TORRENT WALK, DOLGELLEY (p. [198]).
Before reaching the estuary, the Dovey wanders through much wide marshland, over which a railway has been carried, where there is a railway station set amid desolateness, and where no tree or shrub breaks the flat, brown margins of the stream. From such scenery it is very agreeable to break away to where, at high tide, there is a sheet of water six miles broad—the sweetest, calmest, most restful estuary in all Wales, with Borth sunning itself by the sea far away, with hills at whose feet plantations flourish, and mountains with fir-woods climbing up their slopes.
Flowing from the sides of Cader Idris, which holds a gloomy lake in its lap, there is a complex network of streams. Several of these join themselves together to form the little river Dysynni, which, after wandering among the mountains for twelve miles or so, drowns itself in the sea beyond Towyn. One of the sources of the Dysynni is Tal-y-Llyn. Noble and beautiful and ever memorable is the valley through which the stream hurries downwards from that renowned lake, the object of innumerable excursions made from Dolgelley, from Towyn, from Machynlleth, and from all the wild, wonderful, fascinating places roundabout. Tal-y-Llyn is no more than a mile long, and a quarter of a mile broad; but it is like a small piece of Norway transported to Wales. Here alike come those who are intent on reaching the summit of Cader Idris, and those who desire to follow “the contemplative man’s recreation,” for the Dysynni, like the Dovey, is a famous fishing river. Salmon, sewin, and gwyniad are to be found therein, from May until after the autumn leaves are falling. There are white and sea trout, and bass, and in the estuary plentiful grey mullet, which make fine and exciting sport when a ring of nets is thrown around them, and the noisy and vigorous “beaters” drive them into the meshes.
THE LOWER BRIDGE, TORRENT WALK (p. [199]).
One must go up the Dysynni to see the famous “Bird Rock,” a great shoulder of mountain on which the hawk and the cormorant dwell. It is so precipitous that it may be climbed on only two of its sides, and it has one of those echoes for which Wales is almost unapproachable, so that the music of any instrument that is played upon it will be reverberated in a startling chorus from all the surrounding hills. Lower down the river, always amid such scenery as it were vain to describe, there is the site of a manor house from which Prince Llewelyn wrote important letters to ecclesiastical magnates in London, and which that stout soldier-king Edward I. visited, for he dated a charter thence. Older relics there are, like the Tomen Ddreiniog, which, maybe, is one of “the grassy barrows of the happier dead.” It is a valley renowned for its birds and their songs, this of the Dysynni, and for its rare plants and mosses, and its rich store of maiden-hair fern. As we approach Towyn the mansion of Ynys-y-Maengwyn, the dwelling of an ancient Welsh family, presents a quaint and most picturesque mixture of architectural periods, for it combines all the styles of domestic architecture that prevailed between the period of Elizabeth and that of the Georges.
The Dysynni is a land-locked river as it approaches the sea, for the Cambrian Railway crosses its estuary. There is a spectacle on one hand of what seems a lake among purple mountains, and on the other of a stream winding amid dreary flats to the breezy waters of Cardigan Bay. Towyn, which is but a small place, has a certain fame for sea-bathing, and for its association with “a holy man of Armorica, who came to Wales in the sixth century to refute the Pelagian heresy.” One does not inquire too curiously into these things; but there, not far from the estuary of the Dysynni, is St. Cadfan’s Church, and St. Cadfan was one who performed miracles; and in the church there is a pillar which, as some aver, is inscribed in debased Roman characters, and once marked the site of St. Cadfan’s grave.
“Neither the North of England, nor Scotland, no, nor Switzerland, can exhibit anything so tranquil, romantic, snug, and beautiful as a Welsh valley.” These are the words of John Wilson, the “Christopher North” of the famous “Noctes Ambrosianæ” and the “Recreations”; the “rusty, crusty Christopher” of Lord Tennyson’s early satire. He was thinking of Dolgelley and all the indescribable charm of its surroundings. Wilson was a Scot who had dwelt continuously and for many years amid the English Lakes. He knew his Switzerland, too; and it must have been reluctantly, one would think, that he gave this unstinted praise to the particular valley in which North Wales seems most to unite its grander and its quieter beauties, all its wonders of mountains and wood, torrent and waterfall, snug valley and scarred and towering height. The MAWDDACH estuary, which has the appearance of a chain of lakes, winds among the mountains as far as Penmaenpool, where there is a long, low, sinuous railway bridge of innumerable arches. Here, where the Mawddach suddenly becomes a stream, flowing through green marshes, with its course indicated by lines of deep-driven stakes, Christopher North must often have been reminded of the head of his beloved Windermere, missing only the solemn and silent majesty of the Langdale Pikes. Following the river upward through the wide, marshy plain until it again hides itself among woods and hills, one comes upon the river Wnion, which is chiefly of importance among Welsh rivers because it is famous for its trout, because it winds through Dolgelley on its way, and because, two miles further upwards, it is joined by the tumultuous thread of water which tumbles from pool to pool, over cataract after cataract, close beside the steep, mile-long piece of sylvan beauty known as the Torrent Walk. Until it receives this tributary the WNION is, except in seasons of rain, but a thin and feeble stream; but it flows through beautiful and shady woods, fretting sometimes over a rocky bed, sometimes flowing in a peaceful, sunlit calm, and now and again reflecting one of those wide-arched, mossy bridges which indicate by their breadth of span how much way this little river claims for itself when the thin silvery threads of all the small streams that flow into it from the Arans on one side, and from the lower slopes of Rhobell Fawr on the other, are swollen into mountain torrents by continuous rain.