The town of Conway—The castle—Title of Prince of Wales—Archbishop Williams—The church and its screen—Plas Mawr—Caer Seiont—Deganwy—The Yellow Plague—The Sweating Sickness—Llandudno—Overflow of the sea—Gwyddno and Seithenin—Cave with prehistoric relics—The Steward’s Bench—New invasion of North Wales—The tripper—The railway—The Cursing Well—Penmaenmawr—King Helig—The Headland of Wailing—Similar stories—Submarine forests—Chronology of the prehistoric ages—Conovium—Pen-y-Gaer—The purposes of these camps—Underground retreats—Örvar Odd—The salmon-weir of Gwyddno—Elphin—Taliessin.

CONWAY is an interesting and eminently picturesque town, surrounded, as it still is, by its old walls, and possessing the ruins of the finest castle in Wales—it may perhaps be said in England. This castle occupies one point of the triangle that encloses the town, and has the harbour on one side and the River Gyffin on the other.

The castle was begun in 1283 by Edward I. on the site of a Cistercian monastery, Aber Conwy, and was constructed after the designs of Henry de Elreton, the architect of Carnarvon, and it is said that the workmen employed upon it were brought from Rutlandshire, which produced the best masons in England. It is an extensive structure, and possessed a magnificent dining-hall, built on a curve, the roof formerly sustained by eight stone arches, but of these only two remain. It was lighted by nine Early English windows. At the east end is a chapel, with an apse and a groined roof, lighted by three lancet windows.

The castle was in a decayed condition in the reign of James I. However, it was garrisoned for Charles in the Civil Wars by the warlike Archbishop Williams of York, who, huffed at being superseded by Prince Rupert, went over to the Parliamentary faction and assisted in the attack on the town in 1646. General Mytton took the castle, which was defended by Irish soldiers, and so great was the resentment felt against these auxiliaries, that he had them all tied back to back and flung into the river to drown.

Charles II. granted the castle to the Earl of Conway, who, in 1665, stripped the lead from the roofs and carried off the timbers to convert them to his own use. If it had not been for this, what a residence it would have made for the Princes of Wales, and how pleased the Welsh people would have been to have their Prince living among them!

The Welsh are a loyal people, which the Irish are not, and they are sensitive to consideration. Why should not the Prince of Wales have a stately residence in the Principality? Why should his title be a title only recalling cruel injustice done to this people in the past?

Conway Castle is indisputably finer than any on the Rhine, and its situation and the grouping of the towers are eminently picturesque. The crimson valerian has spread as a gorgeous mantle about the rock on which it is built, and adheres as drops of blood to the crumbling walls.

A short account of Archbishop Williams will not come amiss. John Williams was born at Aberconwy in 1582, and was the second son of William Williams of Cochwillan, in Carnarvonshire. At the age of sixteen he entered S. John’s College, Cambridge. He was a young man of good parts, robust constitution, and with a keen eye for the main chance. It was said of him that he never required more than three hours of sleep out of the twenty-four. He became fellow of his college in 1603. His method in study was this. If he desired to master a subject, he put everything else on one side and concentrated his attention upon it, grappled it to him, and did not let it go till he had thoroughly got to know it in all its aspects.

Having made the acquaintance of Archbishop Bancroft, he obtained access to the King, who took particular notice of him, and when he entered Holy Orders he obtained one preferment after another. In 1617 he was made a prebendary of Lincoln, Peterborough, Hereford, and S. David’s, in addition to a rectory in Northamptonshire and a sinecure in North Wales. He was also chaplain to the King, and had to receive and entertain that eccentric man Marco Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, who had quarrelled with the Pope and came to England. In 1619, not satisfied with all his preferments, he obtained the deanery of Salisbury, and the year following, that of Westminster. In 1621 he was made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England, and was raised to the bishopric of Lincoln, which he held along with the deanery of Winchester and his Northamptonshire rectory.

On the death of James I., whom he attended at the last, he fell out with the Duke of Buckingham, and Charles I. took the Great Seal from him in 1626. Afterwards, on some charges brought against him in the Star Chamber, he was fined ten thousand pounds, suspended from all his functions, dignities, and emoluments, and sent to prison in the Tower for three years and a half. The King was, however, soon reconciled to him, cancelled all orders that had been made against him, and in 1641 he was advanced to the archbishopric of York.

When war broke out between the King and the Parliament, he took the side of the former, and had to fly from York, as the younger Hotham was marching on York, and had sworn to capture and kill him for having commented strongly on the manner in which Sir John Hotham had seized on the King’s magazine of arms at Hull.

Archbishop Williams hasted to Conway and fortified the castle for the King, and Charles, by letter from Oxford, “heartily desired him to go on with the work, assuring him that whatever moneys he should lay out upon the fortification of the said castle should be repaid him before the custody thereof should be put into any other hand than his own.”

The good people of Conway town placed all their valuables in the castle for security.

In 1645 Sir John Owen, a colonel in the King’s army, obtained from Prince Rupert the appointment to the command of the castle. This the archbishop angrily resented, as the King had assured the governorship to him till the money he had dispensed should be repaid. Charles could not raise the requisite sum, and the castle was too important not to be placed under a soldier instead of a churchman. He accordingly went over to the side of the Parliament, and with the assistance of Colonel Mytton, the Parliamentarian officer, forced the gates and secured that stronghold for the faction against which he had hitherto contended.

Williams, in fact, had been keen-sighted enough to see that the King’s affairs were falling into ruin in all quarters, and he characteristically joined the winning side.

But if Williams had reckoned on retaining his archbishopric and other emoluments as the price of his treachery, he was mistaken. The rest of his life was spent in seclusion, in vain regrets, and it is said in sincere repentance, rising from his bed at midnight and praying on his bare knees, with nothing on but his shirt and waistcoat. He died at Gloddaith, near Conway, in 1650, and was buried in Llandegai Church, where a monument was erected to him by his nephew, Sir Griffith Williams.

Conway Church is good, with a fine tower and an Early Decorated chancel that has a Perpendicular east window inserted. But the greatest treasure of the church is its magnificent rood-screen; and there are good stalls in the choir.

Plas Mawr is a specimen of a Welsh gentleman’s house of the sixteenth century, with panelled rooms and quaint plaster ceilings. The house has fifty-two doors, as many steps up the tower, and 365 windows.

Rising above Conway is Caer Seiont, where are circles of stones and embankments, the remains of a camp probably dating from the Irish possession of Gwynedd. The railway is carried through a tunnel in a spur of the hill. A glorious view is obtained from the summit, of the sea, the Great Orme’s Head, and the valley of the Conway dotted with houses. Near the mouth of the river on the further bank is Deganwy, once the royal residence of Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd, a bold warrior, but terribly nervous about his health, apparently, for when the Yellow Plague, in 547, broke out he took to his heels. However, the plague went after him, and he died of it.

But Maelgwn was not the only one to run away. Teilo, Bishop of Llandaff, fled, taking with him his clergy, and sheltered in Brittany till the disorder had passed. The Yellow Plague would seem to have been a very infectious sickness attacking the bilious glands and producing jaundice. It spread to Ireland and committed frightful ravages both there and in Britain. As neither Bede nor the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes any allusion to it, the plague cannot have touched the English, but was confined to the Celtic lands. It, however, broke out again in 664.

The plague of 547-50 created the liveliest panic. In Ireland it was thought that the only escape from it was to put “seven waves” between the soil of Erin and a place of refuge, and monks and princes fled to the islands. Maelgwn, in a panic, assumed the habit of a monk, and escaped to the church of Llanrhos, intending to go further, but died there. It is curious that twice again a plague was thought to have originated in Wales. The next was the Sweating Sickness, the germs of which were carried to Bosworth by the army of Richmond, and which after the victory there spread in a few weeks from Bosworth and the Welsh mountains to London. Those afflicted with it had their powers prostrated as by a blow; they suffered intense internal heat, yet every refrigerant was certain death. Not one in a hundred who was attacked escaped at first. The physicians were bewildered; they turned over the pages of Galen and found that the disease was not described there, nor were any remedies prescribed for any malady that at all resembled it. Death came quickly; a day and a night after a man was attacked he was a corpse. The battle of Bosworth was fought on August 22nd, 1485, and Henry entered London on the 28th. Immediately the Sweating Sickness began its ravages. The Lord Mayor and six aldermen died within a week. The sickness struck at the most vigorous and robust men, and from London it spread like wild-fire throughout the kingdom. The coronation of the King had to be postponed, and did not take place till October 30th.

As the physicians were quite at a loss how to deal with the malady, the people looked to common sense, and found that the best of doctors. Directly a man felt the fire in him, and the sweat began to stream from every pore, he took to his bed, not even staying to take off his clothes, and was given only liquids, and these hot.

The plague broke out again in 1551, not exactly in Wales, but at Shrewsbury. All the spring clammy fogs had hung over the Severn valley, and suddenly, on April 15th, the Sweating Sickness again appeared. The visitation was so general at Shrewsbury and in the basin of the Severn that everyone believed that the air was poisoned. The disease came unexpectedly and without warning—at table, during sleep, on journeys, in the midst of amusement, and at all times of the day. Some died within an hour of the attack; none who had it mortally survived four-and-twenty hours.

Crowds of fugitives escaped to Ireland and Scotland, some embarked for France or the Netherlands, but it was remarked that the Sweating Sickness struck down only the English, not foreigners in England, nor did it spread from the refugees abroad. Within a few days nine hundred and sixty of the inhabitants of Shrewsbury died.

Thence it rapidly spread throughout England. The banks of the Severn were, however, the focus of the malady, and a fetid mist was thought to hang over the river, “which mist,” says a writer of the time, “in the countrie wher it began, was sene flie from towne to towne, with such a stincke in morninges and evenings, that men could scarcely abide it.” It lasted from 15th April to 30th September.

To return to Deganwy, from which we have wandered. It was struck by lightning in 812, but was speedily restored. Hugh the Fat, Earl of Chester, made it his stronghold, but it was taken and demolished by Llewelyn ab Gruffydd in 1260.

Llandudno, on the neck of land connecting the Great Orme’s Head, or Pen y Gogarth, with the mainland, has grown into a fashionable watering-place. The Head rises to the height of nearly 680 feet above the sea; on the Conway side was an ancient monastic settlement at Gogarth. In the first half of the sixth century a low-lying tract of land, now overflowed by the sea, formed a hundred called Cantref y Gwaelod, in Cardigan Bay. It was probably a portion of land that had been reclaimed by the Romans from the waves by strong sea walls. This district was ruled by two chiefs, Gwyddno and Seithenin. The story goes that owing to the neglect of Seithenin, who was a drunkard, and whose duty it was to see to the repairs of the walls, one stormy night the rollers coming in with an unusually high tide and wind, the dykes were overleaped, and the whole cantref was covered with sea.

With difficulty did the sons of Gwyddno escape with their lives, and as they had lost their lands and tribal rights, nothing was open to them save to enter religion and found ecclesiastical tribes. Among the sons of the tipsy Seithenin was Tudno, who settled on the Orme’s Head. But here also was a great inundation, as we shall see presently. The church, which is of the twelfth century with a fifteenth-century chancel, was for some time left in ruins, but it has been restored, and service is now held in it in summer. In the interior is an early circular font.

In 1881 a cave in the limestone was discovered behind Mostyn Street in Llandudno, which had been inhabited in prehistoric times, for beside the bones of cave bears, were found skeletons of men, and a necklace of pierced teeth of beasts. These were the relics of that primeval race which began to settle in the land as the Ice Age came to an end and the glaciers disappeared.

There are many caves in the limestone rock of the Head, one fitted up as a summer-house, by some of the Mostyn family, with stone seats and tables. A small cromlech and some rude stone remains on the headland may be seen, but the relics are sadly mutilated.

Pen y Ddinas overhangs the town, and on it is a logan rock, the Maen Sigl, which is also called S. Tudno’s cradle.

A stony ledge runs out to sea, and is covered at high tide with about two feet of water, and is named the Steward’s Bench. Here, according to tradition, a steward of the Mostyn family, who had been convicted of peculation, was compelled to sit naked during the flow and reflow of two tides.

The entire north coast of Wales, after having been invaded by the Gwyddyl, and then by the Britons from Strathclyde, and next by the Normans, has been invaded by a horde of trippers. It has been taken possession of by them for the summer months. The horde derives from Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham; and every vantage place is laid out with piers, promenades, pavilions; and for the delectation of the holiday-makers there are Ethiopian serenaders, dancing-dogs, cheap-jacks, organ-grinders, and monkeys.

The intelligent tourist, knowing that the chief study of mankind is man, will find endless amusement in observing his fellow-Englishmen and women when out on a spree. The bow must at times be relaxed, but when it is, it does not invariably take a graceful form.

How the North Welsh coast has changed within a century in its aspect may be gathered from a letter of Mr. Gladstone, which describes it some eighty years ago.

“I remember,” he says, “paying my first visit to North Wales, travelling along the North Wales coast as far as Bangor and Carnarvon, when there was no such thing as a watering-place, no such thing as a house to be hired for the purpose of those visits that are now paid by thousands of people to such multitudes of points all along the coast. It was supposed that if any body of gentlemen could be found sufficiently energetic to make a railway to Holyhead, that railway could not possibly pierce the country, and must be made along the coast, and if carried along the coast, could not possibly be made to pay. So firm was the conviction that—I very well recollect the day—a large and important deputation of railway leaders went to London and waited on Sir Robert Peel, who was then Prime Minister, in order to demonstrate to him that it was totally impossible for them to construct a paying line, and therefore to impress upon his mind the necessity of his agreeing to give them a considerable grant out of the consolidated fund. Sir Robert Peel was a very circumspect statesman, and not least so in those matters in which the public purse was concerned. He encouraged them to take a more sanguine view. Whether he persuaded them into a more sanguine tone of mind I do not know. This I know, the railway was made, and we now understand that this humble railway, this impossible railway, as it was then conceived, is at the present moment the most productive and remunerative part of the whole vast system of the North-Western Company.”

Prestatyn, Rhyl, Abergele, Colwyn, Llandudno, Penmaenmawr, Aber—what a string it forms of bathing-places, ever extending and threatening in time to run a continuous line of lodging-houses and hotels along the entire coast!

S. Elian’s Well is a little beyond Colwyn. It is now filled up, and the structure over it has been destroyed, for the place was in bad repute, and was resorted to for no good purpose. The spring was a Cursing Well, and here from time immemorial a guardian ministered to the resentments of the ill-disposed. Anyone who bore a grudge against another, and believed himself to have been wronged, would resort to this well to “throw in” his adversary. A writer of the beginning of last century says:—

“The well of S. Elian lies in a dingle near the high road leading from Llanelian to Groes yn Eirias. It was surrounded by a wall of 6 feet high, and embosomed in a grove; but the trees have fallen and the wall is thrown down. It was resorted to by the Welsh to call imprecations and the vengeance of the saint on any who had done them an injury. Mr. Pennant says that he was threatened by a person he had offended with a journey to the well to curse him with effect. The ceremony was performed by an old woman, who presided at the font, in the following manner. After having received a fee, the name of the offender was marked on a piece of lead; this she dropped into the water, and mumbled imprecations, whilst taking from and returning into the water a certain portion of it. It frequently happened that the offending party who had been the subject of her imprecations sought through the medium of a double fee to have the curse removed; and seldom was this second offer refused by her. On this occasion she took water from the well three times with the new moon, select verses of the psalms were read on three successive Fridays, and a glass of the well water drunk whilst reading them.”

The well became such an occasion for ill-feeling that a former incumbent of the parish had it destroyed.

In 1818, at the Flintshire Great Sessions, the “priest” of the well was sent to gaol for twelve months for obtaining money under false pretences, by pretending to put some into the well, and to fetch some out whom others had put in.

The last “priest” of the well was John Evans, who died in 1858. Doctor Bennion, of Oswestry, once said to him, “Publish it abroad that you can raise the devil, and the country will believe you.” Evans took the advice offered in jest, and confessed afterwards, “The people in a very short time spoke much about me; their conduct when they thought I held converse with the devil fairly frightened me.”

In Ireland there are several cursing wells. There boulders are placed on the low wall that surrounds the well, and he who wishes to call down a curse upon another turns the stone against the sun thrice whilst repeating the curse and the name of the person on whom he desires it to fall.

Penmaenmawr, to the west of Conway, is a favourite watering-place, and takes its name from the hill, 1,180 feet high, that rises steeply from the sea and commands a tract like Cantref y Gwaelod, that was about the same time overflowed by the sea. The story told of this sunken land is that King Helig was feasting with his lords and ladies where now lies the sandbank bearing his name, when the cellarer, having gone down to broach another cask, rushed up the steps in terror at finding the cellar under water, and he shouted, “The sea! the sea is on us!” The panic-stricken revellers fled for their lives, and as they issued from the palace heard the roar of the waves and could see the gleam of the manes of the white horses as they overleaped the sea wall.

Half a mile from Penmaenmawr is Trwyn-y-wylfa, the Headland of Wailing, for there the survivors congregated and looked over a tumbling sea that covered what had once been fair pastures and quiet homesteads. Tyno Helig, the lost land of Helig, stretched between Puffin Island and Penmaenmawr; and the Lavan sandbank covers a portion of it. The story reappears in many places with variations. In Brittany the same is told of King Grallo. He was warned to fly from his palace by S. Winwaloe, as the vengeance of Heaven would fall on it on account of the disorderly life of his daughter Ahes, and there the sea encroached and overwhelmed the palace and town.

But the most curious instance of the reduplication of the story is found in the marshes of Dol, in Brittany, where is a little lake which, in popular belief, covers a great city, and it is called la CrevÉe de Saint Guinou. Here we have actually the name of Gwyddno transferred to Lesser Britain. The colonists must have carried the story with them to their new home, and located it there. The morass was not formed till an inundation that took place in 709. The whole of Mount’s Bay, in Cornwall, was also at one time land, and William of Worcester, in his Itinerary, wrote: “All this region was once covered with dense forest, and extended six miles from the sea, a suitable place for wild beasts, and in which at one time lived monks serving God.”

The existence of submarine forests along this north coast of Wales and in Cardigan Bay, as well as off the south coast of Cornwall, may have originated the legend of the sunken land. In 1893, for instance, after a gale, a submerged forest was disclosed at Rhyl, nearly a mile east of the pier. But it is also quite possible that the tradition preserves the memory of a real subsidence.

In Brittany the sinking of the land is still going on. In an island of the Morbihan are two circles of standing stones. One is already half under water, and the other is completely submerged. At Locmariaquer a Roman camp is almost wholly engulfed, and Roman constructions of a villa that were observed and described in 1727 are now permanently under water.

But the submerged forests belong to a much earlier period than the sixth century, though to a time when man lived on the land and hunted in these forests. Gerald of Windsor, in the twelfth century, was puzzled at the revelation of trees beneath the waters of S. Bride’s Bay. He says:—

“The sandy shores of South Wales being laid bare by the extraordinary violence of a storm, the surface of the earth which had been covered for many ages reappeared, and discovered the trunks of trees cut off, standing in the sea itself, the strokes of the hatchet appearing as if only made yesterday; the soil was very black and the wood like ebony.”

Among the bones found in these underwater forests are those of the brown bear and the stag; the trees were Scotch firs, oaks, yews, willows, and birches, and they show by the way they have fallen, with their heads pointing to the east, that the prevailing wind, then as now, was from the west. The size of the trees proves that they must have grown at some considerable distance from the sea-board. Indeed, the forest land can be pretty well made out. The whole of Cardigan Bay was above the sea, and the promontory of Lleyn and Bardsey were heights rising out of the woodland. The stretch of forest extended a long way to the north of Wales, and the coasts of Lancashire and Cheshire were many miles further out to sea than they are now. The men who chased in this primeval forest used flint weapons; the age of metal had not then dawned.

According to Montelius of Stockholm an absolute chronology can now be given for periods of prehistoric civilisation in Europe, because Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages are contemporaneous with an historic period in Egypt and Western Asia, and also because numerous points of connection are known between the different parts of Europe and the East from the beginning of the Copper Age onwards.

He fixes the periods as follows:—

Now the Stone Age preceded that of Copper. So we must throw back the period of this vast forest to something like three thousand years before the Christian era.

Those who are satiated with the study of the tripper and the holiday-takers, and can wrench themselves from the contemplation of their sportive gambols, will take the train to Tal-y-cafn and walk thence to Caerhun, that occupies the site of the Roman town Conovium. This town did not give its name to the Conway, but took its title from it.

The Dulyn is a tributary of the Conway at Tal-y-bont (the Head of the Bridge), and it flows from the little lakes Llyn Dulyn (the Black Pool) and Melynllyn (the Yellow Pool), the former under fine crags, and forms a beautiful fall on its way.

Another stream, Afon Porthlwyd, issues from a much larger lake, the Llyn Eigiau, lying 1,220 feet above the sea under precipices of rock; and another again, the Afon Ddu, or Black River, rises in a still larger lake, the Llyn Cowlyd.

At Pen-y-Gaer, above Afon Dulyn and the little church of Llanbedr-y-Cennin, is a prehistoric camp of stone, with obstacles set in the soil, stones planted on end on the glacis, so as to break up an onrush of the enemy, in a manner seen in the Aran Isles off Ireland, some castles in Scotland, and one in Brittany. Where upright stones were not erected, sometimes the slope before the walls was purposely strewn with rubble or slates, and the assailants had to stumble over these slowly and with difficulty, exposed to volleys of arrows or stones, before they could come to close quarters. In some of the camps are great cairns of stones of a handy size piled up to serve as a store of missiles for the besieged.

It has often been remarked that these camps are away from springs and watercourses; and one wonders how those who held them managed for drink. But almost certainly they never were intended to stand long sieges. They were places of refuge. When an enemy appeared or was signalled by beacons, the inhabitants of the valleys and plains fled to them, driving their cattle before them and carrying their poor possessions on their backs. The foe came on and endeavoured to storm the stronghold; if he failed to do this at once, he abandoned the attempt, and did not sit down before it to reduce it by starvation. In some camps there are underground storehouses rudely constructed of stones set on end and roofed over, where the treasures of the tribe were concealed.

There is a story in the Norse Saga of Örvar Odd, of how he and other northern Vikings came on just such a subterranean passage. A great flat stone lay over it, but he chanced to pull it up, and found the entrance. He went in, and found it full of women in hiding. One was so pretty that he took hold of her and tried to drag her out, but the other women, screaming, held her back.

“You shall come with me,” said Odd.

“Let me buy my freedom,” she pleaded. “I have gold and silver to pay for it.”

“I have plenty of that,” answered the Northman.

“Then I have gay clothing I will give,” she said.

“And of that I have abundance,” he replied.

“Then,” said she, “I promise to embroider for you a beautiful kirtle with gold thread in it, and so thick with the precious wire that no sword will cut through it.”

“That is something,” he said. “But when may I have it?”

“Come next year, and the kirtle shall be done,” she answered. And he agreed, and allowed the women to remain without further molestation.

In the River Conway at Gored Wyddno was the salmon weir of Gwyddno, who had lost his land through the inundation of the sea in Cardigan Bay. He had a son called Elphin, who had so wasted his substance that he was obliged to fall back on his father for help, and Gwyddno consented to allow him for a while the profit of his salmon weir. Coming one morning to it he found there a babe in a leather bag, apparently a leather-covered coracle that had drifted down-stream. “What a bright-browed little chap!” exclaimed Elphin, so Taliessin, or Bright-brow, became his name, and he grew up to be a famous bard. At Christmas, long after this, Elphin was at the court of Maelgwn at Deganwy, and the bards then vied with one another in flattering the king and his queen. He was the handsomest, the wisest, the mightiest of monarchs, and she was the loveliest and most virtuous woman in the world. Elphin had the indiscretion to demur to this, and say that his wife was the chastest on earth. The story runs something like that of Posthumus and Imogen, but there are differences. Maelgwn, highly incensed, ordered Elphin to be cast into prison, and sent his son Rhun to test the lady. But Elphin had time to forewarn her, and she dressed her maid in her clothes, and put his ring on her finger. Rhun was completely deceived; he returned to Deganwy, and cast a finger with a ring on it upon the table, and declared that he had cut it off from the false wife’s hand. Elphin was brought from prison, and was shown the finger. “It is not that of my wife,” said he, “for the finger is larger than hers, and the ring has not been put on it further than the middle joint. The nail has not been cut for a month, whereas my lady trims her nails every Saturday. She from whom this finger has been cut has been recently baking rye bread—you may see the dough under the nail. That is what my wife never does.” So the laugh was turned against Rhun.