Closyd well with royall glas:
Fulfullyd it was with ymagery,
Every windowe by and by,
On each side had ther a gynne
Sperde with manie a dyvers pynne.”
It matters not now whether this was a place of prayer or place in which the Queen arrayed herself. Pennant, when he made his famous “Tour in Wales,” described Conway as castle of matchless magnificence, and a matchlessly magnificent Castle it still is.
It takes but a single effort of the imagination to see again the life within that ancient harp-shaped town as it must have been even so recently as seventy-five years ago: the varying colours of the peasants’ dresses, their large market-baskets and umbrellas, their bright handkerchiefs, the tall North Walian beaver hats and frilled caps peeping out beneath, the bright cheeks and even brighter pink cotton jackets worn by the girls. Healthy, well-made peasants those, neat of garb and gay of heart, good-looking, both men and women. Again the old market-place, beyond Plas Mawr and the church, rings with their laughter and their lively barter, and the clatter of their ponies’ hoofs; again the soft voices of the women are heard and the heavier voices of the men; again they mount their horses, sometimes double, and ride away out of the lively town to the silent hills beyond, through Gyffin, where the colours in the old barrel vault of the church must have been even brighter than they are now; perhaps they go as far as some hillside like that on which Llangelynin still keeps its gray sanctuary. Again down upon the old town settles a double silence. The day’s work is done; twilight has come, and over all reigns a stillness which is as that of a Welsh Sabbath.
Through the Vale of Conway, past Trevriw and Llanrwst with its Gwyder Castle, past beautiful Bettws-y-Coed and Capel Curig, and on to the Pass of Llanberis, a walk of unrivalled beauty, there appears at last, as one travels down to Pen-y-Pass (the head of the pass), the single tower of the ruined castle of Dolbadarn. A Welsh triad says there are three primary requisites for poetry: an eye that can see nature, a heart that can feel nature, and a resolution that dares follow nature. No one can come down from this road over the towering summits of Snowdon to the little green valley in which Dolbadarn lies without, for the time, becoming a poet, even to the resolution that dares follow the spiritual counsels which come from sky and mountain and rushing stream and the very rocks that fill this valley. “Nature has here,” says Camden, “reared huge groups of mountains, as if she intended to bind the island fast to the bowels of the earth, and make a safe retreat for Britons in the time of war. For here are so many crags and rocks, so many wooded valleys, rendered impassable by so many lakes, that the lightest troops, much less an army, could never find their way among them. These mountains may be truly called the British Alps; for, besides that they are the highest in the whole island, they are, like the Alps, bespread with broken crags on every side, all surrounding one which, towering in the centre, far above the rest, lifts its head so loftily, as if it meant not only to threaten, but to thrust it into the sky.”
