CHAPTER III.
THE CLWYD AND THE DEE.
The CLWYD: Rhyl—Rhuddlan Castle—The Elwy—A Welsh Gretna Green—St. Asaph—Denbigh—Ruthin. The DEE: Bala Lake—Corwen—Vale of Llangollen and Valle Crucis Abbey—Dinas Bran—The Ceiriog—Chirk Castle and Wynnstay—The Alyn—Eaton Hall—Chester—Flint.
THE town of Rhyl is like a piece of Liverpool or Manchester, “borne, like Loretto’s chapel, through the air,” and arranged in long terraces and orderly blocks on a piece of flat coast-land near the mouth of the river CLWYD. The place has been much praised by a grandiloquent writer who, in the very height of his rapture, had to admit that “the great object of attraction was the sun setting in a flood of golden beauty on his evening throne.” It is a spectacle that may be observed elsewhere. The virtue of Rhyl is that it is easily accessible from large centres of population, that it enjoys pure and bracing air, that it has a vast expanse of firm sands, that the Great Orme and the Penmaenmawr range look very noble and beautiful from its broad promenade, and that the soft winds blow towards it from the pleasant Vale of Clwyd.
But in the immediate neighbourhood of Rhyl even the famous vale has no attractiveness. The bare river flows through bare mud. This enormously wide valley is, for the most part, a soft, dark marsh, on which a thin vegetation struggles to maintain a dank existence. But even from Rhyl there are agreeable views of what the Welsh call Dyffryn Clwyd, the Vale of the Flat, “the Eden of Wales.” Three miles away, over an absolutely level and barren space, the wooded knolls and the dark towers of Rhuddlan advance almost to the centre of the valley, and have a fine impressiveness when they are thrown into relief by the shadow of some passing cloud. The Clwydian hills seem to close in behind them, with Moel Fammau in the remote distance. The old poet, Thomas Churchyard, says:
“The vale doth reach so far in view of man
As he far of may see the seas, indeede;
And who awhile for pleasure travel can
Throughout this vale, and thereof take good heede,
He shall delight to see a soyle so fine,
For ground and grass a passing plot devine;