The South Wales coast from Chepstow to Aberystwyth

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. CHEPSTOW AND THE WYE . . .13

II. THE " OLD SEVERN CROSSING," PORTSKEWETT

Chapter I

It was market-day when we got to Chepstow, and droves of sheep and cattle from the country were being driven through the town to the market-pens by the railway station. Under the flanking arch of the " Beaufort Arms " a lively Welsh ram made a charge at us ending in a leap, shoulder high ; and for the first time in my experience Chepstow streets appeared wide awake. For within that arch Beaufort Square and the town about it have as a rule the appearance of living upon the recollection of past market-days, an ancient siege or so of the Castle, and the memory of Henry Marten the Regicide.

But once you relate the town to the countryside and the old forest tracts for whose timber it once served as river-port, all becomes changed. Then the west-country air blows down the Wye valley loaded with the true Monmouthshire spice, and mixes persuasively with the salt breath of the tide under the Castle and the bridge. The Castle, cold at first to the traveller's mind, as castles are apt to be, begins to rekindle in the picture. It assumes again the name it bore in Domesday Book : " Castellum de Estrighoeil " — a name

is puzzling at first, which, as you think it over, seems fairly to bristle with military threats, and far more than the Saxon Chepstowe (Cheap Stowe) holds the clue to the original site. Possibly it was Roman to begin with ? Strata Julia, the Welsh of which is Ystrad Iwl — Ystrigoil ? Possibly there was another British name before the Roman ? But it is clear at any rate that under the title of Chepstow you have a British camp and a Roman station, a Norman castle and an English town in a Welsh country which gradually grew under cover of the Castle, and was approached by what had been a Roman road, the old Vicinal Way. You lost the old sense of the town and its approaches in coming here by train, instead of walking or riding the road from Gloucester — the turnpike still called by the people the Street. Tramping that stretch of road, you would experience what it is in an old country highway, and for choice one going west and following a Roman lead, that gets hold of mortal man, and tells him he is walking with the dust of the feet of fifty generations and more on his boots. However, even as you hurry by rail down the Severn with the river appearing and disappearing on your left and the Street some two or three farms away on your right, you may recover something of the mediaeval traveller's mood, and carry from Lydney mixed ideas of an old weather-god like Lud and of a forester from the Forest of Dean like Madawc the son of Twrgadarn. With the final drop into the Wye Valley over Twt Hill, through which the train tunnels, cutting you off from Gloucester, you are in debatable land. For Monmouthshire, like Alsace and Lorraine, is a mixed country. It is not England ; it is not, at any rate in its eastern or Wye borders, Wales. In its wild aspect it is absolute Welsh, however, of the unmistakable kind found in the old tales, and in the western valleys it still speaks the old tongue. It has its deep wooded Wye Valley, its strong castles like Estrighoeil, Goodrich, or St. Briavel's, built high above the river ; its hermit's chapel, like St. David's cell above the Chepstow ferry ; and its churches, like Llancaut (Llancoed), hid in deep riverside coppices.

Every old bridge, and every new bridge that stands where an old one stood, has its traditions. Chepstow Bridge has one memory which brings home to you the notion of empty space crossed by a single giddy plank ; the notion you find in the ballad of Sir Owain : —

" The brigge was as heigh as a tour And as scharpe as a rasour,

And narrow it was also : And the water that there ran under Brend o' lightning and of thonder,

This actual story of the traveller-by-night who came late to Chepstow Bridge goes back to the day when the Bridge was a wooden one, with planks so sprung and tenoned that in case of flood they lifted with the water. And it was at times, says the local recorder, " very dangerous in crossing, because the planks which formed the flooring rose and fell with the tide, so that it seemed like walking on stilts." Once, after a very heavy flood, the bridge had to be put under repair, and the flooring was removed, only one or two planks being left for footpassengers. The place was well lighted, and a man stationed to warn passengers of their danger: but on this particular night it proved so stormy that the lights were blown out, and the bridge-keeper, concluding that no one would attempt to cross, retired to shelter. After midnight, however, a traveller on horseback was heard knocking on the door of the inn, at the bridge end, affirming that he had just crossed. The innkeeper said it was impossible ; but, recognising the man's voice, he opened the door. In the morning the traveller repeated his story of having crossed the bridge ; whereupon his host took and showed him the plank he must have passed over, " at the same time pointing to the gulph below." The man was so moved thereupon to his vitals by the danger he had unwittingly run, that his nerve gave way, and it was some time before he could retake his road.

The oldest Chepstow bridge of all was Roman and above the Castle, and the road cutting in the steep cliff that led down to it, and some broken abutments and piers, could still be seen at low water within living memory. This was the work of Julius Frontinus, who is credited with giving a name to Ystrad Iwl. The first Norman castle was only the usual timbered structure on the verge of the cliff, and the first builder on the site was William FitzOsborn, Earl of Hereford, " who cherished an enormous cause by his boldness," and fortified the place to guard this corner of his wide possessions. " He slew many, and died by the sword." His son, Roger de Britolio, turned rebel, lost Chepstow ; whereafter it fell to the Clares and Richard Strongbow. Through Richard's daughter, Isabel, it went by marriage then to the Marshalls, of whom we shall hear

TOWN GATE, CHEPSTOW.

From a drawing by Mr. T. H. Thomas.

To (ace p. 16.

again. These Clares, Strongbows, Marshalls, and the rest are hard to individualise ; but among them are to be found the originals of the knights who live again in the Morte U Arthur and the Mabinogion.

An artist in antiquities once went to Chepstow Castle to sketch its walls. But the afternoon was sultry and the courts were hot and airless, and he ended by sitting down on a wall in one of the courts, overcome by the smell of hot ivy, and dozing away some centuries. In that taking he saw an immense man, dressed in armour, against the sky, shining in the sun. The figure stood upon the edge of the wall at the landward side of the Castle, bright and stiff as a metal figure.

The sleeper thought, " That is Richard — Richard Strongbow — and he is going to fall."

Thereupon Richard stiffly began to sway and topple over, sure enough ; and yet he did not quite fall. While the knight was still at that uncomfortable angle, the dreamer woke up to see a sturdy little parson escorting a tired lady o/er the ruins, and telling her everything, without pity. It was his voice repeating " Richard Strongbow ! " that had evoked the dream.

To-day, Chepstow Castle, built at as many different periods as there are courts contained in it, gives you a quite excessive notion of the original place. That was a plain keep only, first of wood, then of stone, based on the rock, whose remains you can discover in the third court, much altered later, and now called the Chapel. The structure was some ten paces broad and thirty long ; and in fact the early Norman castles did not give their occupants, if a garrison is allowed for, very much room.

Most of the Castle, as it stands, was of the second term ; for there was an Old Castle era and a New Castle era to reckon within the castle-building centuries ; and Chepstow grew greatly as time went on. The earlier type of building, built at any time between the Conquest and the death of Rufus, was a plain strong-house or keep, chiefly made of wood, intended like a larger suit of armour to protect a few men ; and it was set on a tump, or rock, or any convenient old Roman or British site. The latter kind of castle was made for comfort in living, as well as for defence : the type that grew at last into a huge castellated enclosure, like Caerphilly or Alnwick.

The round towers of the southern end of Chepstow Castle, which give so much character to the building, and resolve so graciously the salient curves and water-worn lines of the Wye under the Striguil rock, were built, I believe, by Roger Bigod. And finally the true praise of this Castle is the recognition of its natural fitness there on its river-cliff. Its containing walls and towers have a structural relation to the site ; and the noble mason-work above, and the natural strata below, and the details of the surrounding scene are as much of a piece as if man's work had grown out of Nature's. This is a test to which all buildings, set in fine surroundings, must conform, or fail, as so many modern buildings do fail. The tubular railway bridge at Chepstow, hard, straight, abrupt, breaks with every natural form about it ; and the Castle quarrels with it at every juxtaposition.

The ghost of Henry Marten the Regicide, as I said, rather bothers one in exploring Chepstow Castle to-day. Within the first court, the tower which imprisoned him at once confronts you on the left. The Castle's history is apt in local gossip to begin and end with Marten, though he was but one among many famous inmates, from Fitz- Osborn, who was there first, and the de Clares, the great castle-dealers of the south, to Jeremy Taylor. But Chepstow Castle saw less fighting in mediaeval days than might have been expected, because it was so strong. The defences that guard its four courts show how strong it was, and as one mounts from the river-chamber to the towers and gazes eastward upon the Gloucestershire landscape, one realises that the place was all but impregnable till cannon were invented. After that it had to yield to both King and Parliament in turn. In the Civil War Cromwell came once to see his guns batter it ; but did not stay to see it fall. It was in 1645 that, after a desperate siege, Cromwell's men, under Colonel Ewer, took the Castle, then held by Sir Nicholas Kemeys, with great slaughter. The Roundheads revenged themselves for the obstinacy of the defence by putting a fourth of the garrison to the sword in cold blood, and Kemeys among them. A wicked deed, to be remembered as you walk the courts.

Marten was lucky in his prison, and probably lived longer in it than he would have done out of it. His acrostic epitaph may be seen in the church. It shows a certain vigour and a rough wit, such as he was credited with : —

Here or elsewhere (all's one to you or me), Earth, air, or water gripes my ghostless dust ; iVone knows how soon to be by fire set free. iJeader, if you an oft-tryed rule will trust, Fou'll gladly do and suffer what you must."

The last line in the Marten verse rings proverbially : —

"2Vbt how you end, but how you spend your dayes."

After the Castle has been explored, St. Mary's Church can be reached via Bridge Street and Church Street. The church has much individuality; many restorations have not destroyed its Norman lines. Its nave suggests that the building was originally designed for a priory church of some state. The canopied tomb in the chancel is that of Henry, second Earl of Worcester, who died in 1549. Chepstow Bridge lies at the foot of Bridge Street, and brings river, town, and Castle into a lazy guide-book perspective, like something in an old print.

I had always thought that Hawker's Hill, one of the narrow lower streets, had really been a street given up to the hawkers who had used the town as a convenient place of resort. But once a farmer, walking with me in a field a mile above Tintern, said, pointing over the river, "Just there lies Hawker's Dyke." He meant Offa's, so I suppose Hawker's Hill is Offa's too. G. pointed out a window in Hawker's Hill which had evidently once been ecclesiastical. Bridge Street, near the church, used to be called St. Ann's Street, after the chapel of that name, in time turned into a bark-house. Oak-bark from the Forest of Dean used to be one of the chief exports here.

The old Cambrian Travellers Guide speaks of the Priory of St. Kynemark on "a pleasant eminence to the west of the town" (not far from Piercefield Lodge), which was, like so many religious houses, turned into farm walls— at St

Kynemark's Farm. Again, " In the town are the remains of several chapels. Near the Beaufort Arms are two stone buildings, used for a barn and coach-house ; one having a Norman and the other a pointed-arched doorway. Opposite the Beaufort Arms is a small vault, under Fydell's long room ; the stone roof is vaulted and engroined. Another old religious edifice adjoins Powis's Almhouse. A priory for monks of the Benedictine Order was founded here soon after the Conquest, called Strigule, or Striguil, monastery. It constituted a cell to the abbey of Corneille, in Normandy." But where is " Fydell's long-room " now ? Lost in an irrevocable Georgian antiquity.

Turning coastwards, on the search for remains, you look first for St. Tecla's Chapel, which sailors and others call Treacle Chapel, perched on a rock

I right at the entrance to the Wye. Tecla was the daughter of a chief of Gwynedd, old North Wales :

i how she came so far south I do not know. She seems to bear a close resemblance to the type of hermitess found in the Sir Percival and Grail stories ; indeed, is she not like Sir Percival's sister ? Her end was tragic. Both Danish and Irish pirates often sailed up the Severn Sea and entered the Wye : and one band spied the cell of the unfortunate Tecla. Let us hope they did not linger out her death.

Before you leave the Wye, the track of the searaiders who sailed up it and raided places as far above Tintern as Symond's Yat ought to tempt you to boat up the stream with the tide. The Wynd Cliff and Tintern Abbey can be made part of the voyage. Last time I saw the abbey, late in April, the orchards around it were in full blossom, and through every window in turn as one passed the crystal boughs stared in and gave an indescribable radiance to the walls. It made one think of the fabled Apple-Isle : —

"There blooms the gleaming deathless tree Of which the birds with harmony Of many a song intone the Hours Amid the fragrant apple-flowers.

And on the silent, listening lawns Are flowers of rarest radiance ; And shining plains where song is loud Lie southward like a silver cloud."

The companion scene to this belongs to the same record. It was a misty morning, not very good for such an expedition, and the sight of a house — a corn-miller's — which had caught fire the night before, whose walls still smouldered and sent a thin wisp or two of smoke to join the mist, seemed to threaten a bad day. But reaching the foot of the Wyndcliff, after skirting some woods full of wild-garlic mixed with lily-of-the-valley, I decided to climb it from the ridiculous tourist's or stage-carpenter's moss-cottage where you pay sixpence for the privilege.

About three-quarters of the way up the mist grew lighter, as if some one were puffing it away from the trees. Another twenty feet up, and the palest blue sky imaginable began to appear overhead, with a sun pale-white as a pewter spoon. Finally, having reached the summit and gained a point where nothing came in the way, I saw the mist rolling away below like thin muslin, and leaving the lower valley clear. Then, after a pause, came the miracle. A sort of second sky appeared, uncertainly repeating the first, and in the perspective an aerial promontory and beyond that a sailing-vessel were to Ibe discovered apparently high in air. The lower sky was the Sea of Severn, and the vision was that of the meeting of the waters in the April sun. There lay the Severn (whose great tide often flows grey or milk-blue, to ebb tinged with rich mud, yellow or brown) like a creature of the sky; and the Wye was tricked out with the same light bright colours.

Chapter II

THE " OLD SEVERN CROSSING " — PORTSKEWETT — THE SEVERN TUNNEL — WENTWOOD

Travelling west from Chepstow, you have a choice of routes. The ten-mile level between the mouth of the Wye and the mouth of the Usk is not what most men find exciting and they usually contrive to pass it by at high railway speed. But it edges a countryside that has at every stage some ruined chapel, some fine old house or other, some castle like Caldecot on the flat, or Llanvair on a hill, that gives history to a scene ; and it is backed by one of the few aboriginal extents of wild forest left in the country — the forest of Gwent or Wentwood.

The railway for a space runs pretty close to the water ; the main road is a couple of miles away inland. But you ought to leave the highway after passing Pwll Meyrick in order to go and see Mathern and Moynes Court : or you can take a shorter way across the fields. Mathern has a church like an old noble dame, that tells of age well borne, and it is so placed as to enlarge its Norman details and tall tower. One of the Welsh knights or chiefs who became saints, a typical romance-figure — Tewdric, petty king of Morganwg — lies here ; the founder of the church.

M

THE "OLD SEVERN CROSSING" 25

His epitaph speaks of him as Theodoric " commonly called St. Thewdrick" — accounted a martyr because he had taken to a holy life voluntarily, giving up his crown to his son. But a Saxon invasion called him again to the field. A battle at Tintern followed, where he was mortally hurt. He begged his son Maurice to carry him home ; but the mortal pangs gat hold on him when they reached Mathern. There he died, and his last wish was that a church should be built on the spot. A stone coffin was unearthed there in 1881.

The wooded rocks at St. Pierre near by start up dramatically to tell you of the miles of the forestland of Wentwood which Tewdrick hunted. In mediaeval days they ran from the sea-borders without a break west and north to the Usk Valley. It was a perfect romance-forest, a forest of the Mabinogion. As you explore it, you find at every turn the very trees, or their direct offspring, that gave reality to the tales of the countryside. " And he did not choose the pleasantest and most frequented road, but that which was the wildest and most beset by thieves and robbers and venomous beasts. And they came to a high-road, which they followed till they saw a vast forest, and they went towards it, and they saw four armed horsemen come forth from the forest." This is from a page of the Mabinogion — a tale saturated with Gwentian local colour and perfume ; and the four armed horsemen are its inevitable creatures. They will overtake you, if you should follow a road like that leading from Caer Went ; they will start out again and again from the wood, as you pursue your way north-west.

The right point from which to approach

Wentwood is from Portskewett, about two miles south-west of Mathern, but over three by the road round by St. Pierre. You may not, remembering the days before the Severn Tunnel was made, think of it as a forest landmark ; but its name is corrupted from Porth-is-Coed, the port under the wood. It is hard now to rescue its washed-away waterside purlieus; but they once stretched far into the side-channel. Indeed, Portskewett figures in the Triads as one of the three chief harbours of Wales. You ought to take the chance of a very low ebb (say, in a dry September) to explore the lines of the lost harbour at the aber of the Nedern or Troggy. Colonel Morgan pointed out long ago the names of spots in the channel, which were once dry land. " Gruggy " is a queer name to fish out of the salt water, for it comes either from "crugyn," a mound or tump ; or Gryg, heather. Bedwin means birch-grove ; and other such woody places lie drowned off Portskewett.

Harold built there a house whose foundations have left their traces close to the church, and in the church itself is a Saxon tympanum, whose like is nowhere else to be seen in the country. Harold meant to entertain King Edward the Confessor in state at the new house, and tradition declares they met there. If you turn to Florence of Worcester you find the rest of the story, in which Tostig, Harold's brother, raided his palace and camp, in revenge, it is said, for the preference shown to Harold by the King. Harold's Welsh raids would make a good fighting saga. They are mixed with the deadly feuds of two Gruffydds — Gruifydd ab Llewelyn and Gruffydd ab Rhydderch, of whom the first was a man of temper

THE "OLD SEVERN CROSSING" 27

and resource, fit to range with Harold's own powers. He deserved better than the cruel death he suffered from his own countrymen— the outcome of one of the endless Welsh vendettas which went on under the tribal order and disorder.

My recollection of Portskewett dates back to the time when there was no Severn Tunnel, and travelling from Bristol to Carmarthen, we alighted on the Somerset side, to cross by broad-decked paddle-boats : a sort of miniature Holyhead-to- Kingstown experience.

Out of all these crossings one made at Easter comes back clearly to mind. It was blowing and raining hard. The Severn was rough and dirty enough for any open sea, tumbling and rolling with choppy muddy yellow billows before a west wind. It was more daunting than Holyhead itself in the teeth of a gale — the flooded Severn, about an hour after high water, looked so malevolent. The wind, too, in the station at Portskewett — crying, buffeting, howling, and whistling — was such as only Dickens with his uncanny faculty of describing the elements at odds with roof and walls, could describe. I have often thought of that crossing when being sucked through the Severn Tunnel in an air-tight, sulphureous cylinder of a railway compartment in about a tenth part of the time : a great saving, no doubt, but a traveller's experience not at all to be compared with the other.

More than a generation later, a September evening took me again to Portskewett. The old waterside hotel was an hotel no longer ; but it let me have pleasant quarters for the night; and after supper I walked under the stars to the waterside, and heard the lazy flap of the tide against the causeway, while in the distance sounded what seemed to be a noise of forge-hamers, or heavy clamping, possibly from the works at Sudbrook.

An early start next morning brought Crick into view betimes, and beyond it the open road to Caerwent. There was in the air the sweet, clean smell of corn in the field, ready to be led ; and flocks of buntings, finches, and hedge-sparrows, swoln with new wheat, were to be spied flying up as some harvest cart or stray harvester disturbed them. But the high-road was almost empty. The only being I met during the first half-mile was a black man, in what might be a seaman's Sunday clothes. What was he doing on the road from Caerwent ? When he had gone by, far ahead of me, a string of what looked rather like a troop of women, continually changing their order and crossing to and fro, appeared on the dusty highway. Presently, one of them fell down, and then they resolved themselves into a troop of school children. Just below the rise to Caerwent village, where one tries to figure the last entrance to the old Roman town, I overtook them. The child that had fallen was a small boy, fair-haired, burstingly plump and well cared for ; he was still sobbing in a perfunctory way ; while two little girls held his fat hand and several others formed a body-guard in white pinafores, behaving as if he was a hero being led in triumph to the camp. A penny dried his tears. In the last glimpse I had, the youngsters were clustered like white butterflies round a small village shop, with lollypops in the window ; no doubt very like those on which the small boys and girls of the camp formerly spent their Roman halfpence.

Everywhere at Caerwent the Roman illusion

THE "OLD SEVERN CROSSING" 29

keeps cropping out in the Monmouth village. The excavation-field had just revealed, when I saw it, a gateway in a ten-foot cutting, out of which climbed a labourer. The resurrection of a live Roman soldier in helmet and tunic, or a slave with his rations, a solid wheaten cake, in his hand, would not have been much more startling. The wheaten cake was suggested by a twopenny loaf which I saw a Roman baker handing in at a door.

But Caerwent, though they do say, mixing no doubt the traditions of two Caers in Gwent, that the sea once came up to its walls, is too far from our main route to be further exploited here. Every year the archaelogical men are laying bare more of the old lines of the Roman city ; and its map will be made and its record written, plain as that of Pompeii, some five or six years hence.

If you return to Portskewett from Caerwent, you can take another road back, via Caldecot, after exploring the old wall and round buttress behind and below the church. Caerwent Church itself, by the way, is half Roman, its walls being largely built out of the old buildings of the Caer. In about a mile and a half this road brings you to Caldecot village, and so to the Castle ; one of the few purposely built in this country on a wet site, with the marsh used for defence.

It was a hot, sleepy afternoon when I reached Caldecot on my way back from Caerleon. No wayfarers at all were on the road, and in the scattered village doors were shut and houses seemed asleep. Outside an inn a hawker's cart was standing ; the people in the churchyard were not quieter than those in the houses. It was hard to find any one to serve as a key-bearer to the Castle, which is not open every day to the public. It was equally hard, having reached it, to imagine it had ever been meant for war by the De Bohuns, so deep was the afternoon quiet about its sunburnt mounds and round towers.

Caldecot Castle was built in three pieces at three different times. The four or five carved Maloresque heads on the west side of the machicolated gateway tempt one to think the whole building later than it is. The oldest part is the keep, on its made mound, with its queer excrescent smaller tower, which leaves one conjecturing if a live cock or a larger biped was walled up in it. There is some mystery about it. This was built about 1150-1175. After that the De Bohuns went on building from time to time, and occasionally pulled down an old piece to make a new. The whole area covered is enough for a whole village. The ruins came at length into the hands of a most conscientious restorer in Mr. Cobb, its present owner, who gives us a wonderful idea of the place in its fighting prime. In his cartoon the main structure fairly bristles with timber, rather like an ironclad with its torpedo spars out. Caldecot's towers and walls have great corbels and big holes (going through the parapet), which must have been intended to hold timber struts for active defence. In this extraneous timbering one has a relic possibly of the earlier kind of Norman castle, which was mainly a wooden erection with stone ballast, earthen dyke, and bristling palisade.