We now enter the beautiful chapel erected by Edward Vaughan, the last of the great building prelates of St. Davids. It boasts a handsome fan-vaulted ceiling, and a peculiar hagioscope fashioned like a cross within a circle.
Symbol of the Trinity St. David's.
Some curious details attract our notice as we wander amongst the unrestored chapels. In one of these, a trio of sculptured quadrupeds suggests the idea of the Trinity, while another contains the effigy of a knight in chain-mail, shorn of half its length by a clumsy buttress—a legacy from the days of churchwarden misrule.
Outside the Lady Chapel stood St. Mary's Well, which according to tradition arose at the prayer of St. David to supply the neighbouring monastery. Giraldus tells us that this accommodating spring would sometimes flow with wine, at other times with milk, and that it was the scene of many edifying miracles.
Sauntering around the mellow-tinted walls of the old cathedral, we notice the huge flying buttresses built against its northern side to strengthen the fabric. These rugged bastions, clothed in their luxuriant mantle of ivy, with the crumbling arches of the ruined cloisters hard by, group in a picturesque fashion beneath the central tower, whose broad front, bronzed by the rays of the declining sun, forms a rallying-point for a host of homing jackdaws.
A bowshot westward of the cathedral stand the beautiful ruins of the Bishop's Palace, rising from amidst the rich meadows beside the Allan River. Our route thither lies over the stony way called the Popples, the ancient approach to St. David's Shrine, and traverses the low-arched bridge that superseded the Llechllafar, or Speaking Stone, which in olden times spanned the stream at this point.
Many a curious legend clung around this venerable stone, which Giraldus tells us was even in his time worn hollow by the feet of wayfarers. Tradition avers that Llechllafar was wont to cry out in remonstrance if a corpse was carried across it; and Merlin is said to have foretold that an English king, returning from the conquest of Ireland, was to meet his death upon this spot. So when Henry II. chanced this way, a disappointed suppliant endeavoured to foist this sinister prediction upon him; but the King, having made a suitable oration to the stone, passed over it unharmed to make his orisons before the Shrine of St. David.