Telford’s road takes an infinitely better course, although, to be sure, the four miles onward to Lake Ogwen are on a steady and uninterrupted rise, almost impossible to face with a steady head-wind, and wholly so when storms scour through the pass. Here is the summit-level of the road, 957 feet above the sea, with mountains 3,000 feet higher surrounding the lonely moorland. Infrequent farmsteads of the smallest and most cabin-like kind are scattered about the almost barren space, among the bogs and the tremendous boulders that have at some time or other come hurtling down from the mountain-sides, where there remain many more of the same sort, ready to descend. Peat-stacks to every farm tell of what fuel they use here, just as the great stones placed on the roofs of stacks and cabins alike hint of the fury of the winds.

Llyn Ogwen comes at the end of this moor, where the mountains close in and narrow the passage. It borders the road for a mile; a shuddery lake of ice-cold water, sombre and austere as Trifaen the three-headed himself, or Braich Du and Carnedd Dafydd on the opposite shores; all of them mountains of the most craggy and stupendous sort.

Trifaen, an abrupt mountain of 3010 feet, is incomparably the finest in Wales, after Snowdon. Its three peaks, with tattered shreds of mists clinging about them, seem to hang immediately overhead, and the huge fissures up its mighty sides, with moisture sparkling here and there on the slaty rocks, like jewels in the sunshine, forbid all but the most determined climbers.

The anglers who fish for trout in Ogwen, the cyclists, and the brake-parties from Bangor, all help to make the little refreshment house that was once a toll-house, a busy enough place. It stands where the overflow from the Llyn dashes down more than a hundred feet, in a series of cascades, into a deep valley. These are the Falls of Ogwen, and the valley that opens out below and stretches for miles onward, with a glimpse of the sea in the distance, is the far famed Nant Ffrancon—“the Glen of Beavers.” Until Telford reconstructed the road from this point, the way—“the most dreadful horse-path in Wales” as Pennant describes it in 1759—led over the Falls by an extremely narrow bridge without parapets, and descended in break-neck fashion into the other side of the valley. Telford wholly abandoned that suicidal drop and set his workmen to quarry and blast out a gradual three miles’ descent on the hither side, along the shoulders of the hills: a gradient so gentle that, although the road is situated in the midst of the most rugged scenery, it never exceeds 1 in 22. He built a new bridge over the Falls, and propped up his road from falling into the valley by a massive length of retaining-wall; carrying underneath the carriage-way by cross drains, the little spouts of water that fall at every few yards from the mountain sides.

The old bridge may still be seen, a moss-grown and decrepit arch, beside the modern, and the old road still descends the vale; but no one save the peasants and the wandering shepherds ever trace the deserted way. David Cox has left a line view of the modern road, with Carnedd Dafydd and Trifaen in the background, and the scenery to the right, where the black and frightful precipice called the “Devil’s Kitchen” gapes; vapours overhanging it like the steam of some infernal cookery.