PENMAENMAWR. After J. M. W. Turner, R.A.
Those italics are not due to Johnson, but are placed here to duly emphasise the romantic note struck, perhaps unconsciously, by him at the close of those too-staccato sentences, studded all too plentifully with that often necessary but harsh word “which.” “The sea beats at the bottom of the way:” there you have a picture of the place that hints in a sentence all manner of disasters; ships blown against the rocky coast, coaches swept off the road into the waves, and obscure catastrophes, the more dreadful because left to the imagination.
But not every one found Penmaenmawr so safe, even though the new road had replaced the old. They had not Johnson’s robust nature, or else desired to make some literary capital out of the scene. Thus, more than twenty years later, the Rev. Richard Warner describes “the rocky mountain of Penmaenmawr,” in what he evidently intends to be blood-curdling terms. “Formerly extremely rude and dangerous,” he says, “it has been entirely altered and divested of a considerable degree of its horror. Still, however, it cannot be travelled without shuddering. Creeping round the side of the mountain, it hangs, as it were, in mid-air, with a frowning precipice above and a steep descent immediately under it. The rocks on the right are nearly perpendicular, sometimes beetling over the road in a terrific manner, at others retiring into deep declivities of nine hundred or a thousand feet, from whose rugged sides project fragments of incalculable magnitude, so capriciously placed, and having such a disjoined appearance that it is impossible for the traveller to lose the perpetual dread of his being every moment crushed to atoms under a torrent of huge stones.” That such stormy torrents did sometimes flow is evident from Wigstead, who, coming to “where Penmaenmawr awfully raises its aspiring head,” found a mass of rock recently fallen into the road in a storm; a huge fragment of cliff that, if broken up, could not have been cleared away by ten large waggons.
PENRHYN CASTLE AND SNOWDONIA, PROM BEAUMARIS. After David Cox.
When the union of Great Britain and Ireland was effected, the Irish members clamoured for the immediate improvement of this dangerous road. Indeed, the city of Dublin had already contributed something towards such a work, but the present fine highway round the base of the headland did not come into existence until Telford came upon the scene, blasting and levelling the way that Turner has pictured so well.
Having passed Penmaenmawr, the old travellers to Holyhead often crossed into Anglesey by the Lavan Sands to Beaumaris: a dangerous passage only to be attempted by those correctly informed of the tides. Horsemen would ride the three-mile stretch of sands exposed at low water, and, hailing the Beaumaris ferry, be readily landed on the island; but if they by any chance ventured out half an hour too late, the rising tide swept them away, or the treacherous sands engulfed them. It was here that Sir John Bramston and his son were nearly lost in 1641. They had ridden across the sands to the verge of the channel and hailed the ferry; but the ferrymen were drunk, and it was long before any notice was taken of them. Meanwhile, the tide was rising fast, and was swirling about them before aid arrived, and they were rescued in the nick of time.
LI
The ferries into Anglesey, five in all, from end to end of the Straits, were all more or less perilous. Crossing by them, according to evidence produced at an enquiry on the subject, 180 persons lost their lives between 1664 and 1842. The mail route was by Bangor Ferry, called by the Welsh Porthaethwy, or the “Ferry of the Narrow Waters,” close by where Telford’s suspension bridge now spans the channel. Up out of Bangor drove the Mails, and many of the stage-coaches, post-chaises, and chariots, to the ferry-house. Thence passengers and their luggage were ferried across to the opposite side in boats and lighters, each manned by four ferrymen. Coaches and chaises were in waiting when they landed, to whisk them off to Mona and Holyhead. Swift crossed here in 1727, and refers to the inn, “which, if it be well kept, will break Bangor.” There he lay the night, and was up at four o’clock the next morning. This inn was the “George,” still standing, with an addition built on, in what was intended to be a grand and imposing style, about 1850. The huge, buff-coloured pile, standing in midst of lovely gardens, faces the Strait. There still hangs on the wall of the coffee-room an autograph of the Duke of Wellington, taken from the visitors-book and proudly framed: “I passed the night of the 21st August, 1851, at the George Inn, and was very well accommodated. Wellington.”