Travel through the country, and similar reflections will meet you in every direction. You step a little off the high-road, and—as, for instance, in Kilgerran—you come to the traditional King Arthur’s castle, the far-famed Welsh Tintagel, of which Warton sings,—
“Stately the feast, and high the cheer, Girt with many an armèd peer, And canopied with golden pall, Amid Kilgerran’s castle hall; Illumining the vaulted roof, A thousand torches flamed aloof; The storied tapestry was hung, With minstrelsy the arches rung, Of harps that with reflected light From the proud gallery glittered bright.”
Or, in the neighbourhood of the magnificent coast of Pembrokeshire, the wondrous little chapel of St. Govan’s, the hermitage of the hundred steps; and those splendid wrecks of castles, Manopear, the home of Giraldus Cambrensis, and the graceful and almost interminable recesses of Carew. A traveller may plunge about among innumerable villages bearing the names of saints for whom he will look in vain in the Romish calendar,—St. Athan’s, St. Siebald’s, St. Dubric’s, St. Dogmael’s, St. Ishmael’s, and crowds besides. All such places are girdled round with traditions and legends known to Welsh archæologists—the very nomenclature of Wales involving poetry and historical romance, and often deep tragedy. The names of the villages have a whisper of fabulous and traditional times, and are like the half-effaced hieroglyphs upon an old Egyptian tomb. There is the _Fynnon Waedog_ (Bloody Well), _the Pald of Gwaye_ (the Hollow of Woe), the _Maen Achwynfan_, (the Stone of Lamentation and Weeping), the _Leysan Gwaed Gwyr_ (the Plant of the Blood of Man), _Merthyr Tydvil_ is the Martyred Tydvil. Villages and fields with names like these, remind us of the Hebrew names of places, really significant of some buried tragedy, long holding its place in the heart, and terror of the neighbourhood.
In a land-locked solitude like that of Nevern, Cardiganshire,—where, by-the-bye, we might loiter some time to recite some anecdotes of its admirable clergyman and great preacher, one of the Griffiths,—the wanderer, after a piece of agreeable wildness, comes to a village, enchanting for its beauty, lying on the brink of a charming river, with indications of a decayed importance; the venerable yew-trees of its churchyard shadowing over a singular—we may venture to speak of it as a piece of inexplicable—Runic antiquity, in a stone of a quadrangular form, about two feet broad, eighteen inches thick, and thirteen feet high, with a cross at the top. Few countries can boast, like Wales, the charm of places in wildest and most delicious scenery, with all that can stir an artist’s, poet’s, or antiquarian’s sensibility. What a neighbourhood is Llandilo!—the home of the really great poet, John Dyer, the author of “Grongar Hill,” a delicious spot in this neighbourhood. Here, too, is Golden Grove, the retreat of our own Jeremy Taylor; and here, in his days of exile, many of the matchless sermons of him who has been called, by some, “the English Chrysostom,” and, by others, the “Milton of the English pulpit,” were preached. We made a pilgrimage there ourselves some few years since, urged by love to the memory of Jeremy Taylor. We found the old church gone, and in its place a new one,—the taste of which did not particularly impress us; and we inquired for Taylor’s pulpit, and were told it had been chopped up for fire-wood! Then we inquired for a path through the fields, which for a hundred and fifty years had been called “Taylor’s Walk,” where the great bishop was wont to meditate,—and found it had been delivered over to the plough. We hope we may be forgiven if we say, that we hurried in disgust from a village which, in spite of its new noble mansion, had lost to us its chief charm. But this neighbourhood, with its Dynevor Castle and its charming river, the Towey, and all the scenery described by the exquisite Welsh poet, in whose verse beauty and sublimity equally reign, compels us to feel that if he somewhat pardonably over-coloured, by his own associations, the lovely shrine of his birth, he only naturally described the country through which these preachers wandered, when he says,—