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Title: The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial:
Rivers of the South and West Coasts

Author: Various

Release date: November 5, 2014 [eBook #47292]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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GREAT BRITAIN, DESCRIPTIVE, HISTORICAL, PICTORIAL: RIVERS
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Original Cover Page.

THE RIVERS OF GREAT
BRITAIN

UNIFORM WITH THIS WORK.

THE ROYAL RIVER: THE
THAMES FROM SOURCE TO
SEA. With Several Hundred
Original Illustrations. Original
Edition, £2 2s.
“Its illustrations surpass all that have
previously adorned any book on the
same subject”—Daily Telegraph.

RIVERS OF THE EAST COAST. With
numerous highly finished
Engravings. Original Edition, £2
2s.
“We have read with the greatest
interest ‘The Rivers of the East Coast of
Great Britain.’ All the articles are by
pleasant writers, and the pages are
lavishly illustrated by engravings after
photographs.”—The Times.

Popular Editions of the above can also
be obtained.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED,
London; Paris and Melbourne.

THE
RIVERS OF GREAT
BRITAIN

DESCRIPTIVE, HISTORICAL,
PICTORIAL

RIVERS OF THE SOUTH
AND WEST COASTS

CASSELL AND COMPANY,
LIMITED
LONDON, PARIS & MELBOURNE
1897
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS.

THE SOUTHERN CHALK STREAMS.—By
PAGE
WILLIAM SENIOR.
General Characteristics—The CANTERBURY STOUR
and its Branches: Ashford and Jack Cade—
Horton and Lyminge—Canterbury—
Fordwich and Izaak Walton—Isle of Thanet
—Minster. The LESSER STOUR: “Bourne
Ground”—Sandwich. The BREDE. The
ROTHER: Bodiam—Isle of Oxney—
Winchelsea—Seaford. The CUCKMERE:
Alfriston and Lullington. THE OUSE: St.
Leonard’s Forest—Fletching—Maresfield—
Lewes. The ADUR: Bramber—Shoreham. The
ARUN: Amberley—Arundel—Littlehampton.
Hampshire Rivers—The ARLE: The Meon
District—Wickham and the Bishop-Builder—
Titchfield. The ITCHEN: A Curious Example
of Instinct—Alresford Pond—Cheriton—
Tichborne—The Winnal Reaches—
Winchester and Izaak Walton—St. Cross—St.
Catherine’s Hill—Southampton. The TEST:
Romsey and its Abbey. The BEAULIEU:
Beaulieu Abbey. The LYMINGTON and the
MEDINA—The HAMPSHIRE AVON and the
STOUR: Christchurch—Salisbury—
Wimborne. The FROME: Dorchester—Mr.
Hardy’s Country—Poole Harbour 1

RIVERS OF DEVON.—By W. W.
HUTCHINGS.
General Characteristics—Sources of the Devon
Streams: Exmoor and Dartmoor. The OTTER:
Ottery Saint Mary and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Exmoor Streams:—The EXE: Its
Source in The Chains—The Barle—The
Batherm—Tiverton and Peter Blundell—

Bickleigh Bridge and the “King of the
Gipsies”—The Culm—Exeter—Countess
Weir—Exmouth. The LYN: Oareford—The
Doone Country—Malmsmead—Watersmeet
—Lyndale—Lynton and Lynmouth.
Dartmoor Streams:—The TEIGN: Wallabrook
—Chagford—Fingle Bridge—Chudleigh—
The Bovey—Newton Abbot—Teignmouth.
The DART: Holne Chase—Buckfast Abbey—
Dartington Hall—Totnes—The Lower
Reaches—Dartmouth. The Tavy. The TAW:
Oxenham and its Legend—Barnstaple—
Lundy. The TORRIDGE: The Okement—Great
Torrington—Bideford—Hubbastone. The
Avon, Erme, and Yealm. The PLYM:
Dewerstone—The Meavy and Plymouth Leat
—Plympton St. Mary and Plympton Earl—
The Three Towns 25

RIVERS OF CORNWALL.—By HUGH W.
STRONG.
The Minor Streams of Cornwall—The TAMAR:
Woolley Barrows—Morwellham and Weir
Head—Morwell Rocks—Harewood—
Calstock—Cotehele—Pentillie—Confluence
with the Tavy—Saltash—The Hamoaze. The
FOWEY: A Change of Name—St. Neot—
Lostwithiel—Fowey. The FAL: Fenton Fal—
Tregony—Truro—Tregothnan—Falmouth 54

THE PARRET AND THE LOWER AVON.
—By HUGH W. STRONG.
The PARRET: Its Source—Muchelney Abbey—The
Tone and Taunton—Athelney Island and
Alfred the Great—Sedgemoor—Bridgwater
—Burnham. The LOWER AVON: Escourt Park
Malmesbury Chippenham Melksham

—Malmesbury—Chippenham—Melksham—
Bradford-on-Avon—Bath—The Frome—
Beau Nash—Bridges at Bath—The Abbey
Church—Bristol—St. Mary Redcliffe and
Chatterton—The Cathedral—“The Chasm”—
Clifton Suspension Bridge—The Lower
Reaches—Avonmouth 67

THE SEVERN.—By the REV. PROFESSOR
BONNEY, D.Sc., F.R.S.
CHAPTER I.—FROM THE SOURCE TO
TEWKESBURY.—Birthplace of the Severn—
Plinlimmon—Blaenhafren—Llanidloes—
Caersws—Newtown—Montgomery—
Welshpool—Powys Castle—The Breidden
Hills—The Vyrnwy. Distant Views—
Shrewsbury—Haughmond Hill—The
Caradoc Hills—Atcham—Wroxeter—
Condover—The Wrekin—Benthall and
Wenlock Edges—Buildwas Abbey—
Coalbrook Dale—Ironbridge—Broseley and
Benthall—Coalport—Bridgnorth—Quatford
—Forest of Wyre—Bewdley—Stourport—
Worcester—The Teme—Ludlow—
Tewkesbury 82
CHAPTER II.—THE UPPER OR WARWICKSHIRE
AVON.—The Watershed of Central England—
Naseby—Rugby—The Swift—Lutterworth
and Wiclif—Stoneleigh Abbey and
Kenilworth Castle—Guy’s Cliff—The Leam
—Warwick and its Castle—Stratford-on-
Avon and its Shakespeare Associations—
Evesham—Pershore—Tewkesbury 107
CHAPTER III.—FROM TEWKESBURY TO THE
SEA.—Deerhurst—Gloucester—The
“Bore”—May Hill—Minsterworth—
Westbury-on-Severn—Newnham—Berkeley

y y
Castle—Lydney—Sharpness—The Severn
Tunnel—The Estuary—A Vanished River 119

THE WYE.—By E. W. SABEL.
“The Notorious Hill of Plinlimmon”—The
Stronghold of Owen Glendower—Llangurig
—Rhayader Gwy—Llyn-Gwyn—The Elan,
the Ithon, and the Yrfon—Llandrindod—
Builth—Aberedw and the Last Prince of
Wales—Hay—Clifford Castle and the Fair
Rosamond—Hereford—The Lug—“The
Wonder”—Ross and John Kyrle—Goodrich
Castle—Coldwell Rocks—Symond’s Yat—
Monmouth—The Monnow, the Dore, and the
Llonddu—Wordsworth’s Great Ode—Tintern
Abbey—The Wyndcliff—Chepstow—The
Lower Reaches 124

THE USK.—By E. W. SABEL.
The Black Mountains—Trecastle—The Gaer—
Brecon—The Brecknock Beacons—
Crickhowell—Abergavenny—Usk—
Caerleon and the Arthurian Legend—
Christchurch—Newport 149

RIVERS OF SOUTH WALES.—By
CHARLES EDWARDES.
Brecknock Beacons—The TAFF: Taff Fawr and
Taff Fechan—Cardiff Reservoirs—Merthyr
—The Dowlais Steel and Iron Works—The
Rhondda—Pontypridd—Castell Coch—
Llandaff and its Cathedral—Cardiff and its
Castle. The NEATH: Ystradfellte—The Mellte
and its Affluents—The Cwm Porth—
Waterfalls and Cascades—The Sychnant—
Pont Neath Vaughan—Neath and its Abbey—
The Dulas and the Clydach. Swansea and its
Docks—Morriston Castle—Swansea Castle
—The Mumbles and Swansea Bay. The
TAWE: Craig-y-Nos—Lly-Fan Fawr. The
TOWY: Ystradffin—Llandovery—Llandilo—
Dynevor Castle—Carmarthen and Richard
Steele—Carmarthen Bar. The TAFF: Milford
Haven—Carew Castle—Pembroke Castle—
Monkton Priory—New Milford and Old
Milford—Haverfordwest. The TEIFI: Strata
Florida Abbey—Newcastle Emlyn—Cenarth
—Cardigan. The YSTWITH: The Upper Waters
—Aberystwith 159

RIVERS OF NORTH WALES.—By AARON
WATSON.
CHAPTER I.—THE DOVEY, THE DYSYNNI, THE
MAWDDACH.—Glories of a Wet Autumn in
North Wales. The DOVEY: Source of the
Stream—Dinas Mowddwy—Mallwyd—
Machynlleth. The DYSYNNI: Tal-y-Llyn—The
“Bird Rock”—Towyn. The MAWDDACH: The
Estuary—The Wnion—Torrent Walk—
Dolgelley—Precipice Walk—The Estuary—
Barmouth—Harlech Castle—Portmadoc—

Glaslyn—Tremadoc and Shelley—The
Traeth Bach 193
CHAPTER II.—THE SEIONT, THE OGWEN, THE
CONWAY.—The SEIONT: Llanberis Pass—
Lakes Peris and Padarn—Dolbadarn Castle
and Cennant Mawr—Carnarvon and its
Castle. The OGWEN: Llyn Ogwen and Llyn
Idwal—Bethesda—Penrhyn Castle. The
LLUGWY: Capel Curig—Moel Siabod—Pont-
y-Cyfing—Swallow Falls—The Miners’
Bridge—Bettws-y-Coed. The LLEDR:
Dolwyddelen—Pont-y-Pant. The MACHNO
and its Fall. The CONWAY: Fairy Glen—
Llanrwst—Gwydir Castle—Llanbedr—
Trefriw—Conway Marsh—Conway Castle
and Town—Deganwy—Llandudno 205
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 223

THE MERSEY.—By W. S. CAMERON.
A Modern River—Derivations—The Tame, the
Goyt, and the Etherow—Stockport—
Northenden—The Irwell and its Feeders—
Manchester and Salford—The Ship Canal—
Bridges over the Irwell—Ordsall—Eccles—
Barton—Warburton—Irlam—Warrington—
Latchford—Runcorn and Widnes—The
Weaver—Eastham Locks—Liverpool and its
Growth—Its Docks and Quays—Birkenhead
and its Shipbuilding Yards—New Brighton—
Perch Rock Lighthouse 242

Perch Rock Lighthouse 242

RIVERS OF LANCASHIRE AND
LAKELAND.—By WILLIAM SENIOR.
A Birthplace of Rivers—The RIBBLE: Ribblehead
—Horton-in-Ribblesdale—Survival of Old
Traditions—Hellifield—The Hodder—
Stonyhurst and its College—The Calder—
Burnley—Towneley Hall—Preston—Its
Development as a Port. The WYRE: Poulton-
le-Fylde. The LUNE: Kirkby Lonsdale—The
Greta and the Wenning—Hornby Castle—
Lancaster—Morecambe Bay—The Journey
from Lancaster to Ulverston in Coaching
Days—Shifting Sands. The KENT: Kentmere
—Kendal. The Gilpin and the Winster. The
ROTHAY and the BRATHAY. Grasmere and
Wordsworth—Rydal Water—Ambleside—
Windermere. Troutbeck. Esthwaite Water.
The LEVEN: Newby Bridge—The Estuary.
The CRAKE: Coniston Water—Coniston Hall
—Brantwood and Mr. Ruskin. The DUDDON:
Wordsworth’s Sonnets. The ESK and the IRT:
Wastwater. The LIZA: Ennerdale Water. The
EHEN: Egremont Castle. The DERWENT: The
Vale of St. John’s—The Greta and Keswick
—The View from Castlerigg top—
Derwentwater 271

RIVERS OF THE SOLWAY FIRTH.—By
FRANCIS WATT.
The Firth—A Swift Tide. The EDEN: The Eamont
—Eden Hall—Armathwaite—John Skelton
—Wetheral and Corby Castle—The Caldew
and the Petteril—Greystoke Castle—Carlisle,
its Romance and History—Serva Pactum
—“Kinmont Willie” and the “bauld

Buccleuch”—Executions of Jacobites—The
Carlisle of To-day—The Sark—Gretna
Green. The LIDDEL—Hermitage Water and
Castle. The ESK: The Tarras—Gilnockie
Tower—Carlenrig and Johnnie Armstrong—
Young Lochinvar—Kirtle Water and its
Tragic Story. The ANNAN: The Land of the
Bruces—Thomas Carlyle. The NITH:
Dumfries—Burns’s Grave—Robert Bruce
and the Red Cumyn—Drumlanrig and
Caerlaverock Castles—The Cairn and its
Associations—The New Abbey Pow and
Sweetheart Abbey. The DEE: Douglas
Tongueland—Threave Castle. The CREE:
Newton Stewart—The “Cruives of Cree.”
The BLADENOCH: The Wigtown Martyrs 301

RIVERS OF AYRSHIRE.—By JOHN
GEDDIE.
Poetic Associations—Headstreams of the Ayrshire
Rivers—“The Land of Burns”—The Ayr and
the Doon—Sorn—Catrine—Ballochmyle—
Mossgiel—Mauchline—Barskimming—
Coilsfield House and the Fail Water—The
Coyl—Auchencruive—Craigie—Ayr—The
Doon 328

THE CLYDE.—By JOHN GEDDIE.
Clydesdale and its Waters—“The Hill of Fire”—
Douglasdale—“Castle Dangerous”—
Bonnington Linn—Corra Linn and
“Wallace’s Tower”—Lanark—The Mouse
Water—Stonebyres Linn—The Nethan and
“Tillietudlem”—“The Orchard of
Scotland”—Hamilton and its Palace—
Cadzow Castle and its Associations—
B th ll B i d C tl Bl t

Bothwell Brig and Castle—Blantyre—
Cambuslang—Rutherglen—Glasgow—The
City and its History—The Quays, Docks, and
Shipbuilding Yards—The Work of the Clyde
Navigation Trust—Govan and Partick—The
White Cart—Dumbarton Rock and Castle—
The Leven Valley—Ben and Loch Lomond—
Greenock—Gourock—The Firth at Eventide 342

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS.

CADER IDRIS, FROM THE DOLGELLEY ROAD Frontispiece.
THE SOUTHERN CHALK STREAMS:— PAGES

Distant View of Canterbury—Rivers of Kent
and Sussex (Map)—Arundel Castle—
Sandwich: The Old Bridge and Barbican—
General View of Winchester—St. Catherine’s
Hill—Winchester Cathedral—Southampton
Docks—The Royal Pier, Southampton—
Southampton from the Water—Romsey
Abbey—Christchurch Abbey—Rivers of
Hants and Dorset (Map)—A New Forest
Stream—The Avon at Amesbury—Salisbury
Cathedral—The Frome at Frampton Court—
Dorchester from the Frome—Poole Harbour
—Wimborne Minster 1–24

RIVERS OF DEVON:—
Bideford Bridge—Rivers of Devon (Map)—
The Wear Water—Exeter—Exmouth, from the
Beacon—Watersmeet—Lynmouth and Lynton
—“Clam” Bridge over the Wallabrook—
Fingle Bridge—Teignmouth—New Bridge—
Buckfastleigh—Staverton—The Island,
Totnes—Totnes—Dittisham—Mouth of the
Dart—Barnstaple, from the South Walk—The
Torridge near Torrington—The Plym from
Cadaford Bridge—In Bickleigh Vale—
Plympton Earl—The Hoe, Plymouth 25–53

RIVERS OF CORNWALL:—
Danescombe—Rivers of Cornwall (Map)—
Tavistock New Bridge—Morwell Rocks—
Cargreen—The Hamoaze, from Saltash—The
Fal from Tolverne—Falmouth Harbour—
Falmouth, from Flushing 54–66

THE PARRET AND THE LOWER AVON:—
The Isle of Athelney—The Parret and the
Lower Avon (Map)—Taunton Church—
Malmesbury Abbey—The Avon near Tetbury
—Bradford-on-Avon Church, from the North-
East—The Avon at Bath—View from North
Parade Bridge, Bath—View from the old City
Bridge, Bath—Bristol, from the Site of the old
Drawbridge across the Harbour—Clifton
Suspension Bridge 67–81

THE SEVERN:—
CHAPTER I.—FROM THE SOURCE TO
TEWKESBURY.—Source of the Severn,
Plinlimmon—The Severn, from the Source to
Tewkesbury (Map)—Valley of the Severn,
from Plinlimmon—The First House on the
Severn, Blaenhafren—Moel-y-Golfa and
Breidden, from Welshpool—The Vyrnwy
Embankment, before the flooding of the
Valley—A Quiet Nook on the Vyrnwy—The
Boat-house Ferry, between Welsh and English
Bridges—Shrewsbury Castle—Quarry Walk,
Shrewsbury—English Bridge, Shrewsbury—
Buildwas Abbey—The Severn from Benthall
Edge—Ironbridge—The Severn in Wyre
Forest—Near Shrawley—Old Houses at
Bewdley—Worcester Cathedral, from the
Severn—Ludlow—The Severn at Tewkesbury 82–106
CHAPTER II.—THE UPPER OR WARWICKSHIRE
AVON.—The Avon near Rugby—The
Warwickshire Avon (Map)—Warwick Castle
—The Avon from Warwick Castle—Stratford-
on-Avon Church—Shakespeare’s House—
The Avon at Stratford—Evesham—The Avon

at Tewkesbury 107–118
CHAPTER III.—FROM TEWKESBURY TO THE SEA.
—Distant View of Tewkesbury—The Severn,
from Tewkesbury to the Sea (Map)—
Gloucester—The Severn Bridge, Sharpness 119–123

THE WYE:—
A Bend of the Wye—Views in the Lower Elan
Valley—The Wye and the Usk (Map)—Pont-
Hyll-Fan, in the Elan Valley—The Shaky
Bridge, Llandrindod—The Wye Bridge and
Hereford Cathedral—Goodrich Castle—Ross
Church—Symond’s Yat and the Ferry—
Monmouth—The Monnow Bridge and Gate-
house, Monmouth—Tintern Abbey, from the
Wye—The Nave, Tintern Abbey—Gateway at
Chepstow—Chepstow Castle—View from the
Wyndcliff—Old Monastery on the Wye 124–148

THE USK:—
Near the Source of the Usk, Talsarn-side—
The Usk at Brecknock—Bit of the Roman
Wall at Caerleon—Usk—Caerleon—
Newport: The Bridge and Castle 149–158

RIVERS OF SOUTH WALES:—
The Brecknock Beacons, from the Taff—
Llandaff Cathedral: The West Front; The Nave
and Choir; The West and North Doors—Rivers
of South Wales (Map)—The Bishop’s Gateway,
Llandaff—Cardiff Castle—St. Mary Street,
Cardiff—The Drawing Room, Cardiff Castle—
In the Vale of Neath—Neath Abbey—Outskirts
of Neath—North Dock, Swansea—Morriston—
The Mumbles—Carew Castle—Carmarthen
Quay—Pembroke Castle and Monkton Priory—
The Royal Dockyard, Pembroke Dock—
Haverfordwest—Milford Haven—The Teifi at
Kilgerran—Aberystwith 159–192

RIVERS OF NORTH WALES:—
CHAPTER I.—THE DOVEY, THE DYSYNNI, THE
MAWDDACH.—Dolgelley—Rivers of North
Wales (Map)—Torrent Walk, Dolgelley—The
Lower Bridge, Torrent Walk—Between
Dolgelley and Barmouth—Barmouth Bridge and
Cader Idris—Snowdon, from Crib-Goch—The
Estuary, Barmouth 193–204
CHAPTER II.—THE SEIONT, THE OGWEN, THE
CONWAY.—Pass of Llanberis—Carnarvon Castle
—The Swallow Falls—Miners’ Bridge, Bettws-
y-Coed—Moel Siabod, from the Llugwy—Pont-
y-Pair—On the Lledr—Another View in the
Lledr Valley—Fairy Glen, Bettws-y-Coed—On
the Conway—The Conway, from Conway Castle
—Conway Castle—The Bridge, from Conway
Castle 205–222
CHAPTER III.—THE CLWYD AND THE DEE.—View
from Rhuddlan Castle—Rhuddlan Castle—St.
Asaph—Denbigh—Bala Lake—Valle Crucis
Abbey—Llangollen—Eaton Hall—The Roodee,

y g ,
Chester—The Dee at Chester, from the Walls—
Chester Cathedral, from the South-West—Swing
Bridge over the Dee near Hawarden—The Sands
of Dee 223–241

THE MERSEY:—
The Mersey at Stockport—The Mersey (Map)—
Northenden—On the Irwell—Pendleton, from
the Crescent—Manchester, from the Grammar
School, showing the Cathedral, the Exchange,
the Town Hall, etc.—Victoria and Blackfriars
Bridges—Steamer passing through Trafford
Road Swing Bridge—The Old and the Swing
Aqueducts, Barton—The Irwell at Ordsall, with
Worrall’s Works—Runcorn Bridge—The Locks
at Eastham—St. George’s Landing-Stage,
Liverpool—Swing Bridge over the Entrance to
Stanley Dock, Liverpool—Liverpool, from
Birkenhead—St. George’s Hall and Lime Street,
Liverpool—The Perch Rock Lighthouse 242–270

RIVERS OF LANCASHIRE AND LAKELAND:—
Stainforth Bridge—Towneley Hall, Burnley—
Rivers of Lancashire and Lakeland (Map)—
Preston, from the West—Lancaster—
Windermere—Rydal Water—Grasmere—Newby
Bridge—Another Bit of the Leven—The Liza
flowing into Ennerdale Water—The Liza at
Gillerthwaite—Coniston Water—Ennerdale—
The Greta between Threlkeld and Keswick—The
Derwent, with Keswick in the Distance—The
Derwent at Crosthwaite—Derwentwater and
Skiddaw—Derwentwater from Scafell—The
Cocker flowing from Crummock Lake—The
Cocker at Kirkgate 271–300

RIVERS OF THE SOLWAY FIRTH:—
The Annan, near Annan Town—The Eden, the
Petteril, and the Caldew (Map)—Eden Hall—
The Weir at Armathwaite—Wetheral Bridge—
View from Brackenbank looking towards
Cotehill—Cotehill Island—View from the Long
Walk, Corby Castle—Rock Stairway to the
Boathouse, Corby Castle—Greystoke Castle—
Carlisle, looking East—Carlisle, looking West—
Rivers flowing South into Solway Firth (Map)—
The Esk, near Gilnockie—High Street, Dumfries
—Lincluden Abbey—Drumlanrig Castle—
Caerlaverock Castle—The Dee at Douglas
Tongueland—The Cree at Newton Stewart 301–327

RIVERS OF AYRSHIRE:—
The Ayr above Muirkirk—Sorn—Rivers of
Ayrshire (Map)—Ballochmyle—The Ayr at
Barskimming—Auchencruive—The Twa Brigs
of Ayr—The Dam at Ayr—The Doon: The New
and the Auld Brig—Ayrmouth 328–341

THE CLYDE:—
One of the Sources of the Clyde—The Clyde
(Map)—Douglas Castle—Bonnington Linn—
Corra Linn—Roman Bridge near Lanark—
Stonebyres Linn—Bothwell Castle—Glasgow
University—The Broomielaw Landing-Stage—
The Clyde at Glasgow—Partick—Paisley—
Dumbarton Rock—Loch Lomond—Greenock—
Gourock 342–369

RIVERS OF GREAT BRITAIN.

Photo: G. W. Wilson & Co., Aberdeen.
DISTANT VIEW OF CANTERBURY (p. 3).

THE SOUTHERN CHALK STREAMS.
General Characteristics—The CANTERBURY STOUR and its Branches: Ashford and Jack Cade—
Horton and Lyminge—Canterbury—Fordwich and Izaak Walton—Isle of Thanet—Minster. The
LESSER STOUR: “Bourne Ground”—Sandwich. The BREDE. The ROTHER: Bodiam—Isle of
Oxney—Winchelsea—Seaford. The CUCKMERE: Alfriston and Lullington. THE OUSE: St.
Leonard’s Forest—Fletching—Maresfield—Lewes. The ADUR: Bramber—Shoreham. The
ARUN: Amberley—Arundel—Littlehampton. Hampshire Rivers—The ARLE: The Meon District
—Wickham and the Bishop-Builder—Titchfield. The ITCHEN: A Curious Example of Instinct—
Alresford Pond—Cheriton—Tichborne—The Winnal Reaches—Winchester and Izaak Walton—
St. Cross—St. Catherine’s Hill—Southampton. The TEST: Romsey and its Abbey. The
BEAULIEU: Beaulieu Abbey. The LYMINGTON and the MEDINA—The HAMPSHIRE AVON and the
STOUR: Christchurch—Salisbury—Wimborne. The FROME: Dorchester—Mr. Hardy’s Country
—Poole Harbour.

T HE long and strong backbone of the North Downs extends,
roughly speaking, from Kent, by way of Dorking and Guildford,
to the source of the Avon, north of Salisbury Plain; and the
South Downs run parallel, more or less, through Sussex and
Hants to the Dorset heights. From these green hills spring the streams which
will be briefly traced from source to sea in this chapter. They are not rivers
of first account in their aid to commerce; even the pair which combine in
the formation of Southampton Water have never been reckoned in the
nomenclature of dock or port. To the angler, however, some of these chalk
streams are exceedingly precious—as they indeed ought to be, when a
rental varying from fifty to a hundred pounds per mile per annum is gladly
paid (and taken) for the right of fishing with rod and line. Such choice
preserves are stocked with trout of aristocratic quality, trout which can only
be reared in streams issuing from the chalk; their water, when unpolluted by
contact with towns, is crystal clear; and the beds of gravel and fine sand
favour the growth of typical vegetation, which in its turn favours typical
water insects and other food suitable for the highest class of non-migratory
salmonidæ.

Wholly different from such noisy, turbulent, masterful rivers as those which
distinguish North Britain, these chalk streams enter into the very spirit of
that sweet pastoral scenery which suggests repose, peace, and plenty. They
maintain for the most part an even course, tranquilly flowing without fret or
violence through level land, and pursuing their tireless journey seawards,
unobstructed by the rugged rocks, obstinate boulders, and uneven beds
which provoke your mountain-or moorland-born waters into thunderous
roar, angry swirl, and headlong rapidity. For foam-flecked pools, and
mighty leaps in romantic gorges, the South-country chalk stream offers
forget-me-nots by the margin, and beds of flowers blossoming from its
harmless depths. It is with rivers of this class we have now to deal,
presenting such features as may be noticed within the limits which have
been assigned to the present chapter.
Beginning, as the
sun in its
progress would
have us do, from
the east, we
introduce the
reader to the fair
county of Kent.
There are at least
half-a-dozen
Stours, great and
small, in
England; and RIVERS OF KENT AND SUSSEX.
though the
stream with
which we start is entirely Kentish (and might, therefore, take the name of
the county), it is commonly distinguished by the name of the CANTERBURY
STOUR. There are others of its namesakes—one of which we shall meet with
towards the end of our journey—of greater watershed, but there is no more
interesting member of the family. As a rule, a river, with its tributaries, as
seen on the map, offers the appearance of the root of a tree, with its
branches gracefully following in a common direction towards the parent
stream, on the principle that, as the main river ever has marching orders
towards the ocean, all its feeders, in the same spirit, loyally join in a

forward movement. Our Stour, however, is a notable exception. It assumes
a respectable magnitude at Ashford, but near that town, and almost at right
angles to the subsequent direction of the main stream, two distinct branches
join issue. The main stream from Ashford to the Isle of Thanet runs almost
due north-east; branch number one, that comes from the hills in the
direction of Maidstone, travels to Ashford almost due south-west, and the
other branch that rises north of Hythe flows in a diametrically opposite
course. These little rivers are of equal length, and flow, in their
unpretending fashion, through purely rural country.
The first-named of these branches rises near Lenham, which takes its name
from a feeder of the great river of the northern watershed of the county.
Visitors to the seat of the Dering family at Surrenden, where there have
been Derings since the time of the Conqueror, and to Little Chart Church,
will be, at the latter place, not far from what is regarded as the real source
of the river Stour, but this brook must not be confounded with the Beult at
Smarden, which belongs to the Medway. Our stream flows the other way,
passing Cale Hill, Hothfield, and Godinton. Hereabouts—if there is
anything in tradition—is the country of troublesome Jack Cade, who must
have known a good deal about the river, for the story is that he was born at
Ashford, and that the squire who had the honour of taking him into custody
lived on the estate known in these days as Ripley Court Farm.
The southern branch takes its rise near Postling, on the famous Stone Street,
or Roman road, which from Westenhanger is a straight northerly highway to
Canterbury. The farmhouse at Horton was a priory founded in the time of
Henry II. Naturally, in this part of England, where Augustine landed, the
countryside is rich in the earliest ecclesiastical reminiscences. At Lyminge,
for example, hard by, was one of the Benedictine nunneries, and the church
where the daughter of Ethelbert was buried is often visited by admirers of
Roman and Anglo-Saxon masonry, for it is believed that the Saxon church
was built on the site of a basilicon. There are many parish churches in Kent
which are of exceptional interest, but that at Lyminge is generally accepted
as the first of them.
The entire course of the Stour is about forty-five miles, and its valley from
Ashford to Canterbury is one of the loveliest features of a lovely county.
Overlooking it is Eastwell Park, which for many years was the country-
house of the Duke of Edinburgh. The valley of the Stour, seen from one of

its higher knolls as on a chart, is not always so open as it is in this
neighbourhood, though its narrowing means but the concentration of
charming scenery, with wooded heights on the one side and open downs on
the other. For a considerable distance the Stour follows the railway line, and
at Wye, where there is one of the most lovely miniature racecourses in the
kingdom, it is crossed by a bridge of five arches. Thenceforth, it is a notable
trout stream, gradually widening until it forms the distinctive feature of the
well-known meadows, with the square-towered cathedral always a
prominent object of the landscape.
Canterbury has been so often described, for it is frequently the scene of
great ceremonials (as witness the impressive burial of Archbishop Benson
in 1896, and the enthronisation of his distinguished successor in 1897), that
a few sentences only are required as we muse by the riverside. But it is
impossible to visit Canterbury without recalling its stirring and suggestive
associations, and the distinction it had in times when other parts of the
country were obscure. It was too near the water to escape the ravages of the
sea-kings, who liked to land at Sheppey and Thanet, and it was more than
once devastated by the Danes. In 1011 it was taken by storm amidst scenes
of death and desolation during which the cathedral and monastery were
burnt, the inhabitants slaughtered in masses, and women and children
carried away into captivity. There is no need to re-tell the story of that
different kind of landing, glorified by the arrival of St. Augustine and his
missionaries. This also honoured the Isle of Thanet, which the Saxon
chronicle mentions as the place of disembarkation of Hengist and Horsa on
their heathen mission to Vortigern. The Stour in its terminal portion has
probably become much cabined and confined since that period, when it
must have been a broad estuary.

Photo: J. White, Littlehampton.
ARUNDEL CASTLE (p. 11).

About two miles below Canterbury is the village of Fordwich, on the
opposite bank of the Stour. As the tide in old days reached thither, it ranked
as a Cinque Port. According to Izaak Walton, the old name of Fordwich was
“Fordidge,” and as such he immortalised it in the “Compleat Angler” as the
home of the Fordidge trout, about which there was some mystery, until in
the present century it was proved to be one of the migratory salmonidæ. An
occasional specimen is now found. This fish does now and then run into
some of our south-east rivers, and no doubt at the time when the Thames
was a salmon river and the waters were unpolluted, it was common in the
Stour, which throughout is an excellent trout stream.

Photo: Poulton & Son, Lee.
SANDWICH: THE OLD BRIDGE AND BARBICAN (p. 7).

Below Canterbury, where the water becomes brackish and the conditions
prosaic, the trout gives place to the ordinary coarse fish of our streams.
Grove Ferry is one of the favourite holiday resorts of the citizens. At Sarr, a
few miles from Fordwich, the ferry which now plies at Grove Ferry was
formerly the means of communication with the Isle of Thanet. This historic
island is formed by the Stour separating right and left, the arm to the north
finding the sea a little east of the Reculvers; while the branch flowing in the
opposite direction marks the boundary of the promontory which includes
the watering-places of Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Margate, and Birchington,
and has for the extreme tip of its snout the lonely North Foreland. This
divergence, which, on a smaller scale, corresponds with the curious right-

angled course of the brooks at the source, used to have a name of its own: it
was called the Wantsum, with a well-known ford at St. Nicholas-at-Wade;
and no doubt this channel was once an arm of the sea. The lesser Stour, of
which something will presently be said, falls into the navigable portion of
the parent river below Sarr. The lower branch runs through marshes by
Minster, which is a deservedly popular village to tourists exploring Kent
who are specially on the lookout for interesting relics of the past. King
Egbert, one of the Christian kings of Kent, founded a nunnery here by way
of atonement for the murder of a couple of princely cousins, and he agreed
to endow it with as much land as a hind would cover in one course. The
Danes had their will of the place. The restored church in its present form
has a Norman nave, with Early English transepts and choir. Minster is a
favourite ramble for seaside visitors to Ramsgate; it is well situated, and its
high ground affords views of distant Canterbury, the ruins of Richborough
Castle, the coast country about Deal, and a proper expanse of marsh. The
Stour, when nearly opposite the point of coast where it eventually falls into
the Straits of Dover, takes a turn to the east, calling, as it were, at the
ancient town of Sandwich, and then proceeds due north to Pegwell Bay.
Rising somewhere near the source of the lower arm of Stour major, the
LESSER STOUR is another charming Kentish trout stream. It flows through
what may be designated bourne ground, as the names of many of its
villages testify. The source is near Bishopsbourne Church, where the
judicious Hooker, a native of the place, performed the duties of parish
priest. There are also Patrixbourne, Bekesbourne, Nailbourne, and
Littlebourne. The last named is well known to tourists, for the village has a
traditional association with the monks of St. Augustine; here are an Early
English church with monuments, and the park at Lee Priory where Sir
Egerton Brydges worked his press; and within a quarter of an hour’s walk is
an old church formerly belonging to some of the Canterbury priors. On the
banks of the stream at Bekesbourne are the remains of a palace of
Archbishop Cranmer; and when the Parliamentarians, according to their
custom, laid it under contribution, in their ransacking they discovered the
Primate’s will behind an old oak wainscoting. Wickham Breaux is another
of the Lesser Stour villages, and all around are the fruit orchards and
occasional hopfields which give a distinctive and agreeable character to the
entire watershed. The Lesser Stour for a while runs parallel with its
companion, which it joins at Stourmouth, to assist in outlining the Isle of

Thanet, and mingling therefore with the current which goes the round of
Sandwich to Pegwell Bay. It seems almost incredible that Sandwich was
once a great port, but if a quiet hour be spent in what is left of it, the town
will be found to repay careful inspection. The Barbican, as the old gateway
tower is called, and the bridge indicate the haven in which refugees from
France and the Low Countries found a safe home.

From Hythe to the ancient and always interesting town of Rye, stretches the
Royal Military Canal; the first stream to claim attention is the BREDE,
though it is scarcely entitled to river rank. It takes its rise a few miles from
Battle, and its course is held to have been the old channel of the Rother,
near Winchelsea. The “Groaning Bridge” is on the Brede, and it was on this
spot that the Oxenbridge ogre of ancient legend was said to have been
disposed of once for all by being divided across the middle with a wooden
saw.

GENERAL VIEW OF WINCHESTER (p. 16).
Photo: Poulton & Son, Lee.

Photo: Poulton & Son, Lee.
ST. CATHERINE’S HILL (p. 17).

But the principal river in the Rye and Winchelsea district, so full of
suggestion in its evidences of past prosperity and present decay, is the
ROTHER, known as the Eastern, to distinguish it from another of the same
name in the western part of the county. At Bodiam is a famous foss, fed by
the river, encircling the excellently preserved castle, with its round tower,
great gateway approached by a causeway, spacious central court, outer
portcullis, and portions of hall, chapel, and kitchen. This is held by
antiquaries to be one of the best of the feudal fortresses in Sussex. In
monkish days the stream was no doubt one of great value. Near the source,
at Gravel Hill, is Robertsbridge, or Rotherbridge, where a Cistercian abbey,
secluded almost from the world by the river, was visited by Edward II. and
Edward III. There are still fragments of the abbey on a farm which occupies
at least a portion of the site. The Rother is a river of many tributaries, one of

them acting partly as the boundary of Sussex and Kent. Its scenery is
somewhat commonplace, but it is navigable for a considerable portion of its
course, which has much altered since the old chronicles were inscribed.
Two of its branches enclose the Isle of Oxney, a flat so easily flooded that
the villagers within its bounds often find the use of a boat a necessity.

Photo: Frith & Co., Reigate.
WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL (p. 16).

The railway crosses the Rother by a stone bridge, then comes Rye Harbour,
and at a distance of two miles, set upon a hill so that it cannot be hid, is the
old-world borough of Winchelsea, which the sea has left high and dry,
though it had been the abode of great kings, and the witness of battles by
sea and land. At Hastings the Downs supply sufficient rivulet-power to
maintain glen, waterfall, and dripping well, for sea-side visitors. Following
the coast-line to Seaford, the quiet and unpretending watering place which

was once a Cinque Port, and which returned members to Parliament until it
was disfranchised by the Reform Act, a short walk over the Downs brings
the tourist to the pretty broken country of East and West Dean.

Photo: F. G. O. Stuart, Southampton.
SOUTHAMPTON DOCKS (p. 19).

The stream crossed by Exceat Bridge is the CUCKMERE, of which it need
only be said that it has ceased to be a feature of importance to shipping
people. It is worth while, nevertheless, to follow it up from the reaches
where barges still find resting-place. At Alfriston British, Roman, and
Saxon coins have been found; there is a rare sixteenth-century inn,

supposed to have been built as a house of call for Canterbury pilgrims, a
market cross, a church on the plan of a Greek cross, sometimes designated
“the cathedral of the South Downs,” a parish register dating from 1512—
possibly the oldest in England—and a half-timbered rectory of still earlier
date. There is some doubt as to which is now the smallest church in Great
Britain, but the claim has been made for Lullington, which is on the slope
of Cuckmere vale. In rambling by this little river the tourist will make
acquaintance with the South Downs free and unadulterated. The Cuckmere
flows into the sea about two miles from Seaford, having escaped through
the opening which takes the name of Birling Gap.

Within an area of four square miles, and almost in touch with St. Leonard’s
Forest, three important Sussex streams take their rise—the Ouse, Adur, and
Arun. This was the centre of the ancient iron industry of Sussex, and the
position would not have been possible without water supply for the hammer
ponds. The OUSE is crossed by the London and Brighton Railway a little
north-west of Lindfield. The river afterwards winds round the well-wooded
seat of the Earl of Sheffield; and at Fletching Common, hard by, the
baronial army spent the night before fighting the battle of Lewes. Gibbon
the historian was buried in the church, which is noted also for an ancient
rood screen and the mausoleum of the Neville family. Maresfield, where the
furnaces and forges of the old Sussex iron-masters clustered thick, retains
vast expanses of the cinder and slag they created centuries ago. It is
beautified by the trees of Ashdown Forest, and sends a tributary to the
Ouse; another tributary presently arrives from Buxted, where the first cast
cannon ever seen in Europe was made in 1543.
The Ouse is the river of the pleasant county town of Lewes. This rare old
town, on its chalk hill, with downs surrounding it, and with the Ouse, on
whose right bank it is spread, adding to its attractions, ranks in interest with
Chester and Durham. The great battle which was fought on May 14th, 1264,
is the event of which the local historians are most proud. As we have seen,
it was at Fletching Common that De Montfort encamped his soldiers, and
thence he sent a couple of bishops the day before the battle on a fruitless
errand to the king, who was quartered at the priory. The most sanguinary
slaughter appears to have taken place south of the town, where the Ouse
was crossed by a bridge; and the river with its marshy flats assisted in the

destruction, for many knights were discovered after the battle stuck in the
swamp, “sitting on their horses, in complete armour, and with drawn swords
in their lifeless hands.” The Ouse cannot be said to be picturesque; at Lewes
it has long lost the sparkle which characterised it in the forest outskirts; but
from any elevated point of Lewes Castle, notably the western keep, the easy
stream may be seen as it is about to disappear between the hills. The
disestablished locks between Cuckfield and Lewes indicate a brisk bygone
barge traffic. Early in the present century the river was navigable for barges
of forty tons burden for ten miles without interruption, and thence beyond
Lindfield in the Hayward’s Heath country. In early times it was probably a
broad estuary extending to Lewes itself, and at some time found an outlet to
the sea at Seaford, three miles to the east. This, however, is very ancient
history, for the river was brought back to its present channel in the sixteenth
century.
Shoreham, the humble and dull attendant upon Brighton, has an advantage
over the great watering-place—which is streamless—in being situated on a
river. It is not a beautiful place, but it has something of a harbour, in which
you may find port in a storm, and it has a bridge across the ADUR. This river
comes down from openings in the hills, having passed through pretty
country, with such villages as Bramber (where there was once a broad
estuary in which vessels anchored) and Steyning. The source of the Adur on
the borders of St. Leonard’s Forest has been previously mentioned; but
there are at least two other rills that have an equal claim. From Henfield the
river runs south, through pasture land, and, as we have seen, winds past
Bramber, supposed to be the Portus Adurni of the Romans. There is very
little of the castle left, and that is almost hidden by trees. At New Shoreham
the Adur turns eastward, and runs for a while parallel with the seashore.
These Sussex rivers which are projected from the neighbourhood of St.
Leonard’s Forest can scarcely be considered as akin to the pure, bright
chalk stream which was described at the commencement of this chapter;
and the most important of the trio, the ARUN, does not in this respect differ
from its fellows. Something more than passing glimpses of it are obtained
from the carriage windows by the railway traveller as he speeds through the
imposing scenery around Arundel. It is navigable for an unusual distance,
and whatever beauty it possesses it owes to its surroundings. Of late years
the river has become the Mecca of members of the London angling clubs,

who charter special trains and invade the districts by hundreds on Sundays.
The first stopping-place of any account from this point of view is
Pulborough, the site of an old Roman settlement, with traces of camp and
buildings, which will not, however, be found on Arun-side, but at Hardham
and elsewhere. Amberley was rescued from oblivion, and from the
desertion enforced upon it by neighbouring marshes, by the railway; and the
scenery between it and Arundel has always been prized and worked at by
artists. Swanbourne Mill as a picture is probably familiar to many who have
never entered the county.
The splendidly kept castle at Arundel has not been dwarfed by the
cathedral-like Roman Catholic church built by the Duke of Norfolk, and
dedicated to St. Philip Neri. Even now it looks like the splendid stronghold
that it was, and the most venerable in the land that it is, on its commanding
terminal of swelling down, with the stream from the Weald narrowing
between the hills through its beautiful valley, to the characteristic marsh
flats beyond. The river hence to the sea does not call for admiration or
comment, save that there is a remnant of a priory at Tortington, a point of
view from which Arundel with its castle-crowned heights looks its best.
Littlehampton, four miles from Arundel, is better known as a port of
departure for steamships than as a watering-place competing with the
pleasure resorts in more favoured situations on the coast.

Hampshire is a well-watered county, and classic ground for that new school
of anglers who are classified as “dry-fly” men. The masters thereof
graduated on the Itchen and the Test, most famous of all South-country
chalk streams, and honourably mentioned in angling literature. To know
that a man is a successful fisher upon either is tantamount to a certificate of
the highest skill. The Hampshire rivers, other than these celebrated feeders
of the Southampton water, are few, and modest in character. There is, it is
true, a small trout stream at Fareham, a busy little seaport which owes its
standing to its proximity to Portsmouth Harbour, and its attractions as a
district abounding in country seats to the rampart of Portsdown Hill,
affording at once protection from the north and opportunity for overlooking
the Solent and the Isle of Wight. Less than three miles west, across the
peninsula that sustains Gosport, is a considerable stream, little known
outside the county, but an ever-present delight to the villages through which

it lightly flows to the eastern shore of Southampton water. This is the Arle,
or Titchfield river.

THE ROYAL PIER, SOUTHAMPTON (p. 19).
Photo: Perkins, Son, & Venimore, Lewisham.

SOUTHAMPTON FROM THE WATER.

In its course of some score of miles the ARLE takes its share in a diversity of
scenery of a soothing rather than romantic character. Rising in the South
Downs, it begins by mingling with village and hamlet life in a sequestered
valley; then it proceeds through an open forest country, and becomes
navigable at Titchfield. The source of the stream is but a few miles west of
Petersfield, but it begins with a sweep to the north and a loop round a
southerly point, passing so much in the Meon district that it is often marked
on the maps by that name, which was probably its only one in the past.
Meonware was a Pictish province when there was a king of the South
Saxons, and Saint Wilfrid preached Christianity to the British heathen.

Indeed a portion of Corhampton Church, across the stream, is ascribed to
that prelate. Wickham, most beautifully situated on the Arle, is celebrated as
the birthplace of William of Wykeham, the great bishop-builder. Warton the
poet lived his last days at Wickham, and died there in the first year of the
century.

Photo: A. Seeley, Richmond.
ROMSEY ABBEY (p. 19).

References to William of Wykeham continually occur in county Hants: thus
in the district under consideration there are a Wykeham chancel at
Meonstoke, a Wykeham foundation of five chantries near the coast at
Southwick, and a reputed Wykeham aisle in the church at Titchfield. The
remains of Funtley Abbey are naturally not far from the stream. They are
close to Titchfield, and mark the site of a Priory founded by Bishop de
Rupibus in the reign of Henry III. The house which Sir Thomas Wriothesley
built upon the place acquired in the usual way at the Dissolution was “right
statelie” when Leland described it; and this was the Titchfield House where

poor Charles Stuart found temporary refuge between the flight from
Hampton Court and the grim lodging of Carisbrooke.
The ITCHEN, as next in order on our westward progress, must receive first
consideration, though it is the smaller of the streams which pay tribute to
the Solent at Calshot Castle. The Itchen and the Test have many things in
common: they both rise out of the chalk downs which stretch from the Stour
in Kent, through Hants, to the confines of Wilts; they both give
Southampton importance; they are both salmon rivers, but to so
unimportant a degree that they have never yet been considered worthy of
governance by a Board of Conservators; and they have the distinction of
being the only salmon rivers in England that may be fished without a rod
licence. But these rivers are so distinct in one characteristic that they may
be quoted as evidence of almost miraculous instinct. The salmon of the Test
hold no communion with those of the Itchen; no fisherman acquainted with
the rivers would be likely to mistake the one for the other; yet, while the
Itchen fish, on return from the salt water, unerringly turn to the right, and
pass the Docks on their way to Woodmill, the salmon of the Test swim
straight ahead, and pause not till they reach their own river beyond the
furthest of the western suburbs of Southampton.

Photo: Poulton & Son, Lee.
CHRISTCHURCH ABBEY (p. 22).

When a river issues from a lake it is the custom to regard the latter as the
headwaters. In this sense Alresford Pond may be set down as the source of
the Itchen. Locally, a brook at Ropley Dean, about eleven miles from
Winchester as the crow flies, has been nominated for the distinction, but
there are other rivulets from the high land between Alresford and Alton
which might be brought into competition. The Bishops of Winchester
formerly had a summer palace at Bishop’s Sutton, and it is somewhat of a
coincidence that in our own times Archbishop Longley was one of its
vicars. There are stores of pike and mammoth trout in Alresford Pond, and
no doubt they had ancestors there when Richard I. was king. Even now, in
its reduced size, this beautiful sheet of clear water covers sixty acres.
The tributaries are inconsiderable; but it is a land of innumerable
watercourses, and of carriers, kept in action for the flooding of the pastures.
Hence the meads are found in a perpetual freshness of “living green,” and
the verdant pastures in the late spring are magnificent with their marsh-

marigolds and
cuckoo flowers
marking the lines
of the meadow
trenches, while
the hedges and
coppices are a
dream of May
blossom. Noble
country houses
are set back on
the slopes, real
old-fashioned
farmhouses and
thatched cottages RIVERS OF HANTS AND DORSET.
are embowered
in every variety of foliage, and the background is frequently filled in by
gently ranging upland clothed with the softest herbage. Here a village with
its mill, and there a hamlet with its homely old church, mark the stages of
the crystal clear river, every foot of which is the treasured preserve of some
wealthy angler. There are golden trout upon the gravel, and in the deeps,
while the shallows, many of which have been fords from time immemorial,
are open to the eye of the wayfarer who quietly pauses on the rustic bridges
to watch the spotted denizens as they cruise and poise.
At Cheriton the Royalists received a crushing blow on the March day when
Lords Hopton and Forth led their army of 10,000 men against an equal
force of Waller’s Roundheads. The engagement was fatal to the Royal
cause, and it gave Winchester and its fort to the Parliamentarians. Of
Tichborne this generation heard somewhat in the seventies, and the
notorious trials brought for many years an increase of visitors, who would
interrupt the discourse upon Sir Roger de Tychborne, and the Tychborne
Dole founded by the Lady Mabell (whose monument is in the church on the
hill), with questions about the Claimant and the lost Sir Roger. Martyr’s
Worthy, King’s Worthy, and Abbot’s Worthy are within sound of the
sonorous Cathedral bells; and after these villages are the loved Winnal
reaches of the stream, one of them sadly marred by the Didcot and
Newbury Railway, which, within the last few years, has been opened with a

station south of the town. The Nun’s Walk is to the right as you follow the
Itchen downwards, often over planks half-hidden in sedges. Sleek cattle
graze in the water-meads; beyond them is the clustering city and its
Cathedral, which at a distance resembles nothing so much as a long low-
lying building that has yet to be finished, the squat tower seeming a mere
commencement. The bye-streams, of which there are several, meet at the
bottom of the town, and the strong, rapid, concentrated current has much
mill work to do before it recovers perfect freedom.

A NEW FOREST STREAM (p. 20).

Izaak Walton lived a while at Winchester, in the declining years of his long
and—who can doubt?—tranquil life. He had friends among the bishops and
clergy, and wrote the lives of contemporary divines. So he came to
Winchester, where a room was kept for him in the Bishop’s Palace, and in
this city he died on December 15th, 1683. His grave is in the Cathedral,

marked by a black marble slab, and within the last few years a memorial
statue has been placed in one of the niches of the newly-erected screen.

THE AVON AT AMESBURY (p. 22).

The ancient hospital of St. Cross is one of the best-known features of the
Itchen in the neighbourhood of Winchester, but there are charming country-
seats along the whole remaining course—fair homes of English gentlemen,
planted above the grass land whence the evening mists of summer rise to
shroud the winding stream and far-stretching water-meads, and adorned
with smooth-shaven lawns intersected by gravel-walks, winding amidst
shrubberies and parterres to the sedgy banks of the silently gliding river.
But St. Cross is unique with its gateway tower and porter’s hutch, where the
wayfarer may even now make the vagrant’s claim for dole of beer and
bread, the former no longer brewed on the spot, and for its own sake not
worth the trouble often taken by sentimental visitors to obtain it. Fine old
elms surround the venerable home of the brethren of this cloistered retreat;
the river flows close to its foundations; and, facing you across the stream,
rises the bold rounded steep surmounted by the clump of beech-trees on St.
Catherine’s Hill. The speculative builder, however, has long been pushing
his outworks towards this breezy eminence where the Wykeham College
boys of past generations trooped to their sports.
The Itchen as it narrows to serve the South Stoneham water-wheels loses
much of its beauty, and is finally, after its course of twenty-five miles,
abruptly stopped at the flour-mill. Through artificial outlets it tumbles into
the tideway, and becomes at a bound subject to the ebb and flow of the
Solent. Southampton, after a temporary depression due to the withdrawal of
the Peninsular and Oriental Company to other headquarters, has launched
out into renewed enterprise; great docks have been added, and the extension
is likely to continue in the future. Queen Victoria opened the Empress
Docks in 1890; the graving docks were the next scheme, and in 1893 the
new American line of steamers began to run. In 1833 her Majesty, then the
Princess Victoria, opened the Royal (or Victoria) Pier, which was rebuilt in
1892 and re-opened by the Duke of Connaught; and from it and other
vantage points commanding views are to be had of the estuary, and of the
New Forest on the further side. To meet this vigorous revival of commercial
development, the suburbs have pushed out in all directions, and the estuary
of the Itchen, from the Salmon Pool at South Stoneham to the Docks, is
now bordered by modern dwellings, and presents an appearance of life in
marked contrast to the dreariness of a quarter of a century ago.

In its general
characteristics
the Test
resembles the
Itchen. It is ten
miles longer, and
has a tributary
assistance which
its sister stream
lacks; but there
are in its valley
similar country
mansions, ruddy
farm-houses,
picturesque
cottages and
gardens, water-
meads and
marshy corners,
mills and mill-
pools, rustic
bridges, and
superb stock of
salmon in the
lower, and of
trout and
grayling in the
higher, reaches.
It springs from
the foot of the
SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (p. 22).
ridge on the
Berkshire border,
and is joined below Hurstbourne Park by a branch from the north-east. For
the first few miles it is the ideal of a small winding stream, and is
established as a chalk stream of the first class at Whitchurch. It skirts
Harewood Forest, and takes in a tributary below Wherwell. The principal
feeder is the Anton, which is of sufficient magnitude to be considered an

independent river. For quite sixteen miles the Test runs a sinuous course, as
if not certain which point of the compass to select, but eventually it goes
straight south. Stockbridge is the only considerable town, and that owes its
reputation to ample training downs, and to the periodical races which rank
high in that description of sport. Between this and Romsey there are many
bye-waters, and it requires one accustomed to the country to distinguish the
main river.
Occasionally a salmon, taking advantage of a flood, will ascend as high as
Stockbridge, but this does not happen every year. At Romsey, however,
gentlemen anglers find their reward, though anything more unlike a salmon
river could not be found, unless, indeed, it should be the Stour and the
Avon, to which we shall come presently. The Test in its upper and middle
reaches is seldom so deep that the bottom, and the trout and grayling for
which it is justly celebrated, cannot be clearly seen. It gets less shallow
below Houghton Mill, and at Romsey there is water enough for salmon of
major dimensions. But the current is even and stately, salmon pools as they
are understood in Scotland and Ireland do not exist, and there are forests of
weeds to assist the fish to get rid of the angler’s fly. The most noted
landmark on the banks of the stream is Romsey Abbey, long restored to
soundness of fabric, yet preserving all the appearance of perfect Norman
architecture. Near it the first Berthon boats were built and launched on the
Test by the vicar, whose name is borne by this handy collapsible craft. The
Test enters Southampton Water at Redbridge, which is in a measure the port
of lading for the New Forest.

Photo: W. Pouncy, Dorchester.
THE FROME AT FRAMPTON COURT (p. 24).

There are tiny streams in the recesses of the New Forest little known to the
outer world. The BEAULIEU river is worthy of mark on the maps, and when
the tide is full it is a brimming water-way into the heart of the forest. The
acreage of mud at low-water, however, detracts from its beauty, and the
upper portion, from near Lyndhurst to the tidal limit, is small and
overgrown. The ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, set in the surroundings of an
exquisite New Forest village, far from the shriek of the locomotive whistle,
or the smoke and bustle of a town, are truly a “fair place.” Beaulieu is one
of the most entrancing combinations of wood, water, ruins, and village in
the county, and the Abbey is especially interesting from its establishment by
King John, after remorse occasioned by a dream.
The LYMINGTON river, the mainland channel opposite Yarmouth, in the Isle
of Wight, is tidal to the town, a tortuous creek in low-water, the course,
however, duly marked by stakes and beacons. The great Poet Laureate,

Tennyson, used to cross to his Freshwater home by this route, and in the
late ’fifties the writer of these words often took passage by the Isle of Wight
boats for the privilege of gazing from a reverent distance at the poet, whose
cloak, soft broad-brimmed hat, and short clay pipe filled from a packet of
bird’s-eye, filled the youthful adorer with unspeakable admiration.

DORCHESTER FROM THE FROME (p. 21).

The Isle of Wight, garden of England though it has been called, is poverty-
stricken in the matter of running water, and it is not rich in woods. Tho
principal river is the Medina, which, flowing from the foot of St.
Catherine’s Down to the Solent at East Cowes, divides the island into two
hundreds. The pretty village of Wootton is situated on Fishbourne creek,
also called Wootton river. There are two Yars—the Yar which rises at
Freshwater, and is tidal almost throughout to Yarmouth Harbour; and the
eastern Yar, at the back of Niton.

The famous salmon of Christchurch, so much in request in the spring, when
the end of the close time brings out the nets in the long open “run” between
the town and the bay, come up from the English Channel on their annual
quest of the spawning grounds of the Avon and the Stour. These rivers unite
almost under the shadow of the splendidly situated church and the priory
ruins. The church was restored by the architect who performed a similar
office for Romsey; and it is under the tower at the west end of the nave that
the singular Shelley memorial is erected. The Avon has the finest watershed
in the South of England, and its feeders water much of Hampshire and a
large portion of Wilts. Its tributaries are numerous; even one of the two
branches of its headwaters is formed by the junction of minor streams at
Pewsey. It has a winding way from Upavon, becomes a goodly stream at
beautiful Amesbury, where it traverses the pleasure grounds of the Abbey,
and crosses direct south by Salisbury Plain to Old Sarum. The Wiley and
Nadder are the largest tributaries, the former entering the Avon near the seat
of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton. The valleys of main stream and
tributaries alike are a succession of fine landscapes, made distinctive by the
downs of varying height, rising on either side, clothed at intervals with
grand woods, and protecting sequestered villages and hamlets nestling at
their feet.
The environs of Salisbury are intersected in all directions by the abundant
water of Avon or its feeders, and the clear murmuring runnels are heard in
its streets. The lofty tapering spire of the glorious cathedral is the landmark
of Avon-side for many a mile around, but the river equally forces itself upon
the notice of the stranger. There is no cathedral in England better set for a
landmark than this, and of none can it be more literally said that distance
lends enchantment. It is on the watermead level, and probably owes its
position to the river. Old Sarum, perched upon its conical hill, had its
fortified castle and many an intrenchment for defence, had its Norman
cathedral and the pomp and power of a proud ecclesiastical settlement; but
it was exposed to the wind and weather, and the Sarumites looked with
longing eye at the fat vale below and its conjunction of clear streams.
Wherefore, under Richard Le Poer, its seventh bishop, there was migration
thither; the present cathedral was commenced, the site, according to one
legend, being determined by the fall of an arrow shot as a token from the
Old Sarum ramparts; and the new town soon gathered around it. At first the
cathedral had no spire; that crowning glory of the structure was added

nearly a hundred years later, and about the time when the work of
demolition at Old Sarum had been concluded. The stone used in the new
cathedral was brought from the Hindon quarries a few miles distant, and
Purbeck supplied the marble pillars. The best view of the cathedral, and of
the straight-streeted and richly-befoliaged city, is from the north-eastern
suburb; and so gracefully is the building proportioned that it is hard to
realise that the point of the spire is 400 feet in air.

POOLE HARBOUR (p. 24).

The STOUR rises at Six Wells, at Stourhead, in Wiltshire, and joins the
Hampshire Avon, as previously stated, at Christchurch, but is essentially a
Dorsetshire river. It touches Somersetshire, and receives the Cale from
Wincanton, and other small tributaries, passing Gillingham, Sturminster,
Blandford, and Wimborne, where it receives the Allen, which flows through
More Critchell. Canford Hall, an Elizabethan mansion which received many
of the Assyrian relics unearthed by Layard; Gaunt’s House and Park; and St.
Giles’ Park, reminiscent of “Cabal” Cooper and the other Earls of

Shaftesbury, are also features of the Stour country. The clean little town of
Wimborne, where Matthew Prior was born, is made rich and notable by its
ancient Minster, which as it stands retains but little of the original
foundation, though the fine central tower dates from about 1100, and the
western tower from the middle of the fifteenth century.
The next river in Dorsetshire is the FROME, formed, as seems to be the
fashion in Wessex, of two branches, both uniting at Maiden Newton.
Frampton Court, the seat of the Sheridans, is in this neighbourhood. The
county town of Dorchester rises from the bank of the river, and has
magnificent avenues as high-road approaches. The Black Downs that
interpose between the country that is fairly represented by the Blackmore
vale of the hunting men further north, and the sea at Weymouth, are bare
enough; Dorchester is surrounded by chalk uplands, and it is, no doubt,
because there were few forests to clear that the entire neighbourhood is
remarkable for its Roman and British remains. The trees around the town
have fortunately been sedulously planted and preserved, and the avenues of
sycamores and chestnuts on the site of the old rampart have somewhat of a
Continental character. The well-defined remains of ancient camps are
numerous on the slopes overlooking the Frome, Maiden Castle and the
Roman amphitheatre being wonderfully perfect in their typical character.
Yet, old-world as Dorchester is in its associations, it has few appearances of
age, standing rather as a delightful example of the clean, healthy, quiet,
well-to-do country town of the Victorian era, pleasantly environed, and
boasting several highways that were Roman roads.
Flowing through the sheep country so graphically described by Mr. Hardy
in his novels, the Frome arrives, after an uneventful course, at Wareham,
and is discharged into Poole Harbour, a place of creeks and islands, sand
and mud banks, regularly swelling with the incoming tide into a noble
expanse of water.
WILLIAM SENIOR.

WIMBORNE MINSTER.

BIDEFORD BRIDGE (p. 48).

RIVERS OF DEVON.
General Characteristics—Sources of the Devon Streams: Exmoor and Dartmoor. The OTTER: Ottery
Saint Mary and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Exmoor Streams:—The EXE: Its Source in The
Chains—The Barle—The Batherm—Tiverton and Peter Blundell—Bickleigh Bridge and the
“King of the Gipsies”—The Culm—Exeter—Countess Weir—Exmouth. The LYN: Oareford—
The Doone Country—Malmsmead—Watersmeet—Lyndale—Lynton and Lynmouth. Dartmoor
Streams:—The TEIGN: Wallabrook—Chagford—Fingle Bridge—Chudleigh—The Bovey—
Newton Abbot—Teignmouth. The DART: Holne Chase—Buckfast Abbey—Dartington Hall—
Totnes—The Lower Reaches—Dartmouth. The Tavy. The TAW: Oxenham and its Legend—
Barnstaple—Lundy. The TORRIDGE: The Okement—Great Torrington—Bideford—Hubbastone.
The AVON, Erme, and Yealm. The PLYM: Dewerstone—The Meavy and Plymouth Leat—
Plympton St. Mary and Plympton Earl—The Three Towns.

A MONG the charms which make Devonshire, in Mr. Blackmore’s
words, “the fairest of English counties,” one need not hesitate to
give the first place to its streams. They who know only its
coasts, though they know them well, may walk delicately, for of
much that is most characteristic of its loveliness they are
altogether ignorant. But anyone who has tracked a typical Devon river from
its fount high up on the wild and lonely moorland to the estuary where it
mingles its waters with the inflowing tide, following it as it brawls down
the peaty hillsides, and winds its way through glen and gorge until it gains
the rich lowlands where it rolls placidly towards its latter end, may boast
that his is the knowledge of intimacy. Commercially, the Devonshire
streams are of little account, for Nature has chosen to touch them to finer
issues. Yet, for all their manifold fascinations, they have had but scant
attention from the poets, who, instead of singing their graces in dignified
verse, have left them, as Mr. J. A. Blaikie has said, to be “noisily advertised
in guide-books.” At first sight the omission seems curious enough, for the
long roll of Devonshire “worthies” is only less illustrious for its poets than
for its heroes. Perchance the explanation of what almost looks like a
conspiracy of silence is that the streams, full of allurement as they may be,
are not rich in associations of the poetic sort. Of legend they have their
share, but for the most part it is legend uncouth and grotesque, such as may

not easily be shaped into verse. Their appeal, in truth, is more to the painter
than to the poet. For him they have provided innumerable “bits” of the most
seductive description; and neither against him nor against the angler—the
artist among sportsmen—for whom also bountiful provision has been made,
can neglect of opportunity be charged.
It is in the royal
“forests” of
Exmoor and
Dartmoor that
nearly all the
chief rivers of
Devon take their
rise. Of these
moorland tracts,
the one
extending into
the extreme
north of the
county from
Somersetshire,
the other
forming, so to
speak, its
backbone,
Dartmoor is
considerably the
THE RIVERS OF DEVON. larger; and in
High Willhayse
and in the better
known Yes Tor, its highest points, it touches an altitude of just over 2,000
feet, overtopping Dunkery Beacon, the monarch of Exmoor, by some 370
feet. Between the two moors there is a general resemblance, less, however,
of contour than of tone, for while Exmoor swells into great billowy tops, the
Dartmoor plateau breaks up into rugged “tors”—crags of granite that have
shaken off their scanty raiment and now rise bare and gaunt above the
general level. Both, as many a huntsman knows to his cost, are beset with
treacherous bogs, out of which trickle streams innumerable, some, like the

Wear Water, the chief headstream of the East Lyn, soon to lose their
identity, others to bear to the end of their course names which the English
emigrant has delighted to reproduce in the distant lands that he has
colonised. Not strange is it that with loneliness such as theirs, Exmoor and
Dartmoor alike should be the haunt of the mischief-loving pixies, who carry
off children and lead benighted wayfarers into quagmires; of the spectral
wish-hounds, whose cry is fearsome as the wailing voice which John Ridd
heard “at grey of night”; and of the rest of the uncanny brood who once had
all the West Country for their domain. Exmoor, too, is almost the last
sanctuary, south of the Tweed, of the wild red-deer; and hither in due season
come true sportsmen from far and near to have their pulses stirred by such
glorious runs as Kingsley has described.
Of the streams
that have their
springs
elsewhere than in
the moors, the
Axe, which
belongs more to
Dorset and
Somerset than to
Devon, may, like
the Sid, be
passed over with
bare mention.
But the OTTER
must not be
dismissed so
brusquely, for
though it cannot
vie with its
moorland sisters
in beauty of
aspect, it has
other claims to
consideration.
Rising in the

hills that divide THE WEAR WATER.
Devon from
South Somerset, it presently passes Honiton, still famous for its lace, and a
few miles further on flows by the knoll which is crowned by the massive
towers of the fine church of Ottery St. Mary, the Clavering St. Mary of
“Pendennis.” It was here, in 1772, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most
gifted scion of a gifted stock, was born. His father, vicar of the parish and
headmaster of the Free Grammar School, and withal one of the most
amiable and ingenuous of pedants, whose favourite method of edifying his
rustic congregation was to quote from the Old Testament in the original
Hebrew, as “the immediate language of the Holy Ghost,” died when Samuel
Taylor was in his ninth year; and the pensive child, who yet was not a child,
was soon afterwards entered at Christ’s Hospital. A frequent resort of his
was a cave beside the Otter, known as “The Pixies’ Parlour,” where his
initials may still be seen. Nor is this his only association with the stream. “I
forget,” he writes, “whether it was in my fifth or sixth year ... in
consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first week
in October I ran away from fear of being whipped, and passed the whole
night, a night of rain and storm, on the bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and
was there found at day-break, without the power of using my limbs, about
six yards from the naked bank of the river.” The experience may well have
left its mark upon his sensitive nature, but it is clear that he carried with him
from his native place a store of agreeable recollections of the stream, of
whose “marge with willows grey” and “bedded sand” he afterwards wrote
in affectionate strains.

Leaving the Otter to pursue its pleasant, but not exciting, course to the
English Channel, we pass at a bound from the sunny south to one of the
weirdest parts of Exmoor, where the most important of the streams that rise
in the northern “forest” have their birth. The chief of them, and, indeed, the
longest of all the Devonshire rivers, the EXE, which has a course five-and-
fifty miles long, oozes out of a dismal swamp known as The Chains, in
Somerset county, some two or three miles north-west of Simonsbath; and
within a space of not more than two miles square are the sources of three
other streams—the Barle, which merges with the Exe near Exbridge; the
West Lyn, which flows northwards to the finest spot on the Devon coast;

and the Bray, a tributary of the Taw. Looking around, one sees in every
direction a waste of undulations rolling away to the horizon like a deeply-
furrowed sea. Far away eastwards rises Dunkery, his mighty top now, as
often, obscured by clouds which the western winds are slowly driving
before them; on the other hand stretches the North Molton Ridge,
culminating in Span Head, which comes within about fifty feet of the
stature of Dunkery himself.

Photo: Denney & Co., Exeter.
EXETER (p. 31).

The infant Exe and the Barle are both brown, peaty streams, and their
valleys, separated from each other by one of the Exmoor ridges, and
following the same general south-easterly trend, have much in common,
though that of the Barle is the less regular and more picturesque of the two.

It is when they have each sped in the merriest-hearted fashion somewhere
about a score of miles that they meet, forming a current which, as it rushes
tumultuously beneath the arches that give to Exbridge its name, must be a
full fifty yards wide. Now the Exe becomes a Devonshire stream, with a
predominantly southerly course; but as it approaches Oakford Bridge it
bends to the west, then curving round to the east to meet the Batherm, fresh
from its contact with Bampton, an old market town celebrated all over the
West Country for its fairs and markets, whereat are sold the shaggy little
Exmoor ponies and the bold and nimble Porlock sheep. The main stream
still shows no disposition to play the laggard, but by this time it has left the
moorland well behind, and, as we follow it among luxuriantly timbered
hills, it presently brings us to Tiverton, agreeably placed on its sloping left
bank. Here it takes toll of the Loman, which has been in no haste to
complete its course of ten miles, or thereabouts, from the Somerset border.

Photo: H. T. Cousins, Exmouth.

EXMOUTH, FROM THE BEACON (p. 34).

Of Twy-ford-town—for so the place was called in former days, in allusion
to its fords across the Exe and the Loman at the points where now the
streams are spanned by bridges—the most salient feature from the banks of
the larger water is the Perpendicular tower of the Church of St. Peter. The
body of the church was virtually reconstructed in the ’sixties, with the
fortunate exception of its most interesting feature, the Greenaway Chapel,
founded nearly four hundred years ago by the merchant whose name it
shares with the quaint almshouses in Gold Street. What remains of the
ancient castle, which stood hard by the church, has been converted into a
modern dwelling and a farmhouse. The old Grammar School, too, on
Loman Green, is now divided up into private houses, a more commodious
structure, in the Tudor style, having been reared a mile or so out of the town
to take its place. Who will begrudge good old Peter Blundell the
immortality which this famous school has conferred upon his honest-
sounding name? A native of Tiverton, he began life as an errand-boy. With
his carefully-hoarded earnings, as Prince tells the story in his “Worthies,”
he bought a piece of kersey, and got a friendly carrier to take it to London
and there sell it to advantage. So he gradually extended his operations, until
he was able to go to town himself, with as much stock-in-trade as a horse
could carry. In London he continued to thrive, and in due course was able to
fulfil the ambition of his life by establishing himself in the town of his birth
as a manufacturer of kerseys; and here he remained until his death, at the
ripe age of eighty.
“Though I am not myself a scholar,” the good old man would say with
proud humility, “I will be the means of making more scholars than any
scholar in England.” And the school founded under his will in 1604 has not
failed to justify his boast. The roll of “Blundell’s boys” includes a brace of
bishops and an archbishop, the present occupant of the throne of
Canterbury, who, before his translation to London, ruled with abundant
vigour the diocese to which Tiverton belongs. Yet, without disrespect to
spiritual dignities, one may be pardoned for remembering with deeper
interest that it was here that “girt Jan Ridd” had his meagre schooling, and
fought his great fight with Robin Snell. John, by the way, who left
Blundell’s at the age of twelve, must have been considerably less stupid

than he appeared to his contemporaries, for when long afterwards he came
to describe the combat he was able to say that he replied to his antagonist
“with all the weight and cadence of penthemimeral cæsura”; and although
he modestly protests that he could “never make head or tail” of the
expression, it is clear from his epithets that he knew perfectly well what he
was writing about.
But we have paused at the town of the fords too long, and must gird up our
loins to follow the Exe southwards to the county town, through scenery
which, if on the whole less picturesque than that above Tiverton, is pleasing
as one of the most fertile of Devonshire vales cannot but be. Four miles
lower down we find ourselves at Bickleigh Bridge, one of the prettiest spots
in this part of the Exe valley. Close by is Bickleigh Court, long a seat of the
Devonshire Carews, and still belonging to members of the family, though
sunk to the uses of a farmhouse. Bickleigh is of some note as the birthplace,
towards the end of the seventeenth century, of Bampfylde Moore Carew,
“King of the Beggars.” Son of the rector of the parish, he was sent to
Blundell’s School, whence he ran away to avoid punishment for some
trifling escapade, and threw in his lot with a tribe of gipsies. Next he
emigrated to Newfoundland, but after a time came back, and soon
signalised himself by eloping from Newcastle-on-Tyne with an apothecary’s
daughter, whom, however, he was afterwards good enough to marry.
Having rejoined the gipsies, he became their king, and ruled over them until
he was transported to Maryland as an incorrigible vagrant. Before long he
contrived to escape, and lived for a while with a band of Red Indians. When
he returned to civilisation it was in the guise of a Quaker, a part which he
successfully played until he grew weary of it, and once more came back to
his native land and his nomadic life. Some say that he was afterwards
prevailed upon to adopt more settled habits, but of his closing years little is
known.
The hill to the right, a little below Bickleigh Bridge, is known as Cadbury
Castle, a Roman encampment, and from its summit may be seen, away to
the south-east, athwart the river, Dolbury Hill, which, according to the
legend, shares with Cadbury a treasure of gold, guarded by a fiery dragon,
who spends his nights flying from one hoard to the other. Now the Exe,
flowing with a dignity befitting its maturity, receives the tribute of the
Culm, which comes from the Blackdown Hills, on the Somerset border,

passing Culmstock and Cullompton, and Killerton Park, a finely placed and
magnificently wooded demesne of one of the most honourable of
Devonshire houses, the Aclands. Over against the point of junction is
Pynes, the seat of another family of high repute, the Northcotes, now Earls
of Iddesleigh, looking down on the one side upon the valley of the Exe, and
on the other upon that of the Creedy, a western affluent after which the
town of Crediton is named.
As it approaches the ever-faithful city, lying like Tiverton on the left bank,
the Exe is bordered by a green strath, with swelling hills on either hand. No
sooner is the suburb of St. David passed than there comes into view the
eminence which formed the limits of the ancient Exeter, its summit
crowned with trees that half conceal the meagre remains of the Norman
castle, while from its southern slope rise the mighty towers of the
Cathedral. Pointing out that, although surrounded by hills higher than itself,
Exeter is seated on a height far above river or railway, Freeman remarks
that we have here “what we find so commonly in Gaul, so rarely in Britain,
the Celtic hill-fort, which has grown into the Roman city, which has lived
on through the Teutonic conquest, and which still, after all changes, keeps
to its place as the undoubted head of its own district. In Wessex such a
history is unique. In all Southern England London is the only parallel, and
that but an imperfect one.” And he goes on to say that the name teaches the
same lesson of continuity that is taught by the site. It has been changed in
form but not in meaning. Caerwise, “the fortress on the water,” as it was in
the beginning of things, “has been Latinised into Isca, it has been
Teutonised into Exanceaster, and cut short into modern Exeter; but the city
by the Exe has through all conquests, through all changes of language,
proclaimed itself by its name as the city on the Exe.”

Photo: E. D. Percival, Ilfracombe.
WATERSMEET (p. 35).

The Castle of Rougemont is represented by not much more than an ivy-clad
gateway tower of Norman date, and portions of the walls, which on one side
have been levelled, and the timbered slopes converted into a pretty little
recreation ground, known as Northernhay, where, among the statues of men
whom Devonshire delights to honour, is one of the first Earl of Iddesleigh,
gentlest of protagonists. Of the cathedral little can be said in this place
except that it admirably exemplifies the development of the Decorated
style, which here reaches its culmination in the venerable west front, its
lower stage enriched with figures of kings and apostles and saints. The

massive transeptal towers that distinguish Exeter from all other English
cathedrals, and, indeed, from all other English churches, with the single
exception of that of Ottery St. Mary, built in imitation of this, are much
earlier than the rest of the fabric, for they were reared early in the twelfth
century by Bishop Warelwast, nephew of the Conqueror, and were left
standing when, towards the end of the thirteenth century, the reconstruction
of the rest of the fabric was begun. Disproportionately large they may be, in
relation both to their own height and to the body of the church; but, if they
cannot be said to contribute to the harmony of the design, it must be
allowed that in themselves they are exceedingly impressive.

Photo: E. D. Percival, Ilfracombe.
LYNMOUTH AND LYNTON (p. 36).

The transformation of the cathedral, begun by Bishop Bronescombe, was
continued by his successor, Peter Quivil, whose plans appear to have been
pretty faithfully followed by those who came after him. Not until the year
1369 was the nave finished, under Grandisson, the bishop who re-built the
church of Ottery St. Mary in its present form; and even then it was left to
Bishop Brantyngham to add the rich west front. What most strikes one
about the interior, which was restored with no lack of vigour by Sir Gilbert

Scott, is the prolonged stretch of graceful vaulting, extending through all
the fourteen bays of nave and choir, with, of course, no central tower to
break the line. There is much beautiful carving, both ancient and modern, in
the church, but the bishop’s throne, attributed to Bishop Stapledon (1307–
26), is perhaps of rather diffuse design, although the craftsmanship merits
all the admiration that has been lavished upon it.
Around the Close, and in a few of the older streets, some interesting
specimens of domestic architecture are to be seen; but, the cathedral and its
adjuncts apart, Exeter is less rich than might be expected in memorials of
the distant past. Of its public buildings, the only one which may not be
ignored is the Guildhall, a stone structure dating from the end of the
sixteenth century, with a balustraded façade resting on substantial piers, and
projecting over the pavement. The ancient bridge over the Exe, connecting
the city with St. Thomas, its western suburb, was destroyed in 1770, and
replaced by the present one.
Hundreds of years have come and gone since the cliffs of Exeter were
lapped by salt water. Towards the end of the thirteenth century Isabella de
Redvers, Countess of Devon, was pleased to cut off the city from the sea by
forming the weir which has given name to the village of Countess Weir, and
it was not till the reign of Henry VIII. that, by means of a canal to Topsham,
communication was re-established. Early in the present century this
waterway was widened, and now Exeter is accessible to vessels of about
400 tons. It is at Topsham, four miles below the city, that the river,
augmented by the waters of the Clyst, expands into an estuary. From this
point to the embouchure its course lies through delightful scenery. On the
right bank are the woods of Powderham Castle, the ancestral seat of the
Earls of Devon, stretching from the water’s brink to the summit of the high
ground behind; away to the west, Haldon’s long ridge rises as a sky-line,
dividing the valley of the Exe from that of the Teign; and finally comes
Starcross. On the left bank, about midway between Topsham and Exmouth,
is Lympstone, a pretty, straggling fishing village. To Exmouth, lying over
against Starcross, belongs the distinction of being the oldest of the
numerous tribe of Devonshire watering-places. A port of some consequence
in very early days, it presently fell into an obscurity from which it was only
rescued in the last century through the agency of one of the judges of assize,
who, sojourning here for the good of his health while on circuit, was so

Photo: Chapman & Son, Dawlish.
“CLAM” BRIDGE OVER THE WALLABROOK.

From Malmsmead, with its primitive bridge of two arches, to Watersmeet,
where the Brendon Water plunges down a charming glen on the left to lose
itself in the larger stream, the Lyn ravine is a very kaleidoscope of beauty
and grandeur. Watersmeet, “an exquisite combination of wood and stream,
the one almost hiding the water, the other leaping down over rocky ledges
in a series of tiny cascades,” must tax the painter’s pencil, and is certainly
no theme for a prosaic pen; and of Lyndale the same despairing confession
must be made. Every turn in this lovely glen reveals some new beauty,
until, with Lynton lying in the cup of a hill on the left, one reaches
Lynmouth, where, just before the river plunges into the sea, it receives the

waters of the West Lyn as they merrily tumble out of Glen Lyn. Southey,
whose description of these and other features of the place has been quoted
to the point of weariness, was one of the first to “discover” Lynmouth; and
in these days it has no reason to complain that its unrivalled attractions are
not appreciated. For some years it has had its little mountain railway, to
spare those whose chief need is exercise the fatigue of walking up the hill to
Lynton; and now the lines have been laid which bring it into touch with the
South Western and Great Western systems at Barnstaple. Let us hope that it
will not presently have to complain of defacement at the hands of the
lodging-house builder, and of desperation inflicted upon it by hordes of
day-trippers, with their beer-bottles and greasy sandwich-papers!

Photo: Frith & Co., Reigate.
FINGLE BRIDGE (p. 38).

Dartmoor is a much more prolific “mother of rivers” than Exmoor. In one
of the loneliest and dreariest regions of the southern “forest,” no great way
from its northern extremity, is the quagmire known as Cranmere Pool, and
from this and the sloughs that surround it ooze all the more important of the
Devonshire streams except the Exe and the Torridge. Out of Cranmere Pool
itself—a prison, according to local legend, of lost spirits, whose anguished
cries are often borne on the wings of the wind—the West Okement drains,
to flow northwards to the Torridge; and at distances varying from half a
mile to a couple of miles, the Teign, the Dart, the Tavy, and the Taw have
their birth. The Okement will be noticed presently, when we have to do with
the Torridge; of the other rivers, the TEIGN rises in two headstreams, the
North and the South Teign, near Sittaford Tor. As is the way of these
moorland waters, they are soon reinforced by tributary rills, among them
the Wallabrook, which flows by Scorhill Down to join the North Teign.
Scorhill Down has in its stone circle one of the most remarkable of those
mysterious relics of an immemorial past in which Dartmoor abounds. At
one time all such remains were regarded, like those at Stonehenge, as
Druidical monuments, but this theory of their origin is no longer in fashion,
and antiquaries now prefer to say nothing more specific than that they
usually have a sepulchral significance, and betoken that regions now
abandoned to the curlew and the buzzard once had a considerable
population. Near Scorhill the Wallabrook is bestridden by a “clam” bridge,
which, interpreted, means a bridge of a single slab of unhewn stone resting
on the ground, as distinguished from a “clapper” bridge, consisting of one
or more such slabs pillared on others, with no aid from mortar.
The North and the South Teign merge at Leigh Bridge, close by Holy Street
and its picturesque mill, which has furnished a theme for the pencil of many
an artist besides Creswick. Then the Teign flows under the old bridge at
Chagford, a village overhung on one side by two rocky hills. The fine air of
the place and its convenient situation for the exploration of Dartmoor bring
to it many visitors in the summer; but it is certainly no place for a winter
sojourn. The story goes—and racy of the soil it is—that if a Chagford man
is asked in summer where he lives, he replies, as saucily as you please,
“Chaggyford, and what d’ye think, then?” But if the question is put to him
in winter, he sadly answers, “Chaggyford, good Lord!”

At Chagford the valley broadens out, but soon it again contracts, and,
sensibly quickening its speed, Teign plunges headlong into what is perhaps
the very finest of all the gorges in Devonshire. Near the entrance is a
“logan” stone, a huge boulder of granite about a dozen feet long, so finely
poised that it may with a very moderate exercise of force be made to rock,
though it is less accommodating than when Polwhele, a century ago,
succeeded in moving it with one hand. The finest view of the gorge is that
to be got from Fingle Bridge, a couple of miles lower down, where, looking
back, one sees how the stream has wound its way amid the interfolded hills,
of which the steep slopes are clad with coppice of tender green. Here, on
the left, is Prestonbury, and on the right the loftier Cranbrook, each crowned
with its prehistoric “castle.” Of the narrow, ivy-mantled bridge, simple and
massive, an illustration is given (p. 57) showing the wedge-shaped piers
which serve to break the fury of the torrent in time of spate.

Photo: G. Denney & Co., Teignmouth.
TEIGNMOUTH (p. 40).

But we must hurry on past Clifford Mill and its bridge to Dunsford Bridge,
another spot of singular beauty. On the right Heltor, on the left Blackstone,
exalt their towering heads, both crowned with large “rock basins,” in which
the rude fancy of our forefathers saw missiles that King Arthur and the
Great Adversary hurled at each other athwart the intervening valley. So,
passing more and more within the margin of cultivation, we come to
Chudleigh, with its Rock, yielding a blue limestone, known to the builder as

Chudleigh marble, and its lovely, richly-wooded glen, down which a little
tributary dances gaily into the Teign. Not a great way beyond, our river is
swollen by the waters of a more important affluent, the Bovey, which, from
its source on Dartmoor, has followed a course not dissimilar from that of
the Teign, lilting along through a rich and often spacious valley, past North
Bovey, Manaton, Lustleigh, with its “Cleave,” and Bovey Tracy. At Newton
Abbot, pleasantly placed a little to the south of the Teign, in a vale watered
by the Lemon, we may have fine views of the valleys of the Teign and the
Bovey by ascending the hills up which this neat little town has straggled. Its
most memorable association is with the glorious Revolution, and there still
stands in front of a Perpendicular tower, which is all that is left of the old
Chapel of St. Leonard, the block of granite from which the Prince of
Orange’s proclamation was read.

NEW BRIDGE.

Now swerving sharply to the east, the Teign develops into an estuary, and
with a background of hills on either hand, those on the left rising into the
broad downs of Haldon, hastens to discharge itself into the sea, flowing
beneath what claims to be the longest wooden bridge in England, which
connects Teignmouth on the north with Shaldon on the south. Teignmouth
is an ancient fishing-village which has grown into a watering-place. If the
story that it suffered at the hands of Danish pirates in the eighth century is
an error due to confusion between Teignmouth and Tynemouth, it was
indubitably ravaged by the French at the end of the seventeenth century. In
these days its chief feature is the Den, a sandbank due to the shifting bar
that obstructs the mouth of the river, but now converted into an esplanade,
whence, looking inland, one sees the twin peaks of Heytor and other
outlying hills of Dartmoor, while to the south, along the shore-line, appears
the bold promontory known as The Ness, and on the north stand out the
quaint pinnacles of red rock which the patient waves have carved into
shapes that have won for them the designation of the “Parson and the
Clerk.”

The DART may be said to attain to self-consciousness at Dartmeet, where in
a deep and lovely valley the rapid East and West Dart mingle their foaming
waters. The two streams rise at no great distance from each other, in the
neighbourhood, as we have seen, of Cranmere Pool; and they are never far
apart, but the western water follows a somewhat less consistently south-east
course, past Wistman’s Wood—a grim assemblage of stunted, storm-beaten
oaks, springing up amidst blocks of granite—and Crockern Tor and Two
Bridges; while the eastern stream, from its source at Dart Head, speeds by
Post Bridge and Bellaford, crossed at both places by “clam” bridges.
Hurrying impetuously along over a shallow rocky bed, with a monotonous
clatter which is locally known as its “cry,” Dart washes the base of Benjay
Tor, and rushing beneath New Bridge—a not unpicturesque structure,
despite its unpromising name—enters a richly timbered glade. Presently, as
its valley deepens, it makes a wide circuit to wander past the glorious
demesne of Holne Chase. Beyond the woods which stretch away for miles
to the north-east, Buckland Beacon rears his giant form; on the other side of
the stream is the little village of Holne, birthplace of Charles Kingsley,
whose father was rector here. A mile or so above Buckfastleigh, on the right

bank, are the ruins of
Buckfast Abbey,
consisting of little more
than an ivy-clad tower
and a spacious barn.
Originating in the tenth
century, this house was
re-founded in the reign
of Henry II., and grew
to be the richest
Cistercian abbey in all
Devon. From the
Dissolution till the
beginning of the
present century the site
remained desolate.
Then a mansion in the
Gothic style was built
upon it, and this is now
occupied by a
community of
Benedictine monks
from Burgundy, who
have in part re-built the
monastery on the old
foundations.
Beyond smoky
Buckfastleigh and its
spire, the Dart flows
among lush meadows
and around wooded BUCKFASTLEIGH.
hills, past Dean Prior,
with its memories of Herrick, and Staverton, where it is crossed by a
strongly buttressed bridge. Now it again makes a bend eastwards to enclose
the fine grounds of Dartington Hall. The house, partly in ruins, is
commandingly placed high above the densely wooded right bank; and the
oldest part of the structure, the Great Hall, dates from the reign of Richard

II., whose badge, a white hart chained, appears on one of the doorways.
Soon Totnes comes into view, climbing the steep right bank and spreading
itself over the summit, its most salient features the ruined ivy-draped shell
of the Norman castle on the crest of the hill, and the ruddy pinnacled tower
of the church.
Totnes has not scrupled to claim to be the oldest town in England, and, quite
half way up the acclivity, far above the highest water-mark of the Dart, they
show the stone on which Brute set foot at the end of his voyage from ruined
Troy. Few places can better afford to dispense with fabulous pretensions,
for the evidences of its antiquity declare themselves on every hand. Its
name is allowed to be Anglo-Saxon, and it is thought to be not improbable
that its castle mound was first a British stronghold. A considerable part of
the ancient wall is left standing, and the East Gate still divides High Street
from Fore Street. Very quaint and charming are many of the old houses in
the High Street, with their gables and piazzas; and the venerable Guildhall
preserves its oaken stalls for the members of the Corporation, with a
canopied centre for the Mayor. Below the town is the graceful three-arched
bridge which connects it with Bridgetown Pomeroy, on the left bank; and
from this one may descend by steps to the tiny island in mid-stream, some
years ago laid out as a public garden.

STAVERTON.

THE ISLAND, TOTNES.
TOTNES.

It is the ten miles or so of river between Totnes and Dartmouth that have
earned for the Dart the title of “the English Rhine.” The absurdity of
likening the inconsiderable Dart, with its placid current and its backing of
gently-sloping hills, to the broad and rushing Rhine, flanked by lofty,

castle-crowned steeps, has before been exposed, but the nickname is still
current, and while it remains so the protest must continue. Yet how
manifold and bewitching are the graces of the stream in these lower
reaches, where it curves and doubles until from some points of view it
appears to be resolved into a series of lakes, embosomed among hills of
softest contour, their braes either smooth and verdant as a lawn or rich with
foliage! Not long after leaving Totnes one sees, on the right, Sharpham
House, surrounded by lawns and parterres and by magnificent woods,
which border the stream for at least a mile. Sandridge House, on the
opposite bank, is notable as the birthplace of John Davis, the Elizabethan
navigator, who discovered the Straits which are known among men by his
name; and presently we shall pass the well wooded grounds of Greenway,
where was born Sir Humphrey Gilbert, another of the heroes of great
Eliza’s “spacious days,” who established the Newfoundland fisheries.
Between these two points comes Dittisham, with its grey church tower, its
famous plum orchards, and its bell, which is rung when one wants to be
ferried over to Greenway Quay. Soon the Dart begins to widen out, and,
threading our way among yachts and skiffs, we come within sight of the
Britannia training-ship, and find ourselves betwixt Dartmouth on the right,
and Kingswear on the left.

DITTISHAM.

Dartmouth, rising from the bank in terraces, wears an aspect hardly less
ancient than that of Totnes. It was incorporated in the fourteenth century,
but for hundreds of years before that was of note as a harbour. William the
Conqueror is said to have sailed herefrom on his expedition for the relief of
Mans; a century later the English fleet, or a part of it, gathered here for the
third Crusade; and did not Chaucer think that probably his shipman “was of
Dertemuthe”? The castle, close to the water’s edge, at the mouth of the
harbour, is something more than the picturesque remnant of an ancient
fortress, for the wall and foss which surround it enclose also a casemated
battery of heavy guns. On the crest of the hill behind are the ruins of
Gallant’s Bower Fort. Nearly opposite is Kingswear Castle, which claims
an even more remote origin; and crowning the hill at whose base it lies are
some remains of Fort Ridley, which, like Gallant’s Bower, was wrested
from the Parliamentarians by Prince Maurice, both strongholds, however,

being afterwards stormed by Fairfax. The harbour, though a fine, broad
sheet of water, is almost landlocked, and the entrance to it is through a strait
channel known as “The Jawbones,” which in more primitive days than
these was protected by a strong chain stretching from one bank to the other.

MOUTH OF THE DART.

Of the two remaining streams that rise in the morasses around Cranmere
Pool, the TAVY runs a course which, though not long, is remarkable for the
grandeur and the richness of its scenery. Did space permit, one would be
glad to follow it from its peaty spring under Great Kneeset Tor, through the
grand defile known as Tavy Cleave, on between Peter Tavy and Mary Tavy
to Tavistock, with its statue of Drake, who was born hard by, and its
associations with the author of the “Pastorals”; thence past Buckland
Abbey, rich in memories of Sir Francis and of the Cistercian monks from
whom the neighbouring village of Buckland Monachorum gets its
distinctive appellation, and so to Tavy’s confluence with the Tamar.
Pleasant also would it be to trace its principal tributary, the Walkham, down
its romantic valley, nor less so to track the Lid from its source, a few miles

above Lidford, through its magnificent gorge, and onwards to its union with
Tamar. But the sands are fast running out, and we must pass on to sketch
very rapidly the career of the Taw as it flows first north-eastwards, then
north-westwards, to meet the Torridge in Barnstaple Bay.
In the first part of its course the TAW, which the Exe exceeds in length by
only five miles, is as frisky and headstrong as the rest of the moorland
streams, but as soon as it has got well within the line of civilisation it sobers
down, and thereafter demeans itself sedately enough. The first place of
interest which it passes is South Tawton, where is Oxenham, now a
farmhouse, but formerly the seat of a family of this name who lived here
from the time of Henry III. until early in the present century. Of these
Oxenhams it is an ancient tradition that a white-breasted bird is seen when
the time has come for one of them to be gathered to his fathers. The last
appearance of the portent was in 1873, when Mr. G. N. Oxenham, then the
head of the house, lay dying at 17, Earl’s Terrace, Kensington. His daughter
and a friend, the latter of whom knew nothing of the legend, were sitting in
the room underneath the chamber of death when, to quote from Murray’s
“Handbook,” their attention “was suddenly roused by a shouting outside the
house, and on looking out they saw a large white bird perched on a thorn
tree outside the window, where it remained for several minutes, although
some workmen on the opposite side of the road were throwing their hats at
it in the vain effort to drive it away.” An interesting occurrence, certainly;
but if we are to see in it more than a coincidence, what is to be said of the
puffin, the only one of its tribe ever recorded to have visited London,
which, having found its way so far inland, flew into the rooms of the
President of the British Ornithologists’ Union? Must we believe that the
adventurous bird was moved to call there in order that its feat might be duly
recorded in the Proceedings of the Institution?

Photo: Photo: Vickery Bros., Barnstaple.
BARNSTAPLE, FROM THE SOUTH WALK (p. 47).

It is below Nymet Rowland that Taw changes its course. Thenceforward it
placidly flows amid rich meadows agreeably diversified with woodland. At
Eggesford it is overlooked by the Earl of Portsmouth’s seat, peeping out
from the trees which climb the left bank. At Chulmleigh it gathers up the
Little Dart; and beyond South Molton Road Station the Mole, which gives
name to North Molton and South Molton, brings in its tribute from the
border of Exmoor. Having laved the foot of Coddon Hill, from whose
rounded top one may have far views of the valley in both directions, the
Taw flows by the cosy little village of Bishop’s Tawton on the right; along
the other bank stretches Tawstock Park, the demesne of the Bourchier-
Wreys, set about with fine old oaks. Then with a sudden bend it comes
within sight of Barnstaple Bridge, and beyond the South Walk, on the right
bank, bordering a pretty little park, appear the graceful tower of Holy

Trinity Church—an unusually effective piece of modern Perpendicular
work—and the ugly warped spire of the mother church.
The “metropolis of North Devon,” as this comely and lusty little town
proudly styles itself, is a very ancient place, which had a castle and a priory
at least as far back as the time of the Conqueror; but these have long since
vanished, and save for a row of cloistered almshouses dating from 1627,
and its bridge of sixteen arches, built in the thirteenth century, it is indebted
for its savour of antiquity mainly to the venerable usages that have survived
the changes and chances of the centuries. Like Bideford, long its rival
among North Devon towns, it fitted out ships for the fleet which gave so
good an account of the Spanish Armada. During the Civil War it declared
for the popular cause, but was captured by the king’s forces in 1643; and
although it soon succeeded in flinging off the royal yoke, it was re-captured,
and remained in the king’s hands until nearly the close of the war.
Just below the hideous bridge which carries the South Western line across
the Taw is the Quay, on the right bank, and beyond it, lined by an avenue of
ancient elms, is the North Walk, now unhappily cut up for the purposes of
the new railway from Lynton. The stream, by this time of considerable
breadth, widens out yet more during the five or six remaining miles of its
course; but its channel is tortuous and shifting, and only by small vessels is
it navigable. A few more bends, and Instow and Appledore are reached, and
Torridge is sighted as it comes up from the south to blend its waters with
those of the sister stream. Then far away over the curling foam of
Barnstaple Bar we get a full view of Lundy, its cliffs at this distance looking
suave enough, though in truth they are not less jagged than when the
Spanish galleon fleeing from Amyas Leigh’s Vengeance was impaled upon
their granite spines; while on the left Hartland Point boldly plants its foot in
the Atlantic, and on the right Baggy Point marks the northern limit of
Barnstaple Bay.
It is at no great distance from Hartland Point that the TORRIDGE, most
circuitous of Devonshire rivers, rises. First flowing in a south-easterly
direction past Newton St. Petrock and Shebbear and Sheepwash, it
presently makes a bend and follows an almost precisely opposite course
north-westwards. In about the middle of the loop which it forms in
preparing to stultify itself, it is augmented by the Okement, which has come
almost due north from Cranmere Pool, brawling down a valley which, near

Okehampton and
elsewhere, is finely
wooded. Past Yew Bridge
and Dolton and Beaford,
Torridge continues its
sinuous course; and as it
approaches Great
Torrington, set on a hill
some 300 feet above its
right bank, its valley
presents the combination
of smooth haugh and
precipitous rock shown in
our view (page 49).
Torrington has a history,
and little besides. Even the
church, enclosed in a
notably pretty God’s acre,
graced with avenues of
beeches and chestnuts, has
no special interest save
that it contains the carved
oak pulpit in which the
great John Howe preached
before his ejectment in
1662; for it had to be
rebuilt after the Civil War,
having been blown up by
the accidental explosion of
a large quantity of
gunpowder while it was
being used as a magazine
and prison. Two hundred
Royalists were confined in
the building at the time, THE TORRIDGE NEAR TORRINGTON (p. 47).
and these, with their
guards, all perished. Winding round Torrington Common, gay in due season

with gorse and bracken, our river glides on past Wear Gifford—an
idyllically beautiful spot incongruously associated with a melancholy
tragedy—to the “little white town” described by Charles Kingsley in the
opening paragraph of his one great story. White it hardly is in these days,
but this is the only qualification that strict accuracy requires. The famous
bridge of four-and-twenty arches dates from about the same period as that at
Barnstaple, which it considerably exceeds in length. The town itself lays
claim to a much higher antiquity, for it traces its origin to a cousin of the
Conqueror, founder of the illustrious line which came to full flower in the
Richard Grenville who, as he lay a-dying, after having matched the Revenge
against the whole Spanish fleet of three-and-fifty sail, was able proudly to
say, in a spirit not unlike that of a later naval hero, that he was leaving
behind him “an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier, that hath done
his duty as he was bound to do.” He it was who revived the fortunes of
Bideford after a period of decline, and so increased its prosperity by
attracting to it trade from the settlements in the New World that it was able
to send seven ships to join the fleet that gathered in Plymouth Harbour to
fight the Spaniard. With memories such as these, the town may surely abate
its eagerness to have accepted as Armada trophies the old guns which have
been unearthed from its dustheap.
Pleasant the course of the stream continues to be, past “the charmed rock of
Hubbastone,” where sleeps an old Norse pirate, with his crown of gold, till,
with Instow on the right and Appledore on the left, Torridge meets her sister
Taw, and the two with one accord turn westward and roll towards “the
everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell.”

Of the streams that have their fountains on Dartmoor, the longer ones rise,
as we have seen, in the northern division of the “forest”; the shorter ones,
the Avon, the Erme, the Yealm, and the Plym, come to being in the southern
division, at no great distance from each other, and amid surroundings not
unlike those of Cranmere Pool; and all of them flow into the Channel on the
western side of Bolt Head. Neither of them is without charms of its own;
but the PLYM is easily chief among them, and with a rapid sketch of its
course from Plym Head, some three miles south of Princetown, to the
Sound, the present chapter must end. Flowing by rugged, flat-topped
Sheepstor on the right, and Trowlesworthy Tor on the left, Plym presently

reaches Cadaford Bridge, where it plunges into a rocky ravine, the
precipitous hillside on the left crowned by the church of Shaugh Prior,
while from the hill on the right, smothered with oak coppice, projects a
huge crag of ivy-clad granite, the Dewerstone, celebrated for its views. At
Shaugh Bridge the stream is swollen by the Meavy, which, not far from its
source on the moorland, is tapped to supply Plymouth Leat—a work for
which the Plymouth folk are indebted to Sir Francis Drake. Afterwards the
Meavy runs by the grey granite church of Sheepstor, where, under the
shadow of a noble beech, is the massive tomb of Sir James Brooke, of
Sarawak fame. Richly-wooded Bickleigh Vale is one of the beauty spots of
the Plym; another lovely scene is that at Plym Bridge, where, close to the
mossy bridge, is the ruined arch of a tiny chantry, built by the monks of
Plympton Priory that travellers might here pray to Heaven for protection
before adventuring into the wilds beyond. Of the Priory, founded in the
twelfth century to replace a Saxon college of secular canons, nothing
remains but the refectory and a kitchen and a moss-grown orchard, which
may be seen close to the lichened church of Plympton St. Mary, if we care
to wander a little eastwards from the river. Not far off is the other Plympton,
with its scanty fragments of a castle of the de Redvers, Earls of Devon.
More memorable is Plympton Earl from its association with Sir Joshua
Reynolds, who was born here, and sat at his father’s feet in the quaint
cloistered Grammar School, where, too, three other painters of note were
educated—Sir Joshua’s pupil and biographer, Northcote, the luckless
Haydon, and the fortune-favoured Eastlake. Reynolds was not without
honour in his own country, at any rate during his life. The Corporation of
Plympton once chose him mayor, and he declared to George III. that the
election was an honour which gave him more pleasure than any other which
had ever come to him—“except,” he added as an afterthought, “that
conferred on me by your Majesty.” A portrait of himself, which he painted
for his native town, was long treasured in the ancient Guildhall, but the
virtue of the Corporation was not permanently proof against temptation, and
at last the picture was sold, for £150. This happened a good many years
ago.

THE PLYM FROM CADAFORD BRIDGE.
IN BICKLEIGH VALE.

Below Plym Bridge the river begins to expand into the estuary, known in
the upper part as the Laira and in the lower as the Catwater, the division
between the two sections being marked by the Laira Bridge, five hundred
feet long. Of “Laira” various derivations have been suggested, the most
ingenious, and perhaps, therefore, the least likely, being that since “leary” in
the vernacular means “empty,” the name may be taken as pointing to the
large expanses of mud and sedge left bare by the tide—larger in the days
before the stream was embanked than they are now. Saltram, a seat of the

Earls of Morley, the first of whom both built the bridge and constructed the
embankment, is on the left shore, embosomed in woods. Below the bridge
the estuary curves round northwards, and, sweeping by Sutton Pool, its
waters lose themselves in one of the noblest havens in the world, studded
with craft of all shapes and sizes, from the grim battleship and the swift
liner to the ruddy-sailed trawler.
To get a coup d’œil of Plymouth and its surroundings, let us take our stand
on the limestone headland known as The Hoe, where, according to the
tradition which Kingsley has followed, Drake was playing bowls with his
brother sea-dogs when the Armada was descried, and refused to stop until
the game was ended. In these days it is surmounted by a statue of the hero,
by the Armada Memorial, and by Smeaton’s lighthouse, removed from the
Eddystone from no defect of its own, but because the rock on which it was
based was becoming insecure. On the east The Hoe terminates in the
Citadel, an ancient fortification which has been adapted to modern
conditions; on the low ground behind crouches Plymouth, effectually
screened from the sea-winds; on the west, beyond the Great Western Docks,
lies Stonehouse, and west of this again is Devonport, its dockyards lining
the Hamoaze, as the estuary of the Tamar is called. Seawards, restraining
the rush of the broad waves of the Sound, is the Breakwater, a lighthouse at
one end, a beacon of white granite at the other, and in the middle, as it
seems at this distance, but really on an island just within it, a mighty oval
fort of granite cased in iron. About half-way to the Breakwater is Drake’s
Island, another link in a chain of defences which has, one may hope,
rendered the Three Towns invulnerable to assault either from sea or from
land; and over against this, bordering the Sound on the west, are the woods
and grassy slopes of Mount Edgcumbe, the noble domain which the
Spanish Admiral, Medina Sidonia, is said to have designed for himself.
Away in the dim distance the new Eddystone rears its lofty head. How the
first of the four lighthouses which have warned mariners of this dangerous
reef was washed away, and the second fell a prey to the flames, every
schoolboy knows. Familiar, too, is the story of the third; yet as we turn to
look at it, now that it is retired from active service, we may be pardoned for
recalling how, from this very spot, Smeaton was wont to watch the progress
of the work which was to be his title to enduring fame. “Again and again,”
says Dr. Smiles, “the engineer, in the dim grey of the morning, would come
out and peer through his telescope at his deep-sea lamp-post. Sometimes he

had to wait long until he could see a tall white pillar of spray shoot up into
the air. Then, as the light grew, he could discern his building, temporary
house and all, standing firm amidst the waters; and thus far satisfied, he
could proceed to his workshops, his mind relieved for the day.”

PLYMPTON EARL. (p. 51).

Photo: W. Heath, Plymouth.
THE HOE, PLYMOUTH.

Plymouth, beginning as Sutton Prior, an appanage of the Augustinian
Monastery at Plympton, the original harbour being what is now known as
Sutton Pool, has a history extending at least as far back as the Domesday
Survey. Stonehouse is a comparatively modern extension; and Devonport,
though its dockyards date from the days of William III., was long in
growing into the consequence which now it possesses. Those who know
their Boswell well will remember that Johnson, coming into Devonshire
with Sir Joshua, visited Plymouth at a time when great jealousy was being
felt of the pretensions of Devonport, then just beginning to assert itself.
Half in jest and half in earnest he vigorously espoused the prejudices of the
older town; and when, in time of drought, Devonport applied to Plymouth
for water, he burst out, “No, no. I am against the dockers; I am a Plymouth
man. Rogues! let them die of thirst! They shall not have a drop!” Since then
Devonport has gone to Dartmoor for a water supply of its own; and

Plymouth, while not oblivious of its glorious memories, is well content to
take a maternal pride in the prosperity of the younger towns.
W. W. HUTCHINGS.

Photo: W. Heath, Plymouth.
DANESCOMBE (p. 58).

RIVERS OF CORNWALL.
The Minor Streams of Cornwall—The TAMAR: Woolley Barrows—Morwellham and Weir Head—
Morwell Rocks—Harewood—Calstock—Cotehele—Pentillie—Confluence with the Tavy—
Saltash—The Hamoaze. The FOWEY: A Change of Name—St. Neot—Lostwithiel—Fowey. The
FAL: Fenton Fal—Tregony—Truro—Tregothnan—Falmouth.

C OMPARATIVELY insignificant though they may be, the rivers of
Cornwall have peculiar interest alike for the geographer and
the geologist, and are rife with the charms of natural scenery
which attract every lover of the beautiful. If we except the
Camel, which is the only river worthy of mention that flows
into the Bristol Channel, the county has a southern drainage, this arising
from the fact that the watershed of Cornwall is almost confined to the
country contiguous to the north coast. Perhaps it is by way of compensation
to the Camel, or Alan, that it has two sources. By Lanteglos and Advent its
course runs through a romantic country of wood and vale, and it meets the
tide at Egloshayle, thence passing Wadebridge, eight miles below which it
falls into Padstow Harbour.
Of the streams possessing something of historic interest and scenic charm,
the Looe must be mentioned because of the lovely vale through which it
flows between Duloe and Morval and the association of the river with the
ancient Parliamentary boroughs of East and West Looe at its mouth. The
Seaton, the St. Austell river, the Hayle, the Gannel, and the Hel, each and
all have their individuality, owing allegiance to no other river tyrannous of
its tributaries; but the three principal streams of the county, the Tamar, the
Fowey, and the Fal, which have been selected for special notice here, have a
virtual monopoly of interest and attention. The TAMAR possesses, in a
singular degree, the more striking characteristics of the Cornish rivers, and
is fairly entitled to the distinction of first consideration at our hands. Having
its rise at Woolley Barrows, in the extreme east of the westernmost county,
a short distance from its source Tamar becomes the boundary between the
counties of Devon and Cornwall, and so continues during nearly the whole

of its course, some forty miles. Flowing distinctly southward, the river leads
a quiet life for at least a league, till, gaining in size and importance, it gives
its name to the pretty village and parish of North Tamerton. Thenceforth
“Its tranquil stream
Through rich and peopled meadows finds its way.”

At St. Stephen’s-by-Launceston it receives the Werrington stream, and
expands into a beautiful lake in Werrington Park. Below the lake the
impetuous Attery stream joins the now brimming river, which, passing
under Poulston and Greston, reaches Tavistock New Bridge, where we are
on the “scientific frontier” of Devon and Cornwall. At this point, too, the
Tamar enters upon a new stage of its existence, leaving its lowly moorland
birth and quiet ordinary youth behind it, and beginning a career which is
henceforth the cynosure of all eyes. Hurrying by Gunnislake, the busy little
hamlet of workers in clay and stone, at Weir Head the river literally leaps
into fame.
From the
coaching hamlet
it has slided on
through a
woodland glade
of bewitching
beauty, which
wins a
spontaneous
outburst of
admiration from
the visitor who,
haply, has chosen
to approach the
favoured scene
by the
serpentining
sylvan walk from
Morwellham to
Weir Head. Here

THE RIVERS OF CORNWALL. its waters break
in a pretty
cascade over the artificial ridge of rocks that reaches from bank to bank.
Then they prettily describe a circle about the islet in mid-stream, gaining
new life and movement from the impetus. With the briskness of a waterslide
the Tamar rushes on to Morwellham. A charming variety of river-glimpses
may be gained through the luxuriant foliage at Weir Head, the views
hereabouts having become the objective of the highly popular steamer-trips
from Plymouth, Devonport, and Saltash, which have constituted “Up the
Tamar” quite a colloquialism in the West.
The winding river gains a new glory from its beautiful and impressive
surroundings as it flows at the base of Morwell Rocks, those wonderful
examples of Nature’s carvings, set in the midst of luxuriant foliage that here
hides their shaggy sides and there throws into bold relief an awe-inspiring
pile. The Rocks are unique in their romantic beauty, even though they figure
among the many objects of interest in a highly picturesque neighbourhood.
The Chimney Rock and the Turret Rock are happier instances of descriptive
nomenclature than usual. Bolder still is that most striking specimen of
natural architecture, Morwell Rock, the massiveness of which doubtless
gained for it the capital distinction. To the giddy height of the topmost rock,
above the far-stretching woodland of Morwellham, scarce a sound of the
rippling river comes; but the silver thread of its serpentine course may be
traced afar through the romantic valley, winding about Okel Tor and the
great bend that forms the peninsula between Morwellham and Calstock, and
then taking its favoured way through cherry orchard-groves on to the haven
under the hill.
The river is navigable to Weir Head, but Morwellham is the highest point
reached by the steamers. Pursuing the line of least resistance, the Tamar
now makes a tremendous sweep about the hill on which Calstock Church
stands. But ere the first view of the “two-faced church” is caught, an
interesting riparian residence is skirted—Harewood, the scene of Mason’s
play of Elfrida, now the office of the Duchy of Cornwall, but formerly one
of the Trelawny properties. Calstock, if it please you, is the centre of the old
“cherry picking” district, though to-day its strawberry gardens must rival
the orchards in their remunerative return to the industrious population of the
quaint little town that seems to have grown away from the water’s edge to

the pleasant Cornish country beyond Tamar bank. Still, if you would see
Calstock in its daintiest garb and most delightful beauty, come you when
the pretty cherry blossom decks the groves by the river, and the tender pink
and white clothes the orchard lawns to the uplands.

TAVISTOCK NEW BRIDGE (p. 55).

From Calstock on to Cotehele, and thence almost to the junction of the
Tamar and the Tavy, the same delightful eccentricity of the river-scenery
presents itself—every prominent feature re-appearing in an entirely
different aspect, scarce five minutes of the river-trip passing without a
variation of the point of view. A last glimpse of Calstock Church, and we
are encompassed by woodland. Everywhere a luxuriant living green meets
the eye. Apparently, the swelling woods and orchard lawns approach ahead
and form a cul-de-sac; but the Tamar makes a sharp detour to the right or to
the left, and another glory of the leafy way bursts upon the sight. Again and
again the pleasing experience is repeated ere a human habitation relieves a
monotony that for once is wholly charming.

Beyond the limekilns of Cotehele appears the lodge gate of Cotehele
House, one of the residences of the Edgcumbe family, and a place of some
historic interest. By far the most prominent feature in the fine landscape
which may be viewed from a tower at the highest point of the grounds is Kit
Hill, the loftiest eminence on Hingston Down, which was the scene of a last
desperate battle between the Britons of Cornwall and the invading Saxons
in the year 835. A beautiful valley near Cotehele, known as Danescombe to
this day, is said to have taken its name from the allies whom the Cornish
called to their aid in this sanguinary struggle.
Immediately below Cotehele the zig-zag course of the Tamar is most
strongly marked, and nowhere are its revelations of new views and fresh
charms more entrancing than where it winds about the extensive grounds of
Pentillie. Shortly after we have doffed our caps in deference to the pious Sir
Richard Edgcumbe, devout worshipper of the Holy Mother, who erected a
church by the river-bank to commemorate his miraculous escape from the
soldiers of the royal Richard, we catch a fleeting but impressive glimpse of
another stately residence of a county family, on a hilly eminence clothed to
its crown with thickly grown woods, the castellated mansion emerging from
dense leafy environs well towards the crest. All suddenly the coquetting
stream swerves to the Devonshire side, as speedily returns to caress the fair
meads of Cornwall, and another glorious prospect is disclosed. A nearer
view is now to be had of Pentillie Castle, lying embowered in the far-
stretching woodland, the Gothic features of the lordly pleasure-house which
the late owner, Mr. John Tillie Coryton, built for himself admirably
harmonising with its beautiful surroundings.
Below Pentillie, the Tamar, in its ampler waters and wider course, has to be
satisfied with less interesting associations. A last big bend in the river, and,
past the pretty hamlet of Cargreen, we shortly find ourselves abreast of the
church of St. Dilpe, at Landulph, erected very near the river-bank, on the
Cornish side. The tower of St. Budeaux Church, whose melodious bells
chime cheerily across the water, rises high above the Devon bank. Here the
Tavy makes common cause with the Tamar, and the twin rivers flow on by
Saltash into the Hamoaze. Nearly opposite the mouth of the Tavy, on the
Cornish side, is the ecclesiastical parish of St. Stephen-by-Saltash, with the
ruins of Trematon Castle at the summit of a well-wooded hill. The castle is

believed to have been built at the period of the Conquest, and was
subsequently held by the Earls of Cornwall.

MORWELL ROCKS (p. 55).

At Saltash—as the Western men will not forget to remind the boasting
Cockney—the Tamar is wider than the Thames at Westminster. Saltash
itself, by the way, was originally (according to Carew) Villa de Esse, after a
family of that name, and to this was added “Salt,” on account of its “marine
situation.” The busy little waterside town has this great dignity—that its
Mayor and Corporation take precedence of those of Plymouth and
Devonport. Saltash has gradually, through many generations, built itself up
a steep, rocky acclivity until the habitations extend to the summit of the hill
at Longstone, from which favoured eminence the prospect is very fine. Here
may we see the broadened river where the ebbing tide swirls by the Mount
Edgcumbe training-ship, that is swinging round on its tidal pivot just above
Brunel’s great bridge; thence, flowing beneath the wondrous iron link of the

two westernmost counties with which the engineer spanned the river, here
half a mile across, the Tamar, now joined by the Lynher from the West,
loses its identity in the all-embracing Hamoaze, with its wood-fringed
shores; the river passing unremarked into Plymouth Harbour, from the
Harbour to the Sound, and from the Sound to the Channel—forgotten now
in the great affairs of navies, and the thrilling stories of the seas on which
Drake and Hawkins, Raleigh and Grenville, sailed to fight the Spaniard.
From haunts of peace, the Tamar, itself a pleasant stream, has flowed
through scenes of rare beauty to these so warlike surroundings, where its
current eddies about the decaying hulks on whose decks the old sea-dogs
died, where its waters wash arsenal, dock, and victualling yard, and where it
oft bears on its broad bosom a mighty fleet of men-of-war.

CARGREEN (p. 58).

At the foot of Brown Willy, Cornwall’s highest hill, in the parish of St.
Breward, there is an aqueous locality in which the water-finder might

exercise his art of divination with the utmost confidence, if, indeed, he did
not find his occupation gone by reason of the abundance of the surface
water. This is Foy-Fenton, and here the FOWEY rises. As, to this day, Fowey
becomes “Foy” in the naming of the boats that boast the prettiest harbour in
the county for their port, one may easily discover a close association in the
nomenclature of the sites and scenes at the beginning and the end of this
very charming stream. In its course, curiously enough, the river changes its
name. Where it flows southward through the moorlands between St. Neot
and St. Cleer, it is called the Dranes (or Dreynes) river; and fishermen from
the “model borough” of Liskeard, who love to flog its pleasant waters for
the toothsome trout that they harbour, would be prepared to contend, in the
face of the maps and in the presence of geographers, that it is the Dranes
river, and no other. In flood-time a strong stream that gives the road-
surveyor endless trouble, the Fowey, leaping along its bouldered way, here
and there lightening its journey by falling in picturesque cascades,
scattering its showers of iridescent spray over the thick foliage that
everywhere clothes its banks, runs almost level with the main road to St.
Neot—a village noted for its window-pictured legend of St. Neot and the
miraculous supply of fish, in the parish church—where it receives a goodly
stream of that name. Increasing the beauty and interest of its course with
every mile it travels, the river by-and-by glides into the far-stretching
woodland of Glynn, the seat of Lord Vivian, and then becomes one of the
principal contributors to the scenic charms of the railway-side from
Devonport to Par, which Miss Braddon describes as the most delightful of
all journeys by rail.

THE HAMOAZE FROM SALTASH (p. 59).

After leaving its moorland haunts, and in order to reach Glynn, the Fowey
took a westerly turn, but, Bodmin once skirted, the river runs directly
southward again, under Resprin bridge and past Lanhydrock House, the
Cornish home of that Lord Robartes who was the leader of the
Parliamentarian forces in these parts. The ancient mansion, of the Tudor
period, passed through many crises, and, together with modern additions,
was practically destroyed by fire in 1881, and rebuilt in 1883–4. The next
object of interest seen from the river is the ruin of Restormel Castle, on the
summit of a bold headland a mile from Lostwithiel. The building of the
castle is ascribed to the Cardenhams, who flourished hereabouts in the reign
of the first Edward; and it was once the residence of the Earls of Cornwall.
At Lostwithiel—the Uzella of Ptolemy—the Fowey is crossed by an ancient
and narrow bridge of eight pointed arches, erected in the fourteenth century.
The bridge is very strongly buttressed, and over each buttress is an angular
niche. A silver oar, which is among the insignia of the Corporation, bears
the inscription: “Custodia aquæ de Fowey.” The celebrated Colonel Silas
Titus, author of “Killing noe Murder,” Member of Parliament for the

borough 1663–79, was the donor of the oar. Lostwithiel, where the river
meets the tide, at once becoming navigable for small vessels, boasts great
antiquity, and in 1664 was the headquarters of the Parliamentarian forces in
Cornwall.
Here, below Lostwithiel’s ancient bridge, let us take boat and taste of the
ineffable enjoyment which laureates of the Fowey have attributed to a sail
or a row down the romantic stream to the mouth of the harbour, where the
sailors sing their chanties as they work the merchantmen out between the
old towers whence chains were stretched across the harbour in the stirring
days when the Spaniard sailed the main. Sing hey, sing ho, for indeed life is
worth living when the soft zephyrs blow, and we glide by the prettily placed
church of St. Winnow, and catch the musical chiming of its melodious peal
of bells. “Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm,” our delight knows
no surcease, but rather grows as, something less than three miles below the
old Parliamentary borough, the banks open out, and we behold that
daydream of scenic beauty, the sunlit reaches of the river winding away
toward the sea. One branch of this estuary, by-the-by, flows to St. Veep,
which has an interesting church. The Lerrin and St. Cadoc creeks yet further
enrich a river which Nature has endowed with charms so abundant.
Bodinnoc Ferry is a name to conjure with in yachting circles, since there is
not one log among the many of the pleasure-boats that make for the “little
Dartmouth” of the Far West in the height of summer but contains some fine
compliment to the rare beauty of the view, landward and seaward, from this
familiar tacking point. No wonder that Fowey Harbour shares with its
Devonshire rival the generous tribute of sportsmen, who have lavished upon
each of these picturesque ports effusive praise that has its point in the proud
title of the “Yachtsman’s Paradise.” Long ere these pleasure-seeking days
was the discovery of Fowey’s possession of a safe and commodious harbour
made: “The shippes of Fowey sayling by Rhie and Winchelsey, about
Edward the IIIrd tyme, would vayle no bonnet beying required, whereupon
Rhie and Winchelsey men and they fought, when Fowie men had victorie,
and thereupon bare their arms mixt with the arms of Rhie and Winchelsey,
and then rose the name of the Gallants of Fowey.” But Leland knew that
they deserved the title long years before, as “the glorie of Fowey rose by the
warres in King Edward I. and III. and Henry V.’s day, partly by feats of
warre, partly by piracie, and so waxing rich fell all to merchandize.”

Fowey took so naturally and keenly to the practice of piracy that the
“gallants” had a little affair at sea with the French on their own account and
against the King’s treaty and commandment, in the reign of the fourth
Edward, who appears not to have been well pleased, since he took the head
of one of their number, imprisoned the captains, and sent men of Dartmouth
down to seize their ships and remove the chain then drawn across the mouth
of the haven. But the “gallants” were nothing daunted, and in the time of
Charles II. their successors beat off eighty Dutch ships of war that, greatly
daring, had chased a fleet of merchantmen into Fowey Harbour. St.
Finbarrus, first Bishop of Cork, is said to have been buried in the church,
which is dedicated to him, and is a handsome structure. Place House, the
seat of the Treffry family, besides being a noble mansion, gloriously dight
with very fine specimens of Cornish granite and porphyry, is of great
historic interest. It was Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Treffry—an ancient
statue of whom stands in the grounds—who, in the absence of her husband,
headed his men and beat off the French in an assault on Place House in July,
1457.

Along its course of but twenty miles, four of which are tidal, the FAL
divides the county into two nearly equal parts. Fenton Fal, in Tregoss Moor,
is the birthplace of the stream; and from the moorland it receives the
tributary waters of many peaty rivulets before gaining entrance to the
romantic vale of Treviscoe, which gives us a foretaste of that feast of the
beautiful which the Fal affords in its lower reaches. Compared with what
goes before and follows after, the course of the stream by Grampound (the
Voluba of Ptolemy), through Creed valley, where it leaves Tregony on its
left bank, and on to Ruan, is somewhat lacking in interest, and the river
itself is of no great strength. Ere tin-streaming and the sandbanks had done
their mischief, you might have reached Tregony on the top of the tide;
nowadays the ebb and flow affect the river no farther than Ruan. Yet this
has sufficed to gain for the Fal a glorious name. Perhaps the finest
compliment ever paid to the river fell from royal lips. When the Queen,
accompanied by the Prince Consort, made the trip down the Fal from Truro
in 1864, she was visibly impressed with the beauty and splendour of the
scenery, and particularly charmed with the view about Tregothnan. Her

Majesty was reminded by it of the Rhine, but thought it almost finer where
winding between woods of stunted oaks, and full of numberless creeks.
At Truro, the two little rivers, Kenwyn and Allen, flow through the city into
a creek of the Fal, known as Truro river; the first-named separates St.
Mary’s from St. Paul’s, while the second divides the parish of St. Mary
from that of St. John. The little Kenwyn is “personally conducted” through
the streets of the cathedral town by the Corporation, in open conduits, and
forms a not unpleasant feature of the tiny city in Western Barbary whose
inhabitants were once said to have a good conceit of themselves: “The
people of this town dress and live so elegantly that the pride of Truro is
become a by-word in the county.” The most modern of our English
cathedrals is a monument to the pious zeal, marvellous industry, and
unquenchable enthusiasm of Dr. Benson, the first Bishop of Truro,
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. The Prince of Wales laid the
foundation stone in 1880, and its consecration took place seven years later.
The style is Early English of the thirteenth century, and at present the
cathedral but partially realises the ambitious design of the architect, who
planned a very imposing edifice, which, in the event of its ultimate
completion, must inevitably challenge comparison with the most notable of
modern achievements in the Gothic. Already it possesses several splendid
windows and many beautiful specimens of modern sculpture.

Photo: F. Argall, Truro.
THE FAL FROM TOLVERNE (p. 65).

The prettiest parts of our river lie between King Harry’s Passage and
Roseland. Below Tregothnan, where the Fal unites with the Truro river and
St. Clement’s creek, both shores are beautifully clothed with wood, and the
fine expanse of water at high tide lends a nobility and magnificence to the
scene which affords ample occasion for the high-flown descriptions and
lavish praise bestowed upon the Fal. On the right are the grounds of

Trelissick; and a picturesque glimpse of the stream may be caught near the
estuary called Malpas Road, by the ferry at Tolverne. After dividing Mylor
from St. Just, the river loses its identity in forming Carrick Road, and
shortly expands into the splendid haven of Falmouth Harbour. The inner
part, between Trefusis Point, Pendennis, and the town, is called King’s
Road. Carrick Road, where the river enters, forms the middle of the
harbour, and midway between the entrance—which is from Pendennis Point
to St. Anthony’s Head—there lies the ominously-named Black Rock,
around which the Mayor of Truro sailed in June, 1709, when he sought to
exercise jurisdiction over the port and harbour of Falmouth. But the citizens
of the port themselves had had a powerful friend at Court, in the person of
King Charles II., who had given Falmouth a charter overriding the ancient
claims of Truro, by which the Mayor of the latter town had levied dues on
all goods laden or unladen in any part of the Fal, from Truro to the Black
Rock; and a trial at law in the same year finally established home rule in
Falmouth Harbour.

Photo: Frith & Co., Reigate.
FALMOUTH HARBOUR.

Though to-day its prosperity is scarcely commensurate with its natural
advantages, the harbour still remains almost unrivalled. First port of call for
homeward-bound vessels, with a depth of water and safe anchorage that
many another harbour might envy, and sheltered from all the winds that
blow save those from the south-south-east, it is so capacious that the whole
British fleet could ride at anchor in its waters. Falmouth as a town owes its
existence to these striking features of its harbour. Beholding them, it struck
the shrewd sons of the House of Killigrew, Lords of Arwenack (there is an
Arwenack Street to this day), who flourished in the time of James I., that
there was no earthly reason why vessels should go seven miles to Truro, or
two miles to Penryn, for a port when an infinitely better one might be
created at the very mouth of the harbour. Vested interests, as represented by
the communities of Truro, Penryn, and Helston, offered stout opposition.
But the silver-tongued Lords of Arwenack prevailed in the argument before
King James, and it was not long ere Falmouth was the first port in
Cornwall. Its great era of prosperity exemplifies the adage that it’s an ill
wind that blows nobody good, for, during our wars with the French,
Falmouth became a mail packet station, and flourished exceedingly on
“Government service.”
It was the boast of proud Falmouthians that a hundred vessels could ride in
the creeks of Falmouth Harbour and yet that no two should be in sight of
each other. How this might be may be understood in part when it is
explained that, besides many smaller arms, there are five principal creeks.
Of these branches not the least is that which was probably the earliest used,
to Penryn; there is a second to Restronguet and Perranarworthal; a third,
also of ancient use, to Truro and Tresillian Bridge; a fourth running up to St.
Mawes and Gerrans; and the fifth and greatest, to King Harry’s Reach,
toward Tregony, which is the main stream of our Fal.
HUGH W. STRONG.

Photo: Frith & Co., Reigate.
FALMOUTH, FROM FLUSHING.

THE ISLE OF ATHELNLY (p. 68).

THE PARRET AND THE LOWER AVON.
The PARRET: Its Source—Muchelney Abbey—The Tone and Taunton—Athelney Island and Alfred
the Great—Sedgemoor—Bridgewater—Burnham. The LOWER AVON: Escourt Park—
Malmesbury—Chippenham—Melksham—Bradford-on-Avon—Bath—The Frome—Beau Nash
—Bridges at Bath—The Abbey Church—Bristol—St. Mary Redcliffe and Chatterton—The
Cathedral—“The Chasm”—Clifton Suspension Bridge—The Lower Reaches—Avonmonth.

O F the even, placid course of the PARRET one sententious writer
has said, “There is nothing remarkable in it, the country being
flat.” A spark of imagination and the merest glimmering of
historic interest would have spared us this dull commonplace.
Surely the stream which saw the dawn of intellect in England,
which witnessed the very beginnings of our modern civilisation, which
watered the self-same mead where walked the first royal patron of learning
that the country boasted, is notable, even if it does not attain to higher rank
among our English rivers.
The Parret—Pedred of the Saxon Chronicle—is not of native Somerset
birth, since it has its uprising a mile over the southern boundary, at
Cheddington Copse, in the Dorsetshire parish of South Perrott. Flowing in a
south-easterly direction, by Crewkerne and the Dorsetshire border, its basin
occupies that portion of the Bridgwater Level lying between the Mendips
and the Quantock Hills. At Crewkerne we have wide glimpses of its broad
green valley, the busy little market town itself rising in the midst of the
natural amphitheatre formed by the distant, unpretentious hills, lying low,
like shadows on the horizon. The fine cruciform church of St. Bartholomew,
whose only real rival among Somersetshire churches is that at Ilminster, in
precisely the same style of architecture, occupies a pleasant situation
westward of the river.
The ruins of Muchelney Abbey rise above the marshy banks of the river in
the hamlet bearing the same name, which the ancient chronicler would have
us accept as a facile corruption of “Muckle Eye,” or Great Island. Of

Athelstan’s
Abbey there are
but scant
remains, though
these are most
suggestive of a
structure of
imposing size
and great
architectural
interest and
beauty. By the
interesting little
town of Langport
the dividing hills
are broken, and
the Parret
THE PARRET AND THE LOWER AVON. receives the
waters of the Isle
from the left, and
of the Yeo (so common a river name, with its obvious derivation), or Ivel,
from the right. Swollen by these tributaries, the Parret’s lazy waters now
creep on under a bridge which unites the banks that marked the limits of the
dominions of the Belgic and Danmonian tribes.
Hereabouts we do indeed appear to be at the very beginnings of English
history, for but a little below the confluence, at Aller, the Danish king,
Guthrum, is said to have received the rite of baptism in the river, his
conqueror, Alfred the Great, magnanimously standing sponsor to the fallen
foe; whilst eight centuries later a fiercer warrior, filled with zeal for what he
conceived to be his righteous cause—Fairfax, to wit—routed the Royalist
forces, giving no quarter, as he had asked none. Before we take up the other
thread of the historical tale, there is the Tone to be reckoned with. Born in a
bog on the Brendon Hills, this most important of the affluents of the Parret
is seen at its greatest in the picturesque vale of Taunton Dean. Imparting its
name to the handsome town of Taunton, it passes at least one splendid
specimen of ecclesiastical architecture in St. Mary’s Church, which rears its

lofty tower in the midst of a delightful neighbourhood, of which Taunton is
the attractive capital.
Below the hill-top village of Boroughbridge the Tone joins forces with the
Parret, and in the slack water at their confluence rises that little plot of
ground made for ever sacred in English eyes by reason of its being the
remote retreat of Alfred the Great when he sought to escape the slings and
arrows of outrageous Fortune. Hurrying thither from his fierce enemies, the
Danes—and, if the fable is in the least to be trusted, from the equally-to-be-
feared anger of the neatherd’s wife—he found a peaceful haven, where he
might heal him of his wounds, recruit his resources, and lay his plans for
the meditated rally. And so, by bold forays from this natural stronghold, he
regained the confidence of his adherents, won over the waverers, and paved
the way for his eventual triumph over the pagan foe and the complete
recovery of his power.

TAUNTON CHURCH (p. 68).

To the honour of St. Saviour and St. Peter, his patron saints, the pious hero
of Athelney raised a monastery on the island, where, in their holy orisons,
the monks chanted the praises of the God who had so confused the heathen
by the shores of the river that stayed its course and stagnated where the
reeds and rushes caught the water-sprite, heavy with sleep, in their toils.

Barely two acres in William of Malmesbury’s day, yet covered by “a forest
of alders of vast extent”(!), the historic spot is now known as Athelney
Farm, a stone pillar telling its great story in this concise inscription: “King
Alfred the Great, in the year of our Lord 879, having been defeated by the
Danes, fled for refuge to the Forest of Athelney, where he lay concealed
from his enemies for the space of a whole year. He soon after regained
possession of his throne; and, in grateful remembrance of the protection he
had received under the favour of Heaven, he erected a monastery on the
spot, and endowed it with all the lands contained in the Isle of Athelney. To
perpetuate the memory of so remarkable an incident in the history of the
illustrious prince, this edifice was founded by John Slade, Esq., of
Maunsell, the proprietor of Athelney, and lord of the manor of North
Petherton, A.D. 1801.”

Photo: William Hanks, Malmesbury.
MALMESBURY ABBEY (p. 72).

History in its heroic elements still clings to Parret’s banks, for, as the river
flows on near Weston-Zoyland, washing the parish on the south and south-

west, Sedgemoor, the Duke of Monmouth’s fatal field, comes into view, and
one looks upon the scene of what in Macaulay’s words was “the last fight
deserving the name of a battle that has been fought on English ground.”
Emerging from the marsh of Sedgemoor, the Parret now takes upon itself
the new office of patron and benefactor of populous, busy Bridgwater, two
miles to the south-west of “Sowyland.” It is the river which at ebb and flood
tide deposits that peculiar sediment of clay and sand that goes to make “the
Bath brick,” of which product Bridgwater has the monopoly. But why
“Bath”? Well, presumably, because the best market for the brick was
originally found in Beau Nash’s town, with the result that it eventually
became the principal centre of trading in the commodity. From half a mile
above to half a mile below the three-arched bridge which Walter de Briwere
—the first of that ilk—commenced, and Sir Thomas Trivet completed, in
the reign of Edward I., the brickworks stretch, giving employment to a large
number of hands, and forming a source of considerable revenue.
The current which nearly overwhelmed General Fairfax in Bridgwater’s
stirring days of 1645 is said to advance with such rapidity and boldness on
the Parret as to rise no less than two fathoms on one wave. But, judging
from the statement of another authority, this must be but a moderate
estimate of the dimensions to which the bore occasionally attains, since it is
asserted that the upright wave-phenomenon of the Parret has repeatedly
reached nine feet in height! This much, however, is positively ascertained—
that spring-tides in the Bristol Channel rise a full 36 feet at the mouth of the
Parret.
King John gave Bridgwater its charter in 1200, but the Briwere family, one
of whom began the building of the great bridge over the Parret, were the
real founders of the town and the actual authors of its commercial
prosperity. The most striking landmark in the birthplace of Admiral Blake,
the great Republican commander, whose glorious achievement it was to
defeat the “invincible” Van Tromp, is the tall tower and fine spire of the
parish church of St. Mary, 174 feet in height, and, therefore, one of the
loftiest in England. A splendid altar-piece, said to have been taken from a
Spanish privateer, is one of the features of the church.
Six miles from the sea at Bridgwater, the Parret, as if loth to lose its
individuality, lingers in the rich valley, doubling the distance by its
circuitous course to the Bristol Channel. At Burnham, just before the Severn

Sea claims them, its waters are still further swollen by those of the Brue, a
considerable stream, which, like the Parret, has a wealth of historical
association, and is of some commercial significance. To the wharves at
Highbridge, above Burnham, vessels of many tons burthen are borne by the
tide; here also are the gates and sluice-locks of the Glastonbury canal
navigation. Then the united streams fall into that part of the Bristol Channel
which is known as Bridgwater Bay. A few miles to the north the Axe
indolently pours into Uphill Bay the waters which it has brought from the
flanks of the Mendips, where it runs a subterranean course some two miles
long before issuing forth in a copious flood from Wookey Hole—a cavern
famous for the prehistoric treasures which it has yielded to the explorer—to
flow through a picturesque glen, and presently to drain the level plains of
West Somerset.

Watering three counties, to the scenic interest and beauty of each of which it
lends an infinitude of charms, the LOWER AVON is not to be measured for its
importance by its length (seventy-five miles), since there are far longer
streams that one would willingly exchange for half the romantic valleys and
the rich country of this river, which has its source in a piece of ornamental
water at Escourt Park, in the neighbourhood of Great Thurston, where the
boundaries of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire almost meet.
Distinction is immediately given to the stream. Just below the village it
enters the grounds of Pinckney House, and after it has passed Eastongrey
and a dozen little thorpes, the river claims proud association with historic
Malmesbury—the British Caer Bladon, and the Anglo-Saxon Ingelburne—
which it enters on the west. This ancient town stands on the ridge of a
narrow hill, sloping down steeply on its southern and northern sides, and is
nearly surrounded by two streams which, uniting at its southern extremity,
form the Avon. On the highest point of the ridge are seen the ruins of the
famous Malmesbury Abbey, which once covered forty-five acres of ground.
Leland, writing in the time of Henry VIII., described it as a “right
magnificent thing.” The present remains are small; but the south porch is
one of the finest specimens of Norman work in the country. A portion of the
structure is still used as a church. Another notable feature of the town in
which William of Malmesbury, the historian, was educated, is a quaint
fifteenth-century market-cross, to which also Leland gave none but honest

praise when he styled it “a righte faire piece of worke.” Malmesbury—
which, by the way, was the birthplace of “Leviathan” Hobbes—has been
built on the peninsula between the Tetbury stream, flowing down from the
Gloucestershire town, and the first beginnings of the Avon, which here
accepts its earliest tributary.

Photo: J. Clark, Tetbury.
THE AVON NEAR TETBURY.

Bending southward at Somerford, another branch is caught up, this
subsidiary stream hailing from the neighbourhood of Wootton Bassett. By
this time the Avon has become no mean river, and in its course by Dauntsey
and Seagry to woody Christian Malford it forms a very prominent feature in
the fine landscape that may be viewed from the high hill to the eastward, on
the summit of which stood Bradenstoke Priory, now converted to the use—
we will not say ignoble—of a comfortable farmhouse. Fast gathering its

supplementary forces, the Avon after passing Kellaways and before
reaching Chippenham welcomes the waters of the Marlan. Chippenham,
pleasant in itself, but made still more interesting by reason of its
surroundings in the fertile valley, is well nigh compassed about by the
Avon, which here is a clear stream and of sweet savour. Later in its history
it may deserve the description of a dark and deep river, except where
shallows interfere. In its lower reaches it will be largely affected in colour
by storms, Wiltshire floods tinging it with the whitish hue of the chalk hills,
and the Somersetshire rains with the red of the ochre beds. But here it is a
placid, pleasant stream, which makes a bold sweep round the environs of
the town, driving its mill-wheels and lending that dignity and interest which
a river peculiarly affords.

Photo: R. Wilkinson, Trowbridge.
BRADFORD-ON-AVON CHURCH, FROM THE NORTH EAST (p. 74).

Hitherto the Avon’s gliding way has lain by the low-lying dairy lands of
North Wiltshire, through peaceful pastoral scenes, its banks clothed with the
brightest flowers of the field, and here and there shaded with willows and
elms, But now, beyond Chippenham, it embarks upon the chequered and
romantic phase of its career. The country becomes more hilly directly we
near the clothing district of Wiltshire. For a short space the Avon renders the
useful service of a boundary, effectually dividing Wilts and Somerset. The
scenery of Chippenham Vale, through which the river flows on to
Melksham, Trowbridge, and Bradford—a trio of interesting towns, each
watered by the same stream—is extremely beautiful.
Melksham, a town of one long principal street, is flanked by rich meadows,
through which meanders the Avon. The quaint, old-fashioned houses are
built on the acclivity of an eminence which may fairly be ascribed to the
river’s wearing work through the ages; and the inhabitants are not without
reason proud of their handsome four-arched bridge.
Again there comes a season of increase, in which the river gains, from this
source and that, a considerable addition to its volume. At Broughton Gifford
a brook by that name surrenders to the brimming river from the west, whilst
from the east enters the Whaddon streamlet. Then, again, near Staverton the
little Biss joineth the great Avon. So our river swells with importance as it
approaches romantic Bradford-on-Avon. The name of this town—from the
“broad ford” over the river—is by no means its only indebtedness to the
Avon, for the highly picturesque situation of Leland’s “clooth-making”
centre is entirely the outcome of Nature’s handiwork. Immediately on the
north side of the river a hill abruptly rises, and it is on the brow and along
the sloping declivity of this eminence that most of the tastefully-designed
dwellings have been erected. The deep and hollow valley of the Avon now
extends between two ranges, the hills here and there richly wooded to their
summits; and pretty villages have scattered themselves along these bold
acclivities.
Bradford-on-Avon Church is of considerable interest, and is remarkable for
the success of its highly sympathetic restoration by Canon Jones, the vicar,
a distinguished archæologist. Two bridges here cross the Avon; the most
ancient, in the centre of the town, being described by Aubrey, two centuries
since, as “a strong handsome bridge, in the midst of which is a chapel for
Mass.” Bradford gained its original eminence in the woollen trade mainly

from the introduction of “spinners” from Holland in the seventeenth
century, and lost it with the development of the greater Bradford of the
North, in the midst of the coalfields.
Before, following the more impetuous course of the now considerable river,
we quit Bradford and its seductive scenes, the peculiar loveliness of the
valley of the Avon in the vicinity of the town, and more particularly at such
fascinating spots as Freshfield, Limpley Stoke—just where the river leaves
Wiltshire and enters Somerset—and Claverton, to name but a few, must be
remarked upon. Then Bladud’s creation, “Queen of all the Spas in the
World,” “City of the Waters of the Sun,” “Queen of the West,” “King of the
Spas,” gives greeting to the noble river that plays so great a part in the
beautification of the historic city lying at the foot of the valley of the Avon,
whence it has grown up its steep banks. Below Bradford the Frome has
become a tributary of the Avon, bringing, besides its goodly stream, many
most interesting reminiscences of its course. After flowing through the
lower part of the agreeably situated town to which it gives its name, the
Frome adds its charms to the manifold attractions of the scenery of Vallis
Bottom. Just half a mile beyond the time-worn Priory of Hinton, which
rears its ivy-clad tower amidst a grove of venerable oaks, Frome merges
itself in the Avon.
As if Nature were here conspiring to make the river worthy of the city of
“Bladud, eighth in descent from Brutus,” at Bathford the Avon receives the
Box brook, from the vale of that name in Wiltshire, and, after a loop to the
west, is joined at Batheaston by another small stream, the Midford, which
has enhanced the romantic interest of the Vale of Claverton; whilst a third
brook descends from the heights of Lansdowne, the fatal battlefield of Sir
Basil Grenville and his Cornish friends, who lost their lives for the
Parliamentary cause under the ill-starred leadership of Sir William Waller.
Approaching the city of “Beau Nash” from the east, and passing between
Bathwick and Bath proper, the Avon washes “Aqua Solis” (or “Sulis”) of
the Romans on the south, and plays its part in the fair scene which, “viewed
under the influence of a meridian sun, and through the medium of an
unclouded atmosphere, presents to sight and imagination everything that is
united with the idea of perfect beauty.” And yet, with all the natural
advantages of its situation, Bath long awaited the touch of the wand of the
modern magician—the man of enterprise and speculation. There lay the

deep romantic valley, gloriously encircled by the triple band of splendid
hills—towering Lansdowne to the north, 813 feet above the sea; Claverton
and Bathwick to the east, some 600 and 400 feet in height respectively;
with Beechen Cliff, Sham Castle, Camden Crescent, and Lansdowne
Crescent, all fine natural view-points, below. Compare with the Bath of to-
day the overgrown village to the practical government of which the famous
Beau Nash succeeded in 1704, when he followed the notorious gambler,
Captain Webster, as Master of the Ceremonies, and you have some idea of
the miracle of change and growth which has been performed. It was after
the death of Beau Nash that the city, waxing great, extended its borders to
Bathwick, on the country side of the river. Towards the close of the
seventeenth century, private munificence caused a bridge to be thrown
across the river, and Bathwick itself, from being a daisied meadowland,
became a thickly populated suburb. And even the bridge thus built was
shortly occupied with rows of dwelling houses and shops, so that the
connection between Bath and Bathwick was complete. Long prior to the
building of this, the Poulteney bridge—nearly five centuries before, in point
of fact—the Avon was crossed by the St. Lawrence’s, or the Old Bridge, as
it is now usually called. Originally built in 1304, it became a prey to the
fever of building speculation which had marked the career of the elder
Wood, of the famous family of Bath architects. Out of date, and, we may
presume, somewhat out of repair also, it was rebuilt in 1754. The Poulteney
Bridge, crossing to Bathwick, followed in 1769; and half a century’s growth
of the popular lower suburb revealing the need for further means of
communication that would relieve the congested traffic, the Bathwick, or
Cleveland, Bridge was added in 1827. Some years later the North Parade
Bridge was built. With the advent of the iron horse there had, by this time,
arisen a newer necessity still. In comparatively rapid succession the
Midland Railway and the Skew Bridge—which justifies its name by the
remarkable angle at which it crosses the Avon—with three suspension
bridges and a foot-passengers’ bridge near the station, have followed.

Photo: J. Dugdale & Co., Bath.
THE AVON AT BATH.

Bath boasts at least one ecclesiastical structure of great interest, in the
“Lantern of England,” as the tower of the Abbey Church has been styled,
because of the unusual number and size of its windows. In the exceptional
height of the clerestory and the oblong shape of the tower, the church is also
distinguished from the general.
Out by the Western Gate the Avon runs, with Holloway Hill and Beechen
Cliff conspicuous landmarks on its left. By Twerton—“the town on the
banks of the Avon”—there are large cloth-mills on the riverside, relics of
the monastic industries established by the monks of Bath so far back as the
fourteenth century. Fielding Terrace, in this town, is the reputed
neighbourhood of the residence of the novelist, who is said to have written
a part of “Tom Jones” during his stay.

VIEW FROM NORTH PARADE BRIDGE, BATH.

VIEW FROM THE OLD CITY BRIDGE, BATH.

Now the Avon is in its beloved valley, deep and green again. Three miles, or
a little more, from the city, a beautiful circling knoll seems to shut in the
vale. The hill is crowned with a handsome house, and ornamented with

woodland and lawn. Kelston Round Hill, as this impressive eminence is
called, is 730 feet above the sea-level, the Avon winding at its foot and the
ascending groves of Newton Park reaching to the fine prospect and the
highest hill in this part of Somerset. Ere, at this point, we bid a reluctant
adieu to the beauties of Bath, it should be pointed out that in most of the
commanding and delightful views obtainable from all the vantage points in
and about the city the Avon and its fertile valley conspicuously figure,
heightening the interest of each entrancing scene. It is no exaggeration to
say that the neighbourhood of Bath is rife with scenic charms. The cliffs,
ravines, and deep excavations in the strata lend endless variety to the
landscape, which is finely compact of hill, vale, rock, wood and water, the
striking beauties of the Avon’s course ever and anon lending a crowning
grace to the view.
Below Kelston the more expanded vale of the Keynsham Hams succeeds.
Flowing round this rich tract of land, the Avon becomes the dividing line
between Gloucester and Somerset. Just beyond, within the parish of
Keynsham, and midway between the sister cities of Bath and Bristol, the
waters of yet another tributary, the Chow, a stream which has come down
from the north side of the Mendip Hills, are gathered up.
Contracted in its channel for more than a mile between lofty rocks at
Hanham, the Avon, emerging from its straitened circumstances, diverts
itself with the strikingly sinuous course which it then follows between
Brislington and St. George’s, ere it is sobered and dignified by its contact
with the traditional Caer Oder, “the City of the Chasm,” the birthplace of
Sebastian Cabot, of Southey, and of Chatterton. Before the river begins to
be tidal, it has another, perhaps its greatest, recruit in the Lower Frome.
After a picturesque course, the Frome washes the Bishop’s Palace at
Stapleton, enters Bristol, and there loses itself in the Lower Avon.
Between modern Bristol and the great port of the “spacious times” the
difference is one of degree only, for the commercial spirit is still strong in
the sons of Cabot and Canynge; and, amid the thick smoke that overhangs
the very centre of the city, there rise e’en to-day the tall spars, fluttering
pennons, and the rigging of the ships of the mercantile marine that made the
name of the opulent city known in every port and on every sea, and brought
to Bristol by the tidal river the trade that trimmed her sails to the breeze of
fortune and set her course fair on the voyage to fame and prosperity. One of

the earliest chapters of the history of the city is connected with the river. It
records the building of the first bridge over the Avon in 1247, an
undertaking mentioned in a charter of Henry II. This bridge united the city
with what was then the suburb of Redcliffe. To-day, this association is
splendidly preserved by that golden historical link, the “finest and stateliest
parish church in England,” as Queen Elizabeth pronounced the edifice of St.
Mary Redcliffe on her visit to Bristol in 1753. The style is the Early
English, though the richly sculptured northern doorway and some other
portions belong rather to the Decorated Period. The structure was founded
about the year 1300, but was enlarged, beautified, and, in fact, refounded by
William Canynge, whose effigy, with that of his wife Joan, will be found at
the end of the south transept. The upper part of the stone steeple was struck
down by lightning in 1445, and not rebuilt for upwards of four hundred
years. It was in the muniment room of this church that young Thomas
Chatterton professed to have found a number of curious MSS. in prose and
poetry, the boy-poet’s ingenious deception long escaping detection. Such
success, which might never have attended the confessed productions of his
own precocious genius, gave the gifted lad of seventeen the necessary
stimulus, and his growing ambition led him to London, where he became a
mere literary hack, and took a life threatened by starvation. A handsome
monument in St. Mary Redcliffe churchyard pays Bristol’s tribute to her
great, but unhappy, son. Of St. Mary Redcliffe, the “pride of Bristowe,”
Camden said it was “the most elegant of all the parish churches I have ever
seen.”
The present bridge replaced the thirteenth-century causeway in 1768. It was
in 1247 that the course of the Frome was diverted to a new channel.
Anciently, the city boundaries were the two confluent rivers which
environed it with a natural defence on all sides save one, where a castle
stood, protected by a broad deep moat supplied with water from the Frome,
which at that time flowed by its northern walls. In Bristol Castle the son of
the Conqueror, Robert, was shut up by his brother Henry.
Though it has been justly said of the Cathedral that it is remarkable neither
for antiquity nor beauty, being far inferior to St. Mary Redcliffe in at least
one of these respects, the Berkeley chapel, forming the north aisle of the
choir, is worthy of note as an elegant example of Early English. The
spacious nave, with side aisles and clerestory in the Early Decorated style,

is a modern addition. Among the animated busts are those of Joseph Butler,
of “Analogy” fame—one of Bristol’s famous line of bishops, two of whom
were of the “glorious company” of seven—Robert Southey, and the
“Dorcas” of the city, Miss Mary Carpenter.
In 1809 our river became a fellow-sufferer with the Frome. The course of
the Avon lay through the city, but now a new channel was dug for it on the
south side, leaving the river to fall into its original bed at Rownham Ferry.
For the rest, the old channels of both the Frome and the Avon were
converted into a fine floating harbour, which, at Cumberland Basin, will
accommodate some of the largest vessels afloat.
“The Chasm” itself, or, as it is more familiarly known, the Gorge of the
Avon, lying just below the Basin, is bridged by a triumph of modern
engineering art. The Clifton Suspension Bridge—our English “Bridge of
Sighs” for suicides—admits to a magnificent view of the Avon where it
flows through the romantic defile of St. Vincent’s Rocks. As the story runs,
St. Vincent, a rival, caught the Giant Goram asleep, and once and for ever
determined the course of the river by cleaving the ravine through which the
Avon now runs to the sea. Brunel’s Bridge, after a remarkably chequered
history—its construction being actually suspended for a period of nearly
thirty years!—was completed for the visit of the British Association in
1864. The foundations had been laid in 1836. The chains of Hungerford
Suspension Bridge at Charing Cross were taken down and here re-hung.
The centre span—one of the longest in the world—is 676 feet in extent, and
the entire length of the bridge is 1,352 feet. Fifteen hundred tons in weight,
the stupendous structure is a wonderful combination of strength and grace,
adding a new interest and beauty to the impressive view rather than
detracting from its great natural charm.

Photo: Harvey Barton, Bristol.
BRISTOL, FROM THE SITE OF THE OLD DRAWBRIDGE ACROSS THE HARBOUR.

When “Cook’s Folly” and the “Pitch and Pay” gate, of mournful memory,
have been passed, and we have reached Sea Mills on the right bank, there is
a distinct softening in the character of the scenery. Here is the supposed site
of the Roman station Abona. The Avon at this point is joined by the small
river Trym. Leland, having the St. Vincent legends clearly in remembrance,
wrote of it: “Some think a great piece of the depeness of the haven, from St.
Vincent to Hungo-rode, hath been made by hande.” As we pass Pill, which
furnishes pilots for the port of Bristol, its ancient fish-like smell forces itself
upon our attention. Now we near the last reach of the Avon, Broad Pill,

where the river widens greatly. Sinuous as well may be, and running
between low banks, those “sea-walls” of rich marshland that lie about
Birchampton, the river’s course beyond that pretty neighbourhood changes
fast, and gathers a new and picturesque interest when the tide comes in.
Now we are at the mouth of the Avon, and in that fine roadstead which the
loyal Bristol seamen would have styled King’s Road.
From the decks of the great ships that here ride out the light gale in safety a
glorious view, up river, along shore, and about the fine anchorage in the
estuary of the Avon and the Severn, may be enjoyed. The pier and docks at
Avonmouth form another splendid enterprise, which, if it has not come too
late, may retain for Bristol something more than a remnant of its ancient
glory as the first port of the kingdom, a training ground for the British
Navy, the haunt and home of sea-dogs who added many a gallant deed to
the proud annals of our island story.
HUGH W. STRONG.

CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE (p. 79).

SOURCE OF THE SEVERN, PLINLIMMON.

THE SEVERN

CHAPTER I.
FROM THE SOURCE TO TEWKESBURY.

Birthplace of the Severn—Plinlimmon—Blaenhafren—Llanidloes—Caersws—Newtown—
Montgomery—Welshpool—Powys Castle—The Breidden Hills—The Vyrnwy—Distant Views
—Shrewsbury—Haughmond Hill—The Caradoc Hills—Atcham—Wroxeter—Condover—The
Wrekin—Benthall and Wenlock Edges—Buildwas Abbey—Coalbrook Dale—Ironbridge—
Broseley and Benthall—Coalport—Bridgnorth—Quatford—Forest of Wyre—Bewdley—
Stourport—Worcester—The Teme—Ludlow—Tewkesbury.

T HE SEVERN, though a much longer river than the Dee, for it is
the second[1] in Britain, is born among less striking scenery.
The latter issues from an upland lake, enclosed by the peaks
of the Arans and the craggy slopes of the Arenigs. But south
of Cader Idris the mountains become less striking in outline, the cliffs fewer
and lower, the summits tamer. It is a region not so much of mountains as of
great hills, which stretch away into the distance, range after range, like
rollers on the Atlantic after a storm. The central point of this region, the
loftiest summit of Mid-Wales, is Plinlimmon, which, though so insignificant
in outline, attains to a height of 2,463 feet, and is the parent of quite a
family of rivers. Of these, one is the Wye, the other the Severn; the sources
of the two, though their paths are distinct unto the end, when they mingle
their waters in the Bristol Channel, are some couple of miles apart. Nor is
the distance very great between the founts of the Severn and the Dee. If we
suppose, as is generally done, the actual head of the latter to be on the flank
of Aran Benllyn, the interval between the two is less than twenty-three
miles.
But to return to the Severn, which rises on the north-east side of
Plinlimmon, at Maes Hafren. Our first illustration gives a good idea of the

scenery near its
source: not,
indeed, striking
in outline—
upland moors
without trees,
hills nearly
without crags,
covered for the
most part with
herbage, coarse
on the lower
ground near the
rivulets, rank in
the not
unfrequent bogs,
but finer on the
upper slopes;
somewhat
monotonous in
its tints, yet not THE SEVERN, FROM THE SOURCE TO TEWKESBURY.
without a charm
of its own—a
sense of freedom and expansion, which is sometimes felt to be wanting
among the towering peaks and precipitous ravines of the grander mountain
ranges. At first, as is the wont of rivers among such surroundings, the
Severn wanders idly through the moorland, a mere brook rippling among
stones and boulders; then by degrees it begins to fray out a path for itself
and to cut down into the underlying rocks. The second illustration shows it
at this stage of life—the child just beginning to feel its strength—and,
besides this, gives a good idea of the character of the hill scenery in Mid-
Wales, of which we have already spoken. The little Severn has now begun
to strike out a way for itself on its journey to the sea; the general plan of its
course curiously resembling that of the Dee. Though the two rivers
ultimately flow in opposite directions, and finish their courses at opposite
ends of the Principality, yet each rises well on the western side of Wales—
each, though here and there with some flexures, maintains for long an

eastward direction; their paths only diverging when they arrive at the
margin of the lowland among the foothills of the more mountainous region.
But for some distance there is little material change in the general character
of the scenery, except that the valleys gradually become more clearly
defined. The next picture shows the youthful Severn about a mile and a half
below its source, at Blaenhafren, the first house in the neighbourhood of its
banks, the earnest of many a “thorpe and town” by which its waters will
flow. A flattish valley bed, a few rather stunted trees, some stone walls, and
a rough-built cottage, with great billowy hills behind, make up a scene
which is characteristic of a good many square miles in Central Wales.

VALLEY OF THE SEVERN, FROM PLINLIMMON (p. 83).

This is, as we have said, a comparatively humble beginning for the second
in length among the rivers of Britain—for a stream which passes more
towns of historic and antiquarian interest than any other in the land, and has
been always the delight of poets. The Britons knew it as Hafren, the

Romans as Sabrina, from which, obviously, the present name has arisen.
For several miles from its birthplace its descent is comparatively rapid, but
gradually the slope diminishes, the stream ceases to brawl among rocks and
stones, the valley widens, and after a course of from a dozen to fifteen
miles, according as its path is estimated, it arrives at its first town,
Llanidloes, where it is joined on the northern side by the Clywedog, which
flows through a pretty valley and seems to be a longer stream than the
Severn itself.
At Llanidloes the Severn plunges abruptly into the bustle of life, for this is a
town with some ten thousand inhabitants, which carries on a brisk trade in
flannels. But, except for its church, which is one of the finest in Wales, and
has a handsome carved oak roof, there is nothing to hinder the
uncommercial traveller. For another ten miles or so there is little to note
along the course of the river; but on approaching a station rejoicing in the
modern name of Moat Lane Junction, where the line from Machynlleth,
descending the wooded valley of the Carno, joins that which comes down
from Llanidloes, one comes to two places which will repay a halt. Here we
are carried back over seventeen centuries of history. Here Briton and
Roman in former days looked at one another with no friendly eyes across
the river; the one, as was his wont, clinging to the mountains, the other to
the valley and the river-side. The gods of the one were gods of the hills,
those of the other loved the plain. The one preferred the eyrie from which,
like the vulture, he could swoop to plunder, and to which he could fly for
safety. The other made his hold sure on the fields, the river, and the roads;
for where he came there he meant to stay.

THE FIRST HOUSE ON THE SEVERN: BLAENHAFREN (p. 84).

The British earthwork, Cefn Carnedd by name, from its bastion-like hill
between the Carno and the Severn, commands a beautiful view overlooking
both valleys. In plan it is a blunt-ended oval, the longer axis lying nearly
east and west; on the latter side and towards the north it is enclosed by a
triple ditch and rampart, but on the southern side a single entrenchment,
owing to the steepness of the hill, suffices for defence. The enclosed area,
about 300 yards in length, rises slightly towards the west, and at this end
about one-third of the whole is cut off by a ditch and rampart, apparently
with the intention of forming a kind of keep. Entrances may still be found
and the approaches traced; these evidently were cunningly devised so as to
be commanded by the defences; in fact, this must formerly have been one
of the strongest and most formidable among the hill-forts of Britain. There
are others in the neighbourhood, though these are inferior to Cefn Carnedd.
The Roman fortress, Caersws by name, is in the valley on the opposite bank
of the Severn, at a distance of some 300 yards from the river. This, too,

must have been in its day a place of great strength. It was enclosed by a
high quadrangular rampart, with a ditch outside, which still remains in most
places, though they have been injured here and there, and one angle of the
vallum has been destroyed to make a site for the railway station. Caersws,
the Mediolanum of Tacitus, evidently was once a stronghold of great
importance, for three Roman roads converge to it. The strategic advantages
of the position are obvious.
The valley of the Severn is now broadening, and its scenery becomes richer
and more fertile, although bare hills still rise in the background. About four
miles lower down another manufacturing town is reached, which, however,
is considerably smaller than Llanidloes. This is Newtown, a place
comparatively modern—as the name implies—which, however, has a
certain commercial status as the recognised centre of the Welsh flannel
trade, but is otherwise uninteresting, except for a carved rood screen and
one or two more relics of an older building preserved in its modern church,
and for being the place where Robert Owen, the father of modern socialism,
was born and was buried.
Wandering on through scenery generally similar in character, pleasant,
pretty, and hilly, but without any very bold features, the Severn in a few
miles reaches Montgomery, a town which is peaceful enough now, but in
former days was not at all suited for people desirous of a quiet life, for it
was one of the fortresses of the Marches, over which Welsh and English
fought like dogs over a bone. As can be readily seen, the castle was a place
of considerable strength, for it stands on a scarped, rocky headland,
overlooking the valley. But of its walls and towers not much remains. Near
at hand is a British camp, but the first castle was built in the days of
William the Norman. After being thrice demolished by the Welsh, it became
the residence of a noted family, the Herberts of Cherbury. The last episode
of interest in its history was a struggle for its possession in the time of the
Civil War. The Royalists were defeated, and the castle was ultimately
“slighted” by the victors. At that time it was owned by Edward, first Lord
Herbert of Cherbury, the eccentric philosopher, statesman, and gallant; and
within its walls, his brother George was born, as noted for the strictness as
the other was for the laxity of his religious views. In fact, this is the cradle
of a distinguished race. The church is cruciform in plan, and contains old
monuments of the Herbert and the Mortimer families. A romantic story is,

or was, told about a bare cross visible in the grass of the churchyard; it
marks the grave of one Newton, who was hanged on a charge of robbery
and murder. He died protesting his innocence, and prayed that the grass
might never grow about his burial-place, as a witness to the injustice of his
doom.
Near Montgomery the Severn begins to change its course, and to trend more
towards the north. Down a fertile valley it makes its way towards
Welshpool, practically the capital of the shire, for it is almost double the
size of Montgomery, and is the assize town. Place and church date from
olden times. Near to the town—approached through a gateway in the main
street—is the family seat of Castell Coch (the Red Castle, from the stone of
which it is built), but more commonly called by the simpler title of Powys
Castle. It has been greatly modernised, but a good deal is of Elizabethan or
of Jacobean date, and some goes back to the thirteenth century. The site, a
rocky knoll, descending steeply in natural terraces, has been occupied from
the beginning of the twelfth century, and the earlier building had, of course,
its due share of sieges, for, as the centre of the old district of Powysland, it
was a place of some importance. In the surrounding park are some fine old
oaks, and the views from the terraces under the castle are noted for their
beauty; they look over the wooded lowland and down the valley of the
Severn to the arched back of the Long Mountain, and the bolder outlines of
the Berwyns, of which one mass is foreshortened to be like a huge tumulus
and the other forms a sharp pyramid. Entrenchments of various kinds and
sizes show that all the district round was formerly one of importance. The
noted “Offa’s Dyke” is only a very few miles away, and interest is added to
the sometimes monotonous aspect of the Long Mountain by a large
earthwork on the summit, where, according to tradition, was fought in 1294
the last battle for the independence of Wales.
The Severn, still working in a direction more northerly than easterly, leaves
the Long Mountain at the gap through which a railway passes towards
Shrewsbury, and then sweeps back into its former course as it rounds the
feet of the Breidden Hills. It needs but a glance at their bold and rugged
outlines to see that they must be carved from a different rock to that of
which the Long Mountain and its neighbours is formed. They consist of
masses of lava and of hard slaty rock, of a more ancient date than the
mudstones of the adjoining district, forming, in fact, a kind of outpost of the

Ordovician or Lower Silurian rocks of the west. The highest point, Moel-y-
golfa, is as nearly as possible 1,200 feet above sea-level, and its pyramidal
outline adds to its apparent elevation. Another, the Breidden proper, is a
heavy mass like a flattened dome; it bears a pillar to commemorate
Rodney’s victory in 1782. The hills are well suited for a watch-tower, for
they command a view far and wide—in one direction over the Welsh hills,
in another towards the Shropshire lowlands.

MOEL-Y-GOLFA AND BREIDDEN, FROM WELSHPOOL (p. 87).

Two or three miles further a tributary enters the Severn, larger than any
which it has hitherto received. This is the Vyrnwy, which drains a
considerable area south of a watershed extending from near Aran
Mowddwy to the Berwyn Hills, though now a heavy tribute has been
exacted from its waters by the town of Liverpool. This great feat of
engineering was completed, after years of labour, in 1890. Up to that time
Liverpool had drawn its main supply from reservoirs on Rivington Pike. A
huge dam, as our illustration (page 89) shows, has been built across the

narrowest part of the Vyrnwy valley. It is 1,255 feet in length and 60 in
height; the foundations, which at some parts had to be carried down to a
depth of 50 feet, resting on the solid rock. By this means a lake has been
formed, four miles in length, which hides beneath its waters—800 feet
above sea-level—a little village and its church. A curious mound rises near
the junction of the two rivers, designed, as some think, to guard the
passage; and then the Severn, turning again to the east, passes on towards
Shrewsbury. Its valley now has become more open: parks and country
houses here and there dapple the gentler slopes within no great distance of
the river, and the views of the hills are always beautiful.

THE VYRNWY EMBANKMENT, BEFORE THE FLOODING OF THE VALLEY.
Photo: J. Maclardy, Oswestry.

Photo: Robinson & Thompson, Liverpool.
A QUIET NOOK ON THE VYRNWY.

The group of the Breiddens is gradually left behind, then rises the steep
mass of Pontesbury Hill, backed by the long ridge of the Stiper Stones, with
their broken crests of rugged and hard white rock, and behind them the
broad backs of the Longmynds or the distant pyramid of Corndon. But, of

course, to enjoy to perfection views of the land which feeds the upper
waters of the Severn, it is necessary to quit the valley and obtain a Pisgah
sight from some commanding hill. Thence we look over mile after mile of
lowland, woodland, cornfield, and pasture, undulating downwards from
bare rough hillsides on which the copses often are thickly clinging, to the
margins of brooks and to the bed of the main river. To the west, line after
line of hills recedes more dimly into the distance, till at last one shadow is
pointed out as Plinlimmon, and another, yet fainter, as Cader Idris, and
sometimes an apex of a far-off pyramid is said to be Snowdon. South of us,
and yet more to the east, lie the nearer masses already mentioned, while in
these directions the eye may detect, from some points of view, the peaked
summits of the Caradoc Hills, or may rest upon the huge hog’s back of the
Wrekin as it rises abruptly from the Shropshire lowland. There are few
prettier districts in our country than the borderland between England and
Wales; and that part of which we now speak can hold its own with most
others. Here and there, perhaps, the hills are a little bare, and we seldom
find much boldness of outline. In the Shelve district also, the lead mines
with their white spoil-banks are distinctly an offence to the eye; but the
wooded glens are often singularly beautiful, and the outlook from the heath-
covered moorlands gives a sense of breadth and freedom, like the open sea.
As it nears Shrewsbury, the Severn quits for a time the hill-country, though
it is only near the waterside that the land is distinctly a plain. The town
itself is at the edge of a low plateau, and some of its streets are fairly steep,
though the ascents are not long. The situation is fine, and in former days,
when the town was restricted to narrower limits, must have been much
more striking than it is at present. The river bends in sharp curves, like a
reversed S, as though the hills had made a final struggle to hold it in
bondage. Of these loops, that on the eastern side is the larger; and it forms a
kind of horseshoe, almost enclosing a hilly headland of moderate elevation,
which shelves down towards the neck of the isthmus, but falls steeply,
sometimes almost precipitously, towards the river brink. Thus, with the
Severn for a moat on more than three sides, and a comparatively narrow
and defensible approach on the fourth, the position is almost a natural
stronghold, and it was selected at a comparatively early date as the site of a
fortified town.

If we could believe certain chroniclers, the history of Shrewsbury would
begin more than four hundred years before the Christian era; but we can
hardly doubt that the town existed in the days of the Romans. Towards the
close of the sixth century English invaders came marauding up the valley of
the Severn, and destroyed the old city of Wroxeter. For a time the fugitives
found a refuge in the fortified palace of the Princes of Powis, which then
stood on the headland now occupied by Shrewsbury; but before long that
stronghold also became a prey to the plunderers, and the Britons were
forced to seek safety among the fastnesses of Wales. Then Pengwern, as it
had been called, became Scrobesbyrig—“the burgh of bushes”—from
which obviously it has obtained its present name. Before very long its
importance as a frontier town was fully recognised, but at first it remained
small—probably because it was too near Wales for merchants or for men of
peace—so that at the date of Domesday Book, though it had four churches,
it contained only 252 houses. The castle was built a few years later by
Roger de Montgomery, a Norman earl, and a gateway leading to the inner
court is a relic of his work. The enclosing wall of the town was completed
in the reign of Henry III. This follows, as far as possible, the line of the
ancient river-cliff, which on the southward side is parted from the Severn
by a strip of level land. Portions of this wall still remain, and it can be
traced more or less perfectly along the southern and eastern sides.
The fortress resisted Stephen, who besieged it in 1138; on its fall, by way of
reading a lesson to his enemies, he hanged ninety-four of the defenders.
Later on, Shrewsbury was twice betrayed by the Welsh, and had one or two
other “sensational” experiences, till the famous fight “for a long hour by
Shrewsbury clock.” It was a race for the fortress between Hotspur and
Henry IV., which was won by the king, who succeeded next day in forcing
an action at a place since called Battlefield, about a league north of the
town, and a mile from the Severn. The river figures more than once in the
accounts of the marching and counter-marching connected with the battle,
in which, as everyone knows, the king gained a complete victory, Hotspur
falling on the field. Some of his principal associates felt the headsman’s axe
a couple of days after the fight. In the Wars of the Roses the town was for
the House of York, and two sons were born to the Duke within its walls: one
died in infancy, and the other was the younger of the two lads murdered in
the Tower. In the great Civil War the townsmen repaired their ruined walls
and declared for King Charles, who spent a short time in Shrewsbury early

in the struggle; but, later on, they were caught napping, for two parties of
the Parliamentary Army effected an entrance during the night, one of them
by scaling the steep slope below the old Council House. This daring band
was headed by Captain Benbow, who afterwards took part with Prince
Charles, was captured at Worcester, and was shot on the scene of his former
exploit. He was buried in St. Chad’s Church, “October ye 16th, 1651,” as
may still be read on his tombstone. Since then Shrewsbury has dwelt in
peace, and during the last half-century has increased greatly and prospered
proportionally. It is now a very important railway junction; the station, too
small for its present needs, being on the lower ground on the eastern side of
the neck of land already mentioned.
In former days the river was crossed by two bridges only, giving access to
the headland—one from the eastern side, and so called the English bridge;
the other, from the north-western, which, of course, bore the name of the
Welsh bridge. Both were fortified in mediæval times, but they were rebuilt
in more modern fashion during the eighteenth century. South of the Welsh
bridge the plateau occupied by the old town slopes more gently down to the
brink of the Severn. This part—a grassy space, planted with avenues of
trees, which has long borne the name of the Quarries, from some old
excavations—now forms a public park, which, as may be inferred from the
illustration (p. 95), adds greatly to the attractions of the town. Between the
Welsh and English bridges is the Boathouse Ferry.

THE BOATHOUSE FERRY, BETWEEN WELSH AND ENGLISH BRIDGES (p. 91).

Shrewsbury has produced its fair share of eminent men, among whom are
the fighting old admiral, Benbow, and the great naturalist, Charles Darwin;
but for many years past its school has been among its chief glories. This
was one of Edward VI.’s foundations, but it assumed its present high
position as a nursery of scholars under Dr. Butler, who was appointed
headmaster about the beginning of the present century. A few years ago the
ancient site had to be discarded, for more room had become imperatively
necessary, and new buildings were erected on Kingsland, an excellent site
near the edge of the plateau to the south-west, looking towards the town
across the Severn. The old school buildings, which are on the left-hand side
of the road going down to the railway station, are of considerable
architectural interest, for they date from the end of the sixteenth century;
they are now used for a town museum and free library. But to a lover of
architecture, the especial charm of Shrewsbury lies in its old black-timbered
houses. In these it is richer than any town, even in the West of England,
with the sole exception of Chester. Indeed, even after the “improvements”

which have been rendered necessary by the development of commerce, the
street architecture of Shrewsbury is universally quaint and attractive; for we
find, shuffled together like the cards in a pack, houses of all dates during the
last three centuries. This gives a picturesque irregularity both to the façades
and the sky-lines in the streets. But these black-timbered houses keep the
chance visitor in a constant state of quiet excitement; he never knows what
may be disclosed at the next turning, for Shrewsbury is pre-eminently a
town of pleasant architectural surprises. Some of the houses are dated; as is
usual, they generally belong to the later part of Elizabeth’s reign, and all
probably were built during the half century centring on the year 1600. The
best specimens are Ireland’s Mansion in the High Street, and the group of
old shops in Butcher Row, which is considered by Mr. Parker to be the
finest example of the kind in England.

SHREWSBURY CASTLE (p. 90).

But if the antiquary halts in Shrewsbury he will not find it very easy to take
his departure. Two of the Shrewsbury churches are unusually interesting;
one, St. Mary’s, the principal church of the town, stands almost on the brink
of the river-cliff, a little to the south of the castle, and its tall tapering spire
adds greatly to the picturesque grouping, which, notwithstanding modern
changes, the town still presents on the eastern side. St. Mary’s is a church of
various dates, impossible to describe in a few words; for it has been altered
and augmented repeatedly. There is Norman work in the north and south
porches of the nave and in the basement of the tower; Early English in the
transept; Decorated and Perpendicular in the body of the church, the east
window being a very fine example of the former style. It has recently
undergone considerable structural repairs, for the upper part of the spire was
blown down in a gale early in the year 1894, and its fall greatly damaged
the roof of the nave and the fittings of the interior. Holy Cross, the other
important church, commonly called the Abbey, stands on the low ground, or
in the Foregate, on the English side of the fortress, on the right bank of the
Severn. It is a relic of an abbey founded by the first Norman lord of
Shrewsbury. The vicissitudes which it has experienced are obvious at a
glance. The rather low western tower, with the bays immediately adjoining,
are evidence of a reconstruction in the fourteenth century; and
Perpendicular work is, on the whole, the more conspicuous in the western
and older part. We rail often—and with good cause—at the restorers of our
own age, but they of the century and a half before the Reformation were no
whit better, as this church can testify. The east end is modern, for it was
destroyed after the dissolution of the monasteries, and was only rebuilt in
1887; but some fine massive Norman work remains inside the church,
especially in the pillars of the nave, and there are some interesting
monuments. The conventual buildings have been destroyed, except a stone
pulpit, which was once in the refectory, and now remains looking
disconsolately at the rails and trucks in the goods-yard of the railway; for
this occupies the site of the monastic buildings, and is on the opposite side
of the Severn to the station.

QUARRY WALK, SHREWSBURY (p. 91).

ENGLISH BRIDGE, SHREWSBURY (p. 91).

On leaving Shrewsbury, the Severn still continues to wind. Immediately
below the town, it strikes off in a north-easterly direction for well over a
mile, then, again swinging to and fro, it almost touches the foot of
Haughmond Hill, from which it recoils, still oscillating, in a direction rather
east of south. It has now entered an undulating and fertile district, where in
one place its waters flow by some river-cliff or wooded brae; in another,
between fields which shelve gently down to its brink; in a third, through flat
meadows, over which, as can sometimes be detected, it has taken in past
ages more than one course. Now more extensive views may be obtained,
even from its stream—views to which a distinctive character and a special
charm is often added by the peculiar shapes of the hills which here and
there rise quite suddenly from the lowlands. Of them, Haughmond Hill is

one; the Wrekin is another, but on a far larger scale; the Caradoc Hills are a
third instance, but these form quite a little range. All have the same origin;
they are wedge-like masses of very old and hard rock, the relics of
primæval volcanos, which crop out here and there among the softer
sandstones and marls from which the long-continued action of rain, stream,
and river has carved the Shropshire lowland. Haughmond Hill looks down
upon the scene of the battle between the forces of Henry IV. and of Hotspur,
and is associated with its memories, for the Douglas, who had come to aid
the Percies, while seeking to escape along its craggy slopes, was so disabled
by a fall that he was taken prisoner. On the western side of the Hautmont—
for that was the original name—a priory was founded by William Fitzalan,
in the days of King Stephen. The monks soon found their way to royal, and
even to papal, favour, for they were permitted to say the divine office in a
low voice and with closed doors, even when the land lay under an interdict.
Then the priory became an abbey of the Augustinian order, until at last it
shared the fate of all others at the Reformation, passing into lay hands and
being cared for no longer. It is now a complete ruin; the church is gone,
though just enough remains to show that it was cruciform in plan. The
monastic buildings have been nearly destroyed, though a couple of Norman
doors remain, and the more important structures can be identified. The best
preserved part is the chapter-house, in the west front of which are three fine
arches in the Transitional-Norman style. The views from the slopes above
are very attractive, as the eye ranges over the Shropshire lowlands, with
their rich alternations of pasture, cornfield, and wood, to the ridges already
named, and still further towards the Longmynds, the Breiddens, the
Berwyns, and the yet more distant ranges of Wales.

BUILDWAS ABBEY (p. 98).

On winds the Severn, gliding with steady flow by meadows, shelving fields
or copses, till it comes at last to Atcham, with its bridge and picturesque old
church near the waterside. Here was born Ordericus, afterwards historian of
William the Conqueror. About a mile below, the little Tern adds its waters to
the Severn, near the home of the Berwicks; and yet another mile, and the
river glides by the parish church of Wroxeter, with its interesting Norman
work, and the site of the Romano-British city of Uriconium, on the famous
Watling Street road; founded, as is supposed, about the reign of Trajan, to
guard the passages over the Severn and the outlets from Wales. In the year
577 a band of West Saxons forced their way, plundering and destroying as
they went, up the rich valley of the Severn. Uriconium was taken, and, as
the bard lamented, “The white town in the valley went up in flames, the
town of white stone gleaming among the green woodland; the hall of its
chieftain left without fire, without light, without song: the silence broken
only by the eagle’s scream—the eagle who had swallowed fresh drink—
heart’s blood of Kyndylan the Fair.” The walls of Uriconium were three
miles in extent, and the area enclosed was larger by nearly a third than that

of Pompeii. Excavations have been made which have disclosed a basilica,
or public hall, a hypocaust belonging to the baths, and many foundations of
houses; but no work of a high class, either in architecture or in decorative
art, has been discovered. Uriconium at best was only a provincial city, and
that in distant Britain; and even if it had possessed any important buildings,
they would have perished, if not from the fury of the barbarian invaders, at
least by the hands of those in later days, who used it as a quarry. Most of the
things dug up are preserved in the museum at Shrewsbury. “In the corner of
the hypocaust three skeletons were found—one of a man, and two of
women; by the side of the former lay a heap of copper coins, numbering a
hundred and thirty-two, which belonged to the days of the later emperors,
and some bits of rotten wood and rusty iron, which may have been the
fragments of a box. It is supposed that some poor wretches, perhaps
servants at the baths, sought refuge here during the sack of the city, and
then perished, either suffocated by the smoke of its burning or buried alive
by the fallen ruins.”[2]

THE SEVERN FROM BENTHALL EDGE (p. 98).

Below Wroxeter, the undulation of the country through which the Severn
now flows, for a time with a straighter course, becomes rather more
strongly marked. The Cound brook joins the river on the right, flowing
down by Condover village, with its Hall, “a perfect specimen of
Elizabethan stonework,” and its interesting church and monuments. Then
the Severn glides under a red sandstone cliff and beneath the wooden bridge
of Cressage, with its memories of old oak trees; then through wooded
ravines as the ground begins to rise. On its right bank copse-clad slopes
enrich the view, while in one direction or another the great hill masses stand
out against the sky. Among these the Wrekin is generally the most
conspicuous, and now for a time it rises on the northern side of the river
almost without a rival. It is the Salopian’s landmark—his Olympus or
Parnassus—“all round the Wrekin” is his toast. This is no wonder, for few
hills in Britain, considering its moderate elevation—1,320 feet above the

sea—are more imposing in aspect, because it rises so boldly and abruptly
from the lowland; and though the Salopian could not assert that “twelve fair
counties saw the light” of its beacon fire, as was said of the Malverns, still,
from far distances and from unexpected places the Wrekin is visible. In
shape it is a rather long ridge, steep on either side, capped by three fairly
distinct summits, of which the central is the highest. But from many points
the lower summits seem to be lost in the central one, and the Wrekin
assumes a form rudely resembling a huge tumulus. Like several of the other
hills, it is largely composed of very ancient volcanic rocks.
As we look down the stream, the view before long appears to be closed by a
wooded ridge, which seems at first to prohibit further progress. This is
Benthall Edge, which may be said to begin at Lincoln Hill, on the left bank
of the Severn, and on the opposite side to join on to Wenlock Edge, to the
south-west. It is formed of the Wenlock limestone, belonging to the Silurian
system, and so called from the townlet of Much Wenlock. This owes its
origin and part of its name—for “Much” is a corruption of monasterium,
like moutier in French—to its priory, once famed as “the oldest and most
privileged—perhaps the wealthiest and most magnificent—of the religious
houses of Shropshire.” Now it is only a ruin, except that the priory-house is
still inhabited, and is a remarkably good instance of a domestic building of
the fifteenth century. The ruins, however, are very extensive, and in parts
most picturesque. But as they are a league away from the riverside, and are
hid by the wooded slopes of Wenlock Edge, we must turn to another ruin,
which stands on the level strath, almost by the waterside, just before the
hills close in upon the Severn. This is Buildwas Abbey, formerly an abode
of the Cistercians, which bears traces of that strict order in the simplicity of
its architecture. Still, its ruins are admirable in their noble simplicity. “They
impress us with the power of its designer, who ventured to trust simply to
the strength of his composition and the grace of his outlines, so as to
dispense with almost all ornamentation whatever. It thus gives it a sense of
calmness and repose, for which we seek in vain in works of more modern
date.”[3] The style indicates the passage from Norman to Early English; the
influence of the latter, on the whole, predominating. The church and
chapter-house are still in fair preservation. The abbot’s house—mainly
thirteenth-century work—has been restored, and is inhabited. The date of
the foundation is a little uncertain; but it is believed to have been about the

middle of the twelfth century. Buildwas was a wealthy abbey in its day, but
made no figure in history.
Through the ridge of Benthall Edge the Severn has sawn its way, so that the
river-valley now becomes almost a gorge, along which, on the abrupt
southern side, the Severn Valley railway has been conducted, and this not
without considerable engineering difficulties. Wooded steeps and grey crags
on either side of the strong stream flowing at their feet form a series of
exquisite pictures, though unhappily not for long, for a change comes where
the dirty hand of man has smirched the face of Nature. To the north and to
the east of the limestone hills lies the most noted of the Shropshire
coalfields, that of Coalbrook Dale, which is rich also in iron, though its
mineral wealth is becoming exhausted. Dismantled engine-houses and great
piles of dark rubbish are only one shade less unpicturesque than tall
chimneys vomiting black fumes, smelting furnaces, the apparatus of the pit-
mouth, and smouldering spoil-banks. But before the days of “smoke, and
wealth, and noise,” this part of the ravine of the Severn, and even
Coalbrook Dale itself, must have been very beautiful.
Ironbridge is a dingy-looking town, built on the steep hillside, which gets
its name from the metal arch—120 feet in span—by which the Severn was
bridged in the year 1779. On the opposite side of the river, hardly more than
a mile away, is Broseley, noted for pottery and clay pipes; and another mile
west of that, Benthall, equally noted for encaustic tiles. The neighbourhood
of the Severn, as far as Coalport, has fallen off in beauty as it has increased
in wealth. But soon, in a geological sense, “the old order changeth, yielding
place to new”: the Severn quits the coal-measures to enter once more upon
the red rocks, which belong to a more recent period. Smoking chimneys and
spoil-banks are left behind, the valley widens, though the scenery continues
to be far from tame, and we pass on by Linley and by Apley Park; the river
sometimes gliding beneath sandstone crags and steeply sloping woods, till
in about four miles we reach Bridgnorth.
The situation is a striking one: the Severn has carved out a deep and rather
narrow valley in the sandstone rock, and a tributary stream has fashioned
another after a like pattern. Between these the upland forms a wedge-like
promontory, defended on either side by a steep, almost precipitous, scarp.
On this, not very much less than a couple of hundred feet above the river,
the upper town, the church, and the castle were built. The town has

gradually climbed down the eastern slope towards the Severn, it has spread
out along its margin, it has crossed the stream and has occupied the tract of
level meadow on the opposite side, the two portions being connected by a
bridge which is in part far from modern. From the lower town here to the
upper one on the plateau is a steep ascent, even though the principal road
winds up. The church stands near the edge of the scarp, on which the wall
of its graveyard is built. Needless to say, it commands a very striking view
—sandstone crags, and steeply shelving woods and green fields beyond,
with the river and the lower town in the glen beneath. The most interesting
part of Bridgnorth is its broad High Street, bounded at one end by a
gateway, with the old market hall—a black and white structure, of the date
1652, which is supported on brick arches. This street also contains one or
two fine houses of about the same era. Others, again, will be found in or
near to the churchyard, and yet another near the end of the street, which
descends so steeply as the main way to the lower town. This, which bears
the date 1580, is a particularly good specimen of the black-timbered houses
so abundant in the valley of the Severn. Here, in the year 1729, Percy was
born, the collector and editor of the “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.”
Bridgnorth Castle also must not be forgotten; occupying the extremity of
the promontory already mentioned, it was a place of great strength in olden
days, and stood more than one siege. It was destroyed after holding out for
a month for King Charles. The most conspicuous remnant is a massive wall,
a portion of the keep, which has heeled over to one side, at so great an angle
—about 17 degrees—that it looks actually unsafe. The adjacent church was
designed by Telford, the eminent engineer, to whom we are more indebted
for the suspension bridge over the Menai Straits than for this rather ugly
Renaissance building.

IRONBRIDGE (p. 99).

1. THE SEVERN IN WYRE FOREST.
2. NEAR SHRAWLEY. 3. QUATFORD.
4. OLD HOUSES AT BEWDLEY(p. 102).

For some miles below Bridgnorth the valley of the Severn is extremely
pretty, the banks half slopes of pasture, half masked with trees. “Now it is a
little wider, now a little narrower, the hills a little steeper here or a little
more wooded there, the grass by the riverside always green, the Severn
sweeping on as it swings from side to side of the valley,” and breaking here
and there into a series of little rapids. It passes Quatford, the site of a Saxon
fortress, which was erected in the tenth century, and through the Forest of
Morf, long since brought under cultivation. Quatford was a place of some
importance till some years after the Conquest, when Bridgnorth was built,
and most of its inhabitants removed to the new stronghold. The river leaves
on its western side the old Forest of Wyre, which, though it still retains
some pretty woods, had lost its best trees even so long ago as the days of
Camden. It is now better known as a coalfield, though it is not one of much
commercial importance.
The Severn glides on beneath the wide arch of an iron railway bridge and
across the parting of Shropshire and Worcestershire to Bewdley, pleasantly
situated on a slope by the river-bank, and well worthy of its name, Beau
lieu. In olden times it had an extensive trade by means of the river, when it
was a place of import and export, especially for the Principality. All the
country round is pretty, notwithstanding occasional symptoms of factories.
The lanes are sometimes cut deep in the red sandstone, and here and there
the rock is hollowed out into dwellings after a primæval fashion. Three
miles or so away to the east is busy but unpicturesque Kidderminster, famed
for its carpets. Stourport follows, not less busy, and yet less picturesque,
where the Severn is joined by the river after which the place is named. Here
the construction of the Worcestershire and Staffordshire Canal has turned a
hamlet into a town. Undulating ground on either hand, the long low line of
the Lickey Hills some miles away to the east, the slightly more varied forms
of the Abberley Hills on the west, limit a piece of country pleasant to the
eye through which the Severn flows for several miles, past Shrawley and
Ombersley. Then the valley becomes a little broader and flatter. The scarp
of the Cotswolds, with Bredon Cloud as an advanced bastion, replaces the
Lickey Hills, and on the other side, as the tower of Worcester Cathedral
grows more and more conspicuous in the view, the Malvern Hills, with their
mountain-like outlines, divert the attention from their humbler advanced
post on the north. There are no places of importance near the Severn,

though Hartlebury Palace, which has belonged to the See of Worcester for
over a thousand years, lies about a league away on the east.
Worcester has no special charm in point of situation, though the river itself
and the distant hills are always an attraction, but some of its streets are
quaint, and its cathedral is grand. The site, comparatively level, but raised
well above the river, early attracted settlers, and it is believed to have been
inhabited before the days of the Romans. It figures from time to time in our
history, but its most stirring days were in the Civil War, when it took the
king’s side, was twice besieged, twice compelled to surrender, and twice
suffered severely for its “malignity.” But even the king’s death did not bring
peace to Worcester, for it was occupied by the younger Charles, and the
decisive battle which crushed the hopes of the Cavaliers was fought in its
very streets. Since the Restoration it has been undisturbed, and has
prospered, especially since it added the manufacture of porcelain to that of
gloves, for which it has long been famed, the compounding of sauce to the
potting of lampreys, and took to making bricks and yet more strongly
scented chemicals.

Photo: Harvey Barton, Bristol.
WORCESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM THE SEVERN.

The cathedral overlooks the Severn, its precincts being almost bounded by
the river-bank. It is a noble pile, the tall central tower being a conspicuous
object for many a mile away in the valley, though it has been, perhaps,
overmuch restored. Parts, however, of the fabric had become so decayed
that it was thought necessary to re-build them. A crypt belongs to a building
erected soon after the Norman Conquest, but the greater part of the present
structure is Early English, and very beautiful work of its kind, being begun
about 1225. The nave, however, is of later date, with the exception of one or
two incorporated fragments of the preceding cathedral. Some of the
monuments also are interesting. Though King John loved not churches, he
lies in the middle of the choir, where his effigy remains, the earliest one of a
royal personage in England; a beautiful chantry chapel commemorates
Prince Arthur, the elder brother of Henry VIII., and no visitor is likely to
forget the mysterious gravestone with its single and sorrowful inscription,

“Miserrimus.” Cloisters, chapter-house, and other portions of the
conventual buildings still remain, though the fine old Guesten Hall was
destroyed not many years ago. The town also retains some fairly interesting
houses, though neither these nor the twelve parish churches are likely to
divert the visitors’ attention from the cathedral.
Below Worcester the Teme comes into the Severn from the west. Few rivers
of its size pass through more charming or more interesting scenery. It
collects a group of streams that have risen among the great hill-masses on
the edges of Radnor and Montgomery, and in the southern part of
Shropshire. They have flowed by craggy slopes and wild moorland, by
lonely farms and quiet villages, by ancestral oaks and ancient halls, by
ruined forts and many a relic of primæval folk. But on these we must not
linger; a glance at Ludlow must suffice. It is one of the most attractive
towns in England—church and castle crown a hill between the Teme and
the Corve, and from it the streets run down the slope. In olden time Ludlow
was a place of great importance, for the castle was the chief of thirty-two
that guarded the Welsh Marches, and here the Lords Presidents of Wales
held their courts. Even after this state had passed away, the town was a
centre of county society. The castle, a picturesque ruin, crowns the
headland, the inner court occupying its north-western angle, and the main
block of buildings overlooks a wooded cliff. These are of various dates,
from Norman to Tudor; the most remarkable being a curious little circular
chapel of Late Norman work, which now stands alone, its small chancel
having disappeared. The castle witnessed sharp fighting more than once in
the Border Wars, and finally surrendered to the troops of the Parliament.
Here died Arthur, Prince of Wales, son of Henry VII.; here also Milton
wrote “The Masque of Comus” and Butler part of “Hudibras.” The church
—a grand building in the Perpendicular style, on a commanding site—is
justly designated one of the noblest parish churches in England. There are
several good specimens of timber-work among the older houses; the most
striking, perhaps, being the Reader’s House in the churchyard, and the
Feathers Inn. The grand old trees in Oakley Park, the Clee Hills, Stokesay
Castle, Tenbury Church, and St. Michael’s College, are but a few of the
many attractions of the surrounding district.

LUDLOW (p. 104).

For some fourteen miles below Worcester the Severn flows through its wide
and pleasant valley without passing near any place of special interest,
unless it be Kemsey, with its fine church standing within the enclosure of a
Roman camp, or Upton, which makes much vinegar and enjoys, besides,
considerable traffic up and down the river; for its bridge, in place of a
central arch, has a platform which can be raised to let vessels pass. But the
foreground scenery, fertile and wooded, is often very pretty: the scarp
bounding the limestone uplands of the Cotswolds is pleasant to see, and the
range of the Malverns is always beautiful. Passing thus through a fertile
land, we come to Tewkesbury, with its abbey church, less magnificent but
hardly less interesting than the Cathedral of Worcester, and its black-
timbered houses not far behind those of Shrewsbury. But as this town
belongs to the Avon even more than to the Severn, it shall be described in
connection with the former river.

THE SEVERN AT TEWKESBURY.

Photo: E. H. Speight, Rugby.
THE AVON NEAR RUGBY (p. 108).

THE SEVERN.

CHAPTER II.
THE UPPER OR WARWICKSHIRE AVON.

The Watershed of Central England—Naseby—Rugby—The Swift—Lutterworth and Wiclif—
Stoneleigh Abbey and Kenilworth Castle—Guy’s Cliff—The Leam—Warwick and its Castle—
Stratford-on-Avon and its Shakespeare Associations—Evesham—Pershore—Tewkesbury.

T HE Avon is a typical river of the English lowlands, and it is surpassed
by few in the quiet beauty of its scenery or in the places of interest on
its banks. It rises in the northern part of Northamptonshire, on an elevated
plateau, the highest spot on which is nearly 700 feet above sea-level. This
forms the watershed of Central England, for on it also the Welland and the
Nen begin their courses to the Wash. But it is not only the source of an
historic stream, it is also the scene of an historic event. Almost on the
highest ground is Naseby Church, and to the north of that, quite in the
corner of the county, is the fatal “field” where the forces of Charles and of
Cromwell met in a death-grip and the King’s cause was hopelessly lost. It
was more than a defeat, it was an utter rout. Henceforth Charles was “like a
hunted partridge, flitting from one castle to another.”
From this upland country—pleasantly varied by cornfield, pasture, and
copses—the Avon makes its way to the northern margin of the county, and
then, working round to the south-west, forms for a while the boundary
between it and Leicestershire. Entering Warwickshire, the Avon passes near
Rugby. All know the great railway junction, immortalised by Charles
Dickens, and the famous school, with its memories of old Laurence Sheriffe
the founder, and Dr. Arnold, its great headmaster. Then the river is joined by
the tributary Swift, which, while hardly more than a brook, has rippled by
the little town of Lutterworth. There, higher up the slope, is the church
where Wiclif ministered, the pulpit from which he preached. There,
spanning the stream, is a little bridge, the successor of that from which the
ashes, after his bones had been dug up and burnt by order of the Council of

Constance, were flung into the water. So the Swift bore them to the Avon,
and the Avon to the Severn, and that to the sea, to be dispersed abroad into
all lands—“which things are an allegory.”
The Avon flows
on through the
pretty, restful
scenery of
Warwickshire,
which has been
rendered classic
by the authoress
of “Adam Bede,”
twisting in great
curves gradually
more and more
to the south. It
leaves, some
three miles away
from its right
bank, the spires
THE UPPER OR WARWICKSHIRE AVON. and ancient
mansions of
Coventry—once noted for its ribbons, now busy in making cycles; it
sweeps round Stoneleigh Abbey, with its beautiful park and fine old oaks,
where a comparatively modern mansion has replaced a Cistercian
monastery. On the opposite side, half a league away, are the ruins of
Kenilworth Castle, with their memories of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth.
It glides beneath Guy’s Cliff, where the famous Earl, the slayer of the Dun
Cow, after his return from the Holy Land, dwelt in a cave as a hermit,
unrecognised, till the hour of his death, by his own wife, though she daily
gave him alms. A little further, and a short distance away on the left, on the
tributary Leam, is the modern town of Leamington, which began a career of
prosperity just a century ago on the discovery of sundry mineral springs.
Then the Avon sweeps by the foot of the hill on which stands the old town
of Warwick. The site is an ideal one—a hill for a fortress, a river for a moat
—and has thus been occupied from a distant antiquity. Briton, Roman,
Saxon—all are said to have held in turn the settlement, till the Norman

came and built a castle. The town retains two of its gates and several old
timbered houses, one of which, the Leicester Hospital, founded in 1571, is
perhaps the finest in the Midlands; and on the top of the hill, set so that “it
cannot be hid,” is the great church of St. Mary. It is in the Perpendicular
style, more or less, for the tower and nave were rebuilt after a great fire in
1694, the choir escaping with little injury. Two fine tombs of the Earls of
Warwick are in this part, but the glory of the church is the Beauchamp
Chapel, with its far-famed altar-tomb and effigy of Richard Beauchamp, the
founder. He died in 1439; and near him lie the Earl of Leicester, Queen
Elizabeth’s favourite, and other members of the house of Dudley.

WARWICK CASTLE.

Warwick Castle is one of the most picturesquely situated mansions in
England. It stands on a rocky headland, which descends almost
precipitously to the Avon. One of our illustrations (p. 111) may give some
notion of the beauty of the view over the rich river-plain; the other (p. 109)
indicates the aspect of the castle itself. A mediæval fortress has been
gradually transformed into a modern mansion, yet it retains an air of

antiquity and not a little of the original structure. It incorporates portions of
almost all dates, from the Norman Conquest to the present day. The oldest
part is the lofty tower, called Cæsar’s tower, which must have been erected
not many years after the victory at Hastings. The residential part mostly
belongs to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though alterations and
additions have been made, especially during the restoration, which was
rendered necessary by a lamentable fire in 1871. We must leave it to the
guide-books to describe the pictures, antiquities, and curiosities which the
castle contains—relics of the Civil War, when it was in vain besieged by the
king’s forces, the sword and porridge-pot of the legendary Guy, and the
famous Warwick Vase, dug up near Tivoli at Hadrian’s Villa. But the view
from the windows is so beautiful that the visitor will often find a difficulty
in looking at pictures on the walls; he will be well rewarded if afterwards he
stroll down towards the old mill by the riverside.
After leaving Warwick the Avon keeps winding towards the south-western
boundary of the county till, before reaching this, it arrives at another and yet
more noted town. Stratford-on-Avon is a household word wherever the
English tongue is spoken. No American thinks his visit to the country of his
ancestors is complete till he has made a pilgrimage to the birthplace and the
grave of Shakespeare—nay, even our distant kinsmen in Germany are not
seldom drawn thither by the same magnetic force. The town, till the days of
railways, was a quietly prosperous, old-fashioned place, in harmony with
the scenery of the neighbourhood. This is thoroughly characteristic of the
Midlands, and exhibits one of their most attractive types. “The Avon, a
fairly broad bright stream, sweeps silently along on its way to the Severn,
through level meadows, where the grass grows green and deep. The higher
ground on either side rolls gently down, descending sometimes to the
margin of the stream, but elsewhere parted from it by broad stretches of
level valley. The slopes are dotted with cornfields, and varied by clumps of
trees and lines of hedgerow timber. It is a peaceful, unexciting land, where
hurry would seem out of place.”[4] The little house where Shakespeare was
born—in 1564, on the 23rd of April, as they say—after many vicissitudes
has been saved to the nation, and perhaps a little over-restored. It is a
parcel-timbered dwelling without enrichment—one of those common in the
Midlands—such as would be inhabited by an ordinary burgess of a country
town.

When
Shakespeare
returned, a
prosperous man,
to his birthplace,
he lived in a much
better house near
the church, which
he purchased in
1597. This,
however, was
pulled down by an
ill-tempered
clerical vandal in
the middle of the
last century.
Shottery, where
we can still see
the cottage of
Anne Hathaway,
whom
Shakespeare loved
not wisely but too
well, is a mile
away; and about
four times that
distance is the
picturesque old
brick and stone
mansion of THE AVON FROM WARWICK CASTLE (p. 110).
Charlecote, with
its beautiful park.
Here dwelt Sir Thomas Lucy, with whose deer the youth made too free, and
on account of whose anger he ran away to London. The dramatist, it is said,
took his revenge on the knight in the portrait of Justice Shallow, but when
he looked back on the ultimate results of his flight from Stratford he might
have justly said, “All’s well that ends well!”

In the month of his birth, 1616, Stratford Church received the body of
William Shakespeare. “Church and churchyard are worthy of being
connected with so great a memory. The former is a fine cruciform structure,
crowned with a central spire; the latter a spacious tract, planted with aged
trees. An avenue of limes leads up to the church porch, between which,
perhaps, the poet often passed to worship, and whose quivering shadows
may one sad day have fallen upon his coffin. But there is a part of the God’s
acre where, perhaps, more than any other, we may think of him, for it is one
which can hardly have failed to tempt him to musing. The Avon bounds the
churchyard, and by its brink is a terraced walk, beneath a row of fine old
elms. On the one hand, through the green screens of summer foliage, or
through the chequered lattice-work of winter boughs, we see the grey stones
of the church—here the tracery of a window, there a weather-beaten
pinnacle—then, through some wider gap, the spire itself. On the other hand,
beneath the terrace wall, the Avon slowly and silently glides along by
bridge and town, by water-meadows, bright with celandine in spring and
thick with lush grass in June.”[5]

STRATFORD-ON-AVON CHURCH.

The church, once collegiate, is an unusually fine one, partly Early English,
partly Decorated, but mostly Perpendicular in style. To the last belongs the
chancel, where Shakespeare is buried, with his wife, daughter, and other
relations. His monument, with the bust, is on the north wall, and his grave

with the quaint inscription is near at hand, both too well known to need
description; but though this one great memory pervades the place, almost to
the exclusion of all beside, there are other tombs of interest, and the church
of itself is well worth a visit.

SHAKESPEARE’S HOUSE (p. 111).

About a league below Stratford, the Avon becomes a county boundary,
separating Warwickshire from the north of Gloucestershire. Then it returns
to the former county, and lastly enters Worcestershire. Its valley becomes
more and more definitely marked as the river cuts its way through the
upland, which forms the eastern limit of the broad Vale of Severn. On a
peninsula of Worcestershire made by a southward sweep of the stream, near
the boundary of the two other counties, stands an historic town, Evesham,
which gives its name to the beautiful vale. A ruined archway and a noble
tower are the sole relics of its once famous abbey. This was founded early
in the eighth century, on a spot where they said both a swineherd and a

bishop had seen a vision of the Virgin. Ultimately it was attached to the
Benedictine order, became one of the most wealthy monasteries, with one
of the grandest churches in the West. It was exceptionally rich in relics and
ornaments. The shrine of the founder was a superb specimen of the
goldsmith’s work; the forms of worship were unusually sumptuous. But at
last the crash came, and the spoiler’s hand fell with exceptional weight on
the abbey of Evesham. “The estates were confiscated and parcelled out, and
the abbey was dismantled and given away to Sir Philip Hoby, a gentleman
of Worcestershire, who shortly afterwards seems to have leased out the
magnificent buildings of abbey and monastery as a quarry for stone, and
thus it continued to be for many a day.” So now “it can hardly be called a
ruin”;[6] but the beautiful tower still remains, which stood at the entrance of
the cemetery, and was meant for clock and bells. This was only completed
just before the surrender of the abbey. Near it are two churches, each of fair
size, each with its own steeple, chapels founded by the monks for the use of
the townsfolk. The three, as shown in our illustration (p. 117), form a very
striking group.
But this quiet town in a peaceful valley was once disturbed by the noise of
battle, and witnessed a crisis in English history. Prince Edward, son of
Henry III., had contrived by masterly generalship to prevent the junction of
the armies of Simon de Montfort and his son. The former was encamped at
Evesham. The Prince’s army blocked his one outlet by land; a detachment
of it had cut off a retreat by the bridges over the river. The fight from the
first was hopeless; De Montfort’s troops were inferior: “The Welsh fled at
the first onset like sheep, and were cut ruthlessly down in the cornfields and
gardens where they had sought refuge. The little group of knights around
Simon fought desperately, falling one by one till the Earl was left alone. So
terrible were his sword-strokes that he had all but gained the hill-top when a
lance-thrust brought his horse to the ground; but Simon still rejected the
summons to yield, till a blow from behind felled him, mortally wounded, to
the ground. Then with a last cry of ‘It is God’s grace,’ the soul of the great
patriot passed away.”[7]
The beauty and richness of the Vale of Evesham are proverbial; it is a land
of corn and orchards, and it widens out as the Avon winds on in rounding
the northern extremity of the Cotswolds. After a time the stream makes a
great undulating sweep to the northward, as if to avoid the outlying mass of

Dundry Hill, and brings us to another country town and another fragment of
a grand church of olden time. Pershore was founded in the tenth century, as
was Evesham, and only a few years afterwards; it too passed under the rule
of the Benedictines, and was richly endowed by a pious Saxon noble, not
only with lands, but also with relics. Pershore, however, was less uniformly
prosperous than Evesham. Edward the Confessor gave of its lands to his
new abbey at Westminster. William the Conqueror took of them for himself
or his courtiers. For all that, money was found for rebuilding, and for
rearing a glorious structure, resembling those at Gloucester and
Tewkesbury, in the latter part of the eleventh century. The choir was again
re-built in the thirteenth; the central tower dates from the middle of the
fourteenth. The Reformation here, as elsewhere, was a time of plunder and
destruction—nave, lady-chapel, and monastic buildings were pulled down;
the people of Pershore, to their honour, purchased the rest of the church,
and thus saved it from annihilation. The north transept fell down at a later
date; but what is left has been carefully repaired and restored, and this
fragment has been justly called one of the noblest specimens of Norman
and Early English work that our country possesses.
Though the foreground scenery, as the two valleys merge, becomes less
striking, the more distant views are always attractive; for the scarp
bounding the limestone uplands of the Cotswolds forms a pleasant feature,
and the range of the Malverns is beautiful in its outline. At last, just before
its confluence with the Severn, the Avon brings us to another interesting
town—Tewkesbury, on the left bank of the latter river, and within half a
mile of the former one. Tewkesbury has an abbey church, not so
magnificent, but hardly less interesting than that of Worcester, while it is
not less rich than Shrewsbury in black-timbered houses. Here the course of
the Severn is interrupted by a weir and a lock, constructed in order to make
the river navigable to Worcester for vessels of larger tonnage, and is crossed
by a fine bridge of iron. It receives the Avon, by the side of which the town
is built, and this stream is spanned by another and ancient bridge of stone.
The streets, with their old timbered houses, are a delight to the antiquary:
they usually have bay windows carried the whole height of the front, the
“Wheatsheaf Inn” being one of the best specimens. The abbey, however, is
the glory of the town, and in ancient days, before Tewkesbury mustard
became a proverb, made its name known all over England. It claims as its
founder two kings of Mercia, rather more than eleven and a half centuries

ago, and in any case appears to carry back its history almost to this time.
But the greater part of the present church was erected early in the twelfth
century, though the choir was re-constructed about two centuries
afterwards. Yet this, though graceful Decorated work in the upper part,
maintains the massive Norman piers below, the combination producing a
rather unusual effect. But not only so, the choir terminates in an apse, a
feature not very common in our English churches, and certainly not the
least among the attractions of Tewkesbury. Central tower, transept, and nave
are mainly Norman; and the west end is peculiar, for it terminates in a huge
arch, which occupies almost the whole of the façade, and in which a great
Perpendicular window has been inserted. It has a curiously incomplete look,
so, possibly, the architect contemplated the addition of a façade with
towers. The church also is unusually rich in chantries and ancient
monuments, secular and ecclesiastical.

Photo: Harvey Barton, Bristol.
THE AVON AT STRATFORD (p. 110).

Photo: Harvey Barton, Bristol.
EVESHAM (p. 114).

Tewkesbury, too, has a place in English history, for on the meadows south
of the abbey was fought the last battle between the houses of Lancaster and
York, and the Red Rose was trampled in the mire. Margaret of Anjou was
taken prisoner; her only son, Edward, was stabbed by the Yorkists—it is
said after the Duke of York had struck him in the face with his gauntlet; and
a large number of the chief men on the losing side were killed or were

executed after the battle. Some of them fled to the abbey for sanctuary.
Edward and his soldiers came in hot pursuit, but a priest, bearing the Host,
confronted them on the threshold, nor would he move until the victor
promised to spare the lives of the fugitives. But on the third day afterwards
a troop of soldiers broke into the building, dragged out the refugees, and
promptly struck off their heads. Revenge proved stronger than religion!

THE AVON AT TEWKESBURY.

The young prince lies in a nameless grave beneath the central tower of the
abbey; and other illustrious victims of the battle were buried within its
walls. The building itself has had more than one narrow escape from
destruction: it was seriously injured by a fire in the later part of the twelfth
century; at the suppression of the monasteries it was placed on the list of
“superfluous” buildings and doomed to be pulled down by the greedy
vandals of that age. But the good folk of Tewkesbury bought it for
themselves, and thus preserved one of the finest and most interesting

ecclesiastical buildings in the West Country. They have well earned the
gratitude of posterity. The monastic buildings, however, to a great extent
have disappeared. The cloisters, which seem to have resembled those at
Gloucester, are unfortunately gone, but the monks’ infirmary, with some
adjacent buildings, has been incorporated into a mansion called Abbey
House, and the principal gateway still remains. Tewkesbury, in short, is to
the lover of architecture far the most interesting town of its size in the
valley of the Severn.

DISTANT VIEW OF TEWKESBURY.

THE SEVERN.

CHAPTER III.
FROM TEWKESBURY TO THE SEA.

Deerhurst—Gloucester—The “Bore”—May Hill—Minsterworth—Westbury-on-Severn—Newnham
—Berkeley Castle—Lydney—Sharpness—The Severn Tunnel—The Estuary—A Vanished
River.

B ELOW Tewkesbury several pleasant places, country-houses, parks and
quiet villages are situated on the lowland, or on the gentle undulations
which diversify the width of the valley, but few are of special interest,
except the little church of Deerhurst, standing near the waterside, which
was built, as an inscription now preserved at Oxford has recorded, in the
year 1056. The greater part of the comparatively lofty tower, with some
portions of the body of the church, belongs to this age; but the latter to a
considerable extent has been rebuilt at various dates, and its plan altered.
There was a priory of earlier foundation, but of this nothing of interest
remains.
But for some miles a great tower has been rising more and more distinctly
above the lush water-meadows, as did that of Worcester on the higher
reaches of the Severn. It is another cathedral, on a scale yet grander than the
former one, the centre of the old city of Gloucester, which for not a few
years has been rapidly increasing; but all about the precincts and in the
original streets are many picturesque remnants of the last and preceding
centuries, while its churches surpass those of Worcester.
Gloucester, as it guards the Severn, and is one of the natural approaches to
Wales, very early became a place of mark. An important station for the
Roman troops, it was in the days of Bede a very notable town, not only in
the Mercian kingdom, but also in all Britain. At Gloucester the first of its
Christian kings founded a monastery about eighty years after the landing of
Augustine; and when the Dane began to harry England the town had not
seldom to fight and sometimes to suffer. Saxon and the earlier Norman

kings often visited it. Probably in few cathedrals out of London—except,
perhaps, Winchester—were royal worshippers so frequent. Henry III., a boy
of ten, was crowned here, and had a particular affection for the town. Hither
the murdered Edward II. was brought for burial; Parliaments were held in
the city; and most of the kings up to the sixteenth century paid it at least one
visit. But when the great Civil War broke out, Gloucester took the side of
the Parliament. So, presently, the Royal troops and Charles himself
appeared before its walls. For about four weeks it was closely invested, and
its defenders were in sore straits, till Essex raised the siege. As a penalty the
walls were destroyed after the Restoration. That did no real harm; the city
was quietly prosperous, till it was quickened to a more active life by
becoming a railway junction, when the “break of gauge” provided many a
subject for Punch.

THE SEVERN, FROM TEWKESBURY TO THE SEA.

The cathedral stands well within the old city, a good quarter of a mile from
the Severn. One rose on this site before the Norman Conquest, but that was
destroyed by fire—the crypt beneath the choir being the only relic—and
another building was erected in the last dozen years of the eleventh century.
Notwithstanding great and conspicuous alterations, the shell of this
structure is comparatively intact. The nave has undergone the least change,
and is a very fine example of the earlier work in that style. It resembles
Tewkesbury in the increased height of the piers and consequent dwarfing of
the triforium, thus differing from, and not improving on, the great Norman
cathedrals of Eastern England; the choir is also of the same age, though the
older work is often almost concealed beneath a veil of Perpendicular
tracery; and the east window, of the latter date, is the largest in England.
The roof also is a magnificent piece of vaulting. In fact, all the eastern part,
including the transept, was remodelled between the years 1337 and 1377,
but the roof of the nave had been already replaced nearly a century earlier
than the former date. The latest conspicuous changes in the cathedral were
the additions of the grand Lady Chapel and of the central tower. The former
was grafted on to its little Norman predecessor in the last forty years of the
fifteenth century, and its great Perpendicular east window still preserves the
stained glass with which it was filled on the completion of the structure.
The east window of the choir also contains the original glass, which is a yet
finer specimen of the art, and is older by nearly a hundred and fifty years.
The central tower was begun at the same time, but was not completed till
some thirty years later. It has few rivals in Britain; some prefer that in the
same position at Lincoln, others Bell Harry Tower at Canterbury.
Gloucester, at any rate, is the most ornate, even if it be not the most
beautiful.

Photo: H. W. Watson, Gloucester.
GLOUCESTER.

The old stained glass, the exquisite tracery of its windows, walls and roof,
give exceptional richness to the eastern half of the cathedral, but in addition
to this, it possesses several remarkable monuments. The luckless Robert
Courthose, eldest son of the Conqueror, who died a prisoner at Cardiff
Castle, was buried before the high altar. His tomb and effigy, contrary to the
usual custom, are of wood (Irish oak), but whether they are
contemporaneous is uncertain. The yet more luckless Edward II. was

brought from Berkeley Castle to lie under the central arch on the north side
of the choir. There his son and successor raised a memorial, which is not
surpassed by any in England. Despised in life, this Edward was honoured in
death—such is the irony of fate. A constant stream of pilgrims flocked to
his grave as to that of an uncanonised saint, and the magnificent
reconstruction of the choir was the fruit of their offerings.

Photo: Hudson.
THE SEVERN BRIDGE, SHARPNESS (p. 123).

Telford spanned the Severn with an arch of stone 150 feet in diameter, and
below Gloucester the railway runs on a viaduct across the meadows, Alney
Island, and the river. The valley now is becoming very wide, and seems to
hint that before long the Severn will broaden into an estuary. The river
begins to swing in huge curves through the level meadows. The tidal wave,
called “the bore,” sometimes attains a considerable height, and is one of its
“wonders.” The Malvern Hills have receded into the background, and their
place is taken by May Hill, famous among geologists; on the opposite side

the scarp of the Cotswolds continues, though with a rather more broken
outline; but outlying hills come nearer to the city.
The Severn ebbs and flows by Minsterworth, where Gwillim is buried,
whose heraldry was beloved by country squires. The main high road, when
possible, keeps away from the stream, for the land lies low and is liable to
floods. Westbury-on-Severn is the first place of mark—a small town with a
rather large church noted for having a separate steeple, the spire of which is
of wood. The Severn here has pressed against higher ground and has carved
it into a low cliff, which affords sections well known to every geologist; and
in the neighbourhood iron ore is worked, as it has been for many a century.
Newnham comes next, a market-town, and an outlet for the important
mining district of the Forest of Dean, which lies a few miles away to the
west. It still preserves a sword of state given to it by King John, and there is
some old Norman work in its church.
The Severn is now changing from a river to an estuary. No places of
importance lie near the riverside, and its scenery is becoming marshy and
monotonous; but some distance away to the east is Berkeley, an old town
with an old castle, memorable for the murder of the hapless Edward; and on
the other side is Lydney, a quaint little town with a small inland harbour, a
market cross, and a fine old church. In the adjacent park, on a kind of
elevated terrace overlooking the valley, are the remains of a group of
Roman villas, from which many coins, pieces of pottery, and other relics
have been unearthed.
At Sharpness, above Lydney, a railway crosses the Severn by a long bridge
of twenty-eight arches, a magnificent work; but below it ferryboats were the
only communication from shore to shore till in 1886 the completion of the
Severn Tunnel linked Bristol and the West more closely to the eastern part
of South Wales. At this point the river is more than two and a quarter miles
across; but the tunnel itself is about double that length. This, the greatest
work of its kind in Britain, was completed by the late Sir John Hawkshaw.
The banks become yet farther apart, the water is salt, the tide ebbs and
flows, as in the sea. The estuary, indeed, continues for many a mile, still
retaining the form of a river-valley. Very probably there was a time when a
Severn flowed along a broad valley, where now the Bristol Channel parts
England from South Wales, to join another stream which had descended

over land, now sunk beneath the Irish Sea, and the two rivers discharged
their united waters into a more distant Atlantic Ocean; but that was very
long ago, so that our task is now completed. We have followed the Severn
from its source to its ending—till our brook has become a river, and our
river has become a sea.
T. G. BONNEY.

A BEND OF THE WYE.

THE WYE.
“The Notorious Hill of Plinlimmon”—The Stronghold of Owen Glendower—Llangurig—Rhayader
Gwy—Llyn-Gwyn—The Elan, the Ithon, and the Yrfon—Llandrindod—Builth—Aberedw and
the Last Prince of Wales—Hay—Clifford Castle and the Fair Rosamond—Hereford—The Lug
—“The Wonder”—Ross and John Kyrle—Goodrich Castle—Coldwell Rocks—Symond’s Yat—
Monmouth—The Monnow, the Dore, and the Honddu—Wordsworth’s Great Ode—Tintern
Abbey—The Wyndcliff—Chepstow—The Lower Reaches.

L IKE many another thing of beauty, the WYE is born amidst
surroundings dreary and dismal. Plinlimmon, the monarch
of the vast waste of hills that forms the southern portion of
the Cambrian system, has three heads. But no one can point
the finger of scorn at him on that account, for great are his cares as he
stands there in that region of morass and bog, the father of five rivers. His
chief head, towering to the sky, gathers from the heavy clouds as they drift
across the land the raindrops and the mist, and these, trickling down his
shoulders, are gathered into five different courses, and, hurrying on their
way, form the five rivers—the Severn, the Wye, the Rheidol, which flows to
Aberystwyth, and the Dulas and the Llyffnant, which by different courses
flow to the Dovey. Moreover, the rugged, austere mountain has long been
spoken lightly of; for a shepherd—it would never do to call him an humble
shepherd—who, in the early part of the present century, had the right to sell
ale and small beer in his cottage up amongst the mountain-tops, had a board
hung out with this modest sentence, which, to be sure, soon became classic,
painted upon it: “The notorious hill of Plinlimmon is on these premises, and
it will be shown with pleasure to any gentleman travellers who wishes to
see it.” So, what with the clouds and mists resting upon his head, the large
family of rivers he has to feed, and the slighting language that is held
towards him, the “notorious hill of Plinlimmon” is bald and sad and sodden.
Unless, therefore, the traveller is fond of dreariness and dankness, he will
scarcely find this a profitable journey to make—this climb to the very
source of the Wye.

Photos: Hudson.
VIEWS IN THE LOWER ELAN VALLEY (p. 128).

Legend, however, weaves a charm over many an else dreary waste, and up
amongst the scramble of hills of which Plinlimmon is monarch, legend and
history unapocryphal combine to fill the home of mists with interest for all
who love a stirring tale. Here, at the very source of the Wye, Owain
Glyndwr—the Owen Glendower of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV.—who
could call spirits from the vasty deep, had his stronghold, and gathered
around him his vicious little band of followers:—

“Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head
Against my power: thrice from the banks of Wye
And sandy-bottomed Severn have I sent him
Bootless home, and weather-beaten back.”

This he truthfully told his fellow-conspirators. Plinlimmon and the
surrounding country is rich in records and legends concerning this turbulent
prince, whose very birth, on May 28th, 1354, is said to have been attended
by remarkable premonitions of coming trouble, for it is told that on that
eventful night his father’s horses were found in their stalls standing in a
bath of blood that reached to their bellies. This is the popular account, but
Shakespeare’s imagination created other and farther-reaching warnings to
the world concerning the fiery spirit that had been ushered upon the scene:
—
“At my nativity
The front of Heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak’d like a coward.”

From this lofty region, half earth and half sky—for the Wye can lay claim
to trace its source to the very clouds that hang thick upon Plinlimmon’s
head—the tiny rivulet bounds down the mountain-side, and the Fates,
catching at a myriad of still smaller rills, braid them into the main stream,
as the tresses of a maiden’s hair are woven together, till united they form a
brook. For a number of miles the land through which the Wye’s course is
laid continues to be melancholy in the extreme, and the torrent, like all
urchins brought up amidst harsh, inclement surroundings, goes on its way
brawling and turbulent, playing leapfrog with rocks, flinging itself over
precipices, swirling in little maelstroms, and almost getting blown away in
spray; and it is not until the pretty village of Llangurig is reached that it
comes in part to its senses, and, although still boisterous, shows itself
amenable to the influence of civilisation. Not only does the Wye here meet
for the first time with civilisation, but here, too, it becomes acquainted with
that which later on in its life is one of its glories, almost its crowning glory
—trees. The head and shoulders of mighty Plinlimmon afford no gracious
foothold for these children of fat lands and lusty air, scarcely a bush raising
its branches in the bog and marsh of the mountain. But up to Llangurig a

few of them have straggled, to break the monotony of the mountainous
region. Here, too, a bridge—one of the few works of man that sometimes
add to rather than detract from the effect of river-scenery, always provided
that it is not a modern railway bridge of iron—crosses the young stream;
and a church, the first of many on the banks of the Wye, stands near by. A
short distance below this village the stream spreads out in its valley, and
flows more gently amongst huge boulders that have been hurled down from
the sides of the mountains.
Between Llangurig and
the next village of any
importance, Rhayader
Gwy, to give it its full
name, although most
people are content to
call it by its “Christian”
name only, leaving the
“Gwy” to take care of
itself—between these
two villages the Wye
enters Radnorshire; and
now the scenery,
although still wildly
mountainous, is of a
more subdued
description, trees
becoming more
plentiful, and the rocks,
occasionally shaking
their heads free from
the thick covering of THE WYE AND THE USK.
spongy morass,
beginning to stand out
bold and picturesque, and to take their proper place in the composition of
mountain-scenery. A short distance above Rhayader Gwy the river Marteg
pours its tiny volume into the Wye, and here is one of the choicest bits of
scenery in all the upper reaches of our stream. Nannerth Rocks, lofty crags,
confront the river, and narrow the bed so that the combined waters can only

squeeze through at the expense of a mighty uproar and much plunging and
dashing and flinging of spray and foam, the brawl of the forced passage
being audible for a great distance. After its straitened course between these
rocks, the river enters an easier bed and flows sulkily down to Rhayader
Gwy.
This village has a situation as wonderful as any in all the kingdom. On
every side tower the great hills, not harsh and gloomy now, but clothed with
oak forest thick and deep. Not so many years ago there were, as the name of
the village bears record, falls at Rhayader Gwy; but in building the bridge
that spans the stream the good people, little caring for the picturesqueness
of the place, removed the stones and widened the channel, and so reduced
the falls to rapids.
Although the place is of little note now, being only a lovely village, once
upon a time it was of considerable importance in the country, and saw
stirring times. Among other things, it had a strong fortress of its own,
erected by Rhys ap Gruffydd, the Prince of South Wales; but this was so
thoroughly rased to the ground by Llewelyn, in 1231, that not a vestige
remains. At a later day a successor to this stronghold was built, but it, too,
fell, in the stormy days of the Parliamentary War, and only a mound marks
the spot where it stood. Near to Rhayader Gwy the Wye, like a mountain
chief exacting tribute from his weaker neighbours, secures the overflow
from a quaint lake, said to be the only beautiful lake in Radnorshire—the
Llyn-Gwyn. In olden days many a pilgrim, full of faith in the miraculous
powers of this little lake, made his way through the rugged district to bathe
in its waters; and there can be little wonder at the hope inspired in their
breasts by the sight of Llyn-Gwyn, for it is such a lake as is rarely found,
dainty, clear, cool, its high wooded banks rising nearly perpendicularly—a
veritable fairies’ ocean. With the overflow from this the Wye tumbles along,
soon to find tributaries of much more importance.
The first of these is the Elan. This river receives the Claerwen; and near to
the juncture of the two streams is Nantgwillt, a house which, in the
momentous year 1812, was occupied by the poet Shelley, while at Cwm
Elan lived Harriet Grove. The journey from Rhayader to Cwm Elan, a
distance of five miles up the valley of the little river, is very beautiful.
Mountains rise on every side, as though guarding the privacy of the
delicious glen; inspiring sights are to be seen at every turn, dainty views of

the Wye and the Elan pleasantly breaking the green of trees and grass, and
the variegated colours of rocks. Further up the valley is the scene chosen for
the illustration on this page, where the waters of the Elan splash along over
the rocks that bestrew their course, until they come to a sombre and
forbidding pool, which might well be bottomless.

Photo: J. Owen, Newtown, North Wales.
PONT-HYLL-FAN, IN THE ELAN VALLEY.

Next, the Ithon, its waters drawn from the Montgomeryshire hills, flows
into the Wye; and then, more considerable by far than any Brecknock
tributary, comes the Yrfon, whose fountain-head is some ten miles from
Llanwrtyd. Long time ago a cave near to the river-bank harboured Rhys
Gethin, an audacious freebooter, who levied contributions from all and
sundry, including his Majesty the King himself. At the Wolf’s Leap, a point
on the Yrfon worthy of a visit, the river may be said to run on edge, for the
rocks close in so that the water, while some 30 feet deep, is only a few
inches across. This is the place where, if tradition is to be credited, the last

Welsh wolf took matters into his own paws, and committed suicide. The
niche of land formed by the junction of the Yrfon with the Wye is pointed to
as the spot where Llewelyn, in 1282, made his last stand against Edward I.
and his English hosts, and was there slain and buried. About an equal
distance from Rhayader and Builth, up the valley of the Ithon, is
Llandrindod, long famous for its pure air and healing wells. As long ago as
the seventeenth century, the waters of these wells were known to have
medicinal properties that made them of peculiar value to those suffering
from scrofula and kindred troubles. The water flows out of the rock high up
on a hillside, and guests at the pump-house and hotels enjoy a magnificent
panoramic view of the valleys of the Wye, Ithon, and Yrfon. In the last
century an hotel of extravagant luxury was erected by the side of these
wells, but, proving unprofitable, it soon became a favourite resort of
gamblers, and continued to be the scandal of the country until a lady of
practical piety became possessed of the property, and, so that there should
be no doubt about her ideas on the subject of gambling, had the building
torn down and utterly removed. That happened long ago, and now other
hotels have taken the place of the one of evil repute; and Llandrindod,
having railway communication with the outside world, is prospering
exceedingly. Let us add that it has not, in its prosperity, come to feel
ashamed of its Shaky Bridge—a primitive arrangement of planks and
stretched ropes, which will some day, it is to be feared, be displaced by a
more “imposing” structure.

Photo: Hudson.
THE SHAKY BRIDGE, LLANDRINDOD.

Builth, on the Wye, is a fisherman’s paradise. Using the little town as a
base, he has within easy reach the waters of the Wye, the Yrfon, the Edw,
the Dihonw, and the Chweffru, all waters rich in sporting fish; and in the
seasons of the sport about as many artificial as natural flies skim the waters,
for anglers come from far and near to a centre so celebrated. The authentic
history of Builth reaches back to Roman times; and in later days the Danes
came with fire and sword, and levelled the place with the ground. The
Castle of Builth was stormed and destroyed as often as it was rebuilt, the
partisans of one chief after another wreaking their rage upon it, and now
nothing but a mound marks the spot where once a succession of strongholds
stood.
History has no more romantic tale to tell, nor one that is more generally
known, than that of the ride of the Prince of Wales, Llewelyn, from
Aberedw, where on the banks of the Wye he had a castle, towards Builth,
which refused to succour him. There is scarce an elementary schoolboy who

has not heard of the ingenious blacksmith who hastily nailed to the hoofs of
Llewelyn’s horse the shoes reversed, so that the tracks in the snow might
mislead those who were in hot pursuit; and alas! heard, too, that the
blacksmith, clever as he was at his trade, was not clever enough to keep the
secret, but betrayed his prince to the enemy, so that the last authentic Prince
of Wales was hounded to his death. It is a story destined to immortality, for
it has drifted into folklore, and, like the curiously barbarous tale of Little
Red Riding Hood, is crooned to each generation of children until every
Welsh child dreams at least once in its lifetime of the harried prince and the
foaming steed, the new-fallen snow, and the marks of the seven-nailed
shoes running, as it were, backwards. The tale has been transplanted to
many quarters of the globe, but the Wye knows that the prince fled along its
banks from the castle to the cruel, inhospitable town. Of the castle—
Llewelyn’s—to be sure, almost nothing now remains; but the village is
delightfully situated, and is much resorted to by anglers, and not by anglers
only.
The next place of particular importance is Hay. From the river the streets of
this picturesque and thriving little town rise rather too abruptly for the
pleasurable convenience of vehicular traffic; but picturesqueness and
practicability seldom go hand in hand, and what Hay streets lack in the
latter is fully made up in the former virtue. To crown them rises the ivy-clad
fragments of the famous castle.

Photo: J. Thirlwall, Hereford.
THE WYE BRIDGE AND HEREFORD CATHEDRAL (p. 134).

It is often found that the same hero ciphers through the history of a country
or district with the persistence of a damaged note in an organ, although
usually with a less irritating effect. In this quarter of the kingdom, which
was once the buffer State between England and Wales, the name of Owen
Glendower crops up continually, and at Hay among other places. At the
head of his wild men from the hills, he came down like an avalanche upon

the castle at Hay; when he retired, the pile was a mass of ruins, and now
nothing stands of the ancient fort but a gateway—the very stones grey with
age—and part of a tower. Legend, which has a pretty fancy and nimble
brain, relates that the castle was built in one night by the celebrated Maud
de Saint Wallery, alias Maud de Hain, alias Moll Walbee. “She built the
Castle of Hay” (to quote Jones’s “Brecknock”) “in one night, the stones for
which she carried in her apron. While she was thus employed, a small
pebble, of about nine feet long and one foot thick, dropped into her shoe.
This she did not at first regard; but in a short time finding it troublesome,
she indignantly threw it over the river Wye into Llowes churchyard, in
Radnorshire (about three miles off), where it remains to this day, precisely
in the position it fell, a stubborn memorial of the historical fact, to the utter
confusion of all sceptics and unbelievers.” Americans have long claimed for
their Chicago belles the largest feet; but from this well-substantiated fact it
is doubtful if any one of them ever wore so spacious a shoe as the fair Maud
on the banks of the Wye. King John, in revenge for succour refused, visited
the town with his vengeance; and altogether its early history is as stirring as
any to be met with in these parts.

GOODRICH CASTLE (p. 138).

By the time Hay is reached the Wye is fast becoming a stream of
considerable size. Now entering Herefordshire, it flows through a broad
vale, cultivated and mellow, where Clifford Castle stands a hoary ruin.
Here, if history speak true, was born, in the reign of Henry II., one of great
and general notoriety, whose name—or nom de guerre, as Dryden has it—is
woven richly into the ballads of that and later days; for doubtless her
beauty, like her failings, was great, and her death untimely and cruel:—
“Jane Clifford was her name, as books aver;
Fair Rosamond was but her nom de guerre.”

Fair Rosamond was born about the year 1140. How much of the story
coming to us through the medium of ballads and folk-tales be true, it is now
quite impossible to discover, but popular fancy still clings to the idea of a
lonely and innocently unfortunate girl installed at Woodstock, protected by
a nurse who proved insufficient when pitted against the cunning of a

scandalised wife and queen. Fair Rosamond was buried at Godstow, and
upon her tomb was carved the famous epitaph:—
“Hic jacet in tumba Rosa Mundi, non Rosa munda:
Non redolet, sed olet, quæ redolere solet.”

The railway has not improved the situation of this old castle:—
“Clifford has fallen—howe’er sublime,
Mere fragments wrestle still with time;
Yet as they perish, sure and slow,
And, rolling, dash the stream below,
They raise tradition’s glowing scene,—
The clue of silk, the wrathful queen;
And link in memory’s firmest bond
The love-lorn tale of Rosamond.”

Passing between wooded eminences, broad fields, and peaceful farms, the
Wye at length reaches the suburbs, and then the ancient city of Hereford.
Hereford was a town of importance even at the dawn of English history.
Outside its walls stood the palace of Offa, the greatest of all the Mercian
princes; and during the reign of the Mercian kings it was the principal town
of Mercia. Ethelfleda, sister of Edward the Elder, governed the place with
great skill, and she it was who constructed the castle that guarded the town,
and constructed it so well that it proved to be one of the strongest in all
England. Leland has this to say of the keep: “High, and very strong, having
in the outer wall ten semicircular towers, and one great tower within”; and
adds that “it hath been one of the largest, fayrest, and strongest castles in
England.”
Here, again, the wily Llewelyn comes upon the scene, for he led his men
from the fastness of the Upper Wye, pillaged and burnt the place, murdered
the bishop and his assistants, set the cathedral ablaze, and left what had
been a fair town a mass of smouldering ruins.
A visitor to this ancient city will find it hard to realise that anything but
peace and goodwill ever reigned in all the district, for in these days of
bustle and worry it would be difficult to discover in all Great Britain a more
placid, steady-going, self-satisfied city than Hereford. Well laid out, clean,
at least reasonably well-to-do—although it does not lay claim to be a place

of great industry,
relying more
upon the church
and the market
than upon the
manufactory—
there seems to be
a perpetual air of
Sunday hovering
over the town.
The very visitors
—and they are
many—move
soberly about the
streets, and
appear to have
become imbued
with the spirit of
the place. No one
can be many
minutes in
Hereford without ROSS CHURCH (p. 136).
detecting that not
only the people
but the very buildings take their key from the grand cathedral that, calmly
gazing into the face of Time, has seen of men and houses generations come
and generations go.
Hereford as an ecclesiastical centre is one of the most ancient in Great
Britain, but until the commission of Offa’s grievous crime it must have been
comparatively unimportant, with a small wooden structure for a church.
Offa’s perfidy changed all that. It will be remembered that the ruthless
prince treacherously induced Ethelbert, King of the East Angles, to visit his
Court, where he had him foully murdered, and buried in the church. Offa, of
course, then seized Ethelbert’s crown. Having secured this, and being safely
installed in the place of his murdered guest, he found time to repent; and
that his repentance might seem the more real, he endowed with great riches
the church in which lay the body of his victim, and soon the wooden

building gave place to a stone edifice. No doubt the king’s offerings greatly
assisted in founding Hereford on a solid ecclesiastical basis, but the effect
of his gifts was evanescent, compared with the value of his victim’s bones,
as an attraction to the devout. Ethelbert’s remains had not long been buried
in the cathedral ere they began to work miracles, and soon great numbers of
people from near and from afar sought the good saint’s assistance, so that
great riches flowed to the church and town; and from that day to this
Hereford has continued to prosper.
For two hundred years the church built over the bones of Ethelbert stood,
before the Welsh, as has been told, laid the place in ruins. In 1079 Bishop
Robert of Lorraine began to rebuild, and the work was not completed until
early in the sixteenth century. This is the building—many times restored—
that stands to the present day. More than a hundred years ago (in 1786) the
western tower collapsed, bringing down with it most of the west front, and
this, as well as many other parts of the cathedral, was rebuilt.
Inside the cathedral are many interesting monuments of men who played
large parts in the history of England, and, besides these, the cathedral has a
unique treasure in the far-famed “Mappa Mundi,” a production of one De
Haldingham, who lived in the fourteenth century. This map, if not the
oldest, is at least one of the very oldest in the world. Havergal says of it:
“The world is here represented as round, surrounded by the ocean. At the
top of the map is represented Paradise, with its rivers and trees; also the
eating of the forbidden fruit and the expulsion of our first parents. Above is
a remarkable representation of the Day of Judgment, with the Virgin Mary
interceding for the faithful, who are seen rising from their graves, and being
led within the walls of Heaven. The map is chiefly filled with ideas taken
from Herodotus, Solinus, Isidore, Pliny, and other ancient historians. There
are numerous figures of towns, animals, birds, and fish, with grotesque
customs such as the mediæval geographers believed to exist in different
parts of the world. The four great cities are very prominent—Jerusalem as
the centre of the world; Babylon, with its famous tower; Rome, the capital
of the world ... and Troy.... In Great Britain most of the cathedrals are
mentioned, but of Ireland the author seems to have known very little.” Truly
a wonderful record of the geographical knowledge of the Middle Ages!
Hereford was the birthplace of Nell Gwynne, orange-seller, actress, and
Court favourite—short, red of hair or nearly so, and with feet so small as to

cause general amusement. The street in which she was born is now called
Gwynne Lane, and the place is still pointed out to tourists who are
interested in the story of the famous beauty. David Garrick also was born in
the city.
Before leaving Hereford, it may be worth while to note that here, as at
many other places, it was once the custom to insert a clause in the
indentures of apprentices “that they should not be compelled to live on
salmon more than two days in the week.” Needless to say, no such clause is
now necessary. In 1234 the wolves became so numerous about the outskirts
of the city, that a proclamation called upon all the king’s liege people to
assist in destroying them.
And now leaving the cathedral city, our river flows under the Wye Bridge,
built so long ago as 1490, with six noble arches, and proceeds on its way
towards Ross. Four miles below Hereford, the most important of all the
tributaries that spill their floods into the winding Wye is met with. This is
the Lug, which itself absorbs the waters of several smaller rivers on its way
southwards. The meeting of the Lug with the Wye takes place at the little
village of Mordiford, where once upon a time an enormous serpent, winged
and awful, used to betake itself from feasting upon men and women and
little children to drink of the waters of the Wye. This terrible serpent was
destroyed by a malefactor, who was offered a pardon should he accomplish
the task of ridding the good people of the sore pest; and it is sad to learn
that in killing the serpent he inhaled so much of its poisonous breath that he
died almost at the same time as the monster he had brought low. But the
results of a later event, almost as important, and awe-inspiring, are to be
seen not far from this part of the Wye. They are known as “The Wonder,” a
mile and a half from Woolhope, in a parish which, one would think, should
be called Miracle, but is really called Marcle. To best describe what “The
Wonder” is, we will quote Sir Richard Baker’s “Chronicles of England” as
follows:—“In the thirteenth year of Queen Elizabeth a prodigious
earthquake happened in the east part of Herefordshire, at a little town called
Kinnaston. On the 17th of February, at six o’clock in the evening, the earth
began to open, and a hill, with a rock under it, making at first a great
hollowing noise which was heard a great way off, lifted itself up and began
to travel, bearing along with it the trees that grew upon it, the sheepfolds,
and flocks of sheep abiding there at the same time. In the place from

whence it was first moved it left a gaping distance 40 foot broad and
fourscore ells long: the whole field was about twenty acres. Passing along,
it overthrew a chapel standing in the way, removed a yew-tree planted in the
churchyard from the west to the east; with the like force it thrust before it
highways, sheepfolds, hedges, the trees; made tilled ground pasture, and
again turned pasture into tillage. Having walked in this sort from Saturday
evening till Monday noon, it then stood still.” Surely, this is a record, even
in the land of Saturday-to-Monday trips!

SYMOND’S YAT (p. 140).

THE FERRY, SYMOND’S YAT.

Between Hereford and Ross the Wye flows quietly, and without many
striking features, either as regards the scenery or the stream itself. Upon its
breast float pleasure-boats in great numbers, although in the dry season of
the year, unless the midmost channel is rigidly adhered to, numbers of
shallows interrupt the passage even of skiffs of light draught, for the river
occasionally spreads out to a great surface, and runs proportionately
shallow over rock and gravel. Indeed, it is not until the ancient town of
Ross is reached that the Wye becomes a general favourite with the floating
population.
Ross, as seen from the surrounding country, appears to be standing a-tiptoe,
trying to touch the sky with the tip of its beautiful spire. The church with its
slender spire attracts the eye from a great distance—it is, to all appearances,
the one prominent object in all the country round about—and the first sight
of it has caused travellers to sigh, for to see it for the first time is to be a
long, long way from it. Here in this tiny town of Ross lived and died a man
whose name is known, one might say, not at all, but whose descriptive
appellation, given to him whilst he was still alive, will be recognised the
world over. This is John Kyrle, “The Man of Ross.”

MONMOUTH (p. 141).

The history of the town of Ross is principally a mass of details, authentic
and apocryphal, regarding the life, times, and labours, the recreations,
walks, works, and ways of “The Man of Ross.” Few places are so entirely
given up to the memory of one man as is Ross to the memory of John
Kyrle. Everywhere in that quaint and clean little town, “The Man of Ross,”
in some form or other, meets the eye. Here his favourite walk, there the park
he gave to the people, again the pew in which he worshipped, the house in
which he lived, the buildings he reared, the streets he made—everything
tells of John Kyrle. He was born in the year 1637, and was educated at
Balliol College, Oxford, where is still to be seen a silver tankard bearing his
name. As this tankard holds five pints, it is to be inferred that the student
who was to become “The Man of Ross” was a lusty drinker, although in
after-life he proved himself to be a man of abstemious habits. His long life
—he died aged eighty-eight—was devoted to doing good to all whom he
could help, improving not only man but town and country as well:—
“But all our praises why should lords engross?
Rise, honest Muse! and sing the Man of Ross:
Pleased Vaga echoes through her winding bounds,
And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds.
Who hung with woods yon mountain’s sultry brow?
From the dry rock who bade the waters flow?
Not to the skies in useless columns tost,
Or in proud falls magnificently lost,
But, clear and artless, pouring through the plain,
Health to the sick, and solace to the swain.
Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows?
Whose seats the weary traveller repose?
Who taught the heaven-directed spire to rise?
‘The Man of Ross,’ each lisping babe replies.”

So says Pope in his “Moral Essays,” and, in saying this and much more
about the good man, scattered the fame of John Kyrle far and wide. It is
pleasant to know that a man who showed himself so solicitous that others
should taste of enjoyment was able himself to take great delight in simple
things. “He dearly loved a goose,” says Leitch Ritchie, “and was vain of his
dexterity in carving it. During the operation, which he invariably took upon
himself, he always repeated one of those old sayings and standing
witticisms that seem to attach themselves with peculiar preference to the
cooked goose. He never had roast beef on his table save and except on

Christmas day, and malt liquors and good Hereford cyder were the only
beverages ever introduced.”
The good man’s bones rest in Ross Church, the spire of which he had
repaired; and to this day are shown the trees that have forced a way through
chinks in the wall and floor of the building, so that their branches and
leaves might droop as though in the attitude of mourning over his grave.
From the churchyard there is to be had a magnificent view of the Wye
sweeping in a great curve far below, the waters hastening on to lose
themselves in the Severn. From Ross to the mouth of the Wye, those who
can afford the time should make the journey by boat. It will be well to
discard the use of adjectives and exclamations in taking this trip, for the
most gifted in the use of these parts of speech will speedily find themselves
at their wits’ end for words to express their admiration of the scenery.

Photo: R. Tudor Williams, Monmouth.
THE MONNOW BRIDGE AND GATE-HOUSE, MONMOUTH (p. 141).

Midway between Ross and Monmouth stands Goodrich Castle, grandly
seated upon a steep, heavily-wooded hill—a castle built so long ago that the
memory of its beginning is lost, in the haze of ancient days. During the
Civil War it was besieged and at length successfully stormed by the
Roundheads, in 1646. It is in form a parallelogram, having a tower at each
angle, and a keep in the south-west part of the enclosure; and, viewed from
the Wye, it is a splendid ruin, trees that cling to the face of the cliffs
heightening the effect of the picture. The Wye, flowing swiftly, soon sweeps
one’s boat round its many bends, until the district known as the Forest of
Dean is reached, lying between the Wye and the Severn. Striking scenes of
stream and forest-clad cliffs, of castles and courts, of abbeys haunted by
memories of events rich in historical interest, now follow one another as
rapidly as changes in a kaleidoscope. Courtfield claims the honour of being
the place where Henry V. was nursed; and there is a cradle to substantiate
the claim. After passing Mailscot Wood, the river forms itself into a loop
like an elongated horseshoe. On one side of the narrow neck of land are the
famous Coldwell Rocks, the beginning of the great limestone cliffs that,
onward to the sea, hem in the stream, and carry on their rugged sides
clinging woods and ivy. Rains and storms have beaten these Coldwell
Rocks into fantastic shapes, until to the traveller who first sets eyes upon
them they seem to be castles cut out of stone by a race of mighty giants.
“Castles and towers, amphitheatres and fortifications, battlements and
obelisks, mock the wanderer, who fancies himself transported into the ruins
of a city of some extinct race.”[8]

TINTERN ABBEY, FROM THE WYE (p. 145).

Anyone who has seen the beauty of both the Moselle and the Wye must be
struck by the similarity between the two rivers. The Moselle, to be sure, is
in every way more important than the Wye—in depth and breadth of
stream, in height of the bluffs that at many points form the banks, and in the
number of castles that crown the hills; but, notwithstanding these
differences, they might almost be called twin rivers. There are no neatly-
trimmed vineyards sloping down the sides of the Wye heights, but, on the
other hand, the Moselle cannot show such grand forests as can the English
stream. And each river, at least once in its course, doubles back upon itself,
so that the spectator can trace the loop, and see the stream flowing far
beneath on either hand. At Symond’s Yat, a little below Coldwell Rocks, the
neck of land that divides the Wye from itself is only some 600 yards across;
and by standing on the rocky plateau, one may see the river flowing by on
both sides. The prospect, one of the finest in all England, embraces large
parts of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Monmouthshire, including

Coppet Hill, Huntsham, Rocklands, Whitchurch, Goodrich Castle, Coldwell
Rocks, the Forest of Dean, Courtfield, and—it is difficult to escape this—
the spire of Ross Church.
In hurrying between
these gigantic cliffs,
and sweeping round the
loop, it is only natural
that the Wye, born with
a turbulent disposition,
should have many
savage encounters with
the rocks; and, now
grown so mighty, the
waters roar their anger
in deep-lunged notes.
Many obstacles impede
the course of the
stream, for storms still
continue occasionally
to hurl great masses of
rock from their
positions; and
altogether, were one to
be given the choice of
seeing only one part of
the Wye, Symond’s Yat
should be the chosen
spot.
Passing between Lords
Wood and Lady-Park
Wood and skirting THE NAVE, TINTERN ABBEY.
Greatwood and
Newton Court, the Wye
arrives at Monmouth. Encircled by hills, and itself seated high, this town,
still unspoiled by the modern builder and restorer, occupies a position
between the Wye and the Monnow. Monmouth has had its ups and downs;

for long before the Conquest a fortress existed here, and to build a castle
has ever been to invite a siege. In the days of Henry III. the castle was
levelled with the ground so effectively that Lambarde writes: “Thus the
glorie of Monmouth had clean perished; ne hade it pleased Gode longe after
in that place to give life to the noble King Henry V., who of the same is
called Henry of Monmouth.” John of Gaunt lived here, and Henry IV. also,
and, as the ancient writer says, Henry V. was born in the castle. This event
has not been forgotten, for a statue of the popular king stands opposite the
Town Hall in Agincourt Square, the centre of the town. In more ancient
days Monmouth was a walled town, and one of the four gates of the wall
still stands; and a bridge built in 1272, remarkably narrow, but sturdy and
strong, still spans the Monnow; while the meagre ruins of the castle look
down from the brow of the river-cliff on the meadows by this tributary
stream. St. Mary’s Church has a spire 200 feet in height; St. Thomas’s
Chapel, dating from the days of the Normans, stands in the centre of the
part of the town which used to be given up to the making of the renowned
Monmouth cap, of which Fuller, in his “Worthies,” says: “These were the
most ancient, general, warm, and profitable coverings of men’s heads in this
island. It is worth our pains to observe the tenderness of our kings to
preserve the trade of cap-making, and what long and strong struggling our
State had to keep up the using thereof, so many thousands of people being
thereby maintained in the land, especially before the invention of fulling-
mills, all caps before that time being wrought, beaten, and thickened by the
hands and feet of men, till those mills, as they eased many of their labour,
outed more of their livelihood.” Not far from the parish church is the
picturesque remnant of a Benedictine priory, founded in the reign of Henry
I. by Wyhenoe, third Lord of Monmouth; and here it is not improbable that
Geoffrey of Monmouth, compiler of the fabulous “History of the Britons,”
out of which grew the Poem of the Table Round, was educated.
The Monnow, which flows into the Wye below Monmouth, has for its chief
tributary the Dore, which winds its way through that delightful region
known far and wide as the Golden Valley. This valley is fitly styled Golden,
though it has received its designation from a mistaken derivation of its
name, which means “water”—that and nothing more—being but a form of
the Welsh dwr. Round it ring the hills, not bald and craggy, nor morass-
bound, but gentle and lush and green, for the valley lies just out of the grip
of the mountainous districts of Wales. Here the fields are fresh, the

undulations
capped with
glorious trees,
and the whole
valley is
chequered with
tints; for it is a
region rich of
soil, and highly
cultivated. One
of the most
interesting places
on the banks of
the stream is the
little village of
Abbey Dore,
where is the
remnant of an
ancient abbey,
now forming the
parish church. It
was begun for
the Cistercians,
by Robert of
Ewias, in the
reign of Henry I.,
but was only
finished in the
days of the third
Henry. Not less
GATEWAY AT CHEPSTOW. attractive to the
antiquary is the
tiny Norman
church of Kilpeck, celebrated for the richness of its decorations. Near by
there once stood a castle, but of this nothing now remains but the mound, a
deep moat, and fragments of the walls.

Another tributary of the Monnow is the Honddu, which flows down through
the Vale of Ewias, past the ruins of Llanthony Priory. This famous house
seems to have been founded in the early years of the twelfth century by
William de Lacy, a Norman knight, and Ernisius, chaplain to Maud, wife of
Henry I. At first it had a prosperous career, but the wild Welshmen soon fell
upon it, and the Prior and his brethren were forced to betake themselves to
the more peaceable regions of Gloucestershire. When men and times
became quieter, however, the monks returned. The remains of the Priory are
still beautiful. In 1809 Walter Savage Landor purchased the estate on which
they stand, and set about making great improvements. Mr. Colvin, in his
“Landor,” says: “He imported sheep from Segovia, and applied to Southey
and other friends for tenants who should introduce and teach improved
methods of cultivation. The inhabitants were drunken, impoverished, and
morose: he was bent upon reclaiming and civilising them. The woods had
suffered from neglect or malice: he would clothe the sides of the valley with
cedars of Lebanon. With that object, he bought two thousand cones,
calculated to yield a hundred seeds each, intending to do ten times as much
afterwards, and exulting in the thought of the million cedar-trees which he
would thus leave for the shelter and the delight of posterity.” All Landor’s
schemes, however, came to nought. Before long he found himself in
embarrassed circumstances: Llanthony was, by arrangement, taken out of
his hands and vested in those of trustees, and his half-built mansion was
pulled down.
A little below Monmouth the Trothey, a much smaller stream than the
Monnow, also joins the Wye. The banks from Monmouth onwards to the
sea are steep and well wooded, and for the greater part of the way a
splendid and well-kept road winds along the side of the right bank. Far
below, the river is continually appearing and disappearing; and the trees dig
their feet into the rocks and seem precariously to cling as they dip down
towards the stream. Occasionally a cliff more than usually near to the
perpendicular has managed to ward off the encroaching growths of forest
and bush and ivy, and to stand bold-faced to the sun; but generally there is
foliage to make more refreshing to the sight the precipitous banks.
Rivers have ever attracted to their banks poets, who of all men most closely
search the heart of Nature in her peaceful and gentle moods; but few
streams have enjoyed the good fortune of the Wye to have their very spirit

caught and shaped into imperishable verse. Wordsworth’s noble poem,
“Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks
of the Wye during a tour, July 13th, 1798,” breathes the inmost soul of river
and hills, and of the tranquil, meditative atmosphere that fills the glorious
valley. No poet has held his ear so close to Nature’s bosom as Wordsworth,
and in these lines he has pictured and glorified the Wye as no pen may hope
to picture and glorify it again. To quote but the opening score of lines:—
“Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain springs
With a sweet inland murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
Among the woods and copses, nor disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!”

Meditation, contemplation, serenity, each not unmixed with pathos, are the
keynotes of this part of the Wye valley; and our river would have done well
enough if not another poet had ever afterwards sung of its banks and flood.
But this was not to be its fate: for has not Tennyson told us in “In
Memoriam” how “half the babbling Wye” is hushed by the Severn, whose
mightier tide drives back its flood?—

“The Wye is hushed, nor moved along,
And hushed my deepest grief of all
When filled with tears that, cannot fall
I brim with sorrow drowning song.
“The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.”

It is at the Bargain Pool, past the pretty village of Llandogo, that the Severn
tide is first met. Now, although the scenery is sublime, there can be no
gainsaying that the rise and fall of the tide mars the beauty of the Wye.
Instead of the clear mountain water, the stream is turbid, and at low tide the
banks present great stretches of soft mud. For the first time the stream now
takes on a commercial aspect, lazy barges floating up and down, and a few
enterprising little steamers making their cautious way round the sharp
bends.

Photo: Harvey Barton, Bristol.
CHEPSTOW CASTLE (p. 146).

But forgetting the blemish, if blemish it be, the traveller can set his thoughts
upon and his face towards one of the most inspiring of all the ancient
memorials of England’s past, the home of the Cistercian monks dedicated to
the Virgin Mary—Tintern Abbey. Coming round a bend in the river one
catches sight of the beautiful ruin with startling suddenness. It stands close
by the waterside, on what was once a meadow stretching away from the
Wye. Here the hills rise in a complete circle, and nestling in the midst of

this amphitheatre is the abbey, a ruin, it is true, yet not so mutilated by the
hand of Time as to make it impossible or even difficult at this day to
imagine it as it stood in all its completeness and beauty. Whether Tintern,
unspoiled by Time and neglect, was as impressive as it is in its decay,
though the greenest of green grass now grows on the floor once trodden by
the white-robed monks, and the rooks sit in a jet-black line on the top of the
roofless walls—one may very well doubt. Those who have passed even a
day in and about the ancient abbey will find it easy to believe that its history
is one of serenity and peace. The hills that ring it round stand like a cordon
of mighty giants to beat back all worldliness that would enter the charmed
circle. The very air hangs heavy and still, and the river, forgetting its wild
youth and stormy middle age, passes by, if one might so describe it, with
bared head and hushed breath. Here for hundreds of years lived successive
generations of monks, having little, wanting little, passing their days in the
deepest peace and solitude; and though they have long since vanished, they
have left behind them what is perhaps the finest monastic ruin in the
kingdom.
Shortly after the dawn of the twelfth century one Walter de Clare founded
Tintern for Cistercian monks, and in the thirteenth century a lord of
Chepstow, Roger de Bigod, built the abbey. Cruciform in shape, it was 228
feet in length, 70 feet high, and 37 feet in breadth, with transepts 150 feet
long. When King Henry VIII. took possession of the monasteries, he
allowed this to fall into rapid decay, and at length presented it to the Earl of
Worcester. The ruins now belong to the Duke of Beaufort, and they are
watched and guarded from further decay with admirable vigilance, each
particular stone being carefully noted, and every moulded arch and
mullioned window—indeed, the very ivy and grass—receiving close
attention. The magnificent eastern window, 64 feet in breadth, is but one
feature of a ruin that attracts multitudes of visitors to the valley of the Wye.
Between Tintern and the little metropolis of the lower Wye, Chepstow, duty
to one’s sense of sight requires him to scale the summit of Wyndcliff. Once
on top, nine counties, according to Bevan, can be seen—to wit, Gloucester,
Somerset, Wilts, Devon, Glamorgan, Monmouth, Brecknock, Hereford, and
Worcester. Not only for the curiosity of a prospect which in its sweep takes
in so many shires, but also for the beauty of the view, this ascent of the
Wyndcliff should not be missed. For an exquisite blending of rock and

river, forests, mountains, and plain, towns and villages, ruins and
farmhouses, roads like white-silk threads blown upon the face of the land,
black railways, drifting ships, it is not too much to say that the finest views
in all the land can do no more than claim to be its peer.
After we have passed on the left Llancaut and on the right Pierce Woods,
the sturdy old town of Chepstow comes into view. The castle, from the
river, seems to have grown out of the living rocks, which here rise sheer
from the water to a great height, and form a natural defence that must have
rendered the fortress impregnable to all attack from the water. Supposed to
have been built in the eleventh and rebuilt in the thirteenth century, it
experienced its most stirring times in the days of the Civil War. It was held
by the Royalists; and there first appeared before it Colonel Morgan, who,
with singular valour and determination, carried it by assault. Later on Sir
Nicholas Kemys successfully surprised the place, which action brought
before the battlements Cromwell himself, who, however, could not spare
the time personally to direct the operations. His substitute, Colonel Ewer,
with great skill conducted the siege, and ultimately forced the king’s men to
throw open the gates.

VIEW FROM THE WYNDCLIFF.

OLD MONASTERY ON THE WYE.

Several parts of an ancient wall that once surrounded Chepstow still remain,
with the watch-towers complete; and one gate dating from the sixteenth
century—the Town Gate—still stands, a curious archway across the
principal street, a thoroughfare that slopes steeply down to the Wye. A
church of great antiquity is Chepstow Church, built in the days of the
Normans, and containing several monuments of unusual interest, with the
grave of Henry Marten, one of the signatories of King Charles’s death-
warrant, who spent many long years as a prisoner in Chepstow Castle. One
of the towers of the castle is called Marten’s Tower, an unintended
commemoration of the Roundhead’s imprisonment within its walls.

Bidding a final good-bye to towns and tributaries, but still retaining its
rugged banks and, in a measure, its stately woods, the Wye makes straight
for the sea, where this child of the mountains, after swallowing the largess
brought down to it by a score of smaller streams, is itself, in turn,
swallowed in the greater flood of the Severn. To the very last, however, the
Wye retains its individuality and character—picturesque ever, picturesque
to the end. From its fount on Plinlimmon to the end of its course of a
hundred and thirty miles, where it gracefully rolls into the broad estuary, it
has scarcely ever, even for a mile, been commonplace.
E. W. SABEL.

NEAR THE SOURCE OF THE USK, TALSARN-SIDE.

THE USK.
The Black Mountains—Trecastle—The Gaer—Brecon—The Brecknock Beacons—Crickhowell—
Abergavenny—Usk—Caerleon and the Arthurian Legend—Christchurch—Newport.

T HE wild and inclement Black Mountains, “Fforest Fawr,”
between Carmarthenshire and Brecknockshire, collect the first
drops that, trickling down the side of the hills, gather volume
and strength and in time become rivers that are the delight and
pride of a country. Three springs, clear and tiny, away up the
dark mountain side, where Talsarn towers to an altitude of
more than 2,500 feet, are the fountain-heads of a river that,
after an extended course of seven-and-fifty miles in the general shape of a
bow, joins the sea at Newport—the USK.[9] Not far away are the sources of
many another river—the Tawe and the Neath, to name but two; but of all
the streams that are born in this cheerless region the Usk is by far the most
important.
Hurrying on its way with the leaps and falls that are characteristic of
mountain streams, our river is first joined by the Henwen brook, a tiny
stream that has the honour of forming a part of the boundary-line between
two shires. Beyond the wooded vale of Cwm Wysc the Usk receives the
Hydfer, and at length comes to Trecastle, once a place of rare show and
importance, but now modest enough in all conscience. Here may still be
seen a mound and large earthworks of Bernard Newmarch’s Castle. Below
this village the Usk receives the waters of Drayton’s “Cray,” the first stream
of real importance that flows into the greater river; and, after leaping a
ledge of rock in a beautiful fall, continues its way through a tract of country
once the hiding-place of a swarm of determined robbers and outlaws—the
Forest of Brecon. At one time this region lay at the mercy of these

desperadoes; and it seems to have been necessary for Edward III. to build
castles for the protection of people compelled to journey through the forest.
Henry IV. sojourned in one of these fortresses in 1403, and thence issued a
general pardon to all the rebels who would cease from troubling; but the
chances are that this wild and well-nigh inaccessible district offered more
attractions to the turbulent robbers than did the prospect of hard and honest
work, coupled with the king’s pardon. The Usk now receives a goodly
contribution from the Yscir; and between the two streams are the remains of
a Roman camp, the Gaer, rectangular in form and believed to have been in
command of Ostorius Scapula. The ruins of this fort are remarkably well
preserved, the walls in places standing six feet high, although partly
overgrown with bush. Many valuable coins and other curiosities belonging
to the Roman period have here been excavated. Inclining to the south, the
Usk now flows through a lovely bit of wooded country, and reaches the
village of Llanspyddid, where an attractive view is to be had of the river,
still in its youth, running with merry song over shallows and between high
picturesque banks.
Brecon, occupying a highly picturesque situation, is the first place of any
importance that the Usk comes to in its flight from the mountains. Two
streams join the river at this point, the Tarel and the Honddu; and, as the
town is ringed completely round with high mountains, it may be said to lie
in the bottom of a huge bowl. Near by, the Beacons, twin peaks, the highest
mountains in South Wales, tower to the sky, and add grandeur to the beauty
of the neighbouring hills. In the reign of good Queen Bess, Churchyard was
moved to verse at the sight of Brecon and its surroundings. Thus he sings:
—
“The towne is built as in a pit it were
By waterside, all lapt about with hill;
You may behold a ruinous castle there,
Somewhat defaste, the walles yet standeth still.
Small narrowe streetes through all the towne ye have,
Yet in the same are sundrie houses brave;
Well built without, yea trim and fayre within,
With sweete prospect, that shall your favour win.
The river Oske and Hondie runnes thereby,
Fower bridges good, of stone stands on each streame.”

Though a town of great antiquity, Brecon, when compared with many
places in Wales, is almost modern, for it seems to have first come into
prominence in the days of the Normans, who out of the ruins of the old
Roman fortress already referred to built the first stronghold here. It was, of
course, a walled town, with ten turrets and five gates, and traces of this old
wall still exist. The castle was a strong one, occupying a commanding
position. In one of its towers Morton, Bishop of Ely, lay in prison, given
into the custody of the Duke of Buckingham by Richard III., who was
jealous of the bishop’s power; and here the gaoler and prisoner, neither of
them well disposed towards the king, plotted to marry Henry of Richmond
with the Lady Elizabeth, and thus heal the breach between the rival houses
of York and Lancaster. So Morton was allowed to escape, while
Buckingham, marching against the king, fell into his enemy’s hands and
lost his head at Salisbury. The Castle of Brecon met its fate in sorry manner.
When the great Civil War broke out, and king and Parliament came to
blows, the people of the town, fearing that the fortress would be garrisoned
by one party or the other, and that the place would be besieged and
themselves visited with all the danger and suffering that waits upon active
war, took matters into their own hands by demolishing the stronghold, of
which only some ivy-clad walls, with the Ely tower, now remain,
overlooking the Honddu. Charles I., in his feverish flight, after the
disastrous battle of Naseby, put up for a time at Priory House; and in a
humble hostelry in High Street, then known as “The Shoulder of Mutton,”
Mrs. Siddons, queen of actresses, was born in 1755, her parents being
temporarily resident here.
The chief glory of the town in these days is the Priory Church of St. John,
founded by Bernard Newmarch, in the reign of Henry I., in the hope of
atoning for the murders and other crimes that he had committed in hewing
his way to the place of power he occupied in this part of Wales. It is a
building of unusual interest, predominantly Norman in style, but with Early
English and Decorated additions. Another feature of Brecon is the massive
bridge of seven strongly buttressed arches which spans the Usk.
Taking a south-easterly direction, the Usk flows away from the county
town, and soon receives a tiny river that comes from the towering heights of
the Beacons, locally called “Arthur’s Chair,” and forming one of the finest
of the sights which Wales offers to her lovers. “Artures Hille,” says Leland,

“is three good Walche miles south-west from Brekenok, and in the veri
toppe of the hille is a faire welle spring. This Hille of summe is countid the
hiest Hille of Wales, and in a veri cleere day a mannne may see from hit a
part of Malvern hilles, and Glocester, and Bristow, and part of Devenshire
and Cornwale. There be divers other hilles by Artures Hille, the wich, with
hit, be communely caullid Banne Brekeniane.” Wood, in his “Rivers of
Wales,” declares that “the well here mentioned does not exist,” so that it
would have been better, perhaps, if Leland had done as Churchyard did,
who wrote of nothing he had not seen—if his verse is to be taken quite
literally. He says:—
“Nere Breaknoke Towne, there is a mountaine hye,
Which shewes so huge, it is full hard to clime.
The mountaine seemes so monstrous to the eye,
Yet thousands doe repayre to that sometime.
And they that stand right on the top shal see
A wonder great, as people doe report;
Which common brute and saying true may bee,
But since, in deede, I did not there resort,
I write no more, then world will witnesse well.”

From the Brecknock Beacons there is a truly remarkable view; and for
those unable or unwilling to climb, there is the sight of the mountains
themselves.

THE USK AT BRECKNOCK.

Continuing its course to the east and south, the Usk passes on, skirting
Bwlch, a mountain over which the main road runs, offering glimpses on one
hand of the valley of the Wye, and on the other of the valley of the Usk.
Presently, our stream passes by the meagre remains of Dinas Castle, which
had the honour of being stormed by Alfred the Great’s daughter, Ethelfleda,
and taken too, although garrisoned at the time by three-and-thirty valiant
Welsh women; for the men were all fighting far afield. Through a lovely
valley the Usk reaches its second town of consequence—Crickhowell. This
“preatie tounlet stondith as in a valley upon Wisk,” Leland says; and,
indeed, its situation on the north-east bank of the river is beautiful.

Whichever way one looks, the scenery is charming in its attractiveness and
rich in the romantic and the picturesque. Close to the Abergavenny road
stand the ruins of what once must have been a castle of very considerable
dimensions, which covered as much as eight acres of ground. Even in the
days of Elizabeth this castle was nothing more than a ruin. No great
distance from Crickhowell is the Well of St. Cenau, eagerly sought for by
the newly-married, for to drink its waters first was to secure command of
the house for life:—
“‘You drank of the well, I warrant, betimes,’
He to the countryman said;
But the countryman smiled as the stranger spoke,
And sheepishly shook his head.
‘I hasten’d as soon as the wedding was done,
And left my wife in the porch;
But, i’ faith, she had been wiser than me,
For she took a bottle to church.’”

Farther down stream is Llangattoc Park, with its roomy cave, known as
Eglwys Faen, “the stone church”; and beyond is Llangwryney, where
Richard, Earl of Clare, passing through the wood, preceded by pipers, was
set upon by the Welsh and murdered. Here the Gwryney joins the Usk,
which, flowing through scenery that has been called the “Garden of Wales,”
and passing from Brecknock into Monmouth, reaches the ancient town of
Abergavenny, lying in the shadow of the Sugar-Loaf Mountain at the
junction of the Usk and the Gavenny—“the brook that christneth
Abergeney.” As is the case with so many Welsh towns, Abergavenny is
wholly surrounded by high hills, but here the valley is spacious and fruitful.
Of this place Churchyard, whose poetry is met with at every turn, says:—
“Aborganie, behind I kept in store,
Whose seat and soyle with best may well compare.
The towne somewhat on steepe and mounting hill,
With pastor grounds and meddowes great at will:
On every side huge mountaines hard and hye,
And some thicke woods, to please the gazer’s eye.”

“Hard and hye” the mountains do rise and tower above the luxurious valley
of “pastor grounds.” Not so long ago all the streets of Abergavenny were
narrow and crooked, but of late years there has been a great display of

public enterprise.
Whether the
changes that
have been
effected are to be
regarded as
improvements is
questionable; for
with the
widening of the
thoroughfares
and the building
of a new town
hall and markets,
and so forth, the
individuality of a
town is apt to
disappear; but BIT OF THE ROMAN WALL AT CAERLEON (p. 155).
the residents may
be pardoned for
thinking themselves to be much better off than were their forefathers. To be
sure, the town has scanty remains of a castle rising from a tree-clad hill to
overlook the houses and the river. Part of the castle area is covered with
houses, and another part has been converted into public gardens. The
associations of the fortress are none of the noblest, for historians tell us that
“it was dishonoured by treason oftener than any other castle in Wales.” It
seems to have been the practice of the Norman lords of Abergavenny Castle
to invite neighbouring Welsh chiefs to feasts within the walls of the
stronghold, and then treacherously murder them. Wood tells of one of the
most dastardly of these deeds. “Soon after the murder of Trahaern Vechan,
at Slansavaddon lake, by William de Braose (lord of Abergavenny Castle),
the Welsh, inflamed with resentment and revenge, commanded by Sitsylt ap
Dyfnwald and other Welsh chieftains, surprised the Castle of Abergavenny,
and took the whole garrison prisoners. William de Braose recovered his
castle by composition; and after the reconciliation of the Welsh lords to
King Henry, A.D. 1175, he invited Sitsylt, his son Geofrey, and other men of
note to a feast, under pretence of congratulation upon the late peace; when,

contriving cause for dispute, he called upon his men, who were ready for
that purpose, and most treacherously murdered the unsuspicious and
unarmed Welsh; then proceeded to Sitsylt’s house, slew his son
Cadwallader in his mother’s presence, and, setting fire to the house, carried
her away to his castle.”
Once upon a time Abergavenny was noted for flannels, but this industry has
been wrested from it by more enterprising competitors, while the
manufacture of wigs, for which it was once noted, has succumbed to change
of fashion. St. Mary’s Church, a fine fourteenth-century church, occupying
the site of a Norman church which was attached to a Benedictine priory,
contains many ancient monuments, amongst others that of Sir Richard
Herbert of Coldbrook, who, together with his brother, was beheaded, after
the Battle of Banbury, in 1469; and in the Herbert chapel is “a Jesse tree,”
of which Murray’s “Handbook” says that it is “perhaps one of the most
perfect extant.”
Leaving this lovely town, the Usk makes more directly for the sea. A few
miles away to the east, in the valley of one of its tributaries, are the ruins of
Raglan Castle, standing on a richly-wooded eminence not far from the
village of the same name. It was begun not earlier than the reign of Henry
V., and apparently not finished until the time of Charles I.; and so strong
was it that it had the distinction of being one of the last fortresses in the
kingdom to surrender to Cromwell’s men. It would be interesting to recall
the story of the siege which it endured, and to describe the lovely remains
of it; but it lies too far out of our course, and we must return to our river and
follow it through the pretty scenery it traverses to the town to which it has
lent its name. In days long gone by, Usk had to bear many a sore blow from
Owen Glendower, but now it has no more alarming invaders than the
placid, contemplative wielders of the rod—for here the Usk is famous for
its salmon and its trout. Standing upon a tongue of land formed by the
confluence of the Olwey with the main stream, Usk has been identified with
a Roman station; and though the evidences are external rather than internal,
the theory has been almost universally accepted of antiquaries. Of its castle,
occupying a commanding site near the river, and still retaining its outer
walls in very fair preservation, with the gateway, towers, and keep, the
precise origin is not known; but in the reign of Henry III. it was in the hands
of Robert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester. From this family it passed to the

Mortimers, Earls of March, and in the reign of Henry VI. was granted to
Richard, Duke of York, as nephew of the last of the Mortimers. It became a
favourite residence of this personage, and is believed to have been the
birthplace of Edward IV. and other princes. Of the scathe which Owen
Glendower had wrought at Usk we have already spoken, but it remains to
add that the citizens were at last avenged, for here he sustained a crashing
defeat and had to flee to the mountains.
Flowing beneath the ancient stone bridge shown in our view (page 156), the
river passes on, through scenery that is never less than pleasant, to
Caerleon, prettily placed on the right bank; and here the Usk takes toll of
the Afon. Caerleon is one of the most interesting spots in all this part of
Wales. Here was quartered the second Augustan legion, and this was the
principal Roman town in the country of the Silures. In those days it must
have been a place of great magnificence and refinement as well as of war,
for Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in the twelfth century, tells of the remains
of splendid palaces, baths, theatres, and other public buildings; and though
these have all vanished, an abundance of Roman relics has been unearthed,
which are treasured in a museum that has been built by an antiquarian
society; and bits of the wall are still to be seen in situ. But the legendary
associations of Caerleon are even more memorable than its history; for here
it was, according to one version of the Arthurian myth, that the British
prince, when, after the withdrawal of the legions, the land was laid waste by
the “heathen hosts” and by the warfare of the native princes—
“Thro’ the puissance of his Table Round
Drew all their petty princedoms under him,
Their king and head, and made a realm and reigned.”

Photo: A. Dunning, Usk.
USK (p. 155).

The Roman amphitheatre consists of a grassy hollow enclosed by a bank,
lying just outside the wall on the east; “Arthur’s Round Table” is a bank of
earth some sixteen feet high. There is no reason to doubt that after the
Roman era Caerleon became the centre of one of the British kingdoms. At a
later time it was “threatened by the fleet of Alfred, which, however, was
recalled home before making an attack. In early days it had its martyrs—St.
Julius and St. Aaron—and afterwards it became the seat of a bishopric,
which for some time enjoyed the honour of being the Metropolitan See of
Wales. After the Norman Conquest Caerleon was a frequent bone of
contention between the Welsh and the invaders, and was alternately taken
and retaken. A castle was built here by one of the Norman barons; but it was
not until the reign of Edward I. that the English obtained undisturbed
possession of the town, which, prior to the building of a castle at Newport,
was a place of considerable strategic importance.”[10]

Photo: Frith & Co., Reigate.
CAERLEON.

By this time the Usk has become a tidal stream with a rapidly widening
valley; and now it follows a devious course through rich meadows with
wooded hills on either hand. A tomb in Christchurch, on the road
connecting Caerleon and Newport, was long believed to have miraculous
powers of cure for sick children who touched the sepulchre on the eve of
the Ascension; and in 1770 as many as sixteen children were laid upon it to
pass the night. Newport, four miles from the mouth of the river, owes its
prosperity mainly to the great output of iron and coal from the interior of
Wales that comes here for shipment. It has many railways to wait upon it,
and its facilities in this kind have been greatly increased by the construction
of the Severn Tunnel; and it is also furnished with abundant dock
accommodation. Of the castle, built by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, a natural
son of Henry I., to command the Usk, some of the walls and towers still
remain, close to the famous bridge of five arches, reared at the beginning of
the century and widened and improved in 1866; but the greater part of the

stronghold has been either demolished or converted into business premises.
The record of the town is, for the most part, one of peace and commercial
development, and contains few episodes of violence, except the attack upon
it by the Chartists led by John Frost in the year 1839. The tower of the
church of St. Woollos, standing on an eminence overlooking the valley of
the Usk and the Bristol Channel, is said by Wood to have been built by
Henry III. in gratitude to the inhabitants of this place and surrounding
districts, who, by a victory over his enemies, relieved him from captivity.
Newport may not have great attractions to offer to the tourist, but in these
later days it has not been mindful only of money-making, as one may see
from the many public buildings with which it has provided itself.

Photo: Hudson.
THE BRIDGE AND CASTLE.

Leaving Newport, the Usk wanders through a plain of no particular interest,
scenically speaking, and almost at its embouchure is joined by the river
Ebbw, which, rising on the border of Brecknockshire in two headstreams
that unite near Llanhilleth, has run a course some twenty-four miles long.
Thus reinforced, Usk merges itself in the larger life of the Bristol Channel.
E. W. SABEL.

THE BRECKNOCK BEACONS, FROM THE TAFF.

RIVERS OF SOUTH WALES.
Brecknock Beacons—The TAFF: Taff Fawr and Taff Fechan—Cardiff Reservoirs—Merthyr—The
Dowlais Steel and Iron Works—The Rhondda—Pontypridd—Castell Coch—Llandaff and its
Cathedral—Cardiff and its Castle. The NEATH: Ystradfellte—The Mellte and its Affluents—The
Cwm Porth—Waterfalls and Cascades—The Sychnant—Pont Neath Vaughan—Neath and its
Abbey—The Dulas and the Clydach. Swansea and its Docks—Morriston Castle—Swansea
Castle—The Mumbles and Swansea Bay. The TAWE: Craig-y-Nos—Lly-Fan Fawr. THE TOWY:
Ystradffin—Llandovery—Llandilo—Dynevor Castle—Carmarthen and Richard Steele—
Carmarthen Bar. The TAF: Milford Haven—Carew Castle—Pembroke Castle—Monkton Priory
—New Milford and Old Milford—Haverfordwest. The TEIFI: Strata Florida Abbey—Newcastle
Emlyn—Cenarth—Cardigan. The YSTWITH: The Upper Waters—Aberystwith.

T HE bold-headed, ruddy Brecknock Beacons and their
neighbouring heights of the Fforest Fawr are, between them,
to be held responsible for the nativity of three important
streams of South Wales: the Taff, the Neath, and the Tawe.
Not one of these streams is navigable, and they all have
courses trivial enough compared with the Severn, the Usk, or the Wye. They
are, however, quite strangely remarkable for their natural beauty, and for the
scars on their beauty due to the mineral wealth of the valleys they drain.
Nowhere in Great Britain is there more fascinating glen scenery or more
sequestered and picturesque waterfalls than on the Neath and its tributaries.
Yet Neath itself is a grimy town, and the river, which, ten miles to the north,
wins admiration from everyone, here flows discoloured amid ironworks and
coal mines, with all their ugly rubbish heaps. The Taff and the Tawe begin
among heather and bracken, loftily and crystal clear; and they end alike,
brown as canals in manufacturing districts, the one among the shipping of
Cardiff, and the other in the blackest and most forbidding part of Swansea.

LLANDAFF CATHEDRAL: THE WEST FRONT (p. 164).

In all Wales there is no finer little group of mountain-tops than the
Brecknock Beacons, as seen from the south. Pen-y-Fan, the highest summit,
stands 2,910 feet above sea-level, and 500 feet less above the town of
Brecon, some five miles to the north. The Beacons are an isolated society,
separated by the Usk and its valley from the Black Forest Mountains east,

and by the deep Glyn Tarel from the irregular mountain mass whence Tawe
springs to the light. Their bases lie set among charming pastoral nooks.
Above, they are good to see when autumn has made tawny the acres of their
bracken; and at the summits they vie with each other in the redness of their
precipices, that of Pen-y-Fan rightly winning the day with a sheer slide of
rock some 600 feet deep, at an angle of about 70 degrees.
Many are the legends that animate the Beacons. Enough if we believe with
certain of the bards that it was here, on Pen-y-Fan, that Arthur called his
chivalry together, and initiated the Order of the Knights of the Round Table.
In the land of the Red Dragon, centuries ago, there could be no higher
dignity than to be associated with him who was to appear for the glory of
Britain: “the lamp in darkness”:—
“In forest, mountain, and in camp,
Before them moved the Burning Lamp;
In blackest night its quenchless rays
Beckoned them on to glorious days.”

Photo: F. Bedford, by permission of Catherall & Pritchard, Chester.
LLANDAFF CATHEDRAL: THE NAVE AND CHOIR (p. 164).

Having clambered, not without considerable exertion, to Pen-y-Fan, the
traveller, if he feels thirsty, has but to turn his back to the north, face the
distant smoke clouds above the hills of Merthyr and Rhymney, and walk a
few yards down the western slope of the mountain. Here are two ice-cold
springs, the parents of baby rivulets. Below you see how briskly these
rivulets broaden and unitedly carry the pure water to the south. This is, in
fact, one of the two main sources of the Taff. The other also is on the
Beacons. The two streams, Taff Fawr and Taff Fechan (the “Great” and
“Little” Taff), run parallel, in respective glens, among heather and rocks, for
eight or ten miles, to join just above Merthyr. Pollution of all kinds comes
to the stream as soon as it is thus fully entitled to be called the Taff.
Even before Merthyr is reached, Taff Fawr has learnt something of the pains
and penalties of an industrial district. Ere it has run five miles from its
source, it falls into the hands of the Cardiff Corporation. Its valley is here a
characteristic mountain glen, with heathery solitudes on either side, and
little clefts among the heather by which nameless affluents bring their pure
tribute to the main stream. Houses there are none. But of a sudden, in all
this loneliness, you come to a huge dam built and building across the valley
from east to west, and beyond you perceive the goodly lake of which the
rising dam is to be the mighty northern boundary.
Yet farther south are other evidences of Cardiff’s great thirst. Our Taff is
again enclosed, and flows through a second reservoir, proceeding out of it
by a series of prepared waterfalls, not unpicturesque, though they have
artificial flagged beds and precise parapets. Here, however, one may almost
look one’s last at Taff the pellucid. The area of toil and sophistication is at
hand. Yet some four miles above Merthyr the river has one notable reach of
beauty. There is a ruined turnpike house to hint of the time of “Rebecca,”
when this part of Wales rose in arms and fought toll-bars as ancient Wales
fought the Normans of the Marches; and high above the wrecked house are
some precipitous limestone cliffs, with jackdaws always circling about their
crests. Taff lies in a deep bed here, with woods on the western slopes where
its waters wash them. It rose in the old red sandstone of the Beacons: it has

now come to the
carboniferous
limestone and to
the coal-
measures to
which South
Wales owes its
phenomenal
prosperity.
Merthyr would
be a pretty place
if it were not
sullied by smoke
beyond
redemption. The
hills, studded
with chimneys,
cumber each
other; and in all
the adjacent
RIVERS OF SOUTH WALES. hollows, high up
and low down,
are manufactories. The people wear clogs. As in other such busy centres,
they seem happy enough, and by no means tearful about the local
desecration of Nature. But it must be admitted that they are grimy, like their
environment.
Of all the large manufactories round Merthyr, those of the Dowlais Steel
and Iron Works, two miles away (a constant ascent), are the most
considerable. One may doubt, perhaps, if these are now the largest of their
kind in the world, but they are still very extensive. A recent report tells us
that they consist of eighteen blast furnaces, producing about 700 tons of
iron and 2,400 tons of steel rails per week, and that their collieries can lift
3,700 tons of coal daily. Founded about a hundred and fifty years ago, they
have been a staff of life to millions. Few sights of the kind are more
impressive than the manipulation here of the huge cruses of molten steel,
and the methodical treatment of the ores, which develop in a few hours into

red-hot steel rails from thirty to sixty yards long; or than the cutting of these
substantial rails into sections by a serrated disc which makes some 1,600
revolutions a minute.

The “Dowlais Lights,”
as they are called, flash
at times high over the
mountains to the north.
The landlord of the
little inn at Devynnock
called the writer out at
night to see them. “It’s
a sign of rain, for
certain,” he said.
Tradition locally lays
down this law; but
tradition often errs, and
on this occasion the
Dowlais lights, seen
here twenty miles
away, were, as it
chanced, the augurs of
a glorious autumnal
morrow.
From Merthyr
downwards Taff flows
fast, as if anxious to
reach the sea from the
uncomely rows of
colliers’ cottages which
rise so thickly above it.
It is still hedged about
by mountains, but the mountains are not now “things of beauty.” Quaker’s
Yard, Aberdare Junction, and Pontypridd are names of industrial value. At
each of these places, “coal” railways from lateral valleys join the Taff Vale
line. With these tributary railways descend tributaries for the Taff itself, the
river Rhondda (which itself bifurcates higher up into the Rhondda Fawr and
Fechan) being the most noteworthy for the volume of its water. The scenery
of these affluents is, like that of the Taff itself, imposing, with deep glens
and wooded dingles, but mercilessly cut about by capitalists.

Pontypridd deserves particular mention for the famous bridge which gives it
its name. In the words of a specialist, this bridge “is a perfect segment of a
circle, and stretches its magnificent chord of 140 feet across the bed of the
Taff, rising like a rainbow from the steep bank on the eastern side of the
river, and gracefully resting on the western—the beau idéal of architectural
elegance.” It is the supreme achievement of a local stonemason named
Edwards, who, a hundred and fifty years ago, devoted himself to the
construction of bridges much as a mediæval artist devoted himself to the
Madonnas of his canvases or to his crucifixes. South Wales owes much to
Edwards the bridge-builder: we shall meet with his work on the Towy and
the Teifi as well as here. In 1755 this “beau idéal of architectural elegance”
showed to better advantage than now, when it is surrounded by the common
buildings of a mining town; but it was never more useful than at present.
Hence, now wide in a shallow bed, and now narrow and rushing deeply
between high banks, gaily wooded in places and mere refuse-heaps in
others, Taff speeds towards Llandaff. Three or four miles ere it comes to
this tranquil spot, a striking crag is seen on its left bank, with glorious beech
woods clothing the steep red slopes of the rock. This is an historic spot:
Castell Coch, or the Red Castle. It is such a site as in Rhineland would at
one time have given a robber-baron a superb base for his depredations. As
such, in fact, it was utilised. We read how, in 1158, Ivor Bach of Castell
Coch descended upon Cardiff Castle and carried off the Earl and Countess
of Gloucester as prisoners: the event is set forth on canvas in the Cardiff
Town Hall. Nowadays the turret that rises above the topmost trees of the
crag tells of other exploits. Castell Coch belongs to the Marquess of Bute,
and it is here that the wine is grown which, in the opinion of some, is
convincing proof that England might, if she would, become a viniferous
country. In the Cardiff Exhibition of 1896 a stall was devoted to the sale of
Castell Coch wines.
But the graceful spire and tower of Llandaff soon appear, in the midst of
green meadows and lofty old trees, to tell of yet other aspirations, with the
myriad houses of expanding Cardiff beyond. Its name describes it: Llan-ar-
Daf, “the church on the Taff.” It has been spoken of “as the most ancient
episcopal see remaining on its original site in Great Britain.” The old
records go far to acclaim Llandaff as both venerable and ancient. Lucius,
the great-grandson of Caractacus, in the second century A.D., endowed, we

are told, four
churches from
the royal estates,
one being
Llandaff. A
bishop of
Llandaff is also
said to have died
a martyr in the
Diocletian
persecution. And
yet, with such
high
associations,
forty years ago
this cathedral
was the most
desolate and
THE PALACE GATEWAY, LLANDAFF (p. 166). neglected in the
land. As it
stands, it is
eloquent of the whole-hearted labours of two men, chiefly: Dean Conybeare
and Dean Williams. Previous to 1857, the cathedral was a picturesque ivied
ruin of Perpendicular tower and Early-English roofless walls, with a ghastly
eighteenth-century conventicle absorbing what is now half the nave and the
east end of the building. The grand old Norman doorways south, north-east,
and west, and also the tower, seemed to have outlived their vocation; and
the Norman arch of the interior, above the present altar—perhaps the finest
thing in Llandaff—was plastered up and totally expunged. The present
cathedral owes its origin to the Norman bishop Urban (1107–33), who was
dissatisfied with the church—28 feet long, 15 feet broad, and 20 feet high—
to the throne of which he had been raised; and its remarkable restoration to
the Llandaff architect, John Pritchard, of recent times. It can no longer be
described as, by Bishop Bull in 1697, “our sad and miserable cathedral.”
Alike within and outside it satisfies by its beauty and good order. The old
and the new are well blended here.

Photo: Alfred Freke, Cardiff.
CARDIFF CASTLE (p. 166).

As a village, Llandaff is now hardly aught except a flourishing suburb of
Cardiff. Still, it keeps its individuality, and declines to be incorporated with
the great invading town. The remains of the old episcopal palace and the old
market-cross consort amicably with the one or two single-storeyed thatched
cottages of the village square. The palace gateway has quite a baronial look,
but it leads to nothing of particular interest. Bishopscourt, the modern
palace, is a more cosy residence than that built by Bishop John de la Zouch
early in the fifteenth century, of which this gateway is the most conspicuous
relic.

Of Cardiff, what
can be said
adequately in
few words? It
began the
century with
about a thousand
inhabitants; in
1881 its
population was
82,671; and now
it is about double
as much. The
Romans had a
fort here, which
the Welshmen
Photo: Valentine & Sons, Dundee. called Caer Didi,
ST. MARY STREET, CARDIFF. or the fort of
Didius (Aldus
Didius): hence, Caerdydd and Cardiff. Fitzhamon the Norman, about 1095,
erected the castle, the substantial fragments of which adorn the grassy
courtyard of the mansion of the Marquess of Bute, who—more than
Morgan ap Rhys, or Fitzhamon, who dispossessed Morgan—may well be
called the lord of Cardiff. The prosperity of the present town began with the
canal and sea-lock, early in this century, which enabled Merthyr to send its
coal abroad; but it was guaranteed by the enterprise of the father of the
actual Marquess of Bute, who expended millions in the construction of
docks. Within the memory of men still living there was tidal mud close to
the stately, if bizarre, outer wall of the Marquess’s residence, with its glass-
eyed effigies of wild beasts perched on the stones. But the “Welsh
Metropolis,” as Cardiff loves to call itself, will not again see those times.
One cannot conscientiously say that there is much of romantic or even
artistic interest in this thriving town—the castle, with its Asiatic richness of
decoration, apart. But the place is at least interesting, in its acres of docks,
its prodigious machinery for the control of water-power and for the lading
of vessels, and even its long ugly road of mean houses connecting it with
the town of Bute Docks. This last is a cosmopolitan district. Coal is in

demand everywhere, and it is pre-eminently coal that Cardiff thrives on. In
1849, only 162,829 tons of it were exported hence; in 1895, the amount was
11,067,403 tons. One of the astonishing sights of the Docks is to see a
railway truck full of coal lifted by machinery as easily as if it were a penny
loaf, emptied into the hold of a ship, and then, in less than a minute, be
succeeded by another truck.

Photo: Mr. Francis Bedford, Camden Road, N.
THE DRAWING ROOM, CARDIFF CASTLE.

Cardiff has every incentive and determination to go ahead. St. Mary’s, the
main street, can boast of costly banks and hotels and a very great deal of
traffic. It is singularly noisy at night; and that also, we presume, is evidence
of the strong modern spirit of the place. The town in 1896 indulged in an
Exhibition on such a scale that its loss may be computed in scores of

thousands of pounds; but the Exhibition was an investment, and it is a proof
of Cardiff’s wealth that it can afford thus to cast expectantly so many
thousands upon the waters. The Marquess’s castle is as unique in its
splendour as is Cardiff among Welsh towns in its development. Of its
external towers, one, the Clock Tower (with many quaint, arrangements for
spectacular effect), is as modern as the residential part of the building. The
other, or Black Tower (though it is of white limestone), dates from early
times. It is also known as the Duke Robert Tower, because it was here that
Robert Duke of Normandy was, by his own brother, Robert of Gloucester,
son of Henry I., confined for many years.

IN THE VALE OF NEATH.

Taff has much to be proud of as it glides into the sea past the castle, though
it has, for miles and miles ere this, lost its crystal purity.

The river NEATH, like Taff, rises among lonely mountains, heather, bracken,
and the bracing winds of the uplands. The three summits of the Fforest
Fawr range—long-backed ridges, woeful to be lost upon—each give names
to the tributaries that flow from them, and at Pont Neath Vaughan form the
Neath river proper. Y-Fan-Nedd, Y-Fan-Llia, and Y-Fan-Dringarth thus
beget the Little Neath (the “dd” in Welsh being equivalent to our “th”), the
Llia, and the Dringarth. The two latter, after about five miles of
independence, join just above Ystradfellte, where another Castell Coch
reminds us that Wales had long ages of intestine and other strife ere she
gave up unfurling the Red Dragon on her hilltops. We are here in the “fiery
heart of Cambria,” where the rocks and morasses were such mighty
fastnesses for the brave Welshmen of old. But these times are long past, and
Cambria’s fiery heart may now be said to depend literally upon the fuel in
the bowels of the land.

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.

Hence to the much more grandiose ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of St.
Mary and the Holy Trinity, which also owed its origin to the same Richard
Grenville, is a walk of a mile or more—not a rural walk, by any means. You
may, if you will, take a tram-car thither, with collier-lads or their
womenfolk for your companions, and with black mud on the roadway. The
ruins stand close-girt by canals and mines and ironworks. Leland describes
the abbey as, in his day, the fairest in Wales; and in the year 1500 its glories,
and especially the sweetness of its convent bells, were bardic themes. Never
was there so abject a change; and yet, after the Dissolution, when it fell to
the lot of Sir Richard Cromwell, nephew of Henry VIII.’s minister and
great-grandfather of Oliver, it was for long an appreciated residence. The
white stone mullions of the many windows of the parts of the abbey added
by Sir P. Hoby, in 1650 or so, still gleam against the dark gritstone of the
walls.

OUTSKIRTS OF NEATH.

In spite of its sordid surroundings, however, Neath Abbey is not despicable.
The area of its ruins impresses; the jagged towering ends of the ivied walls
of its church, with daws croaking about them, and the long-desolate aisle,
tangled with coarse grass and brambles, are also impressive. The
ecclesiastics who sleep in Neath Abbey may be said to lie fathoms deep
under the accumulated soil. Not a trace of one of them remains above the
surface. The dark refectory of their convent, with its pillared roof, stands
pretty much as it did in the sixteenth century, and of itself would dignify the
ruins. But echo alone feasts in its damp, sombre hall. One remembers that it
was here our Edward II. sought shelter after his evasion of Caerphilly
Castle, and that it was a Neath monk who betrayed him into that terrible
custody of Berkeley Castle, where death awaited him; and, remembering
this, one is inclined to be sentimental, and to talk about the curse that
broods over the Neath Abbey ruins. In truth, however, smoke is the main
brooder here.

NORTH DOCK, SWANSEA (p. 174).

The river Neath glides on to its estuary by Briton Ferry, some two miles
distant from the town. Hills escort it right to the sea—not all with smoking
chimneys on them. The town is indeed quite uniquely hemmed round with
beauty, as well as ugliness. Up the valleys of the Dulas and the Clydach,
slim streams which join the Neath near its mouth, are nooks and recesses as
winsome as those of the Mellte itself; and once on the tops of the
mountains, in any direction, the pedestrian may readily forget coal and iron.

It is but seven or eight, miles from Neath to Swansea, where the TAWE
comes to its end, foully enough, amid ironworks and “coalers.” One may,
for convenience sake, make the journey, and later rise with the river to its
source. There is more satisfaction in seeing it gradually purify than in
watching its progress from pellucidity to pollution; from the sweet-aired
heather hills where Adelina Patti has fixed her quiet home, to the
sulphureous atmosphere of Landore and Hafod.
Sweyn’s Ea (Sweyne’s Eye or Inlet), Aber Tawe—or Swansea, as we
modern English call it—is not what it was when Sweyne the King and
Rover was wont to come hither as a base for his forays into the vales of
South Cambria. Still, it can, if it cares to, brag stoutly of its ancient
enlistment in the service of carbon. In 1305 it received a charter from
William de Brews (Breos), great-grandson of the famous Lord Marcher, “to
have pit coal.” That was beginning an industrial career early indeed. Four
centuries later, in 1709, its jurisdiction as a port extended from Oxwich, in
the Gower peninsula, to Chepstow—of course, including the then unborn
and unthought—of Cardiff. It began to smelt copper in 1564, thanks to a
charter given by Queen Elizabeth; and it is to copper and shipping, quite as
much as to its position at the mouth of a great coalfield (estimated still to
hold 19,200,000,000 tons of fuel underground), that Swansea owes its fine
fortunes and its population of about a hundred thousand.
It seems an ungracious thing to say, but Swansea is apparently somewhat
hampered by its antiquity. In the struggle for supremacy with Cardiff, it has
not had Cardiff’s free hand in the matter of laying out a new town; nor, one
may add, quite that powerful vigour of youth which carries all before it.
Hence, it has already been left behind. The Duke of Beaufort is not such a
potentate in Swansea as the Marquess of Bute in Cardiff; yet he stands to

this city somewhat like the Marquess to Cardiff. It was a Duke of Beaufort
who cut the first sod of the North Dock, or Town-Float, in 1852; and his
Grace has large representation in the Swansea Harbour Trust, which has
charge of the city’s port affairs. The late Lord Swansea, speaking on behalf
of this Corporation, once said: “Swansea, you may depend upon it, is
destined to become the Ocean Port of England.” Cardiff, at any rate, laughs
such words to scorn, and even a layman of England may be allowed to think
the prophecy over-sanguine. The North Dock has an area of 14 acres, and is
“connected with a half-tide basin of two and a half acres by a lock 160 feet
long and 50 feet wide, having at its seaward entrance gates of 60 feet, with
a depth of 23 feet over the sill at spring-tides and 16 feet at neaps.” This is,
of course, but one of Swansea’s docks, and by no means the most important
of them. Cardiff’s docks are undoubtedly finer than Swansea’s, with more
gigantic fitments.
Swansea, though ancient, possesses few relics of its past. The castle tower,
in the main street, with a clock set in it, is the chief of them. In the large hall
of the Royal Institution of South Wales—one of Swansea’s many
meritorious establishments—may be seen divers drawings and engravings
of the city one, two, and three centuries ago. In all of them the castle towers
stand up as if they still had the feudal faith strong in them. Green, pleasant,
wooded hills form the invariable background. How changed the landscape
now! The green hills are gone; cut bare and covered with mean mechanic
tenements or smoking manufactories. On the summit of the most
conspicuous of them are a few gaunt walls, which by night may, with the
help of a glamorous moon, come near being deceptively picturesque. This is
the so-called Morriston Castle, three miles north of the city, yet with the
black suburb of Morriston at its feet, an active contributant to Swansea’s
fortunes. The “castle’s” history is brief and ignominious. A hundred years
ago Sir John Morris, a maker of tin plates, who gives his name to the
suburb, erected a lofty and large building on this breezy hilltop, for the
accommodation of four-and-twenty of his workmen and their families.
Healthier homes these could not then have had within easy reach of their
daily labour. But the gradient of the hill soon wore out their enthusiasm,
and, one by one, the families moved down on to the level. Then the
lodging-house, being abandoned, fell slowly but surely into ruin. The ruin is
now Morriston Castle.

Swansea’s castle has a more conventional history. It was built in its final
form (which can only be conjectured from its remains) by Bishop Gower of
St. David’s, in the fourteenth century. After the usual vicissitudes of
disestablished castles, it still, until 1858, offered its dungeons for the
confinement of recalcitrant debtors. In that year even these privileges were
taken from it, and, ever since, civilisation has tried to crowd it out of
existence. Its body is lost in the various buildings and workshops that have
encroached upon it, but the graceful arcaded clock-tower remains. It gives a
pretty touch to Swansea’s main street, which it commands.
Little more can here be said about Swansea, except that the visitor owes it
to himself to leave the city (which was made a suffragan bishopric in 1890)
as soon as possible, and make friends with the Mumbles. The five-mile
curve of bay thither has been compared to that of the Bay of Naples. The
comparison is not a modest one. Nevertheless, there is something
uncommonly exhilarating about this Swansea Bay, with the red and white
green-topped cliffs of the Mumbles at its south-western horn. You soon get
out of reach of the fumes of the city’s copper and other metal works. The
shipping of the Mumbles has a nice clean look after that at the mouth of the
Tawe. And, save when the wind is north-east, the air is sweet here, as it is
bound to be. Mumbles—or Oystermouth, as it used to be called—has an
attractive old castle of its own, of the Decorated period. But it is precious
chiefly to Swansea for its sea and the lighthouse islets at the extremity of
the headland. The view hence towards the busy city, less than four miles
across the water, is not gay. Tall chimneys and a dense canopy of smoke:
such is the Erebus you behold from the pleasant Mumbles cliffs.
Ere moving up Tawe’s valley, it seems quite worth while to tell of
Swansea’s connection with the fortunes of John Murray, the publisher.
Gower the poet, Beau Nash, and other celebrities, owed their birth to this
city; and it was while living here in 1806 that one Mrs. Randell compiled
the “Domestic Cookery,” for which John Murray paid her the solid sum of
£2,000, and which, Dr. Smiles tells us, was very profitable to the young
publisher, and helped in a great measure to establish his position. It may be
added, also, that in the parish churchyard at the Mumbles lies the Dr.
Thomas Bowdler who busied himself so strenuously with Shakespeare’s
Plays, and gave to our dictionaries an awkward, ugly word.

The Tawe cannot
be much more
than twenty-five
miles in length,
from its source in
the lakelet on the
Brecknock Van,
or summit, of the
Fforest Fawr
Mountains, to the
Swansea Docks.
As fully half its
course is through
a colliery district,
it may be
supposed that its
claims to beauty
cannot be of the
strongest. But the
Neath river has
taught us that
these South
Wales streams
cannot be judged
thus summarily.
One must,
therefore,
proceed up the
long valley of
Tawe in the hope
MORRISTON.
of charms other
than those that
emanate from pit-gear, long chimneys, and factories.
Morriston has already been noticed for its “castle.” It deserves a word also
for its bridge over the river. This bears the look of one of Edwards’s
constructions; its eyelet holes and graceful single curve remind one of
Pontypridd. From Morriston to Ystradgynlais, Tawe is continually

trammelled. In one part there is a cañon of slag heaps half a mile long for it
to descend through. It is here shallow, and not more tainted than you would
expect. The hills rise in high long banks on the outer boundaries of the
valley, with wooded reaches above the lofty collieries, and crowned by the
naked rock. Just south of Ystradgynlais the river receives its chief affluent,
the Twrch, which has as bright and lengthy a youth as Tawe itself, rising
under the Carmarthen Van, the rival peak of this Fforest Fawr range, which
makes so commanding a mark on the two counties of Brecknock and
Carmarthen.
The ascent here begins to be steep, and it is constant to the source. The
colliery villages become less and less assertive, and the woods greener. By
Coelbren a little stream hurries to the Tawe through one of those deep,
thickly-treed glens which the Neath river knows so well. It is an enchanting
spot, with the blue and green and russet of Craig-y-Nos across the valley to
the north-west. The river gets quite near to the palace of our sweetest singer,
whose conservatories can be seen gleaming for miles. In South Wales Patti
holds a court other than that assured to her in all the world’s capitals. She is
at home here. Her photographs are in the shop-windows of Neath and
Swansea, and so are the photographs of the various luxurious rooms of her
mountain palace; and she is praised for other virtues than those that proceed
from her entrancing throat. People wonder how she can isolate herself here,
where collieries are not so remote that they cannot be seen. But that is
Adelina Patti’s affair, and has nothing to do with us. She is queen of the
Tawe valley, in one sense, as well as the world’s queen regnant of melody.
At Craig-y-Nos, which is 700 feet above sea-level, Tawe is distant only five
or six mountainous miles from its origin. It begins, like the Taff, with
numerous slender rills from red cuttings in the stony sides of the bleak
uplands, all hurrying together, as if anxious to compose a little strength with
their divided weakness. But its chief source is the lonely tarn (to borrow the
North-country word) of Lly-Fan Fawr, which never fails to keep it active.
This is on the Brecknock Van. On the Carmarthen Van also there is a lake,
Lly-Fan Fach, some two miles from the source of Tawe. From Lly-Fan Fach
comes the Sawddy, one of the Towy’s band of tributaries, which enters that
river at Llangadock.

SWANSEA CASTLE (p. 174).

THE MUMBLES (p. 175).

The TOWY, which now claims our notice, in a far nobler river than the
others treated in this chapter. From its start in the desolate wet uplands of
Cardiganshire (less trodden than any other part of Great Britain) to the long
channel south of Carmarthen, where it enters the bay of that name, it knows
nothing of such pollution as spoils Tawe, Taff, and Neath. It is rural from
first to last: savage almost in its upper reaches, beyond Ystradffin, where it
can be explored only at some not inconsiderable risks, and where its first
company of eager affluents rush to it from all sides in glens and defiles, as
deep, craggy, and yet beautiful, as its own. Of its early affluents, the
Doethiau certainly deserves particular mention. Hard by its junction with
Towy is a strikingly picturesque wooded hill, one of Wales’s many Dinases.

Ystradffin is scarcely a village, but it boasts of attachment to the memory of
a seventeenth-century cattle-raider named Twm Shon Catti (otherwise Tom
Jones, the son of Catherine), who made use of a cave in the side of the
Dinas by Towy for purposes of concealment. This hero of tradition at length
determined to mend his ways, and, we are told, set about it by wooing an
heiress. He secured her hand in the literal sense, and vowed to cut it off
unless she gave it to him in the matrimonial sense. So stern a courtship was
irresistible. Afterwards Twm Shon Catti became respectable, and died
holding high office in the county. But the cave over Towy keeps the
memory of his naughty youth and early manhood still green.
From Ystradffin the river descends circuitously some eleven miles to the
well-known fishing and tourist townlet of Llandovery, gambolling gaily in
its rocky pools as if resolved to make the most of its youth ere coming to
the long green valley which extends from Llandovery to Carmarthen. Here
it receives two voluminous aids in the Bran from the north-east, and the
Gwedderig from the east, both yielding pleasant prospects even for the few
miles their valleys are visible from Llanymddyfri (i.e. “the Church amid the
Waters”), or, as we know it, Llandovery.
Green hills embrace Llandovery as if they loved it. The little town is not so
interesting as its situation, apart from its old inn, the “Castle,” a mellow,
time-worn house. The very rooms here in which you sup on eggs and bacon
(if you are lucky enough) may have known that worthy, the Vicar of
Llandingat, who, in the seventeenth century, daily came hither for his ale,
attended by a goat as thirsty as himself. One day, it is said, this goat drank
well rather than wisely, and thenceforward declined to cross the threshold
of the “Castle” with its master. One may hope that the Vicar learnt a lesson
from the goat.
Towy is here a great, clear, rapid stream, and so it continues for the
remaining thirty miles of its career. Famous view-points on it are the
bridges of Llandovery, Llangadock, and Llandilo, the bridges themselves as
graceful as the valley. Llandilo stands on a knoll on the west bank of the
river, and rejoices in its superiority to Llandovery as a market-town. This, to
the stranger, is much less commendatory than its nearness to one of the
most beautiful seats in South Wales, Dynevor, where the Barons of that title
have long held sway. The ruins of the old Dynevor Castle, on a hill crowded
with oak, ash, and beech trees, are from the river quite ideally picturesque.

It is a pity that the “common herd” of tourists have so misbehaved
themselves that Lord Dynevor has felt compelled to deny free access to so
charming a spot. Golden Grove, an estate as winsome as its name, on the
other bank of the Towy, opposite Dynevor, has had its attractions sung by
Dyer, the poet, who was born in the neighbourhood, and died rector of
Coningsby, in Lincolnshire, in 1757: here is the Grongar Hill, where “often,
by the murm’ring rill,” one “hears the thrush while all is still.”
Between Llandilo (Llan-Teilo: the Church of St. Teilo, who died Bishop of
Llandaff, in A.D. 540) and Carmarthen, Towy’s zigzags are many and
eccentric. After Dynevor another castle, that of Dryslwyn, is soon passed. It
is a mere ruin on a green hill. The Nelson Monument, high in the distance,
on the south side of the river, is a more assertive feature in the landscape,
though less welcome. Midway towards Carmarthen, we cross the Cothi, the
longest of all Towy’s affluents, and here, near its mouth, as great a stream as
the Towy at Llandovery. Looking up it, there is even here some suggestion
of its fine upper gorges. At Abergorlech, some ten miles nearer its sources,
either artist or angler would find reason to rejoice in it, while higher still it
absorbs streamlets right and left as greedily as the Towy itself.
One must, however, resist the temptation to loiter on Cothi’s bridge by
Llanegwad. There is nothing of especial mark to see by the way, save
Merlin’s grotto, where the Arthurian wizard fell a victim to the wiles of the
fairy Viviana, and where he is still imprisoned, and will be for all time. But
you must carry a fine faith with you to be fitly moved by the legend, and it
will not be inexcusable if you fail to find it.
At the Ivy Bush Hotel of Carmarthen, whence there is a commanding view
over the lower part of the valley, one may think tenderly of Sir Richard
Steele, who once lived in it. The tablet to his memory in the parish church
of St. Peter here describes him as the “first chief promoter of the periodical
press of England.” What would he say to the growth of the babe for which
he is thus made responsible?

CAREW CASTLE (p. 182).

This capital town, which in the time of Giraldus had walls of burnt brick, is
nowadays of the modernest. Its castle, or what was left of it, has been
turned into a jail; though you may discern some of its ancient stonework in
the adjacent alleys. The town stands well above the river and the seven-
arched bridge beneath which Towy now moves with stately ease towards
the sea, a navigable stream. There is a small quay here, and a larger one
some three miles farther down, for local coasters. For five miles more Towy
holds its own against the ocean; and yet another five have to be passed ere,
at Carmarthen Bar, the fresh waters gathered from the peaceful and fertile
vales of Carmarthenshire are wholly merged in the salt sea.

We have now come to a singular district of Wales—a part of South Wales
that is not Wales, but “a little England in Wales.” Close by Towy’s mouth,
another river Taf (though with only one “f”) enters the sea very broadly
with the body of water yielded to it by the rivers Dewi Fawr, Gynin, Feni,
and Marias, which all have bright tortuous courses among the green hills of

Pembrokeshire. And four or five miles still farther west, the “Llans” and
“Abers” which proclaim the land of the Cymry end, and give place to
names Danish, Norwegian, and Norman. This continues until we are at
Newgale Bridge, on St. Bride’s Bay, eight miles from the thoroughly
reverend and Welsh city of St. David’s. Newgale Bridge has a small ale-
house adjacent, where they seem contemptuously ignorant of the existence
of the Welsh counties of Carmarthen and Glamorganshire to the east, so
positively do they inform you that on one side of the streamlet spanned by
the bridge it is England, and on the other side Wales.

Photo: Hudson.
CARMARTHEN QUAY (p. 180).

The Normans could not, in spite of their sternest efforts, make much
impression on Wales as a whole for a century or two after the battle of
Senlac. But they could, thanks to Milford Haven, nibble at its south-western
extremity. This is what they did, and with the planting here by Henry I. of a
large colony of Flemings the earlier stock seems to have been either
absorbed or superseded.
Milford Haven, with its arms of tidal water extending twenty miles into the
heart of the country, was a grand aid to conquest in these parts. The Norman
lords who were invited hither to carve out careers for themselves had much
success. They raised castles at the extremities of Milford’s water-ways, and
thus assured to themselves broad controlling powers. Enough if mention be
made of only the important fortresses of Pembroke, Haverfordwest, and
Carew.
The last of these may be first visited. Its situation at the head of a dammed
tidal inlet, low-lying and with no prominent hills near, is unworthy of so
noble a ruin. But Gerald de Windsor, the Norman lord who built it (having
received the land as a dowry with his Welsh wife, Nesta, daughter of Prince
Rhys ap Tewdwr of Dinefawr, or Dynevor), probably cared little for the
picturesque. The strong western towers still bear witness to him; but to the
mere tourist by far the most interesting part of the castle is the east side,
over against the water, with its high wall and the lofty great, flaunting
skeletons of the windows of the palace above, their white mullions bowing
forward with inimitable grace. Unfortunately, one cannot romance about the
rooms to which these majestic oriels and bays belonged. This part of the
castle is of the sixteenth century, and was left unfinished.
Carew Castle (Caerau = fortified camps) still belongs to the Carews. The
Windsors took the name of this possession of theirs, and held the castle for
more than three hundred years. Then their line of lordship was interrupted;
and it was during this period that the great Sir Rhys ap Thomas (whom
Henry VII. made a Knight of the Garter for the part he played before and at
Bosworth Field in aid of the House of Tudor) held such revels here as have
made Carew almost a by-word. Among other shows was a “feate of arms”

of five days’ duration, to which knights flocked from all parts of England
and Wales. These guests filled the castle and more: five hundred, “moste of
them of goode ranke,” were accommodated with tents in the park adjacent,
of which no trace remains. Sir Rhys himself, in gilt armour, on a “goodlie
steede,” attended by two pages on horseback and a herald, “was the judge
of the jousts.” This same mighty noble received Henry VII. at Carew before
Bosworth Field was fought; and, if tradition speak true, with his own hands
killed Richard of Gloucester, who would dearly have liked ere then to have
killed him. Sir Rhys lies in the parish church of Carmarthen, with about
seven feet of armoured stone for a monument; and a very small effigy of a
wife lies by his side. With the Civil Wars came the castle’s destruction. The
Carews of Crowcombe, in Somersetshire, are now lords of the castle, and
anyone may tread its grass and broken stones on payment of a threepenny
bit.
Carew had the honour of entertaining Henry VII., but Pembroke had the
higher honour of being his birthplace, Margaret Beaufort, his mother, being
then only in her fifteenth year. Five months later he was an orphan, and
Jasper Tudor, his uncle, began his long, exemplary, and singularly fortunate
guardianship. Ere then this great castle, at the tip of the most southerly of
Milford Haven’s arms, had had nearly four centuries of existence. The first
castle was only “a slender fortress with stakes and turf,” says Giraldus the
chronicler. If so, however, it must soon have been ousted by the existing
Norman keep, which, with its 70 feet of height and 17 feet of thickness at
the base, is anything rather than “a slender fortress.” Throughout England
there is no better specimen left to us of a feudal keep than this of Pembroke.
The castle buildings, as a whole, measure some 500 feet by 400 feet within
the walls; and, viewed, from the breezy summit of the keep (reached by
broken steps and a rope), are, even in their ruin, a very instructive lesson in
feudal history. The gate-house and the keep are by far the best preserved
parts; these are both little less serviceable than they were in their prime. The
central space, or Outer Ward, is now a grass-plot, kept trim for tennis.
One cannot do more than touch on the conventional last scene in this
castle’s active history. The building was held for Charles I. by Colonel
Laugharne and two other Royalists named Powell and Poyer. As was to be
expected, they made a stout resistance even to Cromwell, who came hither
in person. Eventually, however, supplies were cut off, and the castle

surrendered. “The three leaders were condemned to be shot—though the
sentence was reduced to one. Lots were drawn, it is said, by a little girl.
Two were marked ‘Life given by God,’ the third was blank, and fell to
Poyer, who was shot in Covent Garden, 1649.”
Since then Pembroke Castle has accepted its rôle as a ruin. The very
peacocks that strut about its courtyard seem to understand that their haunt is
a superb one.
There is little else in Pembroke save two of those pleasant white church-
towers which are quite a characteristic, of the shire. Monkton Priory, one of
these, has as lengthy a history as the castle. It was founded in 1098, and
belonged to a community of Benedictines connected with Jayes in
Normandy. Anciently this church, which has a very long back, with the
tower about midway in it, was divided by an inner wall between the monks
of the priory and the local parishioners. Its Norman nave and Decorated
choir are well preserved: indeed, the original builders were as generous of
material as they who raised the castle keep. Externally, save for its tower
(restored in 1804), and a Norman south doorway, it has a very modern
aspect, though its acre or two of gravestones in the churchyard bear witness
against appearances.
There are two Pembrokes and two Milfords on Milford Haven; in each case
one old and the other new. Our New Pembroke, however, goes by the name
of Pater or Pembroke Dock, and a very important little town it is for the
United Kingdom, with its building slips, dry dock, and naval stores. If you
chance to be going from Old Pembroke to Pater between two and three
o’clock any Saturday afternoon, you will be tempted to form an
exaggerated idea of the number of hands employed at this State dockyard.
In fact, there are about 1,000, though, of course, the figure is a variable one.
From Pater the view down the Haven is uninterrupted as far as the
watering-place of Dale, eight or nine miles due west, just at the north corner
of the entrance. The channel is there nearly two miles in breadth, and
fortifications on the small island of Thorn, to the south of Dale, are
designed to prevent undesirable interference with British property in the
Haven’s recesses.

PEMBROKE CASTLE AND MONKTON PRIORY (p. 183).

THE ROYAL DOCKYARD, PEMBROKE DOCK.

In less than five minutes you may cross the Haven, by steam ferry, from
Pembroke Dock to New Milford or Neyland, which calls for no particular
notice. It is a creation of the Great Western Railway, in connection with
which steamers ply nightly to Ireland. Hence to Old Milford is a pleasant
walk of three miles, with the water continuously to the left. The low green
hills of the Haven to the south are not very beautiful, and it is only on
exceptional occasions that the great water-way holds more than half a dozen
big ships in its midst. One or two ironclads on guard may, however, at all
times be looked for. Imogen, in Cymbeline, inquires, as a significant aside
—

“by the way,
Tell me how Wales is made so happy as
To inherit such a haven!”

HAVERFORDWEST (p. 186).

But Wales’s happiness in this possession is of the kind that depends more
on the expectation of favours to come than on benefits actually enjoyed.
Milford Haven was better appreciated in the Middle Ages than it is now. It
was only natural, for example, that Henry Tudor should land here in his
quest of the English crown. Here too, earlier still, Richard II. set foot, on his
anxious return from Ireland, when Henry of Bolingbroke was troubling his
realm. The French chronicler, De la Marque, who was at Milford at this
time, finds much to praise in the conduct of the Welshmen who were with
the unhappy king. Richard’s English retinue deserted him and plundered his
baggage, but the Welsh could with difficulty be dissuaded from
accompanying him in his march north to Conway, and they fell upon such

of the deserters as they could. “What a spirit! God reward them for it!” says
De la Marque.
Old Milford is a prettily situated town terraced above the Haven, with quays
and embankments on its shore-line, ready for the traffic that is still withheld
from it. Master Atkins’s red coat helps to enliven it. The blue water, the
green level ridges that run west to the sea, and the Atlantic itself in the
distance, all prepossess in its favour. But Liverpool and Holyhead both hold
it aloof from the fortune it aspired to.
Before proceeding north to that little known yet seductive river, the Teifi,
Haverfordwest, on one of the two Cleddaus, which enter the Haven at its
northern and westernmost arms, must be briefly mentioned. It is an ancient
town, as its castle—built about 1112 by the father of Richard Strongbow,
that eminent castle-builder—testifies. Among its other privileges was that
of being county and capital town in one; also of having its own lord-
lieutenant. Here the Flemings of the twelfth century most did congregate in
this peninsula, and no doubt the little town’s prosperity was largely due to
them. Nowadays, however, it is a waning place, in spite of its lively look
and, considering its remoteness, its fine buildings. This is proven by the
number of its Maiden Assizes in the later years of its independence, before
its annexation to Carmarthen for judicial purposes, as well as by other less
agreeable tokens. It is, perhaps, the most hilly town in the kingdom. Ere you
are half a mile away from it on the road to St. David’s, it is lost to sight;
while, approaching it from Milford, its situation seems quite Alpine.

The TEIFI (or Tivy), like the Towy, is little known to Englishmen other than
anglers; and again, like the Towy, it well deserves knowing. The two rivers
both rise among the heather-clad moors of Cardiganshire; so near, indeed,
that you may stand on the watershed and mark the different trend of their
streams. Teifi’s chief supply, however, comes from the Teifi pools, three
miles from Strata Florida Abbey, a congeries of mountain lakes, the abode
of interesting and capricious trout that may be recommended to the traveller
with a fishing rod—and a mackintosh. It has as wild an origin as any of the
rivers of South Wales. The Cistercians of Strata Florida probably fished
these lakes far more than do the moderns.

From the pools Teifi descends impetuously to the mere graveyard that
reminds one of the Mynachlog Fawr, or Great Monastery, of which only an
archway remains. Either Rhys ap Tewdwr or Rhys ap Gruffydd, royal
princes both, was the founder of the abbey, which was so important an
establishment that Henry IV. made a special expedition to destroy it. If, as
tradition says. Dafydd ap Gwilym—“the greatest genius of the Cimbric race
and one of the first poets of the world,” in the opinion of George Borrow—
was buried here, one can understand the patriotic influence of such a spot,
and Bolingbroke’s ruthlessness. But many are the poets and princes, as well
as Dafydd ap Gwilym, who lie in this “Westminster of Wales.” The Strata
Florida monks have been made responsible for the Devil’s Bridge, on the
Rheidol—that bonne bouche for visitors to Aberystwith. Excavations have
recently been made in the abbey precincts, with promising results.
Strata Florida is accessible by railway from the Manchester and Milford
station of Pontrhydfendigaid. It must be confessed that some courage is
required to alight at this dreary place on a wet autumn day. Teifi traverses
dismal bog-land for miles hence: a vast flat of glittering pools and reddish
grass and reeds, abounding in hares. One marvels that no serious attempt
has been made to drain these thousands of acres: not such a difficult task,
surely, considering the steep fall to the west beyond the hills. However,
each landlord to his own ideas. Tregaron is passed, and still Teifi is rather a
dull stream, though it can be seen that, lower down, the hills are drawing
together suggestively. This is a famous district for cattle-drovers and cattle
fairs. Your modern Cardigan farmer finds in these fairs one of the main
excitements of his life. But the dealers are often far gone in whisky by the
end of the fair-day, especially if they have had “bargains.”
So towards Lampeter, leaving on the east Llanddewi Brefi, where, in A.D.
519, was held the Great Synod, attended by St. David, at which Pelagius
was adjudged a heretic. Teifi has now become a real river, broad and swift,
and a charm to the angler. A column on a hill by Derry Ormond holds the
eye. This is a tale told of it. The grandsire of the present owner of the estate
wooed a young lady of London, and brought her home; but she pined for
the Metropolis, and said either that she could not or would not live where
she could not see London. To help her a little in this respect, her husband
built the column. History does not inform us whether the wife was won to
her allegiance by this proof of marital infatuation.

Teifi does not excel in its auxiliary streams. This is explainable by the
nature of the country it traverses. Its watershed is not an extensive one, like
Towy’s. The streams that flow to it throughout its course are all
insignificant in size, though the two Cletwrs (Fawr and Fach), Afon Cych,
and especially the merry little mountain-rivulet that joins it a mile west of
Newcastle Emlyn, are not without the customary fascinations of these well-
nigh untrodden glens of Wild Wales.
It is when Teifi turns decisively to the west and its home in the long inlet of
Port Cardigan that its graces become truly bewitching. From Llandyssil to
Newcastle Emlyn it alternates between sweet, green, hill-bounded reaches
and contracted gorges which trammel and fret it so that it roars with
dissatisfaction. At Newcastle its valley is broad again, with wooded hills on
all sides, enclosing the pretty little village and its castle. Put thence to
Cardigan it is majestic all the way, zigzagging with glorious curves, and
with high, densely-wooded banks in the main. Seen when the tints are on its
trees, this part of Teifi’s course makes an enduring mark on the memory.
The salmon-fisher who comes once to Teifi here (and it is a prolific river, in
spite of the “professionals,” who take heavy tolls at its mouth) will have
abundant compensation, even though he have poor sport. There is no
railway between Newcastle and Cardigan; but what a nine miles’ drive or
walk it is!
At Cenarth, for instance, it is impossible not to pause awhile. Here the river
bursts from a confined defile into greater freedom, sweeping under a bridge
of the Edwards hall-mark. Cenarth is a lovely little village, out of the world,
given up to the woods and the crying waters. And under its bridge, at the
side, you may see some of the tiny coracles still in use on this stream.
Fashions die hard in these sequestered parts of Wales. Giraldus tells us that
the beaver kept its haunt on the Teifi when it was extinct elsewhere in Great
Britain.
There is a contenting sameness about Teifi all the way to Cardigan:
unchanged perfection. Two miles short of this capital town, however, it
speeds to the south, and then turns boldly in its final curve towards the sea.
Above it here, on a lofty crag, with woods caressing it, is Kilgerran Castle,
which Turner painted. He could hardly have resisted the temptation, having
seen it. The castle remains consist of two towers and a gateway, all of the
thirteenth century. Historically, little seems known about it.

Photo: Hudson.
MILFORD HAVEN (p. 185).

Thence Teifi makes for the defile which ushers it to salt water, past the
small yet prosperous county town, which has close sea intercourse with
Bristol, and does a good trade in fish. Cardigan, like all these Welsh
capitals, has a fragmentary castle; so fragmentary, indeed, that it is hardly
discoverable. It has also an old church with a remarkably massive tower,
having a buttress like a staircase. From its churchyard tombstones one may
learn much, as well as the common lesson of the mortality of mortals. It is,
for example, interesting to the stranger to be informed that “Let” is no
unusual Christian name for a man here, and “Lettice” for a woman. The
town suffers from a complaint nowadays rare among the capitals of British
counties, to wit, difficult railway communication with the rest of the land.
This will be remedied somewhat when the existing line is continued from
Newcastle Emlyn. But one may be excused for hoping that Teifi’s banks
may for years to come know nothing of the mauling and devastation that
will be inevitable when this takes place.

If you wish to see Teifi, or Tivy, quite to its end, it is worth while to go
north another three miles, to Gwbert-on-the-Sea, a distinctly primitive and
pleasing watering-place, facing Kemmaes Head, with the mile and a half of
Teifi’s mouth (at its widest) intervening.

Photo: S. J. Allen, Pembroke Dock.
THE TEIFI AT KILGERRAN.

Bidding farewell to the beauteous Teifi, we must now in few words track
the last of our rivers to the same inevitable destination. YSTWITH has had no
poets that we are aware of. Not all who visit Aberystwith, indeed, perceive
(though they surely might) that it gives its name to this salubrious town.
The Rheidol, which also enters the sea at Aberystwith, is treated with

distinction. For it there is a solid, handsome bridge, lighted with lamps. But
for Ystwith there is only a very commonplace bridge.
The Ystwith rises in the broken upland a few miles south of Plinlimmon,
runs in a deep channel for three or four miles, and then, with little
hesitation, though infinite sinuosities, rushes due west. Its entire length is
not more than thirty miles. Until it comes to the road by Eglwys Newydd,
and within four miles of the Devil’s Bridge, on its rival the Rheidol, and
even past Hafod, it sees few admirers, though it might have many. People
who come to Eglwys Newydd, on their circuitous way to the Devil’s
Bridge, do not go out of their path to see the Ystwith, but the Chantrey
monument, in memory of Miss Johnes, in this “New Church.” Farther west
the Manchester and Milford Railway runs in its valley from Trawscoed, and
accompanies it to the sea. Here its beauty is of a superb order. The wooded
mountains soar with most impressive effect on its southern side, now and
then parting to show an abysmal glen, just as densely wooded, down which
a baby stream tumbles towards our Ystwith. It matters not so very much,
except to the angler, if the river does suffer from lead-poisoning. The mines
do not obtrude themselves; and one may cheat oneself into the belief that
the thickness of its waters comes from the melting snows high up on the
mountains which it taps. For a few miles one may search the vocabulary for
adjectives in eulogy of Ystwith. Then it sobers into comparatively level
ground, and green pastures between receded green and heather-clad hills
succeed the splendid towering woods. For the rest of its journey, it is an
ordinary stream, and as such it slides into the sea just south of the town with
a modesty that is almost affecting.
Aberystwith the piered, esplanaded and castled, might well condescend to
take a little notice of its humble “godparent,” as well as of the Rheidol, and
might gain credit in the condescension. This resort of a certain order of
fashion (especially now that there are sweet girl-graduates to give a classic
touch to its broad breezy promenade) seems, however, fully content to rely
on the seducing charms of its powerful pure air, its tea-gardens on
Constitution Hill, and—the Devil’s Bridge.
Wondrous indeed is the power of ozone! It reconciles us to weeks in
lodging-houses that are ugly to behold and are in themselves
uncomfortable. Not that Aberystwith is worse off in this respect than other
places. Indeed, it may be said to be in a better plight than most, since the

Esplanade buildings are handsome, once you have accepted their
uniformity. Even were it otherwise, it would matter not at all to the
sojourner in bracing Aberystwith! He acquires resignation and divers other
virtues merely in breathing this pure invigorating air on the broad paved
walk between the lodging-houses and the sea.

Photo: E. R. Gyde, Aberystwith.
ABERYSTWITH.

Of Aberystwith’s castle it must suffice to say that it dates from the eleventh
century, and owes its parentage to Gilbert Strongbow. Cromwell cut its little
comb effectually, and now it exists only in fragments. They are, however,
attractive morsels, and the little green enclosure which they prettily dignify
is a popular resort for visitors. There are seats about it, and you may perch
close over the mutilated low cliffs of the coast and watch the breakers
rolling in towards the town, while listening with your mind’s ear to the tales
told by Time of this downright ancient little place. The University buildings

adjoin the castle demesne. They are quite grandiose. One wonders how
often in the year the noise of the waves on their stones is so loud that it
distracts the academic minds within its stately walls. It has been said
authoritatively that “Aberystwith stands out as being far and away the
Welshiest of the University Colleges, and Cardiff as the most English.” This
is gratifying to those of us who like to see the boundary-lines of
nationalities clearly defined. And yet the faces of the students in the streets
here do not show their birthright as one would expect.
But enough. One must be very morose or abased in body as well as mind
not to perceive the peculiar charms of Aberystwith. To the enterprising, and
perhaps jaded, sojourner in this Brighton of Wales it may, moreover, come
as welcome news that for a mile or two of its course the Ystwith is of a
beauty matchless even in Wales.
CHARLES EDWARDES.

DOLGELLEY (p. 200).

RIVERS OF NORTH WALES.

CHAPTER I.
THE DOVEY, THE DYSYNNI, THE MAWDDACH.

Glories of A Wet Autumn in North Wales. The DOVEY: Source of the Stream—Dinas Mowddwy—
Mallwyd—Machynlleth. The DYSYNNI: Tal-y-Llyn—The “Bird Rock”—TOWYN. The
MAWDDACH: The Estuary—The Wnion—Torrent Walk—Dolgelley—Precipice Walk—The
Estuary—Barmouth—Harlech Castle—Portmadoc—The Glaslyn—Tremadoc and Shelley—
The Traeth Bach.

T HERE are times of the year when North Wales seems to be all
rivers and mountain torrents and tumbling cataracts. The
hills are seamed by thin, white streaks of foaming water. It
is as if all the land were rushing down to the valleys and the
sea. What was yesterday a slow dribble from pool to pool, a
scarcely perceptible moisture among weeds, a narrow
reflection of sky among stones and boulders, is to-day a
broad, impetuous stream, or a wide expanse of bog-stained water, or a
torrent swollen and turbulent. The cataracts which have disappointed the
tourist in dry seasons come down in a way that wholly sustains their ancient
reputation. But the mountains are, for the most part, hidden in mist, or
whelmed in cloud; the white roads glitter like streams, and—
“The rain, it raineth every day;
Heigho, the wind and the rain!”

Yet, decidedly, it is in a wet autumn that one should see North Wales.
“Then, if ever, are perfect days,” when the whole glory of wild Nature
reveals itself in some interval of dripping rains; when the brown foliage,
dipping into the flooded rivers, glows like gold in some sudden outburst of

the sun; and when the mountains fade upward from their heathery bases,
and purple middle-distances, into shadowy peaks of faintest blue.
How
fascinatingly the
bells of
Aberdovey have
rung themselves
into the popular
consciousness!
And all by means
of some foolish
verses that are as
securely
immortal as the
famous and
touching air in
which Neil Gow
has set the bells
of Edinburgh RIVERS OF NORTH WALES.
town to music:—
“‘Ae os wyt ti’n fy ngharu i
Fel ’rwyf fi’n dy garu di,
Mal un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, chwech,’
Go the bells of Aberdovey.”

Seated in a boat in the middle of the estuary of the DOVEY river, one
laments the fact that the bells exist in legend only. How sweetly they would
sound through the distance and in the dusk, over this wide expanse of
shallow water and glimmering sand! But the little town of Aberdovey,
hugging the hillside at the south-westerly corner of Merionethshire, has
certainly had no peal of bells at any date more recent than the time when
Owen Glendower descended into the Dovey valley to procure his own
proclamation as Prince of Wales. It is a humble little town, which, as
somebody has remarked, seems to ask itself why it is not Liverpool. It has a
wharf and a deep-water pier, and a railway at only a few yards from the
beach. Large vessels could lie in safety near to the doors of the Aberdovey
folk, and the maps insist strenuously on the directness of the sea-routes to

Dublin, to Rosslare, and to Waterford. They are direct enough, no doubt;
but who cares to travel by them? Only a few small schooners are to be seen
in the harbour of Aberdovey. Two or three others are drawn up high and dry
on the sands, so that one might almost leap on board from the thresholds of
the cottages. If the world were more happily ordered, the chief trade of the
place might be the exchange of rich merchandise; but, as one may perceive
from the pier yonder, it is merely the exportation of slates.
The river Dovey—or Dyti, as it is called in the more ancient language—
rises among the peaks of Aran Mowddwy, and, dashing down the mountain-
sides with a pretty music, leaves Merioneth for a while to course through a
jutting corner of Montgomeryshire. Then it becomes the boundary between
Merioneth and Cardigan, making its way to the sea through an estuary 6½
miles long—broad, noble, and impressive, with hills green, gentle, and
round on its left, and on its right high mountains and purple heather, and
“the sleep that is among the lonely hills.” It is a river much beloved of
angling folk, for there are “salmons” not only, as Fluellen said, in
Monmouthshire, but also in Montgomery and Merioneth. Likewise there is
abundance of sewin and trout; and the fisherman who visits Dinas
Mowddwy, Mallwyd, or Machynlleth will be likely enough to store his
memory with recollections not only of fine scenery but of glorious days.
Dinas Mowddwy is a small village with a large hotel; but it was nothing
less than a city in the old days, and it calls itself a city still. Even up to so
recent a date as 1886, it had all the honours of a borough, with a Mayor of
its own, and a Corporation, and a Recorder, and the tradition of a charter
dating from James I. It may be reached by means of a ridiculous but
convenient railway from Cemmaes Road, the trains consisting of an engine
and one carriage, with, possibly, a few truckloads of slates attached behind.
Aran Mowddwy, on which the Dovey rises, is, next to Snowdon, the highest
mountain in Wales. It is the centre of a district full of vague traditions and
curiously varied grandeur and beauty. After the death of Owen Glendower,
“many powerful gentlemen of Wales” assembled at Dinas “for the purpose
of making compacts to enforce virtue and order.” Their success can scarcely
have been very great, for it was at this place, not long afterwards, that the
“Red-Haired Banditti of Mowddwy” were wont to hold their meetings and
arrange their murders. It is pleasant to be able to record that in due course
these gentry were as effectually suppressed as were the Doones of Exmoor,

if the story of John Ridd is to be believed. How they found means to exist
by rapine in a country so sparsely peopled is not now intelligible; but they
were, clearly, a very savage and revengeful folk, for forty arrows were
found in the body of a judge who had condemned some of their brethren to
death.
Sparkling along through Dinas, and flowing under the ruins of an ancient
bridge, with a more modern and substantial structure close beside it, the
river Dovey shortly reaches Mallwyd, where there is a church that is much
visited, occupying the site of an earlier edifice which is said to have been
erected by St. Tydecho in the sixth century, and with an ancient yew-tree
which the saint himself is believed to have planted. On the other side of the
river stands the farmhouse of Camlan, associated by a tradition, into the
veracity of which we need not now inquire, with Camelot, and that “battle
long ago” in which King Arthur is said to have been overthrown. All this
wide, winding Dovey valley teems with history of a sort. At the farmhouse
of Mathafarn, below Cemmaes Road, “the great poet and scholar,” David
Llwyd ap Llewelyn, entertained the Earl of Richmond, who was afterwards
to become King Henry VII., and was then on his way to Bosworth fight. At
Machynlleth, with its fine, broad, mediæval street, much frequented by
salesmen of cattle and sheep, you may see the house in which Owen
Glendower held his Parliament after he had “defeated” the English by
flying before them into the hills. Machynlleth itself was the Roman station
of Maglona, and is now a fairly considerable town, situated almost as
happily as Dolgelley, with the square ivy-clad tower of an ancient church
dominating the centre of the valley. Here the beautiful river Dulas joins the
Dovey, and hence one may travel by the tiny Corris railway to Tal-y-Llyn,
through some of the most satisfying scenery in all Wild Wales.

TORRENT WALK, DOLGELLEY (p. 198).

Before reaching the estuary, the Dovey wanders through much wide
marshland, over which a railway has been carried, where there is a railway
station set amid desolateness, and where no tree or shrub breaks the flat,
brown margins of the stream. From such scenery it is very agreeable to
break away to where, at high tide, there is a sheet of water six miles broad
—the sweetest, calmest, most restful estuary in all Wales, with Borth
sunning itself by the sea far away, with hills at whose feet plantations
flourish, and mountains with fir-woods climbing up their slopes.

Flowing from the sides of Cader Idris, which holds a gloomy lake in its lap,
there is a complex network of streams. Several of these join themselves
together to form the little river Dysynni, which, after wandering among the
mountains for twelve miles or so, drowns itself in the sea beyond Towyn.
One of the sources of the Dysynni is Tal-y-Llyn. Noble and beautiful and
ever memorable is the valley through which the stream hurries downwards
from that renowned lake, the object of innumerable excursions made from
Dolgelley, from Towyn, from Machynlleth, and from all the wild,
wonderful, fascinating places roundabout. Tal-y-Llyn is no more than a mile
long, and a quarter of a mile broad; but it is like a small piece of Norway
transported to Wales. Here alike come those who are intent on reaching the
summit of Cader Idris, and those who desire to follow “the contemplative
man’s recreation,” for the Dysynni, like the Dovey, is a famous fishing
river. Salmon, sewin, and gwyniad are to be found therein, from May until
after the autumn leaves are falling. There are white and sea trout, and bass,
and in the estuary plentiful grey mullet, which make fine and exciting sport
when a ring of nets is thrown around them, and the noisy and vigorous
“beaters” drive them into the meshes.

THE LOWER BRIDGE, TORRENT WALK (p. 199).

One must go up the Dysynni to see the famous “Bird Rock,” a great
shoulder of mountain on which the hawk and the cormorant dwell. It is so

precipitous that it may be climbed on only two of its sides, and it has one of
those echoes for which Wales is almost unapproachable, so that the music
of any instrument that is played upon it will be reverberated in a startling
chorus from all the surrounding hills. Lower down the river, always amid
such scenery as it were vain to describe, there is the site of a manor house
from which Prince Llewelyn wrote important letters to ecclesiastical
magnates in London, and which that stout soldier-king Edward I. visited,
for he dated a charter thence. Older relics there are, like the Tomen
Ddreiniog, which, maybe, is one of “the grassy barrows of the happier
dead.” It is a valley renowned for its birds and their songs, this of the
Dysynni, and for its rare plants and mosses, and its rich store of maiden-hair
fern. As we approach Towyn the mansion of Ynys-y-Maengwyn, the
dwelling of an ancient Welsh family, presents a quaint and most picturesque
mixture of architectural periods, for it combines all the styles of domestic
architecture that prevailed between the period of Elizabeth and that of the
Georges.
The Dysynni is a land-locked river as it approaches the sea, for the
Cambrian Railway crosses its estuary. There is a spectacle on one hand of
what seems a lake among purple mountains, and on the other of a stream
winding amid dreary flats to the breezy waters of Cardigan Bay. Towyn,
which is but a small place, has a certain fame for sea-bathing, and for its
association with “a holy man of Armorica, who came to Wales in the sixth
century to refute the Pelagian heresy.” One does not inquire too curiously
into these things; but there, not far from the estuary of the Dysynni, is St.
Cadfan’s Church, and St. Cadfan was one who performed miracles; and in
the church there is a pillar which, as some aver, is inscribed in debased
Roman characters, and once marked the site of St. Cadfan’s grave.

“Neither the North of England, nor Scotland, no, nor Switzerland, can
exhibit anything so tranquil, romantic, snug, and beautiful as a Welsh
valley.” These are the words of John Wilson, the “Christopher North” of the
famous “Noctes Ambrosianæ” and the “Recreations”; the “rusty, crusty
Christopher” of Lord Tennyson’s early satire. He was thinking of Dolgelley
and all the indescribable charm of its surroundings. Wilson was a Scot who
had dwelt continuously and for many years amid the English Lakes. He
knew his Switzerland, too; and it must have been reluctantly, one would

think, that he gave this unstinted praise to the particular valley in which
North Wales seems most to unite its grander and its quieter beauties, all its
wonders of mountains and wood, torrent and waterfall, snug valley and
scarred and towering height. The MAWDDACH estuary, which has the
appearance of a chain of lakes, winds among the mountains as far as
Penmaenpool, where there is a long, low, sinuous railway bridge of
innumerable arches. Here, where the Mawddach suddenly becomes a
stream, flowing through green marshes, with its course indicated by lines of
deep-driven stakes, Christopher North must often have been reminded of
the head of his beloved Windermere, missing only the solemn and silent
majesty of the Langdale Pikes. Following the river upward through the
wide, marshy plain until it again hides itself among woods and hills, one
comes upon the river Wnion, which is chiefly of importance among Welsh
rivers because it is famous for its trout, because it winds through Dolgelley
on its way, and because, two miles further upwards, it is joined by the
tumultuous thread of water which tumbles from pool to pool, over cataract
after cataract, close beside the steep, mile-long piece of sylvan beauty
known as the Torrent Walk. Until it receives this tributary the WNION is,
except in seasons of rain, but a thin and feeble stream; but it flows through
beautiful and shady woods, fretting sometimes over a rocky bed, sometimes
flowing in a peaceful, sunlit calm, and now and again reflecting one of
those wide-arched, mossy bridges which indicate by their breadth of span
how much way this little river claims for itself when the thin silvery threads
of all the small streams that flow into it from the Arans on one side, and
from the lower slopes of Rhobell Fawr on the other, are swollen into
mountain torrents by continuous rain.

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.

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.

The grand castle of Harlech looks out on to the waters about midway in that
waste of shore which divides Barmouth from Portmadoc. The castle has
long been a ruin, but, all things considered, it has been magnificently
preserved. It had the fortune to escape the dismantling which was so nearly
universal during the Civil Wars. Later times have been less considerate, for
many of the houses roundabout have been built from the stone and timber
of the fortress; yet, looking at it from a distance, the place still seems to be
intact, and grandly formidable in its strength and its situation. From
Portmadoc it is the principal feature of the landscape as the eye sweeps
round the fine curve of the bay. The interest of Portmadoc itself lies in the
incomparable view of the Snowdon range which is to be obtained
therefrom, and in a curious association with Shelley. A huge alluvial plain,
the Traeth Mawr, or Great Sand, sheltered by an irregular semicircle of
hills, makes an impressive foreground. Here one might expect to hear tales
of that Prince Madoc who is alleged to have preceded Columbus, by a huge

interval, in the discovery of America; but Portmadoc, with its long, low line
of railway across the Traeth Bach, its small schooners laden with slate, its
rows of houses struggling about the hillside, its active industry, its bridges
and quays, is a town of quite modern date, its history extending backward
only to the end of the last century, and its name being derived, not from the
adventurous prince whom Southey has made the subject of an epic, but
from an energetic Mr. Maddocks, who reclaimed 2,000 acres of good land
from the sea, and carried a mile-long mole of stone across the great estuary
into which the little river Glaslyn flows. Portions of Portmadoc are at this
day some two or three feet below the sea-level. One may obtain from here
one of the best views of Snowdon; and on the south side of the valley, over
which his shadow seems to be cast, the Cynicht—the Matterhorn of Wales,
as it has been called—rises up in noble and entrancing proportions. Hence,
too, come into impressive prominence the green and grassy sides of Moel
Wyn. A walk of a few miles would bring us to Beddgelert, or to the lovely
Pass of Aberglaslyn, with its unforgettable admixture of mountain and of
sylvan scenery; or, by climbing the hill at our back, we may come within
sight of Tremadoc, and the house in which the poet Shelley alleged that he
was assailed by a mysterious and murderous visitant. Into the Traeth Bach,
which is an unreclaimed extension of the Traeth Mawr, pours down the
stream which accompanies the traveller on the “baby railway” from the
heights of Blaenau Festiniog. Westward lie Criccieth and Pwllheli, and the
sharp bend of the Lleyn peninsula, and Bardsey Island and its lighthouse,
round which one may sail into Carnarvon Bay.

THE ESTUARY, BARMOUTH.

RIVERS OF NORTH WALES.

CHAPTER II.
THE SEIONT, THE OGWEN, THE CONWAY.

The SEIONT: Llanberis Pass—Lakes Peris and Padarn—Dolbadarn Castle and Ceunant Mawr—
Carnarvon and its Castle. The OGWEN: Llyn Ogwen and Llyn Idwal—Bethesda—Penrhyn
Castle. The LLUGWY: Capel Curig—Moel Siabod—Pont-y-Cyfing—Swallow Falls—The
Miners’ Bridge—Bettws-y-Coed. The LLEDR: Dolwyddelen—Pont-y-Pant. The MACHNO and its
Fall. The CONWAY: Fairy Glen—Llanrwst—Gwydir Castle—Llanbedr—Trefriw—Conway
Marsh—Conway Castle and Town—Deganwy—Llandudno.

T HE river SEIONT is only about thirteen miles long. One seldom hears
mention of its name, except by the trout-fisher, it may be. It is treated,
in general, as of small account. And yet, surely it is one of the most
distinguished rivers of North Wales, for does it not drain the north-eastern
side of Snowdon, and flow through the Pass of Llanberis, and broaden out
into Llyn Peris and Llyn Padarn, and finally, after devious wanderings, and
much merry tumbling among rocks, boulders, and little reedy islets,
culminate in a port, with the great castle of Carnarvon guarding its exit into
the Strait across which one looks to the lovely island of Anglesea? But if
few speak of the Seiont, there has been unlimited eloquence concerning the
grandeur—what the descriptive writers of the last century would have
considered the awfulness—of the Llanberis Pass. The point of view has
changed whilst the century has been passing away. Where our great-
grandfathers spoke of “horrid scenes” we find nowadays glory of colour,
and magnificence of form, and all the finer characteristics of mountain
beauty. But something, after all, is to be said from the point of view of our
great-grandfathers. We travel through the Pass of Llanberis by coach on
good and safe roads, and they ventured, perforce, along “a horse-path so
rugged that much of it was like going up and down rough stone stairs.”
It was between the two lakes Peris and Padarn, and at the new village of
Llanberis, that the late Poet Laureate foregathered, in his youth, with his

friend Leonard, who sang of “all the cycle of the golden year”:—
“We crost
Between the lakes, and clambered half-way up
The counter side . . . . . .
. . . . . . and high above, I heard them blast
The steep slate quarry, and the great echo flap
And buffet round the hill from bluff to bluff.”

The first recorded ascent of Snowdon seems to have been made from the
same spot in 1639. “At daybreak on the 3rd of August,” says the
seventeenth-century mountaineer, “having mounted our horses, we
proceeded to the British Alps.”
After the mountains, Dolbadarn Castle and Ceunant Mawr—the Waterfall
of the Great Chasm—are the principal attractions of Llanberis. The cataract
is upwards of 60 feet in height. It tumbles over a few ledges, rushes down a
wide slope, and falls into a pool below. The castle is singularly well placed
for picturesque effect. The one tower now remaining occupies the whole of
the surface of a rocky eminence, which presents a precipitous front to the
lake, and has a marvellous background of high-peaked mountains. Often
enough it can be seen only through mists, or driving sheets of rain, for
Llanberis seems to be the home of the rain-cloud and the cradle of the
storm.
An unspeakable lumber of waste slates stretches out into the lakes as we
proceed downwards, but does not interfere with the splendid view of
Snowdon which is to be obtained at the point where the Seiont leaves Llyn
Padarn. Wooded cliffs and heathery crags, and peeps of wild moorland, and
rugged country that is redeemed from desolateness by frequent white
cottages, make fine pictures for us as we proceed down the river towards
Carnarvon. Here and there the stream is divided by great masses of stone,
past which it races in order to drive some watermill, half hidden in leaves.
There are reedy pools, in which a wild swan may occasionally be seen, and
then willowy marshes; and so, bending this way and that, now bursting into
the open sunlight, and then plunging into woodland shade, and always noisy
and impetuous, the little river hastens on until it joins the tide, issuing into
the Menai Strait between the grimly beautiful walls of Carnarvon Castle
and a wooded bank. Only as to its interior can the castle now be properly
described as a ruin. Restoration has here taken the form of rebuilding, and

this proud stronghold is now immeasurably more complete as to its outward
appearance than it can have been when Edward I. exhibited from its walls
the prince who, having first seen the light only a few hours before, was “not
only born in Wales but could not speak a word of the English tongue.”
Away from the
castle and what
remains of the
walls, which, in
appearance, still
to some extent
justify the
ancient name of
“the fort over
against
Anglesea,” the
town of
Carnarvon is
painfully
modern; but
what there is of it
that is really old
conveys the
impression of
mediævalism
more completely
than any other
place in Wales,
except, perhaps,
the old town of
Conway. The
walls of the
castle, with their
numerous towers PASS OF LLANBERIS (p. 205).
and turrets, rise
up to a
prodigious height above the quays, at which little coasting vessels with red
sails and gay streaks of paint take in their cargoes of slates. The great

gateway looking out seaward has a loftiness and a massiveness which cow
the spirit. But the outlook hence becomes all the more beautiful by contrast
with this castellated gloom. Yonder is the Isle of Anglesea—the sacred
island—shimmering through a sunlit mist, and the Strait; with sandbanks
visible here and there, and flocks of sea-birds soaring and dipping and
screaming, is like a broad river, widening itself to its utmost until it
becomes impossible to distinguish between river and sea.

At the head of the Pass of Nant Francon, and behind the huge, dark,
threatening shoulder of Carnedd Dafydd, Llyn Ogwen stretches along for
about a mile or so, hemmed in at its further extremity by a low range of
hills. In Cumberland this lake would be called a tarn, as would also Llyn
Idwal, a sort of miniature Wastwater, which lodges in a hollow, among deep
and gloomy precipices, a few hundred yards to the left. “This,” wrote
Leland, “is a smoule poule, where they say that Idwalle, Prince of Wales,
was killed and drounid.”
“No human ear but Dunawt’s heard
Young Idwal’s dying scream,”

says the ballad in which the tradition is enshrined. The appearance of the
place may well have suggested either the legend in modern or the crime in
ancient days. In stormy weather the surroundings of the little lake are
inconceivably wild and forbidding, and the wind swirls about in this hollow
of the rocks until Llyn Idwal boils like a sea.
Ogwen is a lake of gentler and more serene aspect. At its foot, under
Carnedd Dafydd, where the coach-road crosses, its waters, with those from
Llyn Idwal, form the Falls of Benglog, so well described by an older writer
that his words shall be made to serve the purpose here. “The highest Fall,”
observes Bingley, “is grand and majestic, yet by no means equal to the other
two. At the second, or middle, Fall the river is precipitated, in a fine stream,
through a chasm between two perpendicular rocks that each rise several
yards above. The mountain, Trivaen, fills up the wide space at the top, and
forms a rude and sublime distance. The stream widens as it descends, and
below passes over a slanting rock, which gives it a somewhat different
direction. In the foreground is the rugged bed of a stream, and the water is

seen to dash in various directions among broken masses of rock.” At the
lowest fall “the stream roars with great fury, and in one sheet of foam, down
an unbroken and almost perpendicular rock. The roar of the water, and the
broken and uncouth disposition of the surrounding rocks, add greatly to the
interest of the scene.” And from these Falls of Benglog one looks down the
wide, treeless vale of Nant Francon, a broad, peaty marsh, the bed of some
ancient lake, as it would appear, hemmed in by dark ridges of mountains.

CARNARVON CASTLE (p. 206).

Throughout the whole length of Nant Francon the river OGWEN is a thin,
quiet, winding, silvery stream, unsheltered by bush or tree; but as it
approaches the Bethesda slate quarries it is shadowed by its first foliage,
that seems designed to hide from it the gigantic outrage on which was built
the scattered and rather extensive town of Bethesda, and which has made
Lord Penrhyn one of the wealthiest members of the House of Lords. Below

the fine bridge leading to the quarries the river is lost among deep woods;
but, pursuing it further, one comes most unexpectedly on a long and
romantic series of cascades, continuing until the Ogwen is lost to sight in a
deep hollow filled with mist and foam. The river has a beautiful and
picturesque bend as it passes behind the cottages of Bethesda, a mile or so
lower down, and thenceforward it becomes a river something like the
Llugwy in appearance, tumbling over short cataracts, or wandering deep
among woods, or emerging now and again amid pleasant green spaces, its
banks shaded by overhanging trees.

THE SWALLOW FALLS (p. 210).

As Carnedd Dafydd, and its twin, Llewelyn, are left behind there comes in
sight the steep side and dark, rounded summit of Penmaenmawr, and then,
on an opposite and less conspicuous eminence, looking over Bangor and the
Menai Strait, and surrounded by woods in which the Ogwen is for a while
completely hidden, rises Penrhyn Castle, the seat of Lord Penrhyn, with one
great square, turreted tower dominating all the country roundabout.
Henceforth the river is little seen until it flows out, through a deep ravine,
on to the broad, sandy flats which stretch from Bangor to Beaumaris, its
short, swift, troubled life ending thus in sunlit peace.
The steep mountain-sides which hem in Lake Ogwen at its foot are so
black, bare, rugged, and forbidding, as to suggest the skeleton of an
unfinished world. A kindlier scenery opens out beyond the head of the lake,
where the river LLUGWY—the first of the tributaries of the Conway which
have now to be noticed—after wandering downwards from a small
mountain tarn under the shadow of Carnedd Llewelyn, runs through a wild
and fine pass to Capel Curig. The valley is hemmed in by the great
mountains, and to the south rise the three peaks of Y Tryfan, with the
Glyder-Fach in the hollow to its left.
At Capel Curig, where is Pont-y-Garth, the Llugwy is an inconspicuous
stream, but it grows wider, and its valley becomes very beautiful,
immediately after leaving that place, when it is joined by the waters from
the two small lakes which make the best of all the foregrounds to Snowdon.
Here is “a region of fairy beauty and of wild grandeur,” as George Borrow
says. Moel Siabod, “a mighty mountain, bare and precipitous, with two
peaks like those of Pindus, opposite Janina,” here hides its sternness amid
woods of oak and fir. Above the lakes, all the peaks of Snowdon are in sight
—Y Wyddfa, which is the summit; Lliwedd, “the triple-crested”; craggy
Crib-Goch, advancing itself before the rest; and Crib-y-Ddysgyl. To the
right of the valley, which has Moel Siabod on its left, there is a curving
range of rocky heights, their harshness softened by bracken and dwarf
shrubs, and beyond, and high above, is the stony wilderness of the Glyder-
Fach.
Afon Llugwy—afon being the pretty Welsh word for “river”—flows
through one of the most beautiful of all pastoral valleys on its way from
Capel Curig to the Swallow Falls. Every bend of the stream, every green,
shady pool, every long stretch of rock impeded water has appeared again

and again on the walls of the great picture exhibitions; for there is no river
of Wales which is so much haunted by artists as this which we are now
following to its junction with the Conway. At Pont-y-Cyfing—a modern
bridge of a single tall arch—the river plunges through riven cliffs, boils
round enormous masses of rock, and then tumbles over a bold cascade, to
recover its quiet almost immediately; but only to be again driven into
turbulence where a pretty rustic bridge strides across, to give unimpeded
view of a succession of rapids above and below.
The Llugwy dreams along through pleasant meadows and by quiet woods
before it comes to the famous Rhaiadr-y-Wennol (the Waterfall of the
Swallow). Whence, one is driven to ask, comes such a name as this? The
easy and the usual reply is that these are called Swallow Falls because of
the swiftness with which the water descends. But all waterfalls are swift.
The correct answer to the question suggests itself, as one continues to gaze,
through a mist of fine spray, when the river comes down in an autumn
flood. The ears deafened by the rush of the cataract, the eyes dazzled and
fascinated by the breadth and the mass of the falling waters, a dim sense of
something white, with black streaks here and there, overpowers all other
impressions. As the river sweeps downward over the higher fall, it is broken
and divided by dark pillars of rock. Yes, that is the idea, certainly. What
these Falls suggested to the ancient inhabitants of Wales, to those who gave
its name to the Rhaiadr-y-Wennol, was the swift alternation between the
white gleam of the swallow’s breast and the dark shadow of its wings, as it
darted to and fro between river and sky. George Borrow has a concise,
vivid, and fairly correct description of the Falls, which may be quoted here
because it is impossible to put the matter in fewer words. “First,” he says,
“there are a number of little foaming torrents, bursting through rocks about
twenty yards above the promontory on which I stood; then come two
beautiful rolls of white water, dashing into a pool a little above the
promontory; then there is a swirl of water round its corner into a pool
below, black as death, and seemingly of great depth; then a rush through a
very narrow outlet into another pool, from which the water clamours away
down the glen.”

MINERS’ BRIDGE, BETTWS-Y-COED (p. 212).

We have had the last sight of the mountains for a while when we enter the
little, rock-poised wood from which the Swallow Falls are to be seen. The
grand, solitary mass of Moel Siabod lies behind us, one grey, far-away peak
of Snowdon exhibiting itself over the lowermost slope. Henceforth, almost
to Bettws-y-Coed, the course of the Llugwy is through a deep, rocky, and
finely-wooded glen. It is Matlock on a more magnificent scale. It is the
High Tor repeating itself again and again, in greater grandeur of scale, and
with additional beauty of surroundings. Wild nature is here clothed and
softened by luxuriant foliage, which towers up to the heights. The bare rock
is visible only where the river courses through the deep woods, which are to
be seen to most advantage from the Miners’ Bridge, slanting far upward
across the river to the opposite slope—a bridge of rough sections of tree
trunk bound together, with a hand-rail of long boughs for security—a bridge
erected in an emergency, and for a temporary purpose, as one might guess;
a bridge of perilous slope, which has done good service to more than one
generation of miners, climbing up the hillside to their daily toil.

Photo: I. Slater, Llandudno.
MOEL SIABOD, FROM THE LLUGWY (p. 211).

Of Bettws-y-Coed—“the Bede House in the Wood”—so much is known
that little needs in this place to be said. Here is Pont-y-Pair, and a scene
which painting has made more familiar than almost any other in these
islands. The bridge has been associated with the name of Inigo Jones, but at
least the base of the structure dates back to the fifteenth century, being the
work of a mason who must also have been a fine architect, and who died, as
it seems, before his work was complete. It has four lofty arches, about

which an ancient and gnarled ivy clings. Below, when the water is quiet,
one may see the trout dashing about amid the pools. The river-bed is riven
and torn, and full of craggy masses. A rocky islet, on which clusters a most
picturesque group of fir trees, divides the accelerating waters, that now,
after one final battle with obstructions, sweep sharply round a curve, and
shortly join the Conway.

PONT-Y-PAIR.

The valley of the LLEDR always presents itself to this present writer’s
recollection as he beheld it first, at the end of a dry summer, when the eye

feasted without weariness on glowing colour, and when every bend of the
river opened up some piece of country which was like one of Turner’s
glorious dreams. He saw it last on a day of drifting rain. And in wet or in
dry seasons the Lledr valley permits of no comparison between itself and
any other. It is incomparable in its various beauty; it is unique in its power
of attraction, in its way of producing a satisfying sense of something wholly
individual and complete. High up towards Blaenau Festiniog it has little
beauty; but before the stream reaches Dolwyddelen Castle the real Lledr
valley begins, and is thenceforward down to the junction with the Conway a
perpetually changing scene of loveliness. Here again Moel Siabod, seen in a
new aspect, but always striking in form and noble in proportions, seems to
dominate the landscape. It may be seen from one impressive point with
Dolwyddelen Castle in the middle distance. This ruin is the fragment of an
ancient stronghold which derives all its present importance from the beauty
of its situation. A single tower occupies the summit of a rocky knoll, and
stands out clear against its misty mountain background. Yet the castle was
fairly large in its day, occupying the whole surface of the hill. Here lived
Iorwerth Drwyndwn, whose fortune in battle gained him his surname of
“the Broken Nose”; and here, too, Llewelyn the Great is said to have been
born. At a later day the castle became the residence of Howel Coetmor, a
notorious outlaw and robber chief, who so harried his neighbours that they
sat in church with weapons in their hands. A Roman road crossed the Lledr
at the village of Dolwyddelen, which is about a mile from the castle, and
there are still distinct Roman remains on the hill above the village. But let
no one, on that account, meditate on the ruins of empires at the railway
station which is called Roman Bridge, for the road crossed the river at quite
another place, and the bridge is of an antiquity corresponding to that of the
relic which was discovered by the credulous hero of Sir Walter Scott’s
romance.
The Lledr wanders about its valley as if it were loth to leave. It makes huge
loops and bends, almost knotting itself sometimes into what the sailors call
“a figure of eight.” The whole valley is a combination of wildness and
fertility, of wide prospects and confined glimpses of sylvan beauty, of
wooded hills and frowning crags and broken upland. In rainy weather
innumerable foamy streams swell the Lledr, until, in some portions of its
course, it seems to make a series of lakes. The oldest bridge is Pont-y-Pant,
not far from the entrance to the valley from the direction of Bettws-y-Coed.

Below this the stream hurries onwards through woods and meadow-land,
under mighty bluffs which are wooded to their summits, and, issuing at
length from its rocky barriers, adds to the Conway a volume of water that is
equal to its own.
The river MACHNO falls into the Conway a mile or two beyond its junction
with the Lledr. It is a short river, drawing to itself a number of little
mountain streams, and its principal feature—but that is of the first
importance from the tourist point of view—round which painters of
landscape seem to encamp themselves all the year through, the falls of the
Machno, combines every element of what one may call the ordinary
picturesque. The river foams among crags and boulders, and between rocky
ledges, from which the trees hang dizzily, casting deep shadows across the
stream, and making green reflections in each swirling pool. Then, too, there
is Pandy Mill, making a sunshine in the shady place, and a mill-wheel with
a tumbling jet of water; and nature seems to have lavished all its softer
endearments on this exquisite little scene, delighting the eye with tender
arrangements of moss and film-fern, and lichen and hoar boughs.

Photo: Green Bros., Grasmere.
ON THE LLEDR.

Not far below this pretty landscape cameo are the Falls of the Conway,
where the river rushes on through a gorge of dark, sloping, almost columnar
rocks, and then—divided by a tall crag, on which one or two small bushes
have contrived to grow—bends and plunges down two steep descents to
where a half-ruinous salmon leap brings to mind the eminence of the
Conway as a fishing river. And next, the Fairy Glen! This is a genuine
ravine, where the stream forces itself between riven cliffs, and flows in

deep, rapid streaks of peaty-brown water among a wilderness of grey rocks,
plunging downward, thereafter, into a wild glen overhung by woods. The
name of the Fairy Glen would seem inappropriate enough to such a scene
were it not that here, again, Nature has thrown all manner of rustic
decorations about this frowning gorge. The sunlight, too, seems to fill the
place in a strange, mystic way, so that the lichen-encrusted rocks are seen
through a kind of blue, misty glamour, and there is a suggestion of rainbow
colour over all.

ANOTHER VIEW IN THE LLEDR VALLEY.

From the road high above the Fairy Glen there is a fine prospect of the
mountains. Moel Siabod seems to have come nearer, and the far distance is
closed in by the Glyders, Tryfan, and the Carnedd Llewelyn range. Down in
the valley is the Llyn-yr-Afanc, or the Beaver’s Pool, and nearer to Bettws-
y-Coed the river is crossed by the fine span of the iron bridge which was
built in the year of the battle of Waterloo.

The CONWAY has no
particular attractiveness
as it passes Bettws,
where David Cox’s
famous signboard may
still be seen at the
Royal Oak Hotel. It has
here a green margin of
meadow-land, which
grows broader as we
proceed towards
Llanrwst, a sweetly-
placed little market
town, to which small
vessels seem to have
made their way in the
last century, for a sailor
who penned a diary in
1769 wrote how
“Llanrwst is situated in
a very deep bottom on
the river Conway,
betwixt Denbigh hills
and Carnarvon rocks,
some of which appear
to hang over the town.
Nevertheless, we found
a much better
anchorage than we
could have expected at
such a bottom.”
FAIRY GLEN, BETTWS-Y-COED.
This sailor was an
observing man, for he
continues:—“Llanrwst is a small market-town, containing one church, a
market-hall, as they call it, and about fifty or sixty houses, but never a good
house among the whole lot.” There are some good houses nowadays,
however, and a fine stone bridge of three arches, with a peculiarly high and

graceful spring. Here, again, the design is attributed to Inigo Jones, as,
perhaps, ought to be the case in the immediate country of that renowned
architect. Gwydir Castle, the family mansion of the Wynns, is a
conspicuous object among the woods which here cluster under the feet of
the craggy Carnarvonshire hills. It has now passed, through the hands of the
Earl of Ancaster, whose forbears married with the Wynn family, into the
possession of the Earl Carrington. The founder of the castle was Sir John
Wynn of Gwydir, who represented Carnarvonshire in Parliament in 1596,
and whose soul is said to be imprisoned under the Swallow Falls, “there to
be punished, purged, spouted upon, and purified from the foul deeds done
in his days of nature.” A truly tremendous malediction! Some traces of the
sixteenth-century building still remain, but the present castle belongs to our
own century, though it contains carved work of the reigns of Elizabeth and
James.
At Llanbedr, on the hills above the Llanrwst road, may be found one of the
most remarkable primitive fortifications that are to be seen anywhere in
these islands, Pen-Caer-Helen by name. “It was a British post of great
strength,” says Pennant, “in some parts singularly guarded. It had the usual
fosses, and vast ramparts of stones, with some remains of the facing of
walls, and the foundations of three or four round buildings.” The remains
are still very extensive, and clearly indicate the extent of the ancient stone
ramparts. It was a post from which a very great extent of country could be
surveyed. In one direction you look over the Conway and the Denbighshire
hills, as far as the valley of the Clwyd; in another, the eye stretches over a
barren waste to the Carnedd Llewelyn range. The Great and the Little Orme
are in sight, and Puffin Island, and the sea.
The Conway is still navigable by small vessels as far as Trefriw, a pretty
village of small houses and neat villas, clustering under the hill, and close to
the coach road. Trefriw is renowned not only for its situation, but for its
“Fairy Falls,” and its “spa,” which, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillips, yields “the
nastiest chalybeate I ever had the folly to taste.” For some distance below
Trefriw, the river, now broader and much more deep, runs for a while
between great masses of tall reeds and sedge, and then opens out into a
lake-like width, with such a prospect of spreading water, and woods and
mountain, as recalls the characteristic beauties of Windermere. Very
delightful indeed is a voyage in the little steamer which plies between

Deganwy, Conway, and Trefriw; but it is at Conway Marsh that the river is
at its noblest. When the tide is out, this is a broad, sweeping, sandy bay,
with oozy spaces of bright green towards its centre; and when the tide is
full, it has the appearance of a large and beautiful islanded lake. The river is
walled in on the Conway side, and a thick wood shadows the stream as it
bends round towards the sea. It is here that one of the most effective views
of Conway Castle comes into sight, with the two white bridges stretching
over the narrowing channel, and the great circular towers clustering
together in such manner as to convey a most formidable impression of
massiveness and strength. One naturally compares Conway with Carnarvon
Castle. The two buildings are said to have been designed by the same
architect, and, of their kind, they are among the finest in the world.
Carnarvon Castle is more elaborated in idea, more ingenious, more
decorative, and in general aspect more grand; but Conway suggests a
greater antiquity, a more solid strength, a sounder and more artistic unity of
structure. It is a mere ruin, having been dismantled in 1665. Even before
that period it seems to have been abandoned to time. There is a letter of
James I.’s reign which says that “the King’s Castle of Conway, in the
county of Carnarvon, is in great ruin and decay, whereof the greater part
hath been downe and uninhabitable for manie ages past; the rest of the
timber supporting the roof is all, or for the most part, rotten, and growth
daylie by wet more and more in decay, no man having dwelt in anie part
thereof these thirty years past.” There is no roof at all now; the timbers are
long consumed; the castle is gutted throughout; and yet, as seen from the
Conway river, the castle still has a certain august and complete majesty, as
if time could do it no real despite.

ON THE CONWAY.

Conway Castle, with the Conway mountain, on which there is a British fort,
towering up in the rear, held complete command of the estuary. It was an
English, not a Welsh, stronghold, being built by Edward I., about 1284.
Queen Eleanor is said to have lived there with the king, and one of the
towers has been named the “Queen’s” tower in memory of that event. The
great hall, which was supported on vaults, was 130 feet long by 32 feet
broad. The castle was besieged in 1290 by Madoc, one of the sons of
Llewelyn, the English king himself being present on the occasion. A fleet
bringing provisions saved the garrison just as it was being starved into
surrender. When Bolingbroke landed in England, and Richard II. found
himself abandoned by his army, he fled here for safety, and at this castle, it
is averred, was his abdication signed.

Photo: I. Slater, Llandudno.
THE CONWAY, FROM CONWAY CASTLE.

Conway town, sloping swiftly down to the riverside, and almost wholly
enclosed within its many-towered walls, looks like a contemporary
illustration of Froissart. There is no other such perfect specimen of a small
mediæval walled town now remaining. The fortifications climb up a steep
hillside, in a triangular form—or rather, as has been said, so as to make the
figure of a Welsh harp. The highest point of the triangle is so far above the
other portions of the walls that the whole has that quaint look of being out
of perspective which is the most pronounced characteristic of all mediæval
draughtsmanship.

CONWAY CASTLE.

Across the water, and on the way to Llandudno, the little town, or village,
or city of Deganwy half hides itself among the sands, just above the verge
of what was formerly, and even up to recent times, a marsh stretching from
opposite Conway to Llandudno Bay. It was hereabout, but on the Conway
side of the river, that the pearl-fishing was carried on:—
“Conway, which out of his streame doth send
Plenty of pearls to deck his dames withal”—

says Spenser, in the “Faërie Queene.” The pearl fishery had once a real
importance. Sir Richard Wynn of Gwydir presented to the queen of Charles
II. a Conway pearl, which afterwards adorned the regal crown. This was
probably of a kind that was found higher up the river, at Trefriw. A more
common variety was found in abundance on the bar, and the collection of
the pearl-bearing mussels was for a long time a distinct and regular
industry. “As for the pearls found in these mountainous rivers,” said a letter-
writer of the seventeenth century, “they are very plentiful, and uncommonly

large, though few of them well coloured. They are found in a large, black
muscle, peculiar to such rivers. Several ladyes of this county and
Denbighshire have collections of good pearle, found chiefly in the river
Conway.”

Deganwy, “the place where the white waves break upon the shore,” was a
royal residence from a very remote period. It had a castle, which is said to
have been erected in the sixth century by Maelgwyn Gwynedd, and to have
been destroyed by Llewelyn the Great, whose statue is to be seen in
Conway town. “It was a noble structure,” says Giraldus Cambrensis, “and
its possession was held to be of great importance to the English, so that
Randal Blondevil, Earl of Chester, rebuilt it in 1210. King John encamped
at Deganwy two years later, but was compelled to retreat with his army
before Llewelyn. There were other royal retreats from Deganwy, before the
fierce Welsh, in 1245, 1258, and 1262. There were “great ruines” of the
castle in Leland’s time; but now it is with difficulty that any fragment is
discerned. Deganwy itself has become a watering-place, a small rival to
Llandudno, mainly attractive because it presents a magnificent view of the
estuary of the Conway, and of the fine range of mountains which ends in
Penmaenmawr.”
Llandudno, for the most part, occupies the flat and formerly marshy space
between the Great and the Little Orme. It is altogether a favourable type of
the modern watering-place; but it need not detain us here, for we have
reached the point at which the river broadens out into Conway Bay, and is
lost among the in-rushing waves of the Irish Sea.