NEATH ABBEY (p. [171]).
There is little of exceptional interest in the upper reaches of the Neath’s tributaries. Maen Llia, or the Stone of Llia, is a huge boulder of granite some eleven feet high by the Roman road of Sarn Helen, which, far up near the source of the Llia, crosses the mountains with the recognised audacity of a Roman thoroughfare. But few are the wayfarers, other than reckless tramps, who set eyes on this one among the many monoliths that decorate Wild Wales. It is at Ystradfellte that the wonders of the Neath’s scenery begin. This little village stands more than 900 feet above the sea-level, and the Mellte (as Llia and Dringarth conjoined are named), in its fall of nearly 500 feet in the five miles between Ystradfellte and Pont Neath Vaughan, is a succession of pictures so lovely, and yet so confined, that they excite as much admiration as despair in the mind of the artist who comes to paint them. The Little Neath runs parallel with the Mellte during this course, separated from it by a high ridge, and scarcely a mile apart. This stream also gallops in a rocky bed, with soaring woods on both banks, and with waterfalls here and there of much beauty. But the Mellte and its two affluents, the Hepste and the Sychnant, quite put the Little Neath in the shade in this respect. You may see it for yourself, and also judge by the opinions expressed without reserve by the many colliers and their families who come hither, on picnic bent, from Hirwain and even Merthyr, over the high eastern hills. The Vale of Neath would be accounted a wonder if it were in Middlesex. But its remoteness keeps metropolitan tourists aloof; its charms are for the local colliers, and few besides.
The Cwm Porth, or “river cavern,” a mile below Ystradfellte, is the first of the Mellte’s marked eccentricities. The combination of rocks and water and wood, with the added element of danger in exploring this rugged, echo-haunted perforation in the cliff, are attractive in the extreme to the able-bodied traveller. Mellte, in time of flood, carries a deal of amber-tinted water in its rocky bed, and Cwm Porth is not in the hands of a company who charge for admittance, and guarantee smoothed paths, and ropes and handrails where there is a risk of broken limbs. This, indeed, is just the best of the Mellte: you feel as if you are on virgin soil while scrambling at a venture in its steep woods, now on the edge of the roaring little stream fifty feet sheer above a waterfall, and now midway in the river itself, perched on a rock, with vistas of boisterous water up and down, and the river’s banks, wooded to the sky-line, hundreds of feet on either hand, at an angle of forty-five or fifty degrees. The writer, on one memorable September afternoon, was for hours alone in these woods, passing from waterfall to waterfall, more by instinct than sure guidance, with the gold and bronze and crimson of foliage constantly betwixt him and the blue autumnal sky; nor did he see sign of other human being than himself, nor more than one white farmstead, when he climbed above the topmost trees and returned to the bleak and bare uplands beyond. The squirrels ran from bough to bough, the birds chirped in the infrequent grassy glades, where the sunlight made a bright spot in the midst of this dense, damp shade, and the waters filled the glen with their clamour. In all England there is nothing of its kind so admirable as the seclusion and beauty of this gorge of the Mellte, with its tributary, the Hepste, to the east.
Categorically, the chief waterfalls may be mentioned thus: the Clun Gwyn Falls—Upper, Middle, and Lower—and the two Falls of the Hepste. One cannot describe such things; each of these five has such individuality and beauty that on seeing it you prefer it to the others. Their framing is perfect. Even the heron that gathers up its long legs and whips across the stream out of your way is not wanted to complete your satisfaction in such pictures. Yet in a three miles’ flight a crow would reach coal mines and swart heaps of such refuse as you would not dream could lie within scores of miles of these divine solitudes.
The great Cilhepste Fall, otherwise Ysgwd-yr-Eira (the Spout of Snow), though the best known of the valley’s cascades, is, in the writer’s opinion, the least convincing. The water is tossed in one curve over a ledge of rock, and falls about 45 feet into a basin, whence it moves downwards to the far finer succession of furious white steps known as the Lower Hepste Falls. The woods in autumn clasp it amphitheatrically with their green and gold. There is no fault anywhere. There is also this added eccentricity: you may walk under the Fall from one side of the river to the other. The writer did it in time of heavy flood, and was soaked for his pains. Afterwards he clambered, not easily, down to the Lower Falls, the disarray of which was much more to his taste. The Ysgwd-yr-Eira would please more if it had a flaw. As it is, it looks as if Nature and man had conspired to make a cascade with surroundings that should be a model of their kind. Yet even this criticism—which may well be held to be of the bilious order—will by most be regarded as highly flattering to the Spout of Snow.
After the Mellte, one is not profoundly stirred by the Falls and sylvan graces of the Little Neath and its tributary, the Perddyn. Yet, they, too, are beautiful, especially the cascades of Scwd Gwladys (the Lady’s Fall) and Scwd Einon Gam (Crooked Einon’s Fall), in the latter stream.
The Sychnant, however, is a sensational little river. It joins the Mellte at the foot of a rocky precipice, Craig Dinas, which, even with its mere 170 feet of perpendicular rock, may be warranted to yield a thrill. From the grassy, hawthorned summit of Craig Dinas, one may peer into the deep-cut bed of the Sychnant, where this cleaves through the mountains from Hirwain, and also see its brace of waterfalls. But the glen is well-nigh impassably dense with undergrowth and trees, and bound about with precipices as emphatic, though not as high, as Craig Dinas. Where the Sychnant comes to the light from this dark embedded dingle, it is sadly spoiled by quarry men and others. But even these enterprising gentlemen will fight shy of its higher recesses, especially as they have nothing to gain by the intrusion.
Point Neath Vaughan is a snug little village, with none of the airs it might assume in pride of its position as key to the glories of these glens of the Neath. Its inns are homely, modest buildings. South, for the ten or twelve miles to the sea, the river Neath flows through a broad and lovely valley, with wooded or bare mountains on both sides. From Cefn Hirfynydd (west) and Craig-y-Llyn (east) many a dashing little stream, with miniature cascades, makes great haste to swell the main river. But collieries are here, as well as fascinating scenery, and it is impossible to overlook them and their smoke.
The town of Neath neither gives to nor gains from its river much distinction where this moves through its midst, brown, and with tidal mud on its banks. It is a colliery town, pure and simple, surprisingly furnished with public-houses. The fragments of its castle that survive are pent about by dismal slums, so that a man must have a very keen antiquarian sense to discover them. Nor are they much when found: just a gateway with its towers, the whole prettily hugged by ivy. Richard Grenville, of Bideford, who founded it in the twelfth century, would not care to see it now.