The shrine of St. David, or Dewi, the Water-drinker, the patron saint of Wales, is within, and with him lies the honour of transferring the seat of the Archbishopric from its more ancient site at Caerleon in Monmouthshire to this spot. St. David, said by one legend to have been uncle to King Arthur, became famous by a miracle that occurred in the sixth century, when he addressed a great meeting of the Fathers of the early Christian Church, and laid low the false doctrines of one Pelagius, or Morgan, who was leading the Christians of Britain and other lands astray.
As the saint, then Abbot of St. Patrick’s Monastery, where now stands the present cathedral, addressed a crowd composed of “the saints of Anjou, the saints of England, and of the North, of Man and Anglesey, of Ireland and Devonshire and Kent,” and of many other places, a white dove descended from heaven upon his shoulder. “Upon which the ground on which he was standing,” says the legend, “gradually rose under him, till it became a hill, from which his voice, like a loud-sounding trumpet, was clearly heard and understood by all, both near and far off, seven thousand people, on the top of which hill a church was afterwards built, and stands till this day.”
This happened farther north at Llandewi-brefi, but it was this miracle that placed the see of the Archbishopric to which St. David was at once raised, in Menevia, as this lonely district was called, instead of at Caerleon, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Merlin: “Menevia shall put on the pall of Caerleon.”
CHAPTER XI
THE VALLEY OF THE WYE
To-day let us take a journey up the course of the Upper Wye, loveliest of Welsh rivers, from the point where it crosses the border between England and Wales.
The course of the Upper Wye begins just below the ruins of Clifford Castle, one of the many built upon the “Marches,” or borderland, nominally to keep the Welshmen within bounds, actually to shelter the robber-barons who gained their livelihood by harassing the country on either side. The grey stones of Clifford, covered now with a wealth of ivy, speak to us of that “fair Rosamond” with whom King Henry II. fell so deep in love that he took the maiden from her father’s house and made her a bower at Godstow. There, as we all know, she was forced by Eleanor, his jealous wife, to drink a cup of poison, and never again saw the sunny banks of the Wye.
As the river sweeps along its curving course, the slopes of the Black Mountains rise in a broken mass of hill and dale and heathery upland. A touch of wildness distinguishes the country from the tamer fields of Herefordshire behind us, and rough hills, whitewashed farms, roofed with brown stone slabs and heavy beams, take the place of the comfortable and spacious manors of the English county.
This part of the Wye Valley, divided by the Black Mountains from that of the Usk, is, indeed, one of the most complete solitudes to be found in the country, rivalling that of Menevia itself. “What a wild little block of mountain it is, this eighty square miles of complete solitude!” says a traveller of the hill country between the two rivers. “How dark, and deep, and sombre the gorges! How silent the hills, where grouse lie fairly thick in the big tracts of heather! How striking the blush of the red sandstone against the greener slope, where the teeth or tread of hungry sheep and the downward rush of streams have scarred the mountain-side!”
Presently a spur from these hills stretches out across our valley, and the river turns north-west and changes its character from a broad, easy flow to a rushing torrent, with here and there a deep salmon pool among the rocks of its course. This is a very famous part of the river from the fisherman’s point of view, and few save tramps and fishermen are to be met with on the lonely valley road which we are now pursuing.