Photo: I. Slater, Llandudno.
SNOWDON, FROM CRIB-GOCH.
It is a land of cataracts all round about; but to reach the finest of those one must leave the river Wnion and ascend the Mawddach valley, up the beautiful Ganllwyd Glen, and so to the gold mines. Rely not too implicitly on those learned books which would instruct the confiding stranger wandering amid these mountainous wildernesses. “There are three fine Falls on the Mawddach,” one reads in a book of considerable geographical pretensions—“one of 60 feet in Dolmelynllyn Park, another of 60 feet called the Mawddach Fall, the third, of 150 feet, called the Pistyll-y-Cain.” “I wonder,” said an American humorist, “whether it is worth while knowing so much that is not so.” The Rhaiadr-y-Mawddach—over which, at this stage, flows the river that is shortly to broaden out into the grandest estuary in Wales—descends, in two leaps, into a large and magnificent basin, about which the rocks and trees have arranged themselves into a noble amphitheatre. The Precipice Walk is not far away. One may behold all the Snowdon region from this dizzy height on the open hillside; the Ganllwyd valley opens out below; the Arans tower upwards to the right; and beyond the village of Llanfachreth, looking northward, rises the grand mass of Rhobell Fawr, its head half-hidden in a cloud, “that moveth altogether, if it move at all.” And as for the Pistyll-y-Cain and the Rhaiadr-Du, “the black cataract,” the one, as its name indicates, is the fall of the river Cain, and the other is the fall of the Camlan, less broad, less precipitous, at the first glance less impressive, than its more renowned rival, but quite wonderfully beautiful in its surroundings, its rocks and woodlands, its dual leap, and many windings, and numerous tumbling streams.
Says a Welsh proverb: “There is only one prettier walk in Wales than the road from Dolgelley to Barmouth. It is the road from Barmouth to Dolgelley.” The adjective is ill-chosen. Not prettiness, but a calm majesty, is the characteristic of the rich scenery of the valley of the Mawddach. When the tide is up, the river between Penmaenpool and Barmouth is like a chain of lakes among bold and craggy heights, sloping brown moorlands, and terraced woods. One is reminded sometimes of Switzerland and sometimes of the Rhine. It is advisable to ascend the river, as Wordsworth did, in a boat. The poet was at Barmouth in 1824, when he rowed up “the sublime estuary, which may compare with the finest in Scotland.” One is always driven back upon these comparisons. The estuary of the Mawddach arouses sensations of strangeness and unexpectedness. Even amid the grandeur and the beauty of North Wales, it seems to belong to some other country, and almost to a land of dreams. It may have been some recollection of rowing upwards towards Penmaenpool that inspired the first and greatest of the Lake poets with two of his most splendid lines:—
“I hear the echoes through the mountains throng;
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep.”
And the scenery here is everything. There is little history to engage the mind. One merely shudders at the story of how, in what are now the grounds of Nannau House, Owen Glendower fought with his cousin, Howel Selé, slew him, and hid the body in a hollow tree. The Abbot of Cymmer is credited with having brought about the meeting, in the hope that the two kinsmen might be reconciled; but who knows anything about the Abbot of Cymmer? So much of the abbey as remains is mixed up with farm buildings, amid beautiful sylvan scenery, about two miles from Dolgelley, and near to the banks of the Mawddach. Griffith and Meredydd, lords of Merioneth and grandsons of Owain Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales, founded the abbey in 1198. The architecture suggests Irish influences, and an Irishman by whom such influence is likely to have been exercised is known to have emigrated to Wales at about the time of the foundation. The monks were of the Cistercian order, and the abbey was dedicated to St. Mary. The ruins of the church are the principal portion of what now remains. The abbot’s lodgings and part of the refectory have been incorporated into the present farmhouse. The emissaries of Henry VIII. penetrated even to this remote spot, and so the abbey was despoiled.
Barmouth, which, in Welsh, is Abermaw, or the mouth of the Mawddach, is built in strange fashion about the foot of a mountain which is surpassingly noble in its contour. Some of the houses cling high up among the perilous slopes. In one direction they look out to sea, and in the other across the “sublime estuary” at its widest part. The rich, glowing woods of Arthog climb up the opposite slopes, with the side of Cader Idris rising like a vast cliff above their topmost branches. The little town, with its tremendous background of rugged mountain, has been likened to Gibraltar. The oldest of its dwellings is alleged to date back to the reign of Henry VII. For us of to-day the place has the interest of having been selected as the earliest of the settlements of Mr. Ruskin’s Guild of St. George. “I have just been over to Barmouth,” the Master wrote many a year ago, “to see the tenants on the first bit of ground—noble crystalline rock, I am glad to say—possessed by St. George on the island.” Grandly impracticable was the idea of settling a community of this kind in such a place, and one looks at the small cottages, high on the hillside, with a feeling that they are a stray and stranded fragment of Utopia.
It is a bare, ordinary-looking town, this Barmouth, when surveyed from the level of its lower streets; but there is an unapproachable dignity, beauty, and charm in the wide, level stretch of sand and water which lies between here and Arthog, which winds inland among the brown mountain-slopes, which broadens outward to Cardigan Bay. The bridge is a curious and useful rather than a pleasant feature of the landscape. It carries a railway that branches off to Dolgelley on the one hand, and to Glandovey and South Wales on the other. Fortunately, it lies low down, and close to the water, as it were, its central portion being occasionally raised for the admission of ships, of a tonnage, however, that is marvellously small. From its further side, where the sand has gathered into hillocks, crowned by long, waving, rank grass, the town of Barmouth, with its vast hill of Craig Abermaw, brings into mind the castle of Chillon and its surroundings. It seemed poor and common enough, away there on the other side of the bridge; but from this point it is graceful, noble, almost sublime.