Where the earth extols his praise. Let him rest without a blemish.
The Body of Cyngen, and between them will be the marks.”
Professor Rhys, however, disputes the reading. Cadvan was a son of Gwen of the Three Breasts by her first husband, Æneas of Armorica. Owing to some dynastic revolution he fled with sundry of his cousins and followers to Wales, in the fifth century, and was well received by Cyngen, who gave him lands. Gwen afterwards married one Fragan or Brychan, and went with him to Brittany, where she became the mother of S. Winwalloe, Abbot of Landevennec.
Near the church is S. Cadvan’s Holy Well, now in the yard of a soda-water manufactory, and covered over and disregarded. Formerly it was much resorted to for baths.
From Towyn the Dysynni valley should be ascended to Tal-y-Llyn. The lake occupies the trough of a valley, and is a mile and a quarter long and a quarter of a mile wide, and is one of the most fished lakes in Wales. Although the Dysynni is full of salmon and sewin, these fish do not enter the lake, or, if they do, lose all their sporting instincts. The brooks that feed the lake absolutely swarm with trout, very small, but very delicious; and so the cormorants find them who sit on Craig Aderyn, a magnificent projecting rock down the valley, and dream off their last meal till appetite wakes them and they wing their way, now to fish in the sea and then to go inland for the trout in the lake and its tributaries.
At Towyn there is sea-fishing for others beside cormorants. Good bass angling with a fly can be had where the river enters the sea, and “these somewhat ungainly productions,” says that enthusiastic sportsman Mr. Lloyd Price, “supposed to be the most useful adjuncts to the art, with their red bodies, white and yellow wings, ephemeræ of scorn to the salmon-fishers, display their crude and vulgar proportions in the windows of almost every shop in the town.”
The ascent of Cader Idris can be made from the head of Tal-y-Llyn Lake, and thence the cirque of Cwm Cowarch should be visited, and the wondrous tarn Llyn Caer lying, as it were, at the bottom of a crater.
Near Towyn is Llanegryn, on a height commanding a glorious view, and the church contains a magnificent rood-screen and loft in excellent preservation. In this parish is Peniarth, the house of the Wynns, with its precious legacy of Welsh MSS. The church is crowded with Wynn monuments.
The Wynns are of Irish extraction, deriving from one Osborn Wyddel (the Irishman), who came over in the thirteenth century, and obtained by marriage an estate in Merioneth. He is supposed to have been a junior of the House of the Geraldines, but the evidence is not satisfactory. The family soon became thoroughly Welsh, as far as names go, bearing those of Llewelyn, Gruffydd, Einion, Iorwerth, and quartering the arms of Owen Gwynedd.