From Bangor, Plas Newydd, the seat of the Marquess of Anglesey, may be visited. The grounds are fine, and there is good timber in the park, but the house is naught. More interesting is Plas Côch, a fine example of an Elizabethan house, built by Hugh Hughes, Attorney-General in the sixteenth century.
In the grounds of Plas Newydd are two cromlechs, or rather what the French would call allées couvertes. They are prehistoric tribal mausoleums, and are perhaps the finest in the Principality. The cap stone of one is 14 feet long by 13 feet broad, and from 3 to 4 feet thick. There are vast numbers of cromlechs in Anglesey, but year by year sees the number decrease. By the Highway Act of William IV. (1835) the road surveyor may enter on any waste or common and dig and search for stone and remove the same. He may also take stones from any river. He may go into another parish and do as above, provided he leaves sufficient stone for the said parish. He may enter enclosed land, with the consent of the owner, and remove stone, paying nothing for the same, but paying for any damage caused by transportation of the stone. If the owner refuses consent, the surveyor may apply to the nearest justice, who may authorise him to enter the enclosed land and remove any stone he requires. Farmers are only too delighted to have cromlechs and other prehistoric stone monuments blown up with dynamite and cleared off. Then visitors will not trespass to see them, and all obstruction to cultivation will be removed. Recently a number have been destroyed in Anglesey and elsewhere. They are being used up for roads. The cromlech, kistvaen, and allée couverte were tombs. Usually a stone was left to be removed, or a plug was inserted in a holed stone, that could be taken out at pleasure, to enable the living to enter the tomb and thrust back the skeletons that were old to make room for new interments. Perhaps also food for the dead was passed in to them through these holes.
On a day in the year, we know not what day it was, but probably at Samhain, the Feast of the Underground Spirits, corresponding to our All Souls’ Day, a great banquet was held in commemoration of dead ancestors, and then the bones of the resurrected parents and grandparents were brought out, fondled, scraped, and cleaned up, and then reconsigned to the family tomb. The family or tribal mausoleum was the centre round which the family or tribe revolved. All the religion of these Neolithic and Bronze Age people centred in their dead and in the world of spirits. We find among the Welsh, that all their tribal rights depended on the preservation of their pedigrees. It was the same idea in another form.
We, in our matter-of-fact and of to-day world, think nothing of our forbears. I believe it was Swedenborg who said that Europe had still a great lesson to learn—he did not specify it—and that this lesson would be taught it by the Turanian race. Perhaps the Chinaman will play his part in the future, and he will bring to us Westerns the doctrine of the reverence due to the old people from whose lives we derive our physical and spiritual and mental powers.
Monier-Williams, in his Brahminism and Hinduism (1887), says:—
“The neglect of our ancestors, which seems to spring not so much from any want of sympathy with the departed as from an utter disbelief in any interconnexion between the world and the world of spirits, is by some regarded as a defect in our religious character and practice.”
We have lost a great tie to those who have gone before in the neglect of commemoration of the dead and realisation of the Article of the Faith, the Communion of Saints. Our modern civilisation, our culture, our manliness, our refinement, we owe to the straining after an ideal, not always attained, but seen and sought by those who have predeceased us. We do not make ourselves, we have been made and moulded into what we are by the good old folk who are to us only names in our pedigree. If the sins of fathers are visited on their children, and of this there can be no doubt, so also do their virtues descend, and we owe them something, some recognition, some kindly thought, some remembrance in our commune with God, on that account.
So these cromlechs and kistvaens may teach us something. Anglesey and Carnarvonshire abound in these monuments, and Mr. J. E. Griffith, of Bangor, has published a splendid work on them, with photographic plates representing such as remain.
NANT BRIDGE, CARNARVON