CYFYNG FALLS.
Here the great road enters upon its wildest and most impressive stretches, but not without such compensations to the traveller as the pretty, artist-haunted inns of Tan-y-Bwlch afford. Another toll-gate—never, surely, was there a great highway to vie with this in the number of them—blocked the way until the close of 1890, and the old house remains. Just beyond it, and full in view of the trim peaks of Snowdon, of Moel Siabod, and their great cloud-capped brethren, is the little village, or rather hamlet, of Capel Curig, lying in the valley where roads go off left to the stormy pass of Llanberis and so on to Carnarvon; and on the right to Holyhead. Capel Curig was, like Bettws, never more than a chapelry in the wilds; but, unlike Bettws, it has not grown with modern times. One may seek the reason with success in the fact that no railway comes near it. A contributory reason is perhaps found in the nature of its surroundings. Grandeur of scenery, and purity of air do not compensate holiday-folks for the mists, the furious storms, and the frequent rains that haunt the spot. Visitors to Capel Curig have been known to drive into it through the rain, to stay as indoor prisoners to stress of weather for a week; departing without ever once having seen the mists disperse that cling so fondly about Snowdon, and veil his majesty from many eyes.
A thunderstorm here is a terrific and appalling thing, with the encircling mountains acting as sounding-boards to the demoniacal peals of thunder that crash with ear-rending reverberations along the valleys. Fortunately for those who are unwilling witnesses of this elemental strife, Capel Curig possesses a very large and resourceful hotel, standing off the Holyhead Road, by the twin lakes in the valley. It was built about 1802 by the then Lord Penrhyn, one of the first to urge the improvement of the Holyhead Road and the adoption of this route, instead of the older and more circuitous one by Chester. He probably could not, with the best will in the world, have erected a plainer building.
When Borrow, tramping eighteen miles on a hot and dusty day, came here, he found the fashionable company in the grand saloon surveying him with looks of the most supercilious disdain. They thought him some poor fellow, tramping from motives of economy.
CAPEL CURIG.
The poor little whitewashed church of Capel Curig—the original Chapel of St. Curig that gives the place its name—stands quite near the big hotel. It was dedicated to Curig and to Julitta, his mother. The missionary zeal that impelled them to come here, a thousand years or so ago, must have been at fever heat, for this was then a place of unutterable loneliness: not as now with a fine road running by, but a trackless country, deeply shadowed by the almost impenetrable oak woods that covered the mountain sides and the moorlands, now almost entirely innocent of trees of any sort. A mild specimen of what even eighteenth century roads were like will give some notion of the difficulties of approach that remained until 1820. This “awful example” is the four-mile length of deserted road between Capel Curig and Llyn Ogwen. It was once the only way, and the modern Holyhead Road between these two points is wholly of Telford’s making. The beginning of this track—for it was little better—may be sought between the Post Office and the whitewashed cottage that was once the “Tap” of the hotel down yonder. Passing immediately over a rugged bridge spanning a waterfall on the Llugwy, it mounts across the rising moorland, and climbs a boulder-strewn ridge; to descend to the shores of Ogwen under the beetling crags of Trifaen mountain. There is sufficient evidence that it is little less than the bed of a mountain torrent in winter-time, and even to pedestrians the exploration of it is difficult.
XLVI
Telford’s road takes an infinitely better course, although, to be sure, the four miles onward to Lake Ogwen are on a steady and uninterrupted rise, almost impossible to face with a steady head-wind, and wholly so when storms scour through the pass. Here is the summit-level of the road, 957 feet above the sea, with mountains 3,000 feet higher surrounding the lonely moorland. Infrequent farmsteads of the smallest and most cabin-like kind are scattered about the almost barren space, among the bogs and the tremendous boulders that have at some time or other come hurtling down from the mountain-sides, where there remain many more of the same sort, ready to descend. Peat-stacks to every farm tell of what fuel they use here, just as the great stones placed on the roofs of stacks and cabins alike hint of the fury of the winds.