[VII]
A WEEK IN SOUTH WALES
We leave Shrewsbury by the Welsh bridge for a week among the rugged hills and valleys of Southern Wales, a country rich in relics of antiquity and romantic associations. We sweep along the fine highway to Welshpool and from thence, a little farther, to Montgomery, a decayed, out-of-the-way town in the hills. A fragment of its castle is perched high on the precipitous hill commanding the town and looking far over the vale of the serpentine Severn. The Severn, like the Wye, is the most sinuous of rivers, and there are few more inspiring prospects than its long shining folds winding through the verdant valley as seen from the castle walls. Montgomery, quiet and unheroic as it is today, has a stirring past. It took its name from Roger de Montgomerie, “Second in command in the army of his kinsman, William of Normandy,” though the grim, almost inaccessible castle antedated his possession of the town. Fierce indeed was the strife between the Normans and the wild Welsh tribes, and the fair vale of the Severn was the scene of many a bloody conflict. The castle, though with varying owners and fortunes, continued a stronghold to the day of its surrender to the soldiers of the Commonwealth; after which nothing remained but blackened walls—another added to the long list of feudal fortresses “destroyed by Cromwell.”
The road southward from Newtown leads through as wild a tract of country as we saw in Britain. Not the Scotch Highlands or the hills at the headwaters of the Welsh Wye equal it in loneliness and seeming remoteness. But it is more picturesque than the localities just named, for the hills are mostly wooded, and the shallow, sparkling river which we followed—though usually far above it—runs through a narrow valley diversified in spots with trees and bits of meadow land. For eight miles out of Newtown we encountered a continually rising grade, which brought us to a narrow upland road running along the hillsides, which drop in almost precipitous slopes to the river far below. The road twists along the edge of the hills, at times in almost circular curves, and too close to the sharp declivity at its side for one’s ease of mind. At Llandrindod Wells we had passed the wildest part of the road and we noted with surprise the handsome houses and palatial hotels of a town we had scarcely heard of before, but which has recently become the queen of Welsh inland resorts. The declining sun shot his rays along the purple hilltops that encircle the place and the shadows were already long in the pine-clad valleys. It was growing late, but after a hurried consultation we decided against the pretentious hotels of Llandrindod Wells.
We dashed across the arched stone bridge over the Wye at Builth Wells and brought sharply up in front of the Lion Hotel, which, standing squarely across the way, seemed to bar farther progress, and we had little choice but to stop for the night. The Lion’s accommodations are not elaborate by any means, but it was quite too late to go farther. Though Builth has mineral wells and a “pump house,” a mile from the town, there is nothing of the resort hotel about the Lion; on the contrary, it is the plainest of old-country inns, apparently a haven for fishermen rather than health seekers. Its walls were covered with the antique hand-colored prints so characteristic of English inns; its mantels were loaded with queer pieces of bric-a-brac; tallow candles lighted the bedrooms. The electric push-button had not superseded the tasseled rope by the bedside, with which one jangles a bell hung on a coiled spring in the hallway. But it is spacious and has an air of old-world comfort about it—little modern except its motor garage.
After all, we were fortunate in our pause at Builth, for we beheld the most glorious of sunsets on the long reaches of the Wye as it enters the town from the west. The river dances down the valley in a series of broad, shallow rapids, resting itself here and there in a quiet lakelike pool. The sunset hues were subdued rather than brilliant; pink and salmon tints were reflected in the stream as we stood on the bridge and looked up the quiet valley, and these faded into hazy amethyst as the twilight advanced. It was a scene of quiet, pastoral beauty amidst surroundings that do not lack for legend and antiquity, and altogether left a pleasing recollection of an unattractive Welsh town which in itself has little of the picturesque.
We were away early in the morning following the Wye Valley road, with its vistas of hill and river, as far as Llyswen, where we crossed the hills to Brecon. Our stop here was short, as our route was to bring us again to this interesting old town in a few days. We did not often find a more delightful road than that down the Usk Valley to Crickhowell, Abergavenny and Caerleon. Its excellent surface and long sweeping grades might be a temptation to speed, but it is quite neutralized by the constant beauty of the scenery and interest of the country. On either hand are the low Welsh mountains, wooded to the very crest, and at times far below we caught the gleam of the river—though so shrunken as to scarcely deserve the name—leaping and flashing over its stone-strewn bed. Here and there a quiet village nestled unobtrusively by the roadside; at Crickhowell we found a larger but somnolent town whose huge church is crowded with memorials of the old Welsh warriors. Even larger and more impressive is the great Priory Church at Abergavenny, whose square battlemented tower one might think had been built to withstand the sieges of the devil, even as the Welsh castles were made almost impregnable against the attack of man. No quainter town did we pass than Usk; it must have been much the same when the Conqueror sent his legions to overawe the Welsh tribes, save that its castle, then no doubt a lordly fortress, is now a decayed ivy-mantled ruin. Its greater importance in years gone by is attested by its mighty priory church, ill in keeping with the hamlet that clusters about it today. According to tradition, two kings of England were born in Usk—Richard III. and Edward IV.—and Roman remains indicate an important station on the spot almost at the dawn of the Christian Era.
But what shall one say of Caerleon, farther down the valley, now practically a suburb of Newport, where dim legends still linger to the effect that it was once King Arthur’s capital and that here was the castle
“From whose high towers they say
Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset,
And white sails flying o’er a yellow sea.”
A prosaic historian, however, declares that in all likelihood the King Arthur legend sprang from Roman ruins which some hundreds of years ago existed in Caerleon in great magnificence. At any rate, modern Caerleon has no trace of the regal capital of the early king—a bald, unattractive town close upon the Usk, now broadened into a considerable stream, dull with the taint from the manufactories on its banks.