DEVIL’S BRIDGE,
a long chain of mountains excited our admiration, encircled half way down with a thick mist, similar in appearance to a girdle: this circumstance seems to justify the bold imagery and beautiful description of a mountain given by the Poet:
“As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form,
Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm;
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”Goldsmith.
The comfortable inn, situated near this romantic spot, stands in front of the River Rhyddol, and commanding the most picturesque view fancy can paint, was built by the respectable and truly hospitable owner of Havod.
This celebrated Bridge, so much the object of curiosity and admiration, is so completely environed with trees, that many travellers, not intent upon deep investigation, or in pursuit of Nature’s landscapes, may pass over it without the least suspicion of the dreadful aperture, or the ancient structure that conveys them over the gulf. On the eastern side we descended a steep and treacherous bank, consisting of slate rock or laminac, I should imagine, near an hundred feet: this is the computed measurement; but the eye, confused by the awfulness of the scene, loses its faculty of judging. From this spot, the vast chine, or chasm over which the bridge is thrown, is seen to great advantage. The whole of this fissure was probably occasioned by some convulsion of Nature, as each indenture seems to correspond with the opposite protuberance. Under the bridge, the river Mynach in its confined course, meeting with obstructions of massy rock, and fragments of prodigious size, rushes through the chasm with irresistible violence.
This bridge is called in Welsh Pont-ar Fynach, or Mynach Bridge; it consists of two arches, one thrown over the other. The foundation of the under one is of great antiquity, and vulgarly attributed to the invention of the Devil; it is supposed to have been erected as far back as the year 1087, in the reign of King William II., by the Monks of Strata Florida Abbey, the ruins of which are still visible, about ten miles from hence. Gerald mentions his passing over it, when he accompanied Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the time of the Crusades, in the year 1188, and in the reign of King Richard I. The original arch being suspected to be in a ruinous condition, the present bridge was built over it, at the expense of the county, in the year 1753. The width of the chasm is estimated at about thirty feet.
Our Cicerone first conducted us to a fall on the river Rhyddol, unobserved in Walker’s Description of the Devil’s Bridge, and unnoticed by Warner. The character of this fall is remarkably singular: a huge fragment of rock, projecting over the river for a considerable way, precipitates the water in a singular and almost inexpressible direction: the rocks are occasionally variegated by the dark foliage of underwood, and sometimes barren, rugged, and impending.
Description cannot suggest the full magnificence of the prospect which spread before us, on our arrival at the grand Fall of the Mynach; for though it may paint the grandeur of the elegance of outline, yet it cannot equal the archetypes of Nature, or draw the minute features, that reward the actual observer at every new choice of his position: reviewing this thundering cataract, in the leisure of recollection, these nervous lines of Thomson seem to describe much of the scene:
“Smooth to the shelving brink a copious flood
Rolls fair and placid, where collected all
In one impetuous torrent, down the steep
It thundering shoots, and shakes the country round.
At first an azure sheet, it rushes broad;
Then whitening by degrees, as prone it falls,
And from the loud resounding rocks below
Dash’d in a cloud of foam, it sends aloft
A hoary mist, and forms a ceaseless shower.
Nor can the tortured wave here find repose:
But raging still amid the shaggy rocks,
Now flashes o’er the scatter’d fragments, now
Aslant the hollow channel rapid darts;
And falling fast from gradual slope to slope,
With wild infracted course and lessen’d roar,
It gains a safer bed, and steals at last
Along the mazes of the quiet vale.”
The following table, taken from Walker’s Description of the Devil’s Bridge, gives the exact height from the top of the bridge to the water underneath; and the different falls from thence till the Mynach delivers itself into the Rhyddol below.
FALLS, &c.
| Feet | |
| From the bridge to the water | 114 |
| First fall | 18 |
| Second ditto | 60 |
| Third ditto | 20 |
| Grand cataract | 110 |
| From the bridge to the Rhyddol | 322 |
The rocks on each side of the fall rise perpendicularly to the height of eight hundred feet, and are finely clothed with the richest vegetation to the loftiest summit.
Near the basin of the first fall from the bridge we entered a dark cavern, formerly inhabited by a set of robbers, two brothers and a sister, called Plant Mat, or Plant Fat, signifying Matthew’s Children. Tradition reports, that they committed various depredations in the neighbourhood, and lived concealed in this “specus horrendum” for many years, from the keen research of “day’s garish eye.” The entrance just admits sufficient light to make “darkness visible.”
With regret we left this romantic spot; where, if retirement ever had “local habitation,” this was her “place of dearest residence.” “One excursion,” says Mr. Cumberland, “to this place, will not suffice common observers; nor indeed many, to the lovers of the grand sports of Nature.” “The Mynach” (in another place he describes,) “coming down from beneath the Devil’s Bridge, has no equal for height or beauty that I know of; for, although a streamlet to the famous fall of Narni in Italy, yet it rivals it in height, and surpasses it in elegance.
“After passing deep below the bridge, as through a narrow firth, with noises loud and ruinous, into a confined chasm, the fleet waters pour headlong and impetuous, and leaping from rock to rock, with fury literally lash the mountain’s sides; sometimes almost imbowered among deep groves, and flashing at last into a fanlike form, the fall rattling among the loose stones of the Devil’s Hole—where, to all appearance, it shoots into a gulf beneath, and silently steals away: for so much is carried off in spray, during the incessant repercussions it experiences, in this long tortuous shoot, that in all probability, not half the water arrives at the bottom of its found and sullen grave.”
Four miles from hence, on the Llandiloe’s road, is situated