Alas! for the frustrated purpose of Messrs. Rowlandson and Wigstead, Tan-y-Bwlch could not, or would not, receive them, and they had no choice but to journey three more long Welsh miles to Festiniog in the rain. It sometimes rains in Wales, and when it does, it rarely knows when to leave off.
Arrived there, they almost passed the inn, in the gathering darkness, mistaking it for a barn or an outhouse; and when they made to enter, they were confronted by an extraordinary landlady with the appearance of one of the three witches in Macbeth.
“Could they have beds?”
Reluctantly she said they could, telling them (what we know to be true enough) that she supposed they only came there because there was no accommodation at Tan-y-Bwlch.
The travellers made no reply to that damning accusation, and hid their incriminating blushes in the congenial gloom of the fast-falling night. It was a situation in which, if you come to consider it, no wise man would give “back answers.” You have a landlady who, for the proverbial two pins, or even less, would cast you forth; and when so thrust into the inhospitable night, you have seventeen mountainous miles to go, in a drenching rain, before any other kind of asylum is reached.
Wigstead remarks that they “were not a little satisfied at being under any kind of roof,” and the words seem woefully inadequate to the occasion.
There were no chops that night for supper, nor chickens; and they fed, with what grace they could summon up, on a “small leg of starved mutton and a duck,” which, by the scent of them, had been cooked a fortnight. For sauce they had hunger only.
“Our bedrooms,” says Wigstead, “were most miserable indeed: the rain poured in at every tile in the ceiling,” and the sheets were literally wringing wet; so that, in Wigstead’s elegant phrasing, they “thought it most prudent to sacrifice to Somnus in our own garments, between blankets”: which may perhaps be translated, into everyday English, to mean that they slept in their own clothes.
They saw strange sights on that wild tour, and, in the course of their hazardous travels through the then scarcely civilised interior of the Principality, came to the “pleasant village” of Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, where they found a “decent inn” in whose kitchen they remarked a dog acting as turnspit. That the dogs so employed did not particularly relish the work is evident in Wigstead’s remark: “Great care must be taken that this animal does not observe the cook approach the larder. If he does, he immediately hides himself for the remainder of the day,” acting, in fact, like a professional “unemployed” when offered a job!
A familiar sight in the kitchen of any considerable inn of the long ago was the turnspit dog, who, like the caged mouse or squirrel with his recreation-wheel, revolved a kind of treadwheel which, in this instance, was connected with apparatus for turning the joints roasting at the fire, and formed not so much recreation as extremely hard work. The dogs commonly used for this purpose were of the long-bodied, short-legged, Dachshund type.