A few years ago we should have been obliged, having once passed Criccieth, to spend the night at Pwllheli; but now we shall do well if we rather choose Nevin for our stopping-place. A nice new hotel has been built there—a hotel with no foolish pretensions, but evidently with every intention of gradually becoming a thoroughly comfortable abiding-place for golfers who like quietness. The little town lies close under the shelter of the hills, and between it and the sea is the flat land of the Morfa Nevin, where Edward I. gathered all the chivalry of England and many a foreign noble to celebrate his conquest of Wales in a great tournament.
Nevin is threatened with the railway, which, if it actually approaches the place, will certainly spoil it; but it will be long, I imagine, before any intrusion of that kind disturbs the peace or injures the beauty of little Aberdaron. It is an elect spot, this End of the World in Wales; more remote, less visited than St. David’s, and infinitely less famous; yet once trodden, like St. David’s, by the weary feet of countless pilgrims. For just beyond that low headland on our right is sacred Bardsey, the Island of the Saints, where lies the dust of twenty thousand holy men. St. Mary’s Abbey, of which some fragments still are left, was founded in such early days that Dubritius, who crowned King Arthur and then resigned the See of Caerleon to St. David, came to end his day in this remote monastery; and so holy was the soil at last that every monk in Wales crossed this dangerous channel to kneel upon it. It was here, from these wide, white sands of Aberdaron, that they embarked, half trembling, half inspired—white-robed Cistercians and sombre Benedictines—and here, in this little church between the hills and the sea, that they spent the night on their knees before braving dangers that were not by any means imaginary. The building has been re-roofed and much restored, but these are the very walls within which the pilgrims prayed, the very walls that once gave sanctuary to any man, innocent or guilty, who sought their shelter. The blind wall on the north bears witness to the early British origin of the church.
And we must not forget, as we stand thinking of the pilgrim monks on the shore, that this sheltered, isolated corner, hidden closely by the hills on the one side and protected by the long headlands on the other, was once visited by secular history. Into this bay sailed Hotspur’s father, the base Northumberland, from France, and from Harlech came Owen Glyndwr and Edmund Mortimer; and here in the house of the lord of Aberdaron they swore to be thenceforward “bound by the bond of a true league and true friendship and sure and good union,” and to act in all ways as became “good true and faithful friends to good true and faithful friends.”
The fascinations of the Bay of Aberdaron, however, must not blind us to the fact that the finest scenery in the Peninsula, of Lleyn, is in the north. From Pwllheli we should drive across to Llanaellraiarn under the great brow of Yr Eifl, and then, turning to the right, follow the road between the wild, craggy hills and the sea to Clynnogfawr. Here lived and died the great St. Beuno, and the church that bears his name is of a size and importance quite unusual in so tiny a place: “almost as bigge as St. Davides,” says Leland. This large church only dates from the fifteenth century, but the little chapel where St. Beuno is buried is connected with it by a covered way, and was founded by the saint himself in the seventh century. His tomb was still to be seen in Pennant’s day, and had the gift of working miracles, but now both monument and miracles are no more. In the larger church is carefully preserved a strange old chest that is said to have belonged to St. Beuno.
To reach the Traeth Mawr from Clynnog our best way is to go on to Pont-y-Croes, then strike across to Pen-y-Groes, and thence descend to Tremadoc. There is not much to be said in favour of this road’s surface, but the beauty of it increases every moment, and for the last few miles, as we drop gently down on to that plain of gorse that lies like a sheet of flame between two ranges of purple mountains, we have as fine a sight above, below, and before us as any we shall find in Wales. A few minutes later we are in Portmadoc, and from the long embankment there look up the valley of the Glaslyn across the Traeth Mawr to that gate of Gwynedd through which we came a little while ago.
Presently we cross the estuary of the river Dwryd by a toll-bridge. I think this river-bank must be the scene of a touching incident described by Giraldus. He and his Archbishop, recruiting for the Crusades, were met “at the passage of a bridge” between the Traeth Mawr and Llanbedr near Harlech by Meredyth ap Conan, a prince of this country. He brought with him a large suite, and then and there by the river-side the Archbishop preached to them, and “many persons were signed with the Cross.” Among these ardent souls was a personal friend of the young prince. Meredyth, seated higher on the bank than his suite, looked on while the symbolic cross was sewn upon the cloaks of the new crusaders, till it came to the turn of his own friend. Then Meredyth, says Giraldus, “observing that the cloak on which the cross was to be sewn was of too thin and too common a texture, with a flood of tears threw him down his own.”
From the banks of the Dwryd a very level road soon brings us within sight of Harlech. It is a very distant glimpse of it that we have first; an irregular outline, a grey mass of towers standing out against the sky, raised grandly upon a rock above a plain that is nearly as flat as the sea beyond it. Then trees hide it, and we climb through the woods to the level of the great gate before which so many armies have stood before us—armies of Owen and of Henry, of Edward IV., and of Oliver.
NEAR BEDD GELERT.
