Of her enragéd stepdame Guendolen,”
and therefore connected for ever with Milton’s exquisite lyric, “Sabrina fair.” This is the “glassy, cool, translucent wave” beneath which the goddess sits; this is “the rushy-fringéd bank” from which—they say—she still sometimes rises at twilight; and here are the cowslips on which she sets “her printless feet” so lightly that they “bend not as she treads.”
Between Llandinam and Llanidloes the scene begins to grow wilder; abrupt hills bare, or patched with gorse, rise from the roadside on our left; we are drawing nearer to the slopes of Plynlimmon. At Llanidloes there is a picturesque old market-place, and the church, founded in the seventh century, has some interesting and beautiful fragments from the Abbey of Cwm Hir; a row of fine Early English arches and some quaint figures on the beams that support the roof.
At Llanidloes we leave the banks of the Severn, and, climbing all the way, pass through a prettily wooded gorge into the valley of another famous river—the river that is more renowned for beauty than any other in England—the Wye. But here at Llangurig the Wye has few charms, for we are at the foot of bleak Plynlimmon, and the river flows through a somewhat dull country that is neither fertile nor wild. Llangurig itself is a desolate, chilly little place, but it has a nice inn; and I believe the fishing is good. About eight miles beyond it we leave the Wye, now a mere mountain stream, at a point that is only four miles from its source, and after this the scenery grows more and more austere, as we skirt the bare sides of Plynlimmon.
Upon those wind-swept slopes the red dragon of Wales was once unfurled; for here Owen Glyndwr, with only five hundred men, was surprised and surrounded by fifteen hundred of the Flemings of Pembrokeshire. He cut his way through them, and left two hundred of them behind him, and left behind him, too, an unshakable belief that he was a wizard indeed.
These heights are not without grandeur. At one point, indeed, there is a very striking and unusual view, where the road is high upon the hillside, and the river, very far below, twists and curls away into the distance through a narrow but extremely level plain. The surface of this main road to Aberystwith is above reproach, but after we turn off to the left on the road to the Devil’s Bridge it is not so good and there are some rather steep hills.
“If pleasant recollections,” says George Borrow, “do not haunt you through life of the noble falls, and the beautiful wooded dingles to the west of the Bridge of the Evil One, and awful and mysterious ones of the monks’ boiling cauldron, the long, savage, shadowy cleft, and the grey, crumbling, spectral bridge, I say boldly that you must be a very unpoetical person indeed.”
The falls, and the wooded dingles, and the monks’ boiling cauldron are still beautiful enough to rouse any poetical feelings that we may possess; but the bridge, alas! is neither crumbling, nor spectral, nor in the least poetical. Three bridges now span the rushing waters of the Mynach, built closely one above the other. The lowest of all, dapper and shining with the cement of the restorer, is the original bridge built by the monks of Strata Florida in the eleventh century and ascribed to the Devil, not from any uncomplimentary feeling towards the monks, but merely because the bridging of the Mynach was no easy matter and demanded a simple explanation. The bridge above this is the one that Borrow calls modern, though it was built in 1735, and now looks older than the first; the topmost and newest of all is quite a recent achievement, and might well appropriate the name of the original structure, since it entirely destroys all the picturesqueness of the scene. No doubt, however, its existence is necessary, for this is the only way across the gorge: and these beautiful wooded hills and deep valleys, with the two tempestuous streams, the Rheiddol and the Mynach, are by no means dependent for their charm on the famous bridge.
The road from this spot to Aberystwith is of a most striking and uncommon character. It is raised high on one side of the bare hill, and overlooks a deep valley, through which the Rheiddol twists and curves. The great hills beyond the valley are richly green in summer, but in the spring are chiefly reddish brown, with streaks of the vivid larch, and here and there a shining patch of gorse. A run of twelve miles, mostly downhill, brings us to Aberystwith.
At the first glance, seen from a distance, it is not unpicturesque. It lies at the end of a valley, with the sea beyond it, and in the heart of it the castle tower stands up conspicuously to remind one that Aberystwith was once something more interesting than a popular watering-place. For once all the resources of England were combined in an attack upon this castle. Guns came from Yorkshire, and timber from the Forest of Dean; huge supplies of arms and various murderous concoctions were sent from Hereford, and a shipload of carpenters landed in the bay to turn the timber into machines of war. There was not a young spark in the country, apparently, but thought it incumbent on him as a man of fashion to join Prince Hal outside the walls of Aberystwith.