BETWEEN DOLGELLEY AND BARMOUTH (p. [202]).
There are innumerable little rivers in North Wales, boiling down over tumbled rocks, in deep valleys, with trees swaying and arching overhead. The type of these is the turbulent brook, so narrow that one might leap across it, which descends through the Dwygyfylchi valley, and then quietly loses itself in the sea between Conway and Penmaenmawr. But in all Wild Wales there is no such mad, merry, laughing, and leaping piece of water as the long cataract which hastens down from the upper to the lower bridge of the Torrent Walk, to join the Wnion two miles above Dolgelley. It falls, like a white mist, amid riven cliffs; it pours itself, with a frolic music, between great masses of moss-grown rock; it dips under tree-trunks which have been thrown across it, like rustic bridges, by long-forgotten storms. The channel which this torrent has made for itself is a deep, dark, winding cleft through a beautiful wood on the side of a steep hill. It is in the late autumn that it is at its best, when the trees are of all rich tints, from russet to gold, and when there is a glorious, glowing carpet of brown leaves on either side of the Torrent Walk, and when the torrent itself, swollen by the unfailing rains, breaks into white spray amid the blue mist of the cataracts. The Wnion is tame enough after such a spectacle; but it makes some really striking loops and bends as it winds away to Dolgelley, broadening out in the ever-broadening valley, and then darting forward to the tall, grey arches of Dolgelley bridge, where it dreams along for a while over its multitudinous pebbles, and then wanders away into the green shadow of trees.
Photo: H. Owen, Barmouth.
BARMOUTH BRIDGE AND CADER IDRIS (p. [203]).
Dolgelley is the capital of Merioneth, and the curfew is still rung there; and some of its houses retain all the quaintness of the Elizabethan age, and its streets are so odd, and winding, and confused, that one thinks of the legend of the giant’s wife who dropped a heap of stones from her apron, the which in due course became a town. In the distance, Dolgelley looks like a grey nest amid green branches, sheltering in a basin of the hills. It is walled round by the mountains, Cader Idris being its loftiest and its grandest bulwark. Owen Glendower had a Parliament House here, pulled down only a few years ago; and that is almost the whole history of the place, which is attaining some small additional importance in these days because the gold mines are not far away, and also by reason of its manufacture of excellent Welsh cloth.