Offa’s Dyke, cut through as it is by the road, might very easily be missed in this land, where smooth fields are the exception and rugged pastures the rule. Its site is marked distinctly, however, by a farmhouse, named after it, “Plâs Offa,” standing near the road. On the one hand, the Dyke, very like an ordinary hedgerow, with great trees growing on the embankment, may be seen going uphill towards Chirk Castle; on the other it plunges, straight and resolute, steeply down to the river Dee. It is on this side that the Dyke shows at its best, with an embankment in places over ten feet high, and a ditch on its outer side, six feet deep and twelve broad. Offa here built himself a monument more lasting than many of bronze or marble have proved.
OFFA’S DYKE.
THE VALE OF LLANGOLLEN.
But to return to Whitehurst Toll-house awhile. There the “fertile and happy” Vale of Llangollen first opens out before the traveller in a deep, long, and narrow vista closed by mountainous hills. It is the gate by which one enters the romantic land of Wales, that lies there in the setting sun like a Promised Land flowing with milk, honey, and cwrw; the river Dee sparkling in the distance, and the last sunrays lighting with a magic glow the hillsides and the precipitous Eglwyseg Rocks. A mediæval knight coming upon this profound valley and these crannied precipices would have halted and offered up the prayer, In manus tuas Domine, before going on his way, for the Unknown hid many terrors in those days, and Loathly Worms and unimaginable horrors might then have peopled the rocks. To the modern stranger, with none of these terrors, the scene also calls a halt. He sees the sun go down, lighting the hill-top roofs of Cefn and Acrefair with a mysterious glow, and glinting redly in the serried windows of Wynnstay; lights come out in cottage windows as day draws in, and signal lamps shine red and green on the great railway viaduct crossing the valley immediately beneath him; and it is well if he comes to this spot ignorant and unprepared, for then those colliery villages of Acrefair and Cefn, and the distant smoky shafts of Ruabon, hold many mysteries; the histories of the great railway viaduct and the canal aqueduct of Pont Cysylltau in the middle distance do not put a curb to his imagination, and the dim outline of Wynnstay, majestic in the crepuscule, might be not merely the French Renaissance and very Mansard-roofy, Alexandra-Palace-like residence of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, the local magnate, but a fairy palace. Nor need the fiery dragon that should inhabit the fairy-like and mysterious landscape be missing, for the lighted trains that come down the valley and cross the viaduct in thunder can well sustain the part to the eye.
It is surely in some early autumn evening, when stormy weather threatens not too insistent, and when kindly mists hide the hill-tops, rendering unlimited their possibilities of height and cragginess, that the exploring cyclist, say, should come to the Vale of Llangollen, previously uninstructed in what he is to find there on the morrow. It is to be premised, however, that he be not an unimaginative man. Let all such reach Llangollen by train in the glaring sun of a July afternoon, when everything is revealed, and imagination finds its occupation gone.
The stranger coming down the darkling road, past the little hamlet of Vron Cysylltau, and winding midway between the hills and the valley, obtains the true exploratory thrill. It is true that he will find, on after and daylight experience, that the road is a sandpapered one, on which the puzzle would be to find a rut or a loose stone; but he will proceed with the caution proper to a Livingstone or a Speke in unknown African wilds, and, when at last the lights of Llangollen begin to twinkle before him, will sigh with a great content for perils overpast, and rest at his inn.
Let us forbear in these pages to discuss the accommodation that Llangollen now affords. Is it not the business of the town—the town, mark you!—to find accommodation for tourists of every sort, with the result that it is become a place of many hotels and boarding-houses, and very different from the tiny village of Llangollen that disgusted the travellers of a century ago, of whose one and “only tolerable” inn (he names the “Hand”) Wigstead severely remarks: “Of the accommodation of that—Cætera desunt—” which, by some little freedom, may be translated “the less said the better”?