When, in 1851, Borrow walked into Holyhead, he stayed at the “Railway Hotel,” a “noble and first-rate” house. All others were described to him as “poor places, where no gent puts up.” What, then, had become of the several mentioned in the works of Cary and Paterson; the hostelries that had been sufficient for the needs of coaching times? Only four years had then passed since the last coach was driven off these ultimate miles, and yet Maran’s Hotel, the “Royal,” the “Hibernian,” the “Eagle and Child,” and others, were already dismissed among those unmentionable “poor places.” Possibly travellers by coach put up with a great deal more than railway passengers would tolerate. An illuminating side-light on these matters is shed by Jack Williams’ recommendation of the Holyhead inns, quoted by Colonel Birch-Reynardson; and certainly Jack Williams, who drove the Mail between Bangor and Holyhead, should have been an authority.
“Coachman, do you know Holyhead well?” asked a passenger. “Me know Holyhead,” said Jack, who spoke with a strong Welsh accent. “Yes, inteed; I suppose I to; at laste I should to; I’ve lived there all my life. Yes, inteed; I was pred and porn there.” “Then you can tell me, I dare say, which is the best inn; for I want to stay a day or two at Holyhead.” “How should I know the best inn?” said Jack. “Well, if you know Holyhead so well, surely you must know which is the best inn.” “Well, inteed, I know that there’s two inns in Holyhead, but I canna say which is the pest; I never goes to either of ’em.” “Well, but you must know which of them is called the best, and which would be best for a gentleman to stay at.” “Well, inteed,” said Jack, at last, “I’ll tell you how it is. Should you wish to get drunk, go to Spencer’s. Should you wish to get lousey, go to Moland’s.”
“Maran’s” was probably the house meant. As Colonel Birch-Reynardson remarks, it is not likely that the landlord or the landlady would have felt flattered by Jack Williams’ account of what any one going to their house was to expect.
No one need look to match Borrow’s experience at the “Railway Hotel,” where “Boots” was a poet and critic of poets. “In those days,” says Borrow, “there never was such a place for poets as Anglesey; one met a poet, or came upon the birthplace of a poet, everywhere.” Every one is now a great deal more matter-of-fact, and railway and steam packet time-tables, are the forms of literature best known to the modern hotel staff.
Holyhead, in short, is but a dependency of the London and North-Western Railway, and wakes up only at those intervals when the steamers and the trains arrive. Then, just as though it were an ingenious mechanical toy of a larger growth, like those that used to be—perhaps are now—at the Crystal Palace, and as though the necessary penny had dropped into the mechanism, everything begins to work furiously. Trains roll in, electric lights glare coldly from tall standards in the docks, mountains of luggage are shot out upon platforms or quay walls; porters, sailors, passengers, newsboys, and a miscellaneous crowd rush back and forth, just after the fashion of those little clockwork mannikins in the glass cases. Then the whistles of the steamer or train blow; the passengers are all aboard, the porters trundle their trucks back whence they came, the crowd disperses, the newsboys end in the midst of their shouting, and out go the lights; all as though the machine had done its allotted task, but would begin it all over again if another coin were forthcoming.
Some day, when the oft-discussed project is realised of making Holyhead, instead of Liverpool, the terminus of the trans-Atlantic voyage, the melancholy wastes surrounding the town will be built upon or excavated for docks. Even now, a large proportion of the American passenger traffic comes this way: travellers landing from the great liners at Queenstown saving time and escaping the tedious up-channel voyage and delays at Liverpool by taking train from Queenstown for Dublin, and so across to Holyhead.
More than five millions sterling have been sunk in harbour, lighthouse, and railway works at this bleak port. Close under the sheltering hills behind the town are the original harbour and the railway company’s improvements upon it; and away in the distance the great breakwater of the Harbour of Refuge, that occupied twenty-eight years in building, and was completed in 1873. The breakwater stretches half way across Holyhead Bay, a distance of nearly a mile and a half, with a lighthouse at its seaward end; the greater lighthouses of the Skerries, seven miles away, and the South Stack, on the other side of Holyhead Mountain, guarding the approaches to this perilous coast.
LVIII
But to end the Holyhead Road in the mean streets of Holyhead, or by merely tracing Telford’s modern highway, would be to conclude on a very feeble and inadequate note. Fortunately, the “old post road” across Anglesey still remains. It is three miles longer than Telford’s, and is especially interesting because it affords an excellent means of seeing with our own eyes what were the difficulties travellers had to contend with in the days before road reform. The twists and turns, and hills and hollows, remain just as they were, but as the road is still in use as a means of communication between several villages, with one town midway, the surface, it is safe to assume, is in better condition than in old times. It branches off to the right from the modern road, half a mile beyond Menai Bridge, and gives a taste of its quality at the outset, in making straight for a steep hill. Having climbed this, and passed through Braint and Ceint, up and down and to right and left, it climbs the hill of Penmynydd, whose very name is significant. Here the stage-coaches and the mails were accustomed to be overturned, and it was at sight of this portion of the road that some London coachmen, imported to work this stage, threw up their engagement and went home again. Travellers were not so much interested in Penmynydd being the historic place whence sprang the Tydyrs (“Tiddir” in the Welsh pronunciation and “Tudor” in English), as they were concerned in getting over the ground without broken bones; and the horsemen who preceded coach-travelling looked dismayed in each other’s faces at such a wild spot as this; reassured, however, on descending the rough and stony hill by a sight of a gallows that then overhung the roadway. Cheered by this evidence of law and order extending to the uttermost verge of the land, they removed their hands from their pistol holsters and spurred onward with renewed assurance.
Llangefni, beyond Penmynydd, has grown into a town since those times, with a big “Bull” hotel. At Gwyndû or Glanyrafon, half-way across the Island, an old coachman, not so handy as most of his fellows, failed to steer so neatly as he should between the great stones that in the good old days lay loosely about the road; with the result that the jolt knocked him off his box and he suffered a broken leg. Gwyndû in those times was a noted inn. It is now, like many another, a farmhouse, and all the historian can glean of its history is found in the fugitive notes of century-old tourists. Thus, a Mr. Hucks, pedestrianising in 1795, says he dined at Gwyndû inn, and that the hostess, a “fine old lady,” paid him and his companion “the utmost attention, and appeared particularly solicitous; gave us her blessing at our departure, with a thousand admonitions not to lose ourselves,” which of course they did. Rain and storm beset them, and they gladly quitted the “inauspicious island.”