INTERIOR OF LLANTHONY PRIORY, SHOWING THE EAST END.
TINTERN ABBEY.
The beautiful valley, with its great, bare hilltops and mysterious woods, its loneliness and calm, its memories of saintly men, attracted a poet of the last century so strongly that he, like William de Lacy, determined to stay here. Like de Lacy’s monks, however, Walter Savage Landor could not get on with his neighbours, and after buying the ruins of the Priory and building himself half a house he quarrelled so thoroughly with all the countryside that he thought he would have more peace elsewhere. He lived in the rooms that now form an inn, in the Prior’s Lodge, and here Southey stayed with him.
This run from Monmouth to Llanthony is about twenty-five miles in length. If we are not wedded to the high-road we may return to Monmouth by another route—composed almost entirely of byways and in some cases very hilly ones—and so visit Grosmont and Skenfrith Castles. The red towers of Grosmont stand, as the name implies, on a hill that is not climbed without an effort, and the ruin overlooks a village that was once a town, and indeed is technically a town still. It still possesses a charter, I believe, and a Mayor’s staff; but in the matter of size and prosperity it has been no more than a village since the day when Henry V., then Prince of Wales, wrote to his “most redoubted and most sovereign lord and father” in his “most humble manner” to this effect: “On Wednesday the eleventh day of this present month of March (1405) your rebels of the parts of Glamorgan, Morgannoc, Usk, Netherwent, and Overwent, were assembled to the number of eight thousand men, according to their own account; and they went on the said Wednesday in the morning, and burnt part of your town of Grosmont ... and I immediately sent off my very dear cousin, the Lord Talbot, and the small body of my own household ... who were but a very small force in all.... And there, by the aid of the Blessed Trinity, your people gained the field and vanquished all the said rebels, and slew of them by fair account on the field on their return from the chase, some say eight hundred, and some say a thousand, being questioned on pain of death. Nevertheless, whether it were one or the other, on such an account I would not contend.”
That was a sad day for poor Alice Scudamore, who lived hard by at Kentchurch Court beyond the river Monnow; for Alice Scudamore, or Skydmore, was the daughter of Owen Glyndwr, and the dead men whom Prince Henry left upon the field of Grosmont were Owen’s followers. This defeat was Owen’s first serious disaster, and was for him the beginning of the end. It is said that years later, after the end had come, he lived for a time with his daughter in the castellated tower that still stands below the hill of Grosmont; and, indeed, Kentchurch sometimes claims to be his burial-place. But the claims of Monnington, where another of his daughters lived, are generally thought to be more authentic.
By making a very short detour from the direct road we may see the ruins of Skenfrith Castle on our way back to Monmouth. Even in the seventeenth century this castle was described as having been “decayed time out of the memory of man,” and its remains are now naturally scanty and not especially picturesque. Far more interesting than the castle is the church, with its pretty timbered tower and fine sixteenth-century tombs. At the vicarage is carefully preserved the rarest treasure of this church: a cope that dates from the days before the Reformation.
On the other side of Monmouth, beyond the Wye, is the Forest of Dean, where one may drive for miles through country nearly as grand and quite as thickly wooded as the Black Forest. In most cases the trees are not nearly so fine as those of our own New Forest, for the greater part of this Forest of Dean was cut down to build our victorious fleets of the eighteenth century; but the width of view and the succession of tree-clad hills rising one beyond another, are compensations for the lack of magnificent individual trees. Of these, however, there are a few, such as the Newland Oak and the High Beeches. But on the whole the beauty of Dean Forest lies in its distant views, its great expanses of foliage stretching away from one’s feet to the blue horizon, as at the Speech House and above Parkend, and at many another place; though unfortunately many of these views are partly, if not entirely, spoilt by the black scars and smoking chimneys of the collieries. The Speech House is now a hotel, but it was originally built in Charles II.’s day as a kind of Court House in which to settle disputes connected with the Forest. St. Briavel’s Castle, a few miles further south than this, and nearer the Wye, is a far older relic, for it is said that it once sheltered King John. Be that as it may, the little that is left of this castle is peculiarly attractive. To reach it, or the Speech House, or indeed to drive in the Forest of Dean at all, one must be prepared to encounter long hills with gradients in some places not less than 1 in 7, and roads that have suffered a good deal from the heavy traffic connected with the mines.