If a grand and awe-inspiring finish to the Holyhead Road be sought, let the pilgrim, instead of making for the town, ascend the misty steeps of Holyhead Mountain, and make his rugged and circuitous way to the South Stack. The road runs past some peculiarly depressing outskirts, and by a long row of empty and forlorn cottages offered to be let at fourpence a week, and not finding tenants even at that modest sum. These desolate dwellings were built for the use of the men employed on the Holyhead Harbour Works, and have not been occupied since the Harbour was completed.
The South Stack, at the rocky edge of Holy Island, cannot be gained under four miles of wandering by winding roads across the heathery uplands: the way traced by whitewashed stones placed at intervals to mark the track in foggy weather. Long before the traveller gains the cliff’s edge, he will perhaps be suddenly overtaken by one of the sea fogs, and at last come to the place unawares. Then he may be grateful indeed for the strong breast-wall of masonry that saves the strayed visitor from walking over the precipices into the sea some five hundred feet below.
A sea-fog is a ghastly and chilling phenomenon, but in no other circumstances does the South Stack rock appear so impressive, or the fog-horn of its lighthouse seem so uncanny. As a light wind springs up and gradually clears away the fog, like clouds of white smoke, the first object looming in ghostly fashion out of the absolute void is the lighthouse lantern, apparently detached and swimming in air; while the strange bellowing, like that of a dyspeptic cow, that has been coming at half-minute intervals from some unknown quarter, is located from it. The distant wail, throbbing in a higher key across the invisible water, is the fog-horn on the Skerries.
[Illustration: THE SOUTH STACK. _After T. Creswick, R.A._]
As the fog gradually dies away, the lighthouse becomes revealed with the island rock it stands upon. This is the South Stack: a great mass of seamed and crannied rock torn off from the cliffs and standing as an island, itself rising to a height of 212 feet above high water, and looked down upon by sheer granite cliffs three hundred feet taller. In the narrow chasm below the sea dashes savagely in and out of the gloomy caverns, with a sound like muffled thunder. The grandeur and scale of this terrific scene—a fitting climax to all the varied scenery of the Holyhead Road—are not fully realised when looking down upon it. There, on the island rock, stands the white lighthouse, with whitewashed stone walls zigzagging along the verge of its cliffs, and forming a little compound where the store-houses and the cottages of the staff are situated; and the whole looks so neat and toy-like that its dimensions are not at first grasped. But when the slow and winding descent to it down the face of the cliff by 381 rude rocky steps has been cautiously accomplished, the awful savagery of the spot is realised. There may possibly be a few places on these coasts to approach the grimly bristling rocks of the South Stack in their wild beauty, but none can surpass them.