More in accord with modern Wales is Llansaintffraid, across the Dee, with its trim lodging-houses and villas, and little railway-station which the railway authorities, alarmed at the name of Llansaintffraid, have christened by the simpler title of “Carrog.” More villas, more lodging-houses, and many tourists mark the approach to Corwen, a village or townlet that does not favourably impress the stranger fresh from Llangollen. No one could with truth say that the houses of Llangollen are beautiful, but the scenery there makes full atonement: at Corwen the scene is tame, the hills recede, and the Dee flows through a wide valley. Just here, where the town should be especially attractive, it is mean at the best, and at its worst downright ugly. Moreover, the railway company has deliberately chosen to place its coal-sidings and engine-sheds alongside the road and abutting upon the old Dee bridge.

Opinions upon Corwen are singularly unanimous through the course of over a hundred years. In 1797 Wigstead must have found it at its worst. The houses were then, he says, of clay and loam, and “most miserable hovels: the people, cows, asses, hogs, and poultry all live in one apartment, and all turn out at the same time in the morning.” The following year, another tourist finds Corwen a “disagreeable little town”; and in modern times the kindliest of itinerists has nothing better to say of the place than that “the tourist will not find much to detain him” in it.

The little that does suffice to detain him centres in the old church whence the name of the town derives, Cor Wen meaning White Choir. No longer white, but on the contrary, greyish-black and unlovely, the church stands behind the houses of the long street, and immediately under a huge pile of cliff-like rocks called Pen-y-Pigyn, crowned by a flagstaff, whence Owain Glyndwr is said to have cast his dagger, in some unexplained fit of anger. It is a legend stupidly invented to account for the rudely incised figure of a cross, resembling a short sword, seen in the granite slab now built as a lintel into the south porch. A battered old churchyard cross stands near the west door, and several old slate tombstones with two semicircular hollows, are to be seen, cut in this manner to receive the knees of those who came to pray by the graveside of their dead. On the southern side of this churchyard, more melancholy than most, a row of almshouses, called “Corwen College,” may be noticed; built in 1750 for six widows of Merionethshire clergymen, who may thus meditate among the tombs from morn to eve on the evil fate that left them widows before their husbands had attained to fat prebends, decanal dignities, or the culminating honours and riches of an episcopal throne.

The odd effigy of Iorwerth Sulien, an early vicar of the church, divides with the fine old timber roof the honours of the interior.

The “Owen Glendower” inn at Corwen has long since lost the “fierce gigantic figure like that of some Saracenic Soldan” that once served for a sign, and attracted the attention of every eighteenth-century traveller; and has in other ways altered since the time when the first tourists came, note-books in hand. It must be confessed that the first tourists in Wales are now become highly amusing where they intended to be improving, and not a little dull when their intent was jocular. One of them who says he was “Josephus Rex,” is not a little obscure at first, but presently we find that phrase to be a ponderous play upon words, and that, in short he meant he was Jo King—joking. You take him, do you not? How exquisitely pretty a wit!

Such an one as this must have been the Rev. Mr. Evans who, in 1705, toured the Principality. He found “decent accommodation,” and pointed civility at Corwen, where others had found nothing of the kind; but it was stupid of him to ask for a “tonsor” when he meant “barber,” and wanted a shave. Instead of bringing him a tonsor, they brought him a blind harper. He retained the harper, but still clamoured for his shave; whereupon, a “blooming damsel of twenty-five years” came with razors, soap and hot water, and deftly scraped his chin.

Most of Corwen’s business activity is centred in its railway-station at the further end of the town, where roads divide like the two arms of the letter Y; one, to the left, going to Bala, and the other for Holyhead. Here those two leviathans, the Great Western and the London and North-Western Railways, meet and go their several ways to Barmouth and to Rhyl. Beyond, for twenty-two miles, there is a vast expanse of country where no railway goes, and if Corwen wants to visit Bettws-y-Coed and Bettws desires to return the call, they have either to take the road or else embark upon a roundabout railway journey of fifty miles. The engineering works for a line that should connect the two along the Alwen, Geirw, and Conway valleys would not be so very great; the difficulty perhaps lies in the question, which of the rivals is to do it? Meanwhile, one passes over the ancient bridge that spans the Dee on six lichened arches, and bids good-bye to the modern world for awhile just as effectually as Borrow did when he tramped the road fifty-five years ago.

It is at first a tame road, by comparison with the scenes left behind, and it is not until the “Druid’s Head” inn—or what once was that hostelry—is passed that its character grows wild. The old toll-house of Macs Mawr and the “Cymro Goat Inn” mark the change in pleasant fashion by a bridge at the confluence of the Alwen and the Geirw. Their curu at the “Goat” (whether it be a Billy or a Nanny is no matter) is better than their English, and the traveller is little likely to make himself understood, unless he be as clever a Saxon as Borrow himself, who lost no opportunity of showing the astounded Welshmen that he understood their language. Imagination pictures what he would have done, after several highly critical pulls at his tankard. “Maes Mawr,” he would have asked, “that means ‘great meadow’; that is it, I suppose, across the road?” pointing to a pasture under the lee of the hills; and, when he had been answered in the affirmative, telling his astonished host the history of it, carefully “got-up” before-hand.

Here you meet few people besides farm-hands and drovers. Of drovers plenty, urging their small Welsh sheep and their bony cattle to market. If you be at all curious you remark, perhaps, that the sheep are small. “Yess,” says the drover, “they wass ferry small sheeps whateffer. They wass take them from the mountains to makee the other sheeps petter. They will be”—here they break away suddenly, and the drover hurries after them with an opening “Tam!” swallowed up in a torrent of Welsh expletives.