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.

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.

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:—

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.

CHAPTER II.
THE SEIONT, THE OGWEN, THE CONWAY.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.