It is at Bangor that the old Chester route to Holyhead, by way of Penmaenmawr, falls into the great Holyhead Road. Although we have not come by Chester, it may be worth while to glance at Penmaenmawr, that gigantic headland over whose perilous heights old-time travellers went, trembling for their safety. Its Welsh name, meaning literally the “great stone head,” sufficiently describes this old obstacle and stumbling-block, looking over the water to Anglesey. Nowadays the railway tunnels through it, and travellers by the Wild Irishman, warned by the locomotive’s shriek, are plunged into a momentary darkness, fifteen hundred feet beneath the windy height where the horsemen of two hundred years ago stumbled along an indistinct track. Swift was of that company, and it is still told how the inns at either end of this laborious route used to display on their signs the couplets written by him:—

And—

By 1774, when Dr. Johnson toured in Wales, matters had somewhat improved. “We came to Penmaenmawr,” he says, “by daylight, and found a way, lately made very easy and very safe. It was cut smooth and enclosed between parallel walls, the outer of which secures the passenger from the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. This wall is here and there broken by mischievous wantonness. The inner wall preserves the road from the loose slates, which the shattered steep above it would pour down. That side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones which every accident may crumble. The old road runs higher, and must have been very formidable. The sea beats at the bottom of the way.”

Those italics are not due to Johnson, but are placed here to duly emphasise the romantic note struck, perhaps unconsciously, by him at the close of those too-staccato sentences, studded all too plentifully with that often necessary but harsh word “which.” “The sea beats at the bottom of the way:” there you have a picture of the place that hints in a sentence all manner of disasters; ships blown against the rocky coast, coaches swept off the road into the waves, and obscure catastrophes, the more dreadful because left to the imagination.

But not every one found Penmaenmawr so safe, even though the new road had replaced the old. They had not Johnson’s robust nature, or else desired to make some literary capital out of the scene. Thus, more than twenty years later, the Rev. Richard Warner describes “the rocky mountain of Penmaenmawr,” in what he evidently intends to be blood-curdling terms. “Formerly extremely rude and dangerous,” he says, “it has been entirely altered and divested of a considerable degree of its horror. Still, however, it cannot be travelled without shuddering. Creeping round the side of the mountain, it hangs, as it were, in mid-air, with a frowning precipice above and a steep descent immediately under it. The rocks on the right are nearly perpendicular, sometimes beetling over the road in a terrific manner, at others retiring into deep declivities of nine hundred or a thousand feet, from whose rugged sides project fragments of incalculable magnitude, so capriciously placed, and having such a disjoined appearance that it is impossible for the traveller to lose the perpetual dread of his being every moment crushed to atoms under a torrent of huge stones.” That such stormy torrents did sometimes flow is evident from Wigstead, who, coming to “where Penmaenmawr awfully raises its aspiring head,” found a mass of rock recently fallen into the road in a storm; a huge fragment of cliff that, if broken up, could not have been cleared away by ten large waggons.

When the union of Great Britain and Ireland was effected, the Irish members clamoured for the immediate improvement of this dangerous road. Indeed, the city of Dublin had already contributed something towards such a work, but the present fine highway round the base of the headland did not come into existence until Telford came upon the scene, blasting and levelling the way that Turner has pictured so well.

Having passed Penmaenmawr, the old travellers to Holyhead often crossed into Anglesey by the Lavan Sands to Beaumaris: a dangerous passage only to be attempted by those correctly informed of the tides. Horsemen would ride the three-mile stretch of sands exposed at low water, and, hailing the Beaumaris ferry, be readily landed on the island; but if they by any chance ventured out half an hour too late, the rising tide swept them away, or the treacherous sands engulfed them. It was here that Sir John Bramston and his son were nearly lost in 1641. They had ridden across the sands to the verge of the channel and hailed the ferry; but the ferrymen were drunk, and it was long before any notice was taken of them. Meanwhile, the tide was rising fast, and was swirling about them before aid arrived, and they were rescued in the nick of time.