It is not an especially attractive place. The neighbourhood of the lake is of course pleasant, but the hotel—which, by the way, like many Welsh inns, contains some lovely old furniture—looks out over the street. The scenery of the lake is pretty rather than grand.
Bala must have been more interesting, I think, in Pennant’s day. It must certainly have presented an appearance all its own; for he assures us that the entire population—men, women, and children—spent all their time in knitting stockings. They knitted in their doorways, they knitted as they walked about the streets, and on fine days they sat together on the tumulus at the end of the town, and knitted there. On Saturdays the fruit of all this industry was sold, to the value of four or five hundred pounds, in a special stocking-market. This must have been a sight worth seeing.
We may still see the Tomen-y-Bala, the tumulus where the knitters used to sit and sun themselves, and where, very long ago, a little castle stood. The mound has been made very neat, with gravel paths and rhododendrons; and by paying a small sum we may climb to its modest summit and give a thought to the Romans who made the tumulus, and the Britons who made the castle, and the past generations who made stockings.
Leaving Bala, we may follow the Dee to Corwen, and there join the great London and Holyhead road; and this is by far the simplest route we can choose.
The route we should certainly not choose is the so-called road from Bala to Lake Vyrnwy, the reservoir of Liverpool. The scenery round this lake is very beautiful, it is true, and an excellent hotel stands high on the hillside above the water; and since there is no railway among these wild hills, this is one of the places that show the uses of the motor-car most strikingly. But Vyrnwy should be approached from Shropshire, by way of Llanfyllin. The road that connects it with Bala is a narrow, precipitous pass, cut on the side of a slope that is at some points almost a precipice, unprotected by any kind of fence, sloping downwards on the outer side, and crossed at short intervals by natural water-channels. It is a discouraging picture, and the reality is, to put it mildly, uncomfortable.
As an alternative to the Corwen road we may cross the Holy Dee at the very spot where the “wizard stream,” as Milton calls it—that stream that had the gift of prophesying good or evil fortune to the cause of Wales—flows from the parent waters of Llyn Tegid or Bala Lake, and following a mountain road of many “dangerous” hills, visit the waterfall at Llanrhaiadr before we pass into Shropshire.
The fall is at a lonely spot about four miles beyond the village of Llanrhaiadr, which is itself a pretty place with a nice inn. The road that leads to Pistyll-y-Rhaiadr is little more than a lane, but one may drive up almost to the very foot of the fall. “Prodigious high,” says the letter-writer I have so often quoted: “and seemingly the hend of the world.” There is really some excuse for this dramatic statement. An abrupt mass of rock rises before us impassably. On each side of it are pine-woods, climbing the craggy slopes. There is an air of finality about the place: it is “seemingly the hend of the world.”