Of her sweet tendence hovering over him,
Filled all the genial courses of his blood
With deeper and with ever deeper love,
As the south-west, that blowing Bala Lake,
Fills all the sacred Dee.”
A sacred character has been associated with the Dee from the very earliest times. It was “holy” to the Druids; it was a “wizard stream” to Milton; Drayton speaks of where “Dee’s holiness begun,” and credits it with presaging woe to the English or the Welsh according as, in one portion of its course, it shifted the bed of its stream. The Dee is a mountain-river from Bala downwards, and until Llangollen has been passed. Its outlet from the lake is through a quaint, many-arched stone bridge—a bridge, as Coleridge might have said, “with a circumbendibus.” The railway runs close at hand for almost the whole of its course, which, for the present, lies through what is the peculiar country of Owen Glendower. We have encountered traces of this valiant chieftain at Machynlleth, Dolgelley, and almost everywhere that we have been; but here, at Corwen and roundabout, the country fairly reeks with his memory. The Dee is a fair, wide river when it leaves Bala Lake, and flows for a while through open meadow lands, to plunge before long and with great suddenness into a beautiful mountain gorge, where it is overhung by trees. At the delightful village of Llandderfel it is crossed by another picturesque bridge, set among rocky hills which teem with wild legends, and shortly thereafter it flows once more among wide, open spaces, bare, bleak, and harried by the winds. The Vale of Edeyrnion is the name of the country through which we have just passed, and this valley, in which the character of the scenery changes so conspicuously and so often, comes to an end just before the town of Corwen is reached.
Photo: Carl Norman & Co., Tunbridge Wells.
BALA LAKE.