Yet the end of all this effort and display was merely comic. Glyndwr’s garrison at last, half starving, agreed to yield the castle upon a certain day unless Owen meanwhile relieved it. The Prince, too hasty, as he sometimes was, went off to London joyfully and received the thanks of Parliament for having secured Aberystwith—at the very moment, had he but known it, when Owen and a relieving force were quietly entering the besieged castle!
This was but one of many sieges suffered by Aberystwith, which was always regarded as a place of much importance; so much so, indeed, that Strongbow’s castle on this spot had been battered into uselessness before the days of Edward I., who had to build another. Prince Henry and Oliver have left little enough of that. What there is of it—some round towers and a piece of the curtain-wall—is more tidy than romantic. To tell the truth, Aberystwith is not a romantic place.
It has been my happy fortune to read some manuscript letters written by a lady from Mid-Wales towards the end of the eighteenth century. This is what she says of Aberystwith—
“I have inquired about Aberystwith, where the Sea is very rough, and no Apothecary near, and most ignorant people in regard to illness, which they are so happy to know nothing of, as the Sea is their ownly Physition.”
This might be useful as a house-agent’s advertisement, if the next sentence were suppressed.
“I think the Sea fogs very unwholesom, but dare not say so, as they are for ever talking about the purity of their air.”
The sea is no longer the only physician at Aberystwith; but the purity of the air is still a topic of conversation.
One of its advantages is that it is only fifteen miles from Ystradfflur or Strata Florida; and though this does not lie upon our route, so short a run is but a slight tribute to pay to a place of such great memories. The drive, moreover, will itself repay us. The road follows the Ystwith most of the way, and crosses it at Trawscoed, where splendid beeches overhang the river and masses of rhododendrons line the banks. There is one formidable hill, with a gradient of 1 in 8, from the top of which there is a fine view of winding river and wooded hills. Soon after leaving the Ystwith we join the Teify near its source.
In the Abbey itself there is little to see, but very much to remember. It was founded in the twelfth century by some Cistercian monks on land given by a Norman; but its foundation is often ascribed to that great prince of South Wales, the Lord Rhys, who was one of its chief benefactors. Once it was the grandest house of worship in all Wales, the burial-place of her southern princes, the depository of her archives; but there is little left to show its past greatness but the unique west doorway and the remains of six side chapels—roofed now with corrugated iron! Behind the south transept is a wedge-shaped strip of ground that was the monks’ cemetery, where, under a stone carved plainly with a cross, lies Cadell, the brother of the Lord Rhys. The large cemetery that holds the dust of eleven Welsh princes is between the Abbey and the river. “The cœmiteri wherin the cunteri about doth buri is veri large,” says Leland, “and meanely waullid with stoone. In it be xxxix great hue trees.” There were originally forty of these yew-trees, and now there are but two or three, so it is hardly likely that one of the survivors should be the tree underneath which Dafydd ap Gwilym, the greatest of Welsh poets, was buried; the tree of which Gruffydd Gryg, his rival, wrote—