The stranger coming down the darkling road, past the little hamlet of Vron Cysylltau, and winding midway between the hills and the valley, obtains the true exploratory thrill. It is true that he will find, on after and daylight experience, that the road is a sandpapered one, on which the puzzle would be to find a rut or a loose stone; but he will proceed with the caution proper to a Livingstone or a Speke in unknown African wilds, and, when at last the lights of Llangollen begin to twinkle before him, will sigh with a great content for perils overpast, and rest at his inn.
Let us forbear in these pages to discuss the accommodation that Llangollen now affords. Is it not the business of the town—the town, mark you!—to find accommodation for tourists of every sort, with the result that it is become a place of many hotels and boarding-houses, and very different from the tiny village of Llangollen that disgusted the travellers of a century ago, of whose one and “only tolerable” inn (he names the “Hand”) Wigstead severely remarks: “Of the accommodation of that—_Cætera desunt_—” which, by some little freedom, may be translated “the less said the better”?
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.”