At Newport we are entering a different order of things, brought about by the great industrial development in South Wales due to the coal and iron mines and large shipping interests. In the last century the population of the town has grown from one to seventy thousand. The old order is indeed dead here. There is no effort to attract the tourist, and the castle, almost the sole relic of antiquity, is crumbling into unhindered ruin as it sits far above the drear expanse of mud left by the receding tide. We hasten through the town—we may see a hundred such at home—and seek from a friendly policeman the road to Caerphilly, a village off in the hills which we know has no new-world counterpart.
For ten miles from Newport we wend our way over a dusty, ill-kept byroad with sharp turns and steep grades, and before we come to the village we see from some distance the broken towers and battlements of Caerphilly Castle. We pass through the gateway in the straggling walls and the scene of desolation and massive ruin that lies before us is hardly paralleled in impressiveness among British castles, unless it be by Corfe in Dorset. A great round tower, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, with walls ten feet thick, split as by a thunder stroke, greets our eyes. Half of it is still standing, though leaning many feet from the vertical, and the other half lies in mighty fragments of masonry at its base. There had been four such towers, but only one is comparatively entire. The walls, though much shattered in places, still serve to give an idea of the vast extent of the ancient castle. The huge banqueting hall has been roofed and recalls in a rather pathetic way the rude magnificence of its feudal state.
CAERPHILLY CASTLE, SOUTH WALES.
But words quite fail to describe Caerphilly—such a maze of grim walls and towers, such a network of ruinous apartments, piled deep with debris, overawe and confuse one. Only the antiquarian may painfully decipher the plan of the castle and in imagination reconstruct it as it was when it stood a bulwark between warring nations. But to the ordinary beholder it will remain a mystery set in the midst of the barren hills, and he will hardly care to resolve the impressive pile into its original parts. It will seem an entity to him—it is hard to think it otherwise than it appears today. Its romance is deepened by the obscurity of its history—for the story of Caerphilly has many blanks and breaks. There is no record of when it was first begun and there is doubt as to when it was finally destroyed. Some say the ruin is the work of Cromwell, and it surely seems worthy of that master of the art of wrecking castles; others declare that it was abandoned at the time of the Commonwealth, having been destroyed by Shakespeare’s “Wild irregular Glendower,” in his endless conflicts with the English.
But after all, does it not savor even more of romance that mystery enshrouds the past of the stupendous structure whose scanty remnants encircle us? Why call upon prosaic history to dispel the charm that emanates from the gray ruin, half hidden by its mantle of ivy and dashed here and there with the purple valerian and yellow wall-flower? Such would be folly indeed as we sit on the soft green turf of the court and contemplate the fantastic outlines in the glow of the sunset; when all is silence save for the angry brawls of the rooks, which have entered into full possession—reincarnations, perhaps, of the erstwhile contentious owners.
But the spell of Caerphilly dissolves and a different world surrounds us as we enter the broad modern streets of Cardiff and pause before the American-looking Park Hotel. Cardiff as a village antedates the Conquest, but as a metropolis of two hundred thousand, it is quite recent. One hundred years ago it had a population of a thousand; in 1837, of ten thousand; and it is easy to see that the traces of antiquity in such a city must be few. Its future was assured when the first Marquis of Bute hazarded his entire fortune in the construction of the extensive docks from which shipments of coal and iron are now made. It was a lucky throw of the die for the nobleman, for today his grandson owns the greater part of Cardiff and is one of the wealthiest men in the Kingdom.
Cardiff Castle—forever associated with the dark fate of Prince Robert—has been replaced by a Moorish palace—or rather, an incongruous mixture in which the Moorish predominates. It is easy to gain admittance to this imposing palace, where art has been entirely unhampered by cost, and if garishness and incongruity sometimes prevail, interest is nevertheless continual. There is a fragment of the keep of the old castle in the grounds and Duke Robert’s dungeon is incorporated into the new structure—a dark, vaultlike cavity in the walls where for thirty years the unfortunate prince, the direct heir to the throne of the Conqueror, was kept a close prisoner by his brother Henry. Legend has it that his eyes were put out because of an attempt to escape and that he died in the dungeon at the age of eighty years.