From St. Donat’s we may rejoin the main road at Bridgend; but in this country, where good accommodation is not always to be found, it is well to know that there is a very nice modern hotel at Southerndown, with the Channel and the Exmoor coast in front of it and the trees and Castle of Dunraven near at hand. The actual building of Dunraven is new, but a castle has stood on the same spot for many generations, through many tragedies. In Henry VIII.’s reign the lord of Dunraven, Boteler, or Butler, lost all his children but one on the same day. He saw them die, perhaps, for the windows of his castle looked out across the waters that drowned them. Only one girl was left, and through her Dunraven passed to the Vaughans, who do not always seem to have made a good use of its position. For in Tenby Church lies the dust of a certain Walter of that house, who figures darkly in one of those moral tales—one might almost call them tracts—of which one occasionally hears in actual life. In Walter’s day, which was also the day of Queen Mary, these shores of Dunraven twinkled with treacherous lights, which lured unwary ships to the shore, causing their complete destruction and the great enrichment of the lord of the manor. At last, after years of this villainy, he was waiting one night for the fruits of his labours, waiting while the doomed ship was shaken to pieces and the bodies of her crew were one by one washed ashore. The last body that came was that of his own sailor-son.
Whether we approach Bridgend from Llantwit or from Southerndown, we shall see on our right the embattled tower of Ewenny among the trees. The restored conventual buildings of this very ancient Benedictine Priory are now a private house, but by leaving the high-road we may pass the fortified gateway that once stood between the monks and their enemies. There is no finer example, I believe, of a monastery that is also a castle, and no doubt it is partly owing to the strength of its defences that the Priory of Ewenny still stands in its original Norman austerity, not as a picturesque ruin, but as a parish church. With the exception of one or two Tudor windows, it is pure Norman throughout, very simple, very dignified; and it is still divided, according to ancient custom, into two separate churches that were used respectively by the monastery and the parish at large. The founder, whose beautiful tomb is wonderfully well preserved, was Maurice de Londres, whose name we shall meet again in a less amiable connection at Kidwelly. A great deal has been done in the way of restoring and preserving Ewenny by its owners, the ancient lords of Coity, whose great castle lies in ruins a few miles away. The Norman marchers of their house, it is said, set out to win the lands of Coity by force of arms, but seeing the fair daughter of the Welshman who owned them, he was himself won, and never a blow was struck, for Coity became his by marriage. How much of this story is true I do not know, but it is certainly true that his descendants have lived within a few miles of the spot from that day to this.
At Bridgend we rejoin the road that we left so reluctantly at Cowbridge, and soon, on the right, we pass the hills of Margam, at whose foot are the fragments of a famous Cistercian abbey, more celebrated, we are told, for its charitable deeds than any of that Order in Wales; while on the left there stretch between us and the sea the dreary sands that long ago buried—“shokid and devourid”—the castle and lands of Kenfig. The hills, cleft here and there with deep wooded valleys, are every moment drawing nearer; a strip of glittering sea appears beyond the sands, and beyond that again are the Mumbles. For a little time the masts of Aberavon rise picturesquely on the skyline, but they are too soon replaced by the chimneys of Briton Ferry.
EWENNY PRIORY.
NEATH ABBEY.
It was here that the travellers of old days used to ford the river Neath. It was a dangerous ford, famous for its quicksands. Wherefore a certain twelfth-century bishop of St. David’s, being of a prudent temperament and desirous to cross, selected one of his minor clergy to ford the river before him, a “chaplain of those parts,” who had lately incurred the bishop’s displeasure, and had been suspended. The chaplain meekly consented; took the bishop’s best horse for the purpose; crossed in safety, and forthwith rode away. And it was only when the bishop restored the cure that the chaplain restored the horse.
This pleasant little story, recalled by the name of the ugly smoky town of Briton Ferry, will help us through the dismal streets that lead to Neath.
Neath itself is not an attractive town. Its abbey to Leland “semid the fairest abbay in al Wales.” To-day it is perhaps the most pathetic. During its last and most splendid days a Welsh bard sang of it and of the monks who lived in it; sang of its towers and cloisters, and coloured windows and princely shields; of its columns of blue marble and of the painted archangels on its roof. It was just at this time that it seemed to Leland so fair, that is to say just before Leland’s employer, Henry VIII., silenced the “peaceful songs of praise” of its white monks for ever. Even now we can guess at its past splendour, for though the blue marble and the archangels are gone, the crypt still has its vaulted roof, and through the heavy ivy there are fragments visible of the gleaming white stone with which it was once faced. It stands, unspeakably desolate, on the low, squalid outskirts of the town, amid a waste of scrap-iron and nettles and rubbish; but when Edward II. came to beg for a night’s lodging under its roof, when Neath was little more than a village and a castle, and there were no shunting, shrieking trains between the abbey and the hills, this must indeed have seemed a beautiful refuge for a tired, hunted king.