Troy House—Anecdote—Antique custom—Village Churches of Monmouthshire—White-washing—The bard—Strewing graves with flowers—St. Briavels’ Castle—Llandogo—Change in the character of the river—The Druid of the Wye—Wordsworth’s “Lines composed above Tintern Abbey.”

Just below Monmouth the Wye forms a sharp curve, the apex of which is met by the Monnow and the Trothy, in such a way that these two streams, tending to nearly the same point, but coming from different directions, and the two sides of the Wye curve, make the place resemble the meeting of four roads. We have already seen how interesting the Monnow is; the Trothy, which passes White Castle, and has its source in the mountains near the Great Skyrrid, is hardly less so; the Wye we have followed from the summit of Plinlimmon, through a tract of mingled beauty and grandeur, unrivalled in England; and we are now about to trace its course to the monastic ruins of Tintern, and through the fairy land of Piercefield to its destined bourne, the Severn.

The banks are at first low, and the country laid out in level meadows, framed in at a short distance by swelling hills. Troy House is the first object that arrests our attention in front by its sombre woods. In the reign of James I. it was the property of Sir Charles Somerset, the brother of the gallant defender of Raglan Castle, between whom and Charles I. a conversation relating to Troy House took place, which is thus reported in the “Apothegms.”

“Sir Thomas Somerset, brother to the marquis of Worcester, had a house which was called Troy, five miles from Ragland Castle. This Sir Thomas, being a complete gentleman, delighted much in fine gardens and orchards, where, by the benefit of art, the earth was made so gratefull to him at the same time that the king (Charles the first) happened to be at his brother’s house, that it yielded him wherewithal to send him a present; and such a one as (the times and seasons considered) was able to make the king believe that the sovereign of the planets had now changed the poles, and that Wales (the refuse and outcast of the fair garden of England) had fairer and riper fruit than England’s bowels had on all her beds. This present, given to the marquis, he would not suffer to be presented to the king by any other hand than his own. ‘Here I present you, sir,’ said the marquis, (placing his dishes on the table) ‘with that which came not from Lincoln that was, nor from London that is, nor from York that is to be, but from Troy.’ Whereupon the king smiled, and answered the marquis, ‘Truly, my lord, I have heard that corn grows where Troy town stood, but I never thought there had grown any apricots before.’”

Some articles said to be relics of Henry V. are preserved here: the bed in which he was born, the cradle in which he was rocked, and the armour in which he fought at Agincourt. There is also a carved oak chimney-piece from Raglan Castle.

Soon the hills approach nearer, and, covered with rich foliage, sweep down more suddenly towards the river. On the right bank is Penalt church, standing on a wooded eminence; and behind it, an extensive common distinguished for a superstitious custom, derived, as is supposed, from the days of the druids. When a funeral passed that way, the cortege stopped at an oak tree, and placed the corpse on a stone seat at its foot. The company than sang a psalm, and resumed their procession. It may be remarked that wherever an old oak tree is found in this part of the country, in an insulated or otherwise remarkable situation, there is sure to be connected with it some religious tradition, or some observance whose origin is lost in antiquity. The churches are usually an interesting feature in the landscape, for it would seem as if their founders had sought purposely out for them solitary places, by the banks of rivers or in the midst of groves or fields. In general they are exceedingly simple in appearance, many having the marks of great antiquity, and almost all being whitewashed from top to bottom. An antiquary has ingeniously accounted for this peculiarity, by the custom the Normans had of constructing even large buildings of pebbles and rag-stone, which obliged them to cover the inequalities, outside and inside, by a coat of lime and sand. However this may be, the effect is not unpleasing; more especially when the rural temple, as is frequently the case, is shaped like a barn, and without a belfry. Such churches, more especially in the mountainous districts, still present the rounded arches, and other peculiarities, which denote that their rude walls were raised by our Saxon ancestors, if not by the ancient Britons themselves.

We find the white walls, so common in Wales, alluded to as a poetical circumstance by one of the bards of the fourteenth century, in a piece of considerable beauty; and in the succeeding paragraph there is an allusion to another Welsh custom, of more classical authority, that of strewing the graves of the dead with flowers. The poem is an invocation to summer, to shed its blessings over the country of Gwent. The following is the paragraph referred to, with the second allusion, terminating the ode by an abrupt and pathetic transition.

“If I obtain thee, O summer, in thy splendid hour, with thy fair growth and thy sporting gems; thy serenity pleasantly bear, thou golden messenger, to Morganoc. With sunshine morn gladden thou the place, and greet the whitened houses; give growth, give the first fruits of the spring, and collect thou blossoms to the bushes; shine proudly on the wall of lime, full as light and gaily bright; leave there in the vale thy footsteps in juicy herbage, in fresh attire; diffuse a load of delicious fruits, in bounteous course among its woods; give thy crop like a stream over every lawn, the meadows, and the land of wheat; clothe the orchard, the vineyard, and the garden, with thy abundance and thy teeming harvest; and scatter over its fair soil the lovely marks of thy glorious course!

“And oh! whilst thy season of flowers, and thy tender sprays thick of leaves remain; I will pluck the roses from the branches; the flowerets of the meads, and gems of the woods; the vivid trefoils, beauties of the ground, and the gaily smiling bloom of the verdant herbs, to be offered to the memory of a chief of favorite fame: Humbly I will lay them on the grave of Ivor!”

The Ivor here alluded to was Ivor Hael, or the Generons, an ancestor of the Tredgear family of Morgans, whose pedigree is traced, by the Welsh bards from the third son of Noah. The poet David, ap Gwillim, styled the Welsh Ovid, loved a lady of the name of Morvid, in whose praise his prolific muse produced no fewer than a hundred and forty-seven poems. A rich rival, however, gained the unwilling prize; and the son of song consoled himself by carrying off his lost mistress on two several occasions, when her husband, Rhys Gwgan, was with the army in France, where he served in the rank of captain at the battle of Crecy. For both these offences he was fined and imprisoned, and in both instances liberated by the gentlemen of Gwent, who came forward in a body in favour of their darling bard. The above extract is taken from one of two poems which he wrote in testimony of his gratitude. It may be added, that when flowers are planted on graves, it was, and we believe is the custom to surround the area with stones, which are periodically whitewashed.

On the bank opposite Penalt, or a little further down, is Redbrook, upper and lower, the one standing above the other on the hill side. The stream from which they derive this name separates Monmouthshire from Gloucestershire, and the Wye then continues the boundary. The brook, also, serves the purpose of turning the wheels of some iron and tin works; but without vulgarising any more than such accidents have done heretofore, the scenic romance of the river. Wye Seal House comes next, on the same side of the river, with the hamlet of Whitebrook and its paper-mills on the opposite bank. Then Pan-y-van hill, and the ruins of the old manor-house of Pilton—then an iron bridge over the Wye, and then Big’s-weir House, and its surrounding grove, with Hudknolls behind, and the ruins of St. Briavels’ Castle on their summit.

This fortress stands in the forest of Dean, and dates from the reign of Henry I., when it was founded by Milo, earl of Hereford, for the residence and defence of some of the lords-marchers. St. Briavels, formerly a place of some importance, is now a village. Its inhabitants enjoyed several singular immunities which are now obsolete; but they have still a right of common in Hudknolls wood, a tract of land on the banks of the Wye seven miles long. They are supposed to enjoy the privilege through the performance of a strange ceremony on Whit-sunday. Each inhabitant pays twopence to the churchwardens, who buy bread and cheese with the fund, which they cut into small pieces, and distribute to the congregation immediately after the service is ended, in the midst of a general scramble. They are also allowed to cut wood, but not timber, in any part of the forest. It is said that a countess of Hereford procured for them their privileges by the performance of a feat similar to that of the Lady Godiva.

St. Briavels’ Castle was erected by Milo St. Walter, earl of Hereford, in the time of Henry I., as a barrier against the Welsh. Two circular towers alone remain entire with a narrow gateway between, composing the north-west front. They contain several apartments, the walls of which are eight feet thick. One is used as a prison for the hundred. In the interior are two other similar gateways, on the right and left of which are the remains of spacious rooms.

The governor of St. Briavels—for it became a royal fortress after the Hereford family had possessed it for about a century—had formerly jurisdiction over the forest of Dean; and it is recorded, that in his court the miners were sworn upon a branch of holly instead of the testament, lest the holy book should be defiled by their fingers.

We now enter a long reach of the river, with Tiddenham Chase Hill rising boldly in front; till Llandogo appears, a beautiful little village on the right bank, seated on a hill side in the midst of gardens and orchards, and with its small church near the edge of the water, peeping through the trees. This is a scene of quiet beauty, which after the massive forms we have passed, we term prettyness. Whatever be its proper name, however, in the pedantry of taste, it is not surpassed on the Wye in its own kind. It is unfortunate, nevertheless, that at this spot an unfavourable change should be observed in the river—although only in the river considered as a volume of water, and not taken in conjunction with its scenery. Here the Wye becomes a tide stream, acted upon by the ebb and flow of the Severn sea; and in consequence, it is henceforward habitually turbid, and no longer a current of pure element, subject only to the influence of rains and freshes.

This circumstance has also its effect upon the moral character of the river. Large barges are floated up by the tide to Brook Weir, a little lower down, which is midway between Monmouth and Chepstow, or nine miles from each; and there they receive the merchandise brought thither in small inland vessels from the upper part of the Wye. Our romantic stream, therefore, whose outlines hitherto have been broken only by the smokes of furnaces hidden among the trees, and whose still life has been varied only by the corracles of the ancient Britons, and other inland craft that never dreamt of the breezes of the salt sea, becomes now a small highway of trade, a sort of water lane by which the corn, and hoops, and fagots, and other productions of the interior are conveyed to Bristol. But even the coasting barge, with her blackened sails, and sixty tons of cargo, is not here “a jarring and a dissonant thing.” Creeping with the tide along those solemn banks, she acquires a portion of their solemnity; floating silently through those pastoral vales, she is invested, for the time being, with their simplicity. Her characteristics are swallowed up in the character of the river—the spell of the Wye is upon her!

If you doubt the fact, let us wander on but a little further; let us turn the point of Lyn Weir, and, looking along the reach beyond, inquire with what vulgarised ideas, with what broken associations, we find ourselves gliding into the region of Tintern! Near this spot, the great Druid of the Wye, the poet of nature internal and external, produced a poem which in all probability will be read, either with tears or smiles of delight, long after the works of man shall have completely obliterated those features of the grand, the beautiful, the simple, and sublime, to which it is our humble task to point the finger.

“Five years have past, five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts,
Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
Among the woods and copses, nor disturb
The wild green landscape. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very doors, and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees;
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where, by his fire,
The hermit sits alone.

“These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

“If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft,
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight, when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart;
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee.

“And now with gleams of half extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again,
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment, there is life and food
For future years, and so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows, and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise,
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”