PENRHYN CASTLE.
LONISAF TOLL-HOUSE.
The gates of Penrhyn Park confront the traveller when he has at last left Bethesda in his wake. They are appropriately feudal and threatening, in a revival of the old castellated style, just as though the owner of the quarries had shut himself within, and was prepared to defend himself and his hoards to the last extremity against the starving thousands of the quarry-town. The little village of Llandegai stands near, and beyond stretches the Park, with Penrhyn Castle in its midst: a lovely scene of dense woodlands falling towards a blue expanse of sea, with an island and a lighthouse and white-winged yachts. The Castle turrets dominate the whole, an elaborate and highly successful piece of make-believe, compelling the reverence of the wayfarer, until he draws near and discovers that the Norman keep, own brother in appearance to that of Rochester Castle, was built about a hundred years ago by a certain “judicious Hopper” (not our old theological friend, the judicious Hooker), “who with his usual taste and science has preserved in his improvements the characteristic style of the military Gothic.”
Positively the last toll-house before Bangor is found at Lonisaf, standing not far from the spot where the old road from Ogwen Falls joins the modern. Some toll-gates were provided with weighbridges, and Lonisaf was one of them, the little weigh-house still remaining. The especial function of these weighbridges was to detect overloading. Fines for carts and waggons laden beyond their proper weight were very heavy, and their severity and frequent application fully reimbursed the trustees the cost of installing a check of this kind.
XLVIII
The road makes an abrupt turn to the left to enter the city of Bangor. The grim stone walls on either side of the forbidding edifice in front do not represent a prison, workhouse, or lunatic asylum, but have at present the honour of housing the University College of North Wales, founded in 1884. Years before that date this was the “Penrhyn Arms” hotel, one of the largest and best on the road, with great resources in the way of reception-rooms, extensive private suites for the considerable personages who travelled to and from Ireland, and stabling for over a hundred horses. A private inclined road leads up to the pillared doorway, and an arch over the public road conducted in those days to the hotel farm and dairy. It is frequently found to be too low to permit the passage of hay and straw waggons and other mountainous loads, with the result that the so-called “private” road is used, and is almost as public as the other. The best side of the building is turned away from the road, and looks from amid wide lawns and beautiful gardens across the Menai Straits to Beaumaris. Here they show with reverence the stump of a fir tree planted by the Princess Victoria in 1832. The tree died in 1899. The interior of the house is, of course, divided into class-rooms, lecture-rooms, and the like. The kitchen and scullery are now a library, and students now swat where fat cooks once sweated before roasting fires. The change is one that would have horrified Colonel Birch-Reynardson, equally with the coachmen and guards of the Holyhead Mail that used to change here in the palmy days of Host Bicknell.
THE PENRHYN ARMS.