The embattled walls which surround the town are coeval with the castle, and drawn in the form of a British harp, like those encompassing Caernarvon. The design and style of the castle however are wholly different, and most happily suited to its bold position. The ground plan is nearly in form a parallelogram. Two sides of the castle rise from a steep rock, washed by the tide water of a little creek that runs up along the town walls, and by the flood of the Conway river. The exterior presents to view eight noble circular towers, from the walls of which issue slender machiolated turrets, giving a singular lightness to the whole design, and connected by massive embattled curtains. A long wall formerly extended from the southern angle of the castle into the river, terminated by a little water tower, used to obstruct the passage of enemies, and facilitate the landing of their friends. The principal entrance, which is tolerably perfect, was by a drawbridge thrown across a deep fosse, concealed within a barbacan. The interior is divided into two distinct parts, an outer and an inner court, the entrance to the latter impassable by more than one person at a time, and that by the permission of those within. Around the outer courtyard were the apartments of the garrison, the chapel, great hall, &c.: the inner area was encompassed by the apartments of the royal founder and his household. The walls of a small chamber, still entire, with an open ornamented casement, bear the name of the Queen’s Oriel, and appear, from a poem of the age in which it was erected, to have been the ladies’ dressing-room. At the south-western extremity, beyond the royal apartments, a broad terrace is raised above the river upon a ledge of solid rock; from this, as from the oriel, a view of the adjacent country is enjoyed, intersected by cultivated hills, between which and the castle the Conway is seen to roll his flood, passing beneath the broad waterway afforded by a beautiful suspension bridge, which, from the appropriateness of style, seems an appendage of the ancient pile. A curious proof is here afforded of the excellence of masonry in the early ages. Although the castle appears identified with the rock from which it springs, a separation has taken place in one instance; neither has this occurred from the disintegration of the walls, which hang out beyond the base of the broken tower, it is the rock itself that has crumbled away.
There are many historic events of deep interest connected with the story of this warrior pile. Like the artist of the brazen bull, Edward was the first who was necessitated to make trial of the sufficiency of his new state prison. Here he was besieged and nearly reduced by famine, and only rescued from such a critical situation by the providential arrival of a fleet with supplies. This was also the appointed rendezvous of forty thousand loyalists who attached themselves to the fortunes of King Richard the Second, and were destined to check the career of Bolingbroke. Here Percy and King Richard held an interview, from which it would appear that the unhappy prince mistrusted his faithful friends; for, secretly withdrawing from Conway, he put himself into the hands of Northumberland, at Flint, by whom he was betrayed into the power of his rival. Amongst its different vicissitudes Conway Castle was once converted into a public treasury, and discharged its trust with honour and good fortune. In the civil wars of King Charles’s time, being held by Dr. Williams, archbishop of York, for the king, the country gentlemen entrusted to his Grace’s keeping their title deeds, plate, and most valuable moveables. This trust he cheerfully undertook and made himself entirely responsible for their value by giving to each depositor a personal receipt. In the May of 1645, Prince Rupert was appointed governor of the castle, and by his order Sir John Owen was substituted for the archbishop in the guardianship of the valuables lodged within. Sir John constantly evading the archbishop’s applications on the subject of the deposit, the prelate, to avoid his own ruin, and seeing no prospect of a return to regal government, joined the Parliamentarians, assisted Mytton in the reduction of the castle, and having again got into possession of those treasures for which he had pledged himself, restored them uninjured to the respective owners. For these services parliament granted him a free pardon and a release from all his sequestrations. The singular beauty of this fortress appears to have obtained for it not only the admiration but the respect of the ruin-making conquerors of the seventeenth century; but being at last granted by Charles the Second to Lord Conway, while it was still roofed and perfect, that gothic personage dismantled the entire structure, and sold the lead, iron, timber, and all other disposable materials which could be easily separated.
The suspension bridge at Conway is thrown from the foot of the southern tower to a small island in the river, the suspension piers corresponding in design with the rounders of the castle occasion little interruption to the harmony of the whole, and reduce it to a mere question of taste, whether the bridge be not an appropriate accession to the scene, and the very drawbridge of the castle.
BEDDGELERT.
The village of Beddgelert, the Goodesberg of Cambria, is situated on a little plain reposing amidst wild and awful mountains, and adorned by the conflux of two bright streams, the Glaslyn and the Colwyn. The agreeable and fascinating character of the scene is more immediately and vividly impressed upon the traveller who approaches it from the Caernarvon hills. After traversing a wild heathy district, and coasting along the banks of many gloomy lakes, the little village of Beddgelert, in the centre of a verdant mead, with its cheerful accompaniments of inhabitation, breaks suddenly on the view amidst all the horrors of untamed nature. No situation could be more happily chosen for the inspiration of religious meditation, or more wisely selected for the maintenance of an institution of human beings, in a region so savage and unproductive as this must have been when the vale was occupied by a college of monks. The village consists of a few huts coarsely and substantially built, deriving all their charms from the beauty of their position, a handsome inn, embosomed high in tufted trees, and the old parish church. Moel Hebog, or the hill of the falcon, known in the world of elegant literature as “Lord Lyttleton’s Hill,” hangs over the valley on the opposite side to the village, and at its base was discovered, in the year 1784, a Roman shield of a circular shape, and formed of thin brass.
The church, which is dedicated to St. Mary, was anciently conventual, and belonged to a priory of Augustines, conjectured to be also of the class called Gilbertines. The regulations of this last order permitted the residence of men and women beneath the same roof, their convents being separated by a wall; and this opinion receives some support from the circumstances of a tract of land adjoining the church being known to this day by the appellation of “The Nun’s Meadow,” in Welsh Dol y Lleian. Beddgelert is the oldest monastic establishment in North Wales, Bardsey excepted. Llewellyn the Great, who commenced his reign in 1184, appears to have bestowed upon it certain grants of land, and David ap Llewellyn granted others which were afterwards resumed, an investigation establishing the property of them to have been originally in Tudor ap Madoc, and not in the reigning prince. Besides many granges in Caernarvon and Anglesea, an allowance of fifty cows and twenty-two sheep, the Prior had a certain tithe or proportion of bees, or rather of their honey and wax. It is extremely probable that all the preceding were not intended for the sustenance of the few religious of this house, but for the maintenance and extension of a liberal hospitality to all persons travelling this way from North to South Wales, and England to Ireland. Mead was the favourite drink of those times, the nectar of that age, whence the veneration in which bees were held of so vain a character, that the priests fabled them to have been blessed by the Almighty at their departure from Paradise, and that therefore no mass ought to be celebrated but by the light of wax. This conceit is mentioned in the laws of Howel Dda. A farther and rather substantial testimony of the hospitality practised here in by-gone days, was afforded in the existence of a pewter drinking mug, capable of containing about two quarts, which remained until within a very few years in an old tenement called the Prior’s House. Any traveller who could grasp the Beddgelert pint with one hand, when filled with good ale (cwrw dda) and quaff it at a single draught, was entitled to the liquor gratis. The tenant was to charge the value to the lord of the manor, who deducted the amount from the ensuing rent. It was also for the further continuance of such an useful hospitality that Edward the First munificently repaired the damages which the convent had sustained by an accidental fire in 1283; and Bishop Anian granted indulgences to other benefactors. At the dissolution of monasteries the revenues of Beddgelert were estimated at seventy pounds, Edward Conway was its last Prior, and its lands in Caernarvonshire were granted to the Bodvells.
Here are interred two eminent bards, Rhys Gôch Eryri, who flourished about the year 1420, and Dafydd Nanmor, whose death is placed in 1460. The poet attributes the foundation of Beddgelert church to a later date, and to a different prince, and rests his proof upon the following tradition. Llewellyn the Great came to reside here, during the hunting season, accompanied by his princess and their children; and one day while the family were abroad a fierce wolf was seen to approach the palace. The prince, upon his return from the chase, was met at his entrance by his faithful dog Gelert all smeared with blood, though still using his accustomed indications of happiness upon seeing his master. Llewellyn alarmed ran with haste into the nursery, and there finding the cradle overturned and the floor stained with blood, concluded that Gelert had been the destroyer of his child, and drawing his sword instantly plunged it into the heart of his favourite dog. But upon restoring the cradle to its proper position the infant was discovered wrapped confusedly in the clothing, and a monstrous wolf lying dead by its side. Llewellyn, says tradition, immediately erected a church upon the spot, in thankfulness to God, and placed a tomb over the remains of poor Gelert, who lies buried in the centre of the valley, called from that day Beddgelert, or Gelert’s Grave. This interesting tale forms the subject of the following pleasing ballad, by the Hon. W. R. Spencer—
The spearman heard the bugle sound,
And cheerly smiled the morn,
And many a brach and many a hound
Attend Llewellyn’s horn.
And still he blew a louder blast,
And gave a louder cheer,
“Come, Gelert, why art thou the last
Llewellyn’s horn to hear?
“Oh where does faithful Gelert roam?
The flower of all his race:
So true, so brave, a lamb at home,
A lion in the chase.”