It is surprisingly well preserved. This, no doubt, is partly because it has never been overcome by any more destructive agent than the starvation of its garrison. Glyndwr besieged it on its landward side, and his French allies attacked it from the sea; but they made little impression upon it, and finally, since time was precious, they thought it wiser to employ their engines elsewhere more profitably, though the garrison within numbered only twenty-eight men, in sore want of provisions.
Between Carnarvon and the Pass of Llanberis lie ten miles of undulating country. But the mountains are towering before us like an impassable wall, growing ever higher and more formidable as we pass Llyn Padarn and Llanberis town, whence the mountain-railway starts for the summit of Snowdon. No doubt the northern shores of Llyn Padarn and of Llyn Peris, which lies beyond it, were once beautiful; but they are now merely a mass of unsightly débris, mountains of broken slate, terrace above terrace of melancholy grey. The southern shore of Llyn Peris, however, at the very foot of the Pass, has kept its own wild beauty, and on a craggy little hill that rises at the lower end “there is yet a pece of a toure,” as Leland says. A very notable piece of a tower it is too; for Dolbadarn was the very centre and heart and ultimate citadel of Welsh freedom from the earliest days. Here Llewelyn, the third and last, kept his brother a prisoner for twenty-three years, and here Owen Glyndwr hid himself whenever it suited him to elude the English, who invariably lost their way among these mountains. It was here, too, that Owen hid his chief enemy, Lord Grey of Ruthin, who had embroiled him with the King of England and caused all the trouble. But this little square grey “pece of a toure” is far older, they say, than Owen or Llewelyn. It is supposed to have been built by Maelgwyn, the same prince who built that first castle at Deganwy which was rebuilt by Robert of Rhuddlan and King John at such large cost to themselves. Maelgwyn, King of Gwynedd in the sixth century, is one of the forceful characters who stand out here and there conspicuously in the rather bewildering host of Cymric princes; a personable man, according to all accounts, and one of great courage and success in battle, yet not without leanings towards the monastic life. He actually became a monk for a time; but no one can have been greatly surprised when he tired of the constraint and took to soldiering again. On the whole I fear he was a truculent creature, for Taliesin, “chief of the bards of the West,” proclaimed, with the ambiguity common to prophets, that—
“A most strange creature should come from the sea-marsh of Rhianedd
As a punishment of iniquity on Maelgwn Gywnedd,
His hair, his teeth, and his eyes being as gold.”
And Maelgwyn died of the yellow plague.
DOLBADARN CASTLE.
SNOWDON, FROM CAPEL CURIG.