Under the fort of Rauran, mossy hoar,
From whence the River Dee, as silver clean,
His tumbling billows rolls with gentle roar;
There all my days he trained me up in virtuous lore.”
But, apart from legend, Caer Gai touches history itself. From its well-preserved ramparts and “fosse,” or moat, enclosing what is now a farm-house, we see that it must have once been a Roman fortress. Roman urns have been dug up here, and not very many years ago a ploughman turned up a stone with an inscription that showed it must have been placed there by Roman soldiers about A.D. 105.
Leaving Llyn Tegid, or Bala Lake, behind us, we set off down our river to Corwen and Llangollen. These places we have already visited, so we will only stay to notice the lovely scenery of this part of the Dee, so dear to fishers. Not far from where the river bends north-east to Chester and the sea, stands Chirk Castle, and near by, in order to reach it from Llangollen, we shall pass the line of Offa’s Dyke, a bank with a moat below it that ran from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Wye, which was erected by a King of Mercia in the eighth century as a barrier beyond which no Welshman might pass.
For the rest of its course, therefore, the Dee really forms part of the boundary-line between England and Wales, and though we shall be sorely tempted to linger when we come to the beautiful old city of Chester, gazing down from its ancient walls upon the broad river below, we must remind ourselves that this is English soil, and leave the sacred waters of the Dee to empty themselves by a very long estuary into the sea some miles below Flint Castle, the last refuge of the unhappy Richard II. before he gave himself into the hands of Bolingbroke.
CHAPTER X
A PEEP AT PEMBROKE
To-day we will leave North Wales and travel south to take a glimpse at Pembrokeshire, in some ways one of the most interesting counties in Wales.