Welsh Mountains

“ Three sides of this wide panorama rise and fall in constant change of hill and dale like the waves of an agitated sea, and are bounded at the horizon by the strangely formed, jagged outline of the Welsh mountains, which at either end descend to a fertile plain shaded by thousands of lofty trees, and in the obscure distance, where it blends with the sky, is edged with a white misty line—the Atlantic Ocean. ”

“ After I had satisfied myself with gazing at this romantic specimen of human power and skill, I turned to one of the greatest and most varied works of nature;—the entire range of the Welsh mountains, which rises immediately from the water, distinct and near enough clearly to distinguish woods, villages and valleys, and stretches along an extent of ten miles. The mountains grouped themselves in every variety of light and shadow ”

“ About a mile beyond the Welsh Prince, the valley becomes truly beautiful. Waving woods adorn the mountains upon either side. The Wnion here begins to be an important stream; and, though in its course towards Dolgelly it is swelled by numerous mountain tributaries into a broad river, the trees upon its banks form an impenetrable screen, which conceal it from the traveller, and its hoarse murmur, as it dashes over the rocks that vainly endeavour to intercept its way, alone remind him of its vicinity. ”

“ Penmaenmawr (1,553 ft.) is far from being a difficult mountain. The ancient Britons had a fort on the top of it, and it was ascended 'by a person of quality in the reign of Charles II.,' but it is scarcely a paradox to say that it was the greatest obstacle to knowledge of Welsh mountains [Pg 17] during last century. The highroad from Chester crossed it, and our ancestors used to go rolling off it down into the sea, and did not like it. Therefore a journey to Wales was a great and a rare feat. All the early travellers dilate upon its terrors. ”

“ The pretty little Welsh town of Cardyllian stands near the shingle of a broad estuary, beyond which tower the noble Cambrian mountains. High and dim, tier above tier, undulating hills, broken by misty glens, and clothed with woods, rise from the opposite shore, and are backed, range behind range, by the dim outlines of Alpine peaks and slopes, and flanked by purple and gold-tinted headlands, rising dome-like from the sea. ”

“ Moel Shebbod towers in front, and, as we pursued our delightful path, about two miles and a half from Beddgelert, an opening of the hills upon the left displayed a deep gorge, and the base of Snowdon, whose high peak, rising in the unclouded skies, held up the holy symbol of Christianity, as in adoration of the Creator. At length, I reached Llynn Dinas, a lake of about three quarters of a mile in extent, through which the Gwynant runs; it is surrounded by lofty mountains of a deeper tint than is usually seen upon the Welsh hills. ”

“ The magnificent scenery seems to create a pensive awe upon the spirit. Often the pedestrian, passing along a piece of unsuggestive road, suddenly finds that the stupendous mountains have sloped down, to valleys of the wildest, and most picturesque beauty, valley opening into valley, in some instances; in others, as in the vale of Glamorgan, stretching along, for many miles, in plenteous fruitfulness, and beauty, illuminated by some river like the Tivy, the Towy, or the Llugg, some of these rivers sparkling, and flashing with the glittering gleisiad, as an old Welsh song sings it ”

“ The bottom is a small grassy plain, dotted with trees, which has obtained the appellation of Beauty sleeping in the lap of Terror. The mountains that surround the vale have a wild and rugged appearance. As I proceeded along the road towards the head of the valley, a horn was sounded from the mountain, and I perceived a Welsh girl standing upon a projecting eminence: bare headed and bare footed was this nymph of Cambria; her cheeks were swelled out with her occupation, and she looked like a female Boreas, bursting with the wind she was sending forth by degrees to alarm the world. ”

“ An impression prevails among those who know both that the weather of N. Wales is, if possible, more changeable than that of the Lakes. Climbers will notice this chiefly in winter, when the snow on the Welsh mountains less frequently settles into sound condition. Perhaps sudden changes of temperature are partly to blame for the greater frequency in Wales of deaths from exposure. Winter climbing is very enjoyable, but proper precautions must be taken against the cold. ”

“ Let it be understood that I mended my strap with my pocket-handkerchief, that Miss O’Flannigan did her hair with three surviving hairpins, and that we received all possible assistance from the horse-flies.
The midsummer sun in the heart of the Welsh mountains is bad to beat. It was blazing when we began the long ascent from the valley as though it had been at it all night—as, indeed, I{55} suppose it had, somewhere or other—and until that early morning ride we cannot be said to have properly known what the word heat might mean. ”

“ To the Welsh, besides being the hill of the Awen or Muse, it has always been the hill of hills, the loftiest p. 174of all mountains, the one whose snow is the coldest, to climb to whose peak is the most difficult of all feats, and the one whose fall will be the most astounding catastrophe of the last day.
To view this mountain I and my little family set off in a calèche on the third morning after our arrival at Bangor.
Our first stage was to Caernarvon. ”

“ EXTINCT GLACIERS IN WALES. The considerable amount of vertical movement in opposite directions, which was suggested in the last chapter, as affording the most probable explanation of the position of some of the stratified and fossiliferous drifts of Scotland, formed since the commencement of the glacial period, will appear less startling if it can be shown that independent observations lead us to infer that a geographical revolution of still greater magnitude accompanied the successive phases of glaciation through which the Welsh mountains have passed. ”

“ Mountain Fairies—The Gwyllion—The Old Woman of the Mountain—The Black Mountain Gwyll—Exorcism by Knife—Occult Intellectual Powers of Welsh Goats—The Legend of Cadwaladr’s Goat.
I.
The Gwyllion are female fairies of frightful characteristics, who haunt lonely roads in the Welsh mountains, and lead night-wanderers astray. They partake somewhat of the aspect of the Hecate of Greek mythology, who rode on the storm, and was a hag of horrid guise. The Welsh word gwyll is variously used to signify gloom, shade, duskiness, a hag, a witch, a fairy, and a goblin ”

“ I give a free translation of this effort as delivered on Sunday, December 24th, 1876 (which proved a mild day) , and which I find reported in the ‘Western Mail’ of the 26th as follows: ‘The day of the winter solstice has dawned upon us; little is the smile and the halo of Hea. The depth of winter has been reached, but the muse of Wales is budding still. Cold is the snow on the mountains; naked are the trees, and the meadows are bare; but while nature is withering the muse of Wales is budding. ”

“ Thirdly, a second continental period when the bed of the glacial sea, with its marine shells and erratic blocks, was laid dry, and when the quantity of land equalled that of the first period, and therefore probably exceeded that represented in the map, p. 279. During this period there were glaciers in the higher mountains of Scotland and Wales, and the Welsh glaciers, as we have seen, pushed before them and cleared out the marine drift with which some valleys had been filled during the period of submergence. The parallel roads of Glen Roy are referable to some part of the same era. ”

“ And as some of these events and fictions are the subjects of, and are explained by, existing Welsh legends, it follows that the legends must be, in some shape or other, of very remote antiquity. It will be observed that this argument supports remote antiquity only for such legends as are connected with the greater topographical features, as mountains, lakes, rivers, seas, which must have been named at an early period in the inhabitation of the country by man. ”

“ In this domain, the prevalent belief in Wales may be said to rest with the ignorant, to [Pg 5] be strongest in rural and mining districts, to be childlike and poetic, and to relate to anywhere except the spot where the speaker dwells—as to the next parish, to the next county, to the distant mountains, or to the shadow-land of Gwerddonau Llion, the green meadows of the sea. ”

“ Climbing, with the help of guides, the steep and rugged path by which alone the mountains were then scaled, they at last reached the summit, and found, to their amazement and delight, a lovely country of hill and dale, pasture, woodland, and cultivated fields, spreading for miles before them. Invigorated by the cool air, and captivated with the scene, they reported the discovery in brilliant colours, and pioneered their countrymen to this truly charming retreat from the heat of the plains below. ”

“ In the single province of Bengal are districts containing seven million five hundred thousand inhabitants, without a missionary; and in other parts of India you may journey through district after district, and province after province, with millions and millions of inhabitants, and find but two or four men, toiling amid the masses of heathenism around them, as if attempting to empty the ocean by buckets-full, or to tunnel the mountains with bodkins. In other places you will find no man at all to shed one ray of light upon the unbroken darkness of false religion. ”

“ We begin our climb out of the valley over the Bwlch Ooeddrws Pass—the name is even more alarming than the heavy grade shown in the road book—and for three miles we climb steadily up the mighty hill alongside an incline that drops sharply to the roaring stream far below. From the summit a grand prospect greets our eyes: the wild, broken, intensely green Welsh hills stretching away range after range until they fade in the purple shadows of the distance, and yet higher above us looms the crest of Cader Idris, on which still linger flecks of snow. ”

“ We thanked her, and proceeded to mount the hill, or monticle, once the residence of the great Welsh chieftain, whom his own deeds and the pen of Shakespear have rendered immortal.
Owen Glendower’s hill, or mount, at Sycharth, unlike the one bearing his name on the banks of the Dee, is not an artificial hill, but the work of nature, save and except that to a certain extent it has been modified by the hand of man. ”

“ We have six miles of climbing before us, close under the heights of Cader Idris, through one of the wildest tracts of country in wild Wales, where the road at last rises steeply between rough stone walls across a desolate moor, and a mountain stream dashes below us on the right, and in all probability a flock of little Welsh sheep makes excitedly for the nearest gap. ”

“ While agriculture prospered in the Pecos valley, the Eddy brothers wondered if similar applications of technology, capital, and expertise could generate prosperity to the west in the Tularosa basin. Gold strikes in the Sierra Blanca had created the boomtown of White Oaks, while timber harvests had begun in the Sacramento mountains. Charles Eddy approached a group of investors in El Paso, Texas, suggesting the merits of a rail line between that border town and the mines. ”

“ In like manner, later cave dwellers called the "Hueco" culture (from the Spanish word for "tank") appeared along the west face of the Sacramento Mountains by AD 500. Building upon the centuries of agricultural evolution in the region, the Hueco people lived in pit houses and cultivated crops by diverting water from nearby streams. ”

“ The rocks of Wales are older and harder than the rocks of the plains; and as you travel from the south to the north, the older and harder they become. The highest mountains of Wales, and some of its hills, have crests of the very oldest and hardest rock—granite, porphyry, and basalt; and these rocks are given their form by fire. But the greater part of the country is made of rocks formed by water—still the oldest of their kind. In the north-west, centre, and west—about two-thirds of the whole country,—the rocks are chiefly slate and shale; in the south-east they are chiefly old red sandstone ”

“ The bare river flows through bare mud. This enormously wide valley is, for the most part, a soft, dark marsh, on which a thin vegetation struggles to maintain a dank existence. But even from Rhyl there are agreeable views of what the Welsh call Dyffryn Clwyd, the Vale of the Flat, “the Eden of Wales.” Three miles away, over an absolutely level and barren space, the wooded knolls and the dark towers of Rhuddlan advance almost to the centre of the valley, and have a fine impressiveness when they are thrown into relief by the shadow of some passing cloud. ”

“ Every valley, every cliff is beautiful to my sight.
Through patriotic feeling, so charming is the murmur
Of her brooks, rivers, to me.
If the enemy oppresses my land under his foot,
The old language of the Welsh is as alive as ever. ”

“ Beyond the bog and at some distance to the west of the two hills rose a brown mountain, not abruptly, but gradually, and looking more like what the Welsh call a rhiw, or slope, than a mynydd, or mountain.
“That, sir,” said my guide, “is the grand Plynlimmon.”
“It does not look much of a hill,” said I.
“We are on very high ground, sir, or it would look much higher. I question, upon the whole, whether there is a higher hill in the world. God bless Pumlummon Mawr!” said he, looking with reverence towards the hill. ”