Whenever a tourist wishes to pass his summer months healthily and agreeably, but is in doubt whither to go, let him start off for Wales—North Wales—forthwith; and let him not return till wood and water, and hill and dale have ceased to call forth his admiration.
Do not trust too implicitly to guidebooks, good traveller; take them and consult them; but beware of their lying propensities. They have inveigled many a loving subject of her Majesty’s into a scrape, and have proved the dearest things he ever admitted into his pocket. Go with your eyes open; go with a little common sense; go to be pleased: don’t go to find fault. Make up your mind to rough it if need be; and don’t give yourself the airs of my Lord Duke at every little wayside inn that your dignity may be forced to put up at. You may then travel smoothly and cheerfully through the Cimbric territory.
Take also this along with you. The Welsh are tremendously slow coaches. Indolent, pig-headed, and careless, the dolce far niente is their motto throughout life; and, were they left to themselves, they would positively retrograde through unwillingness to go a-head. It is of no use hurrying them; a Welshman was never in a hurry in his life; time, like water, is to him of little value; he has plenty and to spare of it, and the waste of either commodity is not thought of. In Wales, they let both run away often to little purpose; they have fewer “water privileges” than any one could imagine; and they turn their privilege of an ad libitum supply of leisure to very poor account. So do not hurry a Welshman; for you will not gain any of his time, but will only lose some of your own, by so doing.
The true way to enjoy Wales, and to understand the country, is to go and fix your quarters at some quiet little country inn in a spot to your taste; and remain there for a fortnight—a month—or as long as your gusto endures; walking up the whole country around, until you know every crook and cranny of it, until it becomes in fact your “ancient neighbourhood.” Many, or rather innumerable are the spots where you may so fix yourself, and where your enjoyments, though simple, may be extreme. If you are a bachelor, you can get clean beds, sheets of driven snow, plenty of good milk, mountain mutton, and bread and butter à discrétion; and what the deuce does a man want more? If he is young, and in good health and spirits, and cannot fare upon this, let him put up his traps and go to the antipodes. Or, if you are in the softer predicament of having with you what, when you and I were young, you know, used to be called poetice, the “girl of your heart”—but what now in Polichinellic phraseology is termed the “wife of your bussum”—why, even in this extremity, you may find room for two in any inn that you venture to light upon. The lady must not be too fine in her notions, it is true; she must be of that breed and mettle that will enable her to face the mountain breeze, and wipe with hasty foot—as friend Gray says,—the dews of the upland lawn; to meet the sun or the moon, or any other natural phenomenon that is to be encountered on the hill-side. In short, she must be the sort of girl that can mount a rough pony, or scramble over a stone wall, and not care for her bonnet or her locks in a pelting shower, but must be content to follow her liege lord, and love him—and love his pursuits too, whether by the purling brook, or on the misty height. Be sure of it, my friend, that with such a companion as this, Welsh scenery—mountain scenery—nay, any scenery, will have for you a double—ay, a tenfold charm.
Men enjoy mountains: women enjoy waterfalls. There is no saying why it is; but the fact is positive. Perhaps it may be that men can toil up the rugged steep with greater ease, and therefore enjoy themselves the more when they reach the top. Perhaps it is that there is something grand, and bold, and rough, and dangerous, in the very nature of a mountain, which the masculine mind is alone capable of fully understanding. In waterfalls, there is all the beauty of form, and light and graceful motion, and harmonious sound, and cooling freshness, and ever-changing variety that woman always loves; and there are overshadowing trees, and an escape from the noontide sun, and the hum of insect life, and moss-grown stones, and soft grassy banks. Waterfalls and their adjuncts have a kind of mystic influence about them that acts with all-persuasive energy on the female mind: hearts like stones are worn down by their action, and the swain has often been indebted to the Naiad for the granting of his prayer.
Well; wherever you may be, whether single or double, any where in Wales, the first thing to do is to make a bargain with your landlady, (Welsh inns are always kept by women,) whereby you may be “boarded and lodged and done for” at so much a day, or a week, or a month, or whatever time it may please you to stay. This is the very best of all plans for “taking your pleasure in your inn;” you know then the exact cost of your stay—the precise damage done to your pocket; you dine comfortably, without fearing that you are swallowing a five shilling piece in the midst of each chop, and you can witness the last day of your sojourn arrive without dread of that unpleasant winding up—the bill. You may get boarded and lodged comfortably, nay luxuriously, as far as mountain luxury goes, for a pound a-week: you may take your full swing of the house for this; and your landlady will ask for a repetition of the honour next year when you depart. So let no man say that living in Wales is extravagant; it is only the savoir vivre that is the scarce commodity.
And if you would know where to go and find comfortable quarters of this kind, and at this rate, then take our advice, gentle reader, and listen to a few experiences. Go to Bala, and fish the lake there till not a trout is left in it, and cut away at mine host’s mutton and beef, when you come back from your day’s excursion, as though you had not eaten for a week; and turn in by ten at night,—not later, mind; and be up again by five, and out on the mountain side, or amid the woods by six, and home again by seven to your morning fare. So shall you have health and happiness, and freedom from ennui the livelong day.
Or go to Ffestiniog, up among its mountains, and ramble over to the lakes below Snowdon, and visit the company at Beddgelert and Tan-yBwlch—rather aristocratic places in their way, and made for travellers with long purses. At Ffestiniog you are in the neighbourhood of the best mountain scenery of Wales; and as for vales and streams, you have such as you will never see elsewhere.
Or else go to Bettws-y-Coed near Llanrwst, the village of the confluence of so many streams and valleys; that sweet woodland scene, that choice land of waterfalls, and sunny glades, and wood-clad cliffs. Here you may have variety of scenery in the greatest perfection; and here you may enjoy the happiest admixture of the wild and the beautiful that the principality can boast of. It is indeed a lovely spot; and, provided the visitor has some intellectual resources and amusements within himself, one that the tourist can never get tired of. It will bear visiting again and again. Decies repetita placebit.
But, dear sir, if you are bent upon making the grand tour, and if you positively will see the whole of the country, then by all means start from Chester, and make a continual round until you arrive at Shrewsbury; so shall you see the whole length and breadth,—the bosom and the very bowels of the land. You must go and see Conwy, Penmaen Mawr, and “the Bridge,” as it is still emphatically called—Telford’s beautiful exemplification of the catenary curve—and then go and hunt out Prince Edward’s natal room in Caernarvon’s towers; and then clamber up Snowdon; and then go down again to Capel Curig and Beddgelert, and so pass by Pont Aberglaslyn to Tan-y-Bwlch, Ffestiniog and Dolgelly; and then mount Cadair Idris; and then run up to Bala and Llangollen, and so stretch away to the abode of the “proud Salopians.” And a very agreeable tour you will have made, no doubt; but you will not know Wales for all that. You have not been along the byeways, nor over the dreary heath, nor into the river’s bed, nor under the sea-crag’s height: you will not have seen a tithe of the wonders of the country. You must see all these great places of course: but you ought to look after much more than this; you must wander over the broad lands of the Vale of Clwyd, and look up all its glorious little trout streams; you must go to the solitary heights of Carnedd Llewelyn, and the Glidr above Nant Francon; and you must get up to Llyn Idwal, and have nerve enough to climb over and under the rocks of the Twll Du; and you must go to the very end of Llŷn, or else you will never know what it is to lie down flat at the edge of the Parwyd precipice, and look down six hundred feet sheer into the sea, with not a blade of grass nor a stone between you and the deep blue waters fresh from the Atlantic. And you must climb over the bleak Merionethshire hills to seaward, and hunt up the lonely fishing pools that abound in their recesses; and you must dive into the green wooded valleys of Montgomeryshire, and learn whence the Severn draws all its peat-brown waters. There is occupation enough in this for the longest summer that ever yet shone on Wales; you may start on your pilgrimage with the first green bud of spring, and end it with the sere and yellow leaf of autumn: but it is only in such lengthened and lonely rambles as these that the real beauties of the country are to be seen, and that the full loveliness of nature—unsophisticated nature—is to be perceived.