“This place,” says Warner, “as its name imports, was connected with the awful superstitions of the ancient Britons, and exhibited some years since vestiges of Druidical worship.” These vestiges were British stone huts or tombs—the “kistvaens” of archæological literature. Warner and the peasantry thought them to be prisons, but, whatever they were, they have long since disappeared; only the rocky site—like a granite island rising from the surrounding level—remaining to give a reason for Cerrig’s name. It is curious to reflect that the village of Crick in Northants, was originally Cerrig, and that the name of Carrick, in Ireland, has a similar meaning. Only in England, where ages ago “the coiling serpent” (as the Welsh call the advancing Saxon) established himself and expelled the Celt, has the word been corrupted. When Borrow came to Cerrig-y-Druidion he says he stayed at the “Lion—whether the white, black, red, or green Lion I do not know.” It was, in fact, the “White Lion,” which still protrudes a battered and weather-beaten sign over the bye-street, while the “Saracen’s Head” stands boldly upon the main road. How he met the Italian who spoke Welsh, and on the morrow met the Irish fiddler with the game leg and the infernal cheek, let the pages of Wild Wales relate.
XLI
The scattered cottages and old toll-house of Glasfryn bring one to Cernioge, the place to which the milestones have been insistently directing, since Corwen. What, the stranger wonders, is this place (“Kernioggy” the Welsh pronounce it) that it should be thus dignified? Well, here it is, just a farmhouse lying back from the road, with a pond beside it under the trees, a few outbuildings, and an older toll-house than the Glasfryn one. Not, nowadays, a very striking spot, except for its remote solitude; yet this, in the old days of road-travel, was a quite famous inn and posting-house, a stage between Bettws-y-Coed and the “Druid’s Head.” The inevitable reflection here is that if it was to such lonely places as this that travellers of old were glad to come, exclaiming with delight as to their comfort, how discomfortable must travelling then have been!
The older toll-gate standing close by, and early deserted, was found to be inconveniently close to the inn, and certainly no postboy, having been halted at the gate for toll, could in the few remaining yards drive his patrons up to the house with the flourish and circumstance that the times demanded. It is all very well nowadays, when even a first-class fare between London and Holyhead only costs a trifle over two guineas, for the traveller to leave the railway station in the decent obscurity of a cab; but, in times when a journey between those places might cost anything from thirty to fifty pounds sterling, travellers liked some pomp and circumstance for that expenditure. And they generally obtained it, for when travelling was so costly that few but the well-to-do were found upon the roads, and when the guest at an inn was wont to drink many bottles of the best port, it was eminently desirable he should be received and despatched with the greatest show of consideration.
CERNIOGE.
“Cernioge Mawr”—or “Great Cernioge”—was the full name of the place. George Borrow conceived it to have derived from “Corniawg,” which means a place with many chimneys or turrets; certainly not descriptive of the existing house, but perhaps so in remote days when an old mansion stood here, its gables and clustered chimneys prominent to wayfarers in this solitude while they were yet far off, down the road.
The accommodation at Cernioge, whose sign, by the way, was the “Prince Llewelyn,” seems to have varied considerably at different times, and somewhat over a hundred years ago it appears to have been very bad. Some tourists in 1795, hearing that the inn kept three chaises and a post-coach, assumed a larder to match, but found “not a single article of food that even hungry appetites could relish.” Another, three years later, in speaking of the house as “a solitary inn, in the midst of a desert, chiefly intended for the accommodation of the coaches which run this road,” talks bitterly of the larder “in unison with the population of the country: nothing to be had but a leg of mutton, which it seems was tripping over the dark brown heath about three hours ago.”
By 1836, however, a change had come over the scene, for another tourist is found to speak of the “comforts and accommodations not being exaggerated”; but by that time its day was almost done. Another ten years saw the road exchanged for the rail, and Cernioge became what it is now, a farm.
Beyond this sometime inn the road descends, and “Snowdonia”—a term invented by Pennant a hundred and thirty years ago—opens up before the advancing explorer; a majestic disarray of tumbled peaks and lesser hills, smeared across with trailing mists. Then, in two miles, comes the hamlet of Pentre Voelas, with the “Voelas Arms,” a slate-fronted inn, by the way, displaying a very elaborately blazoned coat-of-arms over its door. “Toujours Prest” says the motto under that family scutcheon, and a very good motto too. Let us hope it has always been descriptive of the inn also, and that it, unlike Cernioge, was “Always Ready.”