ledges, rushes down a wide slope, and falls into a pool below. The castle is singularly well placed for picturesque effect. The one tower now remaining occupies the whole of the surface of a rocky eminence, which presents a precipitous front to the lake, and has a marvellous background of high-peaked mountains. Often enough it can be seen only through mists, or driving sheets of rain, for Llanberis seems to be the home of the rain-cloud and the cradle of the storm.

An unspeakable lumber of waste slates stretches out into the lakes as we proceed downwards, but does not interfere with the splendid view of Snowdon which is to be obtained at the point where the Seiont leaves Llyn Padarn. Wooded cliffs and heathery crags, and peeps of wild moorland, and rugged country that is redeemed from desolateness by frequent white cottages, make fine pictures for us as we proceed down the river towards Carnarvon. Here and there the stream is divided by great masses of stone, past which it races in order to drive some watermill, half hidden in leaves. There are reedy pools, in which a wild swan may occasionally be seen, and then willowy marshes; and so, bending this way and that, now bursting into the open sunlight, and then plunging into woodland shade, and always noisy and impetuous, the little river hastens on until it joins the tide, issuing into the Menai Strait between the grimly beautiful walls of Carnarvon Castle and a wooded bank. Only as to its interior can the castle now be properly described as a ruin. Restoration has here taken the form of rebuilding, and this proud stronghold is now immeasurably more complete as to its outward appearance than it can have been when Edward I. exhibited from its walls the prince who, having first seen the light only a few hours before, was "not only born in Wales but could not speak a word of the English tongue."

Away from the castle and what remains of the walls, which, in appearance, still to some extent justify the ancient name of "the fort over against Anglesea," the town of Carnarvon is painfully modern; but what there is of it that is really old conveys the impression of mediævalism more completely than any other place in Wales, except, perhaps, the old town of Conway. The walls of the castle, with their numerous towers and turrets, rise up to a prodigious height above the quays, at which little coasting vessels with red sails and gay streaks of paint take in their cargoes of slates. The great gateway looking out seaward has a loftiness and a massiveness which cow the spirit. But the outlook hence becomes all the more beautiful by contrast with this castellated gloom. Yonder is the Isle of Anglesea--the sacred island--shimmering through a sunlit mist, and the Strait; with sandbanks visible here and there, and flocks of sea-birds soaring and dipping and screaming, is like a broad river, widening itself to its utmost until it becomes impossible to distinguish between river and sea.

* * * * *

At the head of the Pass of Nant Francon, and behind the huge, dark, threatening shoulder of Carnedd Dafydd, Llyn Ogwen stretches along for about a mile or so, hemmed in at its further extremity by a low range of hills. In Cumberland this lake would be called a tarn, as would also Llyn Idwal, a sort of miniature Wastwater, which lodges in a hollow, among deep and gloomy precipices, a few hundred yards to the left. "This," wrote Leland, "is a smoule poule, where they say that Idwalle, Prince of Wales, was killed and drounid."

"No human ear but Dunawt's heard
Young Idwal's dying scream,"

says the ballad in which the tradition is enshrined. The appearance of the place may well have suggested either the legend in modern or the crime in ancient days. In stormy weather the surroundings of the little lake are inconceivably wild and forbidding, and the wind swirls about in this hollow of the rocks until Llyn Idwal boils like a sea.

Ogwen is a lake of gentler and more serene aspect. At its foot, under Carnedd Dafydd, where the coach-road crosses, its waters, with those from Llyn Idwal, form the Falls of Benglog, so well described by an older writer that his words shall be made to serve the purpose here. "The highest Fall," observes Bingley, "is grand and majestic, yet by no means equal to the other two. At the second, or middle, Fall the river is precipitated, in a fine stream, through a chasm between two perpendicular rocks that each rise several yards above. The mountain, Trivaen, fills up the wide space at the top, and forms a rude and sublime distance. The stream widens as it descends, and below passes over a slanting rock, which gives it a somewhat different direction. In the foreground is the rugged bed of a stream, and the water is seen to dash in various directions among broken masses of rock." At the lowest fall "the stream roars with great fury, and in one sheet of foam, down an unbroken and almost perpendicular rock. The roar of the water, and the broken and uncouth disposition of the surrounding rocks, add greatly to the interest of the scene." And from these Falls of Benglog one looks down the wide, treeless vale of Nant Francon, a broad, peaty marsh, the bed of some ancient lake, as it would appear, hemmed in by dark ridges of mountains.

Throughout the whole length of Nant Francon the river /Ogwen/ is a thin, quiet, winding, silvery stream, unsheltered by bush or tree; but as it approaches the Bethesda slate quarries it is shadowed by its first foliage, that seems designed to hide from it the gigantic outrage on which was built the scattered and rather extensive town of Bethesda, and which has made Lord Penrhyn one of the wealthiest members of the House of Lords. Below the fine bridge leading to the quarries the river is lost among deep woods; but, pursuing it further, one comes most unexpectedly on a long and romantic series of cascades, continuing until the Ogwen is lost to sight in a deep hollow filled with mist and foam. The river has a beautiful and picturesque bend as it passes behind the cottages of Bethesda, a mile or so lower down, and thenceforward it becomes a river something like the Llugwy in appearance, tumbling over short cataracts, or wandering deep among woods, or emerging now and again amid pleasant green spaces, its banks shaded by overhanging trees.

As Carnedd Dafydd, and its twin, Llewelyn, are left behind there comes in sight the steep side and dark, rounded summit of Penmaenmawr, and then, on an opposite and less conspicuous eminence, looking over Bangor and the Menai Strait, and surrounded by woods in which the Ogwen is for a while completely hidden, rises Penrhyn Castle, the seat of Lord Penrhyn, with one great square, turreted tower dominating all the country roundabout. Henceforth the river is little seen until it flows out, through a deep ravine, on to the broad, sandy flats which stretch from Bangor to Beaumaris, its short, swift, troubled life ending thus in sunlit peace.

The steep mountain-sides which hem in Lake Ogwen at its foot are so black, bare, rugged, and forbidding, as to suggest the skeleton of an unfinished world. A kindlier scenery opens out beyond the head of the lake, where the river /Llugwy/--the first of the tributaries of the Conway which have now to be noticed--after wandering downwards from a small mountain tarn under the shadow of Carnedd Llewelyn, runs through a wild and fine pass to Capel Curig. The valley is hemmed in by the great mountains, and to the south rise the three peaks of Y Tryfan, with the Glyder-Fach in the hollow to its left.

At Capel Curig, where is Pont-y-Garth, the Llugwy is an inconspicuous stream, but it grows wider, and its valley becomes very beautiful, immediately after leaving that place, when it is joined by the waters from the two small lakes which make the best of all the foregrounds to Snowdon. Here is "a region of fairy beauty and of wild grandeur," as George Borrow says. Moel Siabod, "a mighty mountain, bare and precipitous, with two peaks like those of Pindus, opposite Janina," here hides its sternness amid woods of oak and fir. Above the lakes, all the peaks of Snowdon are in sight--Y Wyddfa, which is the summit; Lliwedd, "the triple-crested"; craggy Crib-Goch, advancing itself before the rest; and Crib-y-Ddysgyl. To the right of the valley, which has Moel Siabod on its left, there is a curving range of rocky heights, their harshness softened by bracken and dwarf shrubs, and beyond, and high above, is the stony wilderness of the Glyder-Fach.

Afon Llugwy--_afon_ being the pretty Welsh word for "river"--flows through one of the most beautiful of all pastoral valleys on its way from Capel Curig to the Swallow Falls. Every bend of the stream, every green, shady pool, every long stretch of rock impeded water has appeared again and again on the walls of the great picture exhibitions; for there is no river of Wales which is so much haunted by artists as this which we are now following to its junction with the Conway. At Pont-y-Cyfing--a modern bridge of a single tall arch--the river plunges through riven cliffs, boils round enormous masses of rock, and then tumbles over a bold cascade, to recover its quiet almost immediately; but only to be again driven into turbulence where a pretty rustic bridge strides across, to give unimpeded view of a succession of rapids above and below.

The Llugwy dreams along through pleasant meadows and by quiet woods before it comes to the famous Rhaiadr-y-Wennol (the Waterfall of the Swallow). Whence, one is driven to ask, comes such a name as this? The easy and the usual reply is that these are called Swallow Falls because of the swiftness with which the water descends. But all waterfalls are swift. The correct answer to the question suggests itself, as one continues to gaze, through a mist of fine spray, when the river comes down in an autumn flood. The ears deafened by the rush of the cataract, the eyes dazzled and fascinated by the breadth and the mass of the falling waters, a dim sense of something white, with black streaks here and there, overpowers all other impressions. As the river sweeps downward over the higher fall, it is broken and divided by dark pillars of rock. Yes, that is the idea, certainly. What these Falls suggested to the ancient inhabitants of Wales, to those who gave its name to the Rhaiadr-y-Wennol, was the swift alternation between the white gleam of the swallow's breast and the dark shadow of its wings, as it darted to and fro between river and sky. George Borrow has a concise, vivid, and fairly correct description of the Falls, which may be quoted here because it is impossible to put the matter in fewer words. "First," he says, "there are a number of little foaming torrents, bursting through rocks about twenty yards above the promontory on which I stood; then come two beautiful rolls of white water, dashing into a pool a little above the promontory; then there is a swirl of water round its corner into a pool below, black as death, and seemingly of great depth; then a rush through a very narrow outlet into another pool, from which the water clamours away down the glen."

We have had the last sight of the mountains for a while when we enter the little, rock-poised wood from which the Swallow Falls are to be seen. The grand, solitary mass of Moel Siabod lies behind us, one grey, far-away peak of Snowdon exhibiting itself over the lowermost slope. Henceforth, almost to Bettws-y-Coed, the course of the Llugwy is through a deep, rocky, and finely-wooded glen. It is Matlock on a more magnificent scale. It is the High Tor repeating itself again and again, in greater grandeur of scale, and with additional beauty of surroundings. Wild nature is here clothed and softened by luxuriant foliage, which towers up to the heights. The bare rock is visible only where the river courses through the deep woods, which are to be seen to most advantage from the Miners' Bridge, slanting far upward across the river to the opposite slope--a bridge of rough sections of tree trunk bound together, with a hand-rail of long boughs for security--a bridge erected in an emergency, and for a temporary purpose, as one might guess; a bridge of perilous slope, which has done good service to more than one generation of miners, climbing up the hillside to their daily toil.

MOEL SIABOD, FROM THE LLUGWY (_p. 211_).]

Of Bettws-y-Coed--"the Bede House in the Wood"--so much is known that little needs in this place to be said. Here is Pont-y-Pair, and a scene which painting has made more familiar than almost any other in these islands. The bridge has been associated with the name of Inigo Jones, but at least the base of the structure dates back to the fifteenth century, being the work of a mason who must also have been a fine architect, and who died, as it seems, before his work was complete. It has four lofty arches, about which an ancient and gnarled ivy clings. Below, when the water is quiet, one may see the trout dashing about amid the pools. The river-bed is riven and torn, and full of craggy masses. A rocky islet, on which clusters a most picturesque group of fir trees, divides the accelerating waters, that now, after one final battle with obstructions, sweep sharply round a curve, and shortly join the Conway.

The valley of the /Lledr/ always presents itself to this present writer's recollection as he beheld it first, at the end of a dry summer, when the eye feasted without weariness on glowing colour, and when every bend of the river opened up some piece of country which was like one of Turner's glorious dreams. He saw it last on a day of drifting rain. And in wet or in dry seasons the Lledr valley permits of no comparison between itself and any other. It is incomparable in its various beauty; it is unique in its power of attraction, in its way of producing a satisfying sense of something wholly individual and complete. High up towards Blaenau Festiniog it has little beauty; but before the stream reaches Dolwyddelen Castle the real Lledr valley begins, and is thenceforward down to the junction with the Conway a perpetually changing scene of loveliness. Here again Moel Siabod, seen in a new aspect, but always striking in form and noble in proportions, seems to dominate the landscape. It may be seen from one impressive point with Dolwyddelen Castle in the middle distance. This ruin is the fragment of an ancient stronghold which derives all its present importance from the beauty of its situation. A single tower occupies the summit of a rocky knoll, and stands out clear against its misty mountain background. Yet the castle was fairly large in its day, occupying the whole surface of the hill. Here lived Iorwerth Drwyndwn, whose fortune in battle gained him his surname of "the Broken Nose"; and here, too, Llewelyn the Great is said to have been born. At a later day the castle became the residence of Howel Coetmor, a notorious outlaw and robber chief, who so harried his neighbours that they sat in church with weapons in their hands. A Roman road crossed the Lledr at the village of Dolwyddelen, which is about a mile from the castle, and there are still distinct Roman remains on the hill above the village. But let no one, on that account, meditate on the ruins of empires at the railway station which is called Roman Bridge, for the road crossed the river at quite another place, and the bridge is of an antiquity corresponding to that of the relic which was discovered by the credulous hero of Sir Walter Scott's romance.

The Lledr wanders about its valley as if it were loth to leave. It makes huge loops and bends, almost knotting itself sometimes into what the sailors call "a figure of eight." The whole valley is a combination of wildness and fertility, of wide prospects and confined glimpses of sylvan beauty, of wooded hills and frowning crags and broken upland. In rainy weather innumerable foamy streams swell the Lledr, until, in some portions of its course, it seems to make a series of lakes. The oldest bridge is Pont-y-Pant, not far from the entrance to the valley from the direction of Bettws-y-Coed. Below this the stream hurries onwards through woods and meadow-land, under mighty bluffs which are wooded to their summits, and, issuing at length from its rocky barriers, adds to the Conway a volume of water that is equal to its own.

The river /Machno/ falls into the Conway a mile or two beyond its junction with the Lledr. It is a short river, drawing to itself a number of little mountain streams, and its principal feature--but that is of the first importance from the tourist point of view--round which painters of landscape seem to encamp themselves all the year through, the falls of the Machno, combines every element of what one may call the ordinary picturesque. The river foams among crags and boulders, and between rocky ledges, from which the trees hang dizzily, casting deep shadows across the stream, and making green reflections in each swirling pool. Then, too, there is Pandy Mill, making a sunshine in the shady place, and a mill-wheel with a tumbling jet of water; and nature seems to have lavished all its softer endearments on this exquisite little scene, delighting the eye with tender arrangements of moss and film-fern, and lichen and hoar boughs.

ON THE LLEDR.]

Not far below this pretty landscape cameo are the Falls of the Conway, where the river rushes on through a gorge of dark, sloping, almost columnar rocks, and then--divided by a tall crag, on which one or two small bushes have contrived to grow--bends and plunges down two steep descents to where a half-ruinous salmon leap brings to mind the eminence of the Conway as a fishing river. And next, the Fairy Glen! This is a genuine ravine, where the stream forces itself between riven cliffs, and flows in deep, rapid streaks of peaty-brown water among a wilderness of grey rocks, plunging downward, thereafter, into a wild glen overhung by woods. The name of the Fairy Glen would seem inappropriate enough to such a scene were it not that here, again, Nature has thrown all manner of rustic decorations about this frowning gorge. The sunlight, too, seems to fill the place in a strange, mystic way, so that the lichen-encrusted rocks are seen through a kind of blue, misty glamour, and there is a suggestion of rainbow colour over all.

From the road high above the Fairy Glen there is a fine prospect of the mountains. Moel Siabod seems to have come nearer, and the far distance is closed in by the Glyders, Tryfan, and the Carnedd Llewelyn range. Down in the valley is the Llyn-yr-Afanc, or the Beaver's Pool, and nearer to Bettws-y-Coed the river is crossed by the fine span of the iron bridge which was built in the year of the battle of Waterloo.

The /Conway/ has no particular attractiveness as it passes Bettws, where David Cox's famous signboard may still be seen at the Royal Oak Hotel. It has here a green margin of meadow-land, which grows broader as we proceed towards Llanrwst, a sweetly-placed little market town, to which small vessels seem to have made their way in the last century, for a sailor who penned a diary in 1769 wrote how "Llanrwst is situated in a very deep bottom on the river Conway, betwixt Denbigh hills and Carnarvon rocks, some of which appear to hang over the town. Nevertheless, we found a much better anchorage than we could have expected at such a bottom."

This sailor was an observing man, for he continues:--"Llanrwst is a small market-town, containing one church, a market-hall, as they call it, and about fifty or sixty houses, but never a good house among the whole lot." There are some good houses nowadays, however, and a fine stone bridge of three arches, with a peculiarly high and graceful spring. Here, again, the design is attributed to Inigo Jones, as, perhaps, ought to be the case in the immediate country of that renowned architect. Gwydir Castle, the family mansion of the Wynns, is a conspicuous object among the woods which here cluster under the feet of the craggy Carnarvonshire hills. It has now passed, through the hands of the Earl of Ancaster, whose forbears married with the Wynn family, into the possession of the Earl Carrington. The founder of the castle was Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, who represented Carnarvonshire in Parliament in 1596, and whose soul is said to be imprisoned under the Swallow Falls, "there to be punished, purged, spouted upon, and purified from the foul deeds done in his days of nature." A truly tremendous malediction! Some traces of the sixteenth-century building still remain, but the present castle belongs to our own century, though it contains carved work of the reigns of Elizabeth and James.

At Llanbedr, on the hills above the Llanrwst road, may be found one of the most remarkable primitive fortifications that are to be seen anywhere in these islands, Pen-Caer-Helen by name. "It was a British post of great strength," says Pennant, "in some parts singularly guarded. It had the usual fosses, and vast ramparts of stones, with some remains of the facing of walls, and the foundations of three or four round buildings." The remains are still very extensive, and clearly indicate the extent of the ancient stone ramparts. It was a post from which a very great extent of country could be surveyed. In one direction you look over the Conway and the Denbighshire hills, as far as the valley of the Clwyd; in another, the eye stretches over a barren waste to the Carnedd Llewelyn range. The Great and the Little Orme are in sight, and Puffin Island, and the sea.

The Conway is still navigable by small vessels as far as Trefriw, a pretty village of small houses and neat villas, clustering under the hill, and close to the coach road. Trefriw is renowned not only for its situation, but for its "Fairy Falls," and its "spa," which, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillips, yields "the nastiest chalybeate I ever had the folly to taste." For some distance below Trefriw, the river, now broader and much more deep, runs for a while between great masses of tall reeds and sedge, and then opens out into a lake-like width, with such a prospect of spreading water, and woods and mountain, as recalls the characteristic beauties of Windermere. Very delightful indeed is a voyage in the little steamer which plies between Deganwy, Conway, and Trefriw; but it is at Conway Marsh that the river is at its noblest. When the tide is out, this is a broad, sweeping, sandy bay, with oozy spaces of bright green towards its centre; and when the tide is full, it has the appearance of a large and beautiful islanded lake. The river is walled in on the Conway side, and a thick wood shadows the stream as it bends round towards the sea. It is here that one of the most effective views of Conway Castle comes into sight, with the two white bridges stretching over the narrowing channel, and the great circular towers clustering together in such manner as to convey a most formidable impression of massiveness and strength. One naturally compares Conway with Carnarvon Castle. The two buildings are said to have been designed by the same architect, and, of their kind, they are among the finest in the world. Carnarvon Castle is more elaborated in idea, more ingenious, more decorative, and in general aspect more grand; but Conway suggests a greater antiquity, a more solid strength, a sounder and more artistic unity of structure. It is a mere ruin, having been dismantled in 1665. Even before that period it seems to have been abandoned to time. There is a letter of James I.'s reign which says that "the King's Castle of Conway, in the county of Carnarvon, is in great ruin and decay, whereof the greater part hath been downe and uninhabitable for manie ages past; the rest of the timber supporting the roof is all, or for the most part, rotten, and growth daylie by wet more and more in decay, no man having dwelt in anie part thereof these thirty years past." There is no roof at all now; the timbers are long consumed; the castle is gutted throughout; and yet, as seen from the Conway river, the castle still has a certain august and complete majesty, as if time could do it no real despite.

THE CONWAY, FROM CONWAY CASTLE.]

Conway Castle, with the Conway mountain, on which there is a British fort, towering up in the rear, held complete command of the estuary. It was an English, not a Welsh, stronghold, being built by Edward I., about 1284. Queen Eleanor is said to have lived there with the king, and one of the towers has been named the "Queen's" tower in memory of that event. The great hall, which was supported on vaults, was 130 feet long by 32 feet broad. The castle was besieged in 1290 by Madoc, one of the sons of Llewelyn, the English king himself being present on the occasion. A fleet bringing provisions saved the garrison just as it was being starved into surrender. When Bolingbroke landed in England, and Richard II. found himself abandoned by his army, he fled here for safety, and at this castle, it is averred, was his abdication signed.

Conway town, sloping swiftly down to the riverside, and almost wholly enclosed within its many-towered walls, looks like a contemporary illustration of Froissart. There is no other such perfect specimen of a small mediæval walled town now remaining. The fortifications climb up a steep hillside, in a triangular form--or rather, as has been said, so as to make the figure of a Welsh harp. The highest point of the triangle is so far above the other portions of the walls that the whole has that quaint look of being out of perspective which is the most pronounced characteristic of all mediæval draughtsmanship.

Across the water, and on the way to Llandudno, the little town, or village, or city of Deganwy half hides itself among the sands, just above the verge of what was formerly, and even up to recent times, a marsh stretching from opposite Conway to Llandudno Bay. It was hereabout, but on the Conway side of the river, that the pearl-fishing was carried on:--

"Conway, which out of his streame doth send
Plenty of pearls to deck his dames withal"--

says Spenser, in the "Faërie Queene." The pearl fishery had once a real importance. Sir Richard Wynn of Gwydir presented to the queen of Charles II. a Conway pearl, which afterwards adorned the regal crown. This was probably of a kind that was found higher up the river, at Trefriw. A more common variety was found in abundance on the bar, and the collection of the pearl-bearing mussels was for a long time a distinct and regular industry. "As for the pearls found in these mountainous rivers," said a letter-writer of the seventeenth century, "they are very plentiful, and uncommonly large, though few of them well coloured. They are found in a large, black muscle, peculiar to such rivers. Several ladyes of this county and Denbighshire have collections of good pearle, found chiefly in the river Conway."

Deganwy, "the place where the white waves break upon the shore," was a royal residence from a very remote period. It had a castle, which is said to have been erected in the sixth century by Maelgwyn Gwynedd, and to have been destroyed by Llewelyn the Great, whose statue is to be seen in Conway town. "It was a noble structure," says Giraldus Cambrensis, "and its possession was held to be of great importance to the English, so that Randal Blondevil, Earl of Chester, rebuilt it in 1210. King John encamped at Deganwy two years later, but was compelled to retreat with his army before Llewelyn. There were other royal retreats from Deganwy, before the fierce Welsh, in 1245, 1258, and 1262. There were "great ruines" of the castle in Leland's time; but now it is with difficulty that any fragment is discerned. Deganwy itself has become a watering-place, a small rival to Llandudno, mainly attractive because it presents a magnificent view of the estuary of the Conway, and of the fine range of mountains which ends in Penmaenmawr."

Llandudno, for the most part, occupies the flat and formerly marshy space between the Great and the Little Orme. It is altogether a favourable type of the modern watering-place; but it need not detain us here, for we have reached the point at which the river broadens out into Conway Bay, and is lost among the in-rushing waves of the Irish Sea.

RIVERS OF NORTH WALES.