From Maerdy Post-office, half a mile onwards, commences a steady rise of nearly two miles, the uplands on the right presently culminating in the crags of Cader Dinmael, and the valley of the Geirw on the left gradually deepening and contracting into a profound and narrow gorge; the road running round cornices of rock, fenced by breast-high masonry on the one side, and overhung by rocky cliffs on the other. With boring-tools, pickaxe, and blasting-powder, Telford forced a way for his road round this shoulder of the mountain and converted what had been a narrow and dangerous track into a smooth highway, thirty-six feet in width. This is the spot rightly called in the old road-books “the romantic Pass of Glyndyffws,” and the bridge that seems to hazardously leap the gorge where the Geirw plunges and foams is identical with the “Pont-y-Glyn-Bin”—the Bridge of the Glen of Trouble—named by Borrow. Very justly he speaks of this as “one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes imaginable,” and of the bridge as “a kind of Devil’s Bridge, diabolically fantastical, flung over the deep glen and the foaming water.”

“Projecting out over the ravine,” he continues, “was a kind of looking-place, protected by a wall forming a half-circle, doubtless made by the proprietor of the domain for the use of the admirers of scenery. Cut on the top surface of the wall, which was of slate and therefore easily impressible by the knife, were several names, doubtless those of tourists who had gazed from the look-out, amongst which I observed, in remarkably bold letters, that of T******”

Borrow would have been more correct in his surmise if he had given the credit of this little balcony built out from the road to Telford. He it was who designed that little look-down into the depths, together with a few others along this road at particularly favourable view-points, thus proving his own appreciation of scenery and the possession of that artistic sense denied engineers by architects, who, as a body, are the most intolerant, opinionated, and barbarous set of professional men in existence, ready to ruin an old building for an idea, or to destroy the artistic work of one period to replace it with modern imitations of the especial style that suits their individual opinion.

Glyndyffws (how tearful and wonderful these Welsh names!) is lovely beyond expression. Nowhere else are the mountain-ashes and the scrub-oaks more exquisite than here, where they are seen clinging tenaciously to the jagged ledges of the ravine, soaked continuously in the moisture thrown up from the tortured water below, and clothed in every twig and wizard limb with moss and lichens. This, of course, was a spot that most powerfully impressed the imaginations of old travellers. Hear one of them. He speaks of the “deep and dismal chasm through which the hoarse-sounding torrent roars over the disjointed rocks beneath, and, lashing the rocky sides that check its impetuosity, rolls its angry waters to the Dee.” But we have not done with him yet. He goes on to describe the “stupendous fissure fully two hundred feet deep, overhung by large forest trees,” and continues in that strain to a wearisome length, until, in fact, we tear ourselves away, catching as we go such disjointed phrases as “awful scene,” “maddened torrent,” “profundity of horrible bed,” and so forth. That old tourist, fortunately for himself, did not visit Snowdon, after so recklessly expending all his adjectives on the way. Had he done so, he must surely, bankrupted in phrases, have, in presence of Snowdon’s grandeur, become a literary insolvent, paying the equivalent of a farthing in the pound.

Leaving Pont y Glyn and its “tremendous roar” behind, “the prospect,” according to a century-old wayfarer in these wilds, “becomes as uninteresting as Bagshot Heath.” But scarcely so. That Heath has no mountains enlivening the distance, nor a clear and beautiful stream trickling in little sharps and trebles through a solitary valley, such as this. Indeed, the hamlet of Tynant passed, where a shop, an inn, a chapel, and some scattered farmsteads in the cwms or on the hillsides comprise the whole, the rest of the way to Cerrig-y-Druidion is singularly beautiful in the open and unfenced sort. The name of Tynant alone, which means the “House by the Stream,” points to a solitude once greater than now, when the inn was the only house here.

It was to this quiet spot, by the sparkling trout stream, that Dick Vickers, who once drove the Holyhead Mail between here and Shrewsbury, retired, as Colonel Birch-Reynardson relates. He had been in early days a postboy, and had then performed the feat of driving “His Honour,” of Pradoe, from that place to London faster than the fastest. “His Honour” was posting up to town in a light barouche, and reached the “Lion” yard at Shrewsbury just as the “Wonder” was starting. “Dick,” said the squire, “I wonder whether I could beat the ‘Wonder’ into town; I should like to do it if I can.” And, in short, it was done, that celebrated coach coming in a bad second.

But steady and careful as old Time was little Dick when on the bench. “Little Dick” they called him because “he had to get on sixpennyworth of halfpence to look on the top of a Stilton cheese,” and those cheeses are of no great stature. In an evil hour he gave up the ribbons and set up as a farmer at Tynant, where, when his day’s work was done, he had been used to fish the little stream. But farming was a very different matter from driving four horses, and he lost his money in it, and so one ill day they found him hanging from a beam in one of his barns.

Flat for four miles to Cerrig-y-Druidion, with spreading moors ahead, the village itself stands prominent on a knoll, with an old road going to its bleak and hard-featured street, and the Holyhead Road just skirting its fringe. Cerrig-y-Druidion means “the rock of the Druids.”

“This place,” says Warner, “as its name imports, was connected with the awful superstitions of the ancient Britons, and exhibited some years since vestiges of Druidical worship.” These vestiges were British stone huts or tombs—the “kistvaens” of archÆological literature. Warner and the peasantry thought them to be prisons, but, whatever they were, they have long since disappeared; only the rocky site—like a granite island rising from the surrounding level—remaining to give a reason for Cerrig’s name. It is curious to reflect that the village of Crick in Northants, was originally Cerrig, and that the name of Carrick, in Ireland, has a similar meaning. Only in England, where ages ago “the coiling serpent” (as the Welsh call the advancing Saxon) established himself and expelled the Celt, has the word been corrupted. When Borrow came to Cerrig-y-Druidion he says he stayed at the “Lion—whether the white, black, red, or green Lion I do not know.” It was, in fact, the “White Lion,” which still protrudes a battered and weather-beaten sign over the bye-street, while the “Saracen’s Head” stands boldly upon the main road. How he met the Italian who spoke Welsh, and on the morrow met the Irish fiddler with the game leg and the infernal cheek, let the pages of Wild Wales relate.