A Book of North Wales. Baring-Gould Sabine

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СКАЧАТЬ the Hon. William Owen Stanley, good, but wrongly placed.

      The nave has internally on each side an arcade of three Tudor arches. On the north, the piers are octagonal; on the south, clustered of four shafts, with general capitals. The arrangement of the transepts is clumsy, like other Welsh examples, running from north to south, uninterrupted by arches, and giving the effect of one church set at right angles to another.

      Capel y Llochwyd is on the mountain. Bishop Stanley, in 1830, thus describes it: —

      “A singular fissure, cleaved in a direct line from the summit to the base, forms, or rather did form, a passage of communication of no small celebrity in ancient days, and retaining its odour of sanctity till very recent date. It is known by the name of Ogof Lochwyd, ogof signifying a cave. A spring of crystal water filtering through the deep strata formed a deep well at the bottom of this chasm. Situated just at the higher opening of the gorge was a chapel for the accommodation of pilgrims called Capel y Llochwyd, of which a considerable remnant in ruins at the head of this gorge still remains. Till within sixty years the lonely chapel with its well were from time unknown the resort of lads and lassies of the island, who, at a certain annual festival called Suliau y Creiriau, the Sundays of the Relics, and held during three successive Sundays in July, assembled in troops to ascertain the contingencies awaiting them. Each diviner into futurity descended the chasm to the well, and there, if after having taken a mouthful of holy water and grasped two handfuls of sand from the charmed font, he or she could accomplish the re-ascent with them safely, each would obtain the wish of their heart before the close of the year. About sixty years ago (1770) the chapel was reduced to ruins, and the well was concealed by filling it with rubbish; but till twenty years ago the walls, to the height of seven or eight feet, remained sufficiently entire to convey a tolerable idea of the perfect building, which is represented to have been a substantial though rude and primitive edifice, composed of unhewn stones cemented with mortar, the windows and doorways excepted, which were well wrought by the chisel with considerable labour from some obdurated material, the whole apparently consisting of one oblong chamber not exceeding a few yards in length.

      “Of the well, however, not a trace was left, though its existence was proved beyond a shadow of doubt a few years ago by a party who landed and at length succeeded in detecting the spot, from whence, after removing a quantity of sand and loose stone, again gushed the fountain of water in its pristine vigour and doubtless inherent virtues.”

      There was at one time a chapel of S. Ffraid or Brigid on an islet where according to legend she disembarked from Ireland. This was not the Brigid of Kildare, but a namesake. The story goes that being unable to find a boat to serve her purpose, she cut a sod of turf, threw it into the sea, stepped on it, and was carried across. The turf lodged on this hump of rock, and became fast there. But the wintry waves have eaten away the isle, chewed up the turf, and torn down the chapel walls.

      The breakwater of Holyhead is a stupendous achievement. It is about a mile and a half long, and has a lighthouse at the extremity. On the Skerries also, some seven miles north, is another lighthouse, and the Government had to buy it from the owner, a Mr. Jones, for the sum of £444,984.

      The old Government pier had already cost a million and a half of money, but it was abandoned when the London and North Western Railway Company undertook the construction of the new pier. The new harbour has a water area of twenty-four acres.

      Every visitor to Holyhead makes a point of going to the South Stack, just under four miles from the town. Cliffe thus describes it: —

      “At first you feel disappointed, and it is not until you descend that you become impressed with the grandeur of the scenery. At the foot of the formidable stairs, 380 in number, you arrive at the entrance of a light suspension bridge. For some years after the lighthouse was erected (1809) the only means of access across the chasm was by a rope and basket; then a bridge of ropes was made, but the risk was so great that a chain bridge became necessary. After crossing the bridge you can descend to look at a vast fissure in the islet, and wonder, if the day be stormy, how the boats fared that conveyed the materials for the lighthouse to that rugged and perilous spot, where the surge of the sea is awe-inspiring. The sea in south-westerly gales often dashes over the dwellings of the lightkeepers, when the scene is truly sublime.”

      The coast is alive with sea-birds, kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots, solan geese, puffin, shag, cormorant, and tern; and collections of these birds’ eggs can be obtained at a very small cost in the town. An ingenious provision of Nature saves the eggs from being carried by the raging winds from the ledges of rock on which they are laid, when the mother-bird is not sitting. If, for instance, a guillemot’s egg be looked at, it will be seen that it is so balanced that the wind, catching it, spins it round on its centre of gravity, and does not obtain sufficient resistance to carry it away bodily, and precipitate it into the sea.

      There are objects of considerable archæological interest in Holy Island, and these are the Cytiau’r Gwyddelod, or habitations of the Irish. There are several collections, and some were explored by the Hon. W. O. Stanley in 1871.

      They are strewn over the side of Holyhead mountain, but there are others by Porth Dafarch and Mynydd Celyn.

      The sites of ancient habitations have been selected for shelter from the prevailing winds, and the huts are usually grouped together forming villages of from twelve to fifty huts. They are always protected from hostile attack by rude walls of dry masonry or by precipitous rocks. They are circular, and have slabs of granite set on end to face them within and without. The entrances are to the south. The roofs were constructed of poles resting on the low walls, brought together in the middle, and thatched or covered with turf. The walls of the huts enclose a space of from fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, and the doorway is formed of two upright stones of about four feet high, upon which formerly rested a stone lintel.

      Some of these huts were dwelling-houses, others served merely as kitchens, and some were sweating or bathing chambers, by the production of steam by throwing water over heated stones.

      Mr. Stanley found bronze weapons, jet necklaces, ornamented spindle-whorls, stone lamps, and moulds for bronze buttons. The abundance of articles discovered in these dwellings is very unusual and seems to point to their having been left in a hurry.

      There is a strong camp, Caer-y-Twr, on Holyhead mountain, facing east, and about two-thirds of the way up to the summit from the town. It is surrounded by a rude wall of dry masonry, following the ridge of the rock, which in places is almost perpendicular. The entrance is steep and seems to have been defended by hornwork.

      There is a narrow cleft in the face of the mountain to the west, above débris of rock that has fallen in some convulsion of nature, leaving a perpendicular face of rock two hundred feet in height. This gap forms a passage through which only one person could pass at a time, and a steep path winds to it between rock faces. It may have served as a postern to the camp.

      The construction of huts in the fashion described was derived by the Irish from the original population of the isle, the people who erected the rude stone monuments.

      A traveller in Gilead and Moab will find precisely similar collections of hovels, similarly surrounded with walls of unhewn blocks, and associated, as in Ireland, with cromlechs and cairns and menhirs, the relics of the same prehistoric race which through long centuries, and after long journeys to new lands, continued to build houses, erect camps, and set up monuments to their dead in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, and Northern Africa precisely as they did in Central Asia and in Palestine. A mysterious people that never advanced in the art of building, but clung tenaciously, as the bee, the bird, the spider, and the ant, to traditional usage in the structure of their dwellings, and which clung with like tenacity to the cult of ancestors. It came out of Asia with polished stone weapons, and only slowly accepted, as foreign importations, axes and swords and personal ornaments, made of bronze.

      Certainly СКАЧАТЬ