Our imaginary and imaginative traveller, waking at Llangollen to morning sunshine and matter-of-fact, will, if his mind is of the proper critical kind, be at once disappointed with the town and enthusiastic on its setting. Around it, shutting out the noisy world, rise the great heights of Barber’s Hill and Castell Dinas Bran, the last-named a mighty eminence rising to a height of over a thousand feet, and diademed with a circlet of very ancient and time-worn ruins. If any one were known to have visited Llangollen and not to have climbed the steeps leading to “Crow Castle”—as it is called in English—on him or her would fall the righteous wrath of those who, much enduring, have made that toilsome pilgrimage. From this height you command not only the town of Llangollen at its foot, diminished as though looked at through the wrong end of a telescope, but mile upon mile of heaped-up or overthrown mountains, tumbled and fantastic masses, growing at last indistinct in the direction of Snowdon; or, looking eastwards, see the Eglwyseg Rocks, a long range of mural precipices, curiously stratified, stretching towards Ruabon, with the Vale below their unscalable crags. The slate-works of bygone years have made little impression upon the scene, but they sufficiently impressed Ruskin, who speaks of “the Works (whatever the accursed business of them) on the north hillside.”

In the rear of this fortified hill extends the region eloquently called the “World’s End,” where infrequent tracks lead to nowhere in particular, and the craggy descent of one hill but to the immediate toilsome ascent of another. Those who named the “World’s End,” named it well. The ruined Castle itself on this blusterous height is only a matter of rude walls; shapeless but for a tall fragment that shoots up above the rest and shows against the sky as you near the summit, like some gigantic cockerel in the act of crowing. Who built the Castle and who destroyed it are equally uncertain matters. Eliseg, Prince of Powis, occupied it in the eighth century and Gruffydd ap Madoc five hundred years later; that false Gruffydd who sided with the English under Henry III., and, later, founded Valle Crucis Abbey for the expiation of that and many other sins and wickednesses. But when these walls were unroofed, and by whom, no man knows.

The only architectural gem in these surroundings is that Abbey, two miles away in the Vale of the Cross, a transverse valley opening on to the Dee. There its ruins still nestle among the trees, just as Turner has pictured them, surrounded by the most fertile land within many miles. Men of Wrath might build themselves impregnable castles on shivery hill-tops, but holy monks knew a better way, and mortified the flesh in the fruitful and sheltered lowlands, where the fishponds were unfailing, the kine came lowing into byre at eventide, the corn was gathered in its season, and the fruit ripened early on sunny walls. But the habitations of wrathy and peaceable are alike overthrown, and both are the sport of the excursionist and the amateur photographer.

But now for more intimate grips with Llangollen, that “dirty, ill-built, and disagreeable town,” as the Reverend Mr. Bingley described it in 1798. Many at that time told the same unflattering tale, and though it be out of date to-day, Llangollen as a town cannot, with the exception of the bridge across the Dee, be said to contain anything in the least beautiful or interesting. Only the lovely vale and the encircling mountainous hills render Llangollen endurable. One forgets the mean houses in the beauty of the scenery. Dividing the place in half, the Dee flows noisily over a bed of rocky slabs and under that old bridge once regarded as one of the wonders of Wales. Engineering wonders are so plentiful nowadays that the mind, supersaturated with them, and the eye, accustomed to works on a gigantic scale, refuse to marvel at anything more. Only one wonder is left to the modern visitor to Llangollen—the wonder that Llangollen Bridge should ever have been considered a wonder. One has mentally to project oneself into the period when the bridge was built, over five hundred and fifty years ago, to understand why it was so considered. It was built when times were always disturbed, and when nothing in the nature of a town or a hard road existed here; and certainly they wrought well who built, for though the Dee has come down in floods innumerable, it still stands. It was doubled in width in 1873, and modern times have witnessed the coming of the railway up the vale along the course of the Dee, causing it to be lengthened by another opening. Four old pointed stone arches and a stone and girder span now make the total sum. Let the number here be specified, for the many travellers who have written on Llangollen exhibit a curious inability to give them correctly. Turner, whose view of Llangollen may be referred to, gives six, and in addition, places a viaduct on a hillside possibly intended for Castle Dinas Bran, in a place where no viaduct or aqueduct ever was or could be. Those are, however, the merest trifles compared with his dealings with the Dee, represented as flowing in the opposite direction it takes in Nature, and upwards towards its source.