The Glen of Beavers is a beautiful spot from the standpoint of the tourist, if not of the farmers, who have with infinite labour collected the scattered boulders, and built boundary walls with them; and essay to grow corn and hay in the bottom, where the Ogwen stream goes prattling in summer on its winding course. The Ogwen is no friend to the farmer, for walls and stacks and earth are often carried away in winter by the innocent looking brook, that arises at such times and, clearing the fields far and wide in an irresistible flood, deposits stones where the good earth bad been, and carries the earth itself in solution down to Bangor, and so out to sea. Before agriculture can feel secure here, locks and dams should regulate the tricksy watercourse, just as was done by the dams the beavers built in the unrecorded ages, before ever the farmer came.

At the foot of the descent is Tyn-y-Maes——the House in the Meadow, a hamlet where an inn stood in coaching days to supply relays for the last stage into Bangor, and where, one may be quite sure, the coachmen and passengers coming down or going up, partook of those creature comforts the rigours of the journey demanded. A coachman was said to have lost his eyesight from the effects of a snowstorm at Nant Ffrancon.

It is a woeful exchange from the quiet streams and the rural sights of the last few miles to Bethesda and the hideous slate quarries that gash the hillsides. “A Scriptural name,” said Borrow, when a chance acquaintance on the road told him the name of the village.

“Is it?” said he; “well, if its name is Scriptural, the manners of its people are by no means so.”

If the appearance of Bethesda (now a town, and a very mean and ugly one) were any criterion of the character of its inhabitants, then, the Bethesda people would be past praying for. It is a long, long street of the most furiously ugly houses that ever roof was put to, and the whole of its surroundings are pitifully sordid. Whether cheap stucco or slate be the building materials, the result is the same, and the generations of quarrymen who have laboured to enrich Lord Penrhyn and his ancestors are doomed to dwell in a most squalid place, within sight of some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.

For Lord Penrhyn is the owner of land far and near. Not, for the most part, land that would enrich its possessor, but in the slate quarries of Bethesda a veritable mine of wealth, far surpassing the riches derived from many a goldfield. Slate rock that can be quarried and split into the thin sections required for roofing is of the rarest occurrence, and most of it is situated within the bounds of the Penrhryn estates, that for centuries have produced more than three-quarters of the slates coming into the market. Not only the home market is supplied from here, but foreign also. Unlike the working of most mineral estates, the quarries are not let out to some middleman, but worked direct for Lord Penrhyn, and have been notorious from time to time for the bitter and long-drawn strikes that have taken place. The middleman is not generally regarded with favour, but it is safe to say, without following the wretched story of the Bethesda quarrymen, that if such an one had the control of the quarries, such occurrences, although possible, would not have been of so protracted a character. A man who should lease the quarries could not afford to lock them up, and, putting the key in his pocket, let the strike go on for ever, or until the workmen and their families were starved into accepting terms; but the Lords Penrhyn can. The Penrhyns have been so greatly enriched by the quarries that their wealth is colossal, and current income from that source can be cut off without any discomfort. The whole pitiful business would be impossible under that enlightened statesmanship which some day will make all mineral wealth public property.

The chief features of the Bethesda scenery are the long series of rubbish-heaps, or rubbish-mountains, and the terraced clefts in the hills whence the slates have come. Whole hillsides have been cut and blasted away, to be fashioned into slates that have roofed half the little suburban villas of the world. The great success of Welsh slates is due to their cheapness, and to the thinness to which it is possible to split them, so that the cheap builder of cheap houses need not provide a very substantial roof to bear their weight. It is very different with the Cumberland slates; smaller and thicker and a great deal more expensive, they are only to be found on buildings where cheapness has not been the first object. Between the Welsh and the Cumbrian products there can only be one choice on the score of appearance and strength. Welsh slates have a disagreeable colour, something between a blackish-blue and dark purple: those from Cumberland are a delicate grey-green, beautiful when new, and improving with age. Their comparative thickness, too, is an advantage from many points of view.

The gates of Penrhyn Park confront the traveller when he has at last left Bethesda in his wake. They are appropriately feudal and threatening, in a revival of the old castellated style, just as though the owner of the quarries had shut himself within, and was prepared to defend himself and his hoards to the last extremity against the starving thousands of the quarry-town. The little village of Llandegai stands near, and beyond stretches the Park, with Penrhyn Castle in its midst: a lovely scene of dense woodlands falling towards a blue expanse of sea, with an island and a lighthouse and white-winged yachts. The Castle turrets dominate the whole, an elaborate and highly successful piece of make-believe, compelling the reverence of the wayfarer, until he draws near and discovers that the Norman keep, own brother in appearance to that of Rochester Castle, was built about a hundred years ago by a certain “judicious Hopper” (not our old theological friend, the judicious Hooker), “who with his usual taste and science has preserved in his improvements the characteristic style of the military Gothic.”

Positively the last toll-house before Bangor is found at Lonisaf, standing not far from the spot where the old road from Ogwen Falls joins the modern. Some toll-gates were provided with weighbridges, and Lonisaf was one of them, the little weigh-house still remaining. The especial function of these weighbridges was to detect overloading. Fines for carts and waggons laden beyond their proper weight were very heavy, and their severity and frequent application fully reimbursed the trustees the cost of installing a check of this kind.