NORTH WALES.*

" Where lies the land to which the ship would go ? Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know."

So sand the Poet, to the intense indignation of the Skipper. He (the Skipper) answered in a fury, " Do you think I should be such a blamed fool as to cast off without definite orders, just for the fun of it, like a lot of silly trippers ? " Whatever be the solution of this nautical poetic controversy, one thing is certain. Thousands of anxious families are now debating where they shall go for their holiday. It is getting late, but till the tickets are taken and the labels affixed to the trunks the choice remains open. No doubt the Englishman, man or woman, boy or girl, is a rover at heart, and wants to go abroad in general and to Italy in particular. " Italiam petimus" --" 'Tis Italy we seek "—said Virgil, and so in theory say all of us. But the arch of azure sky that spans the deep blue Spezia Bay and the coves and inlets that rival the peacock's neck in hue are a long way off. Railway journeys are hot and hotels apparently expensive ; when a simple lunch costs 15 lire per person ! It is all very well to say that this is cheap when the pound sterling is changed for 100 Italian francs, but think of the mental agony of counting out the fifteen, or maybe thirty, notes—torn, greasy and dirty. No doubt after you have figured it all out on the back of an envelope and find it only comes to about three shillings each you feel better and cooler ; but still there remains over a sense of financial exhaustion, if not, indeed, of depravity. There are also a thousand other reasons of health, purse, and person which make for casting the holiday lot into the lap of the British Isles.

When my advice is asked as to what part of the aforesaid Isles, I say without a moment's hesitation, " Go to North Wales." If you love the mountains and the sea, and scenery of high romance in miniature, but not the less grand and soul- shaking for that, you will bless the hand that directed you to Merioneth and Carnarvon. North Wales is, of course, no discovery of mine. It is known, worshipped and enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of Englishmen. Yet I dare venture to say, " By none is it enough beloved." People who go to North Wales and like it, and get great pleasure thereby, seldom realize, as fully as they should, how incomparable a heritage of beauty we have at our very doors. We somehow * Burrell's Guide to North Marti. With a section upon Mountain Walks and hock (limbs by Dora Benson. [Cheltenham: Burrow. 24. net.]

think it looks silly to enthuse over scenery unless it is at least five hundred miles off. Yet we may say truthfully of North Wales that it can make out a very good case when challenged

by " haughty Greece or insolent Rome." Though you cannot tread glacier-ice, glissade down a snow-slope, or jump a crevasse, you can get as delightful, as fascinating mountain walks in Wales as those afforded by the proudest Alps or the most romantic Apennines. The smallness of the scale never troubles you, so exquisite and so justly proportioned is the hill scenery of our most westerly coastline, so magical are the mountain forms, so clear the lakes and tarns, so boldly break down the torrent-tongued ravines, so august is the pomp of the tides as they race inland up the rockbound estuaries and fill the hollows of the hill with their sea-music. Even the expert mountaineer when once he is out on a Welsh hill-side is transported. Indoors he may be troubled by the thought that when he has walked for four hours he will not have risen more than two thousand five hundred feet above the sea. When, however, he is on the slopes and rocks of Snowdon, Cader Idris, or the Glyders, he will not only smile at his chamber grumblings, but feel heartily ashamed of them. He will, if he is a scholar, remember that there are ten-lined poems in the Greek Anthology as worthy of our wonder as the mightiest epics. If he is a lover of painting, he will recall how the great miniaturists give us as much character in the reverse of a locket as we can find in the ample canvases of Vandyck or Sir Joshua. Turner was never more tremendous, more homage-compelling, more Olympian, more master of our emotions than in the tiny vignettes designed to illustrate Rogers's Italy. " Hannibal's passage of the Alps," with its vast fields of snow, its abysmal ravines, its endless stream of toiling soldiers, its elephants and horsemen on the march, is almost oppressive in its immensity. It is, in fact, some two and a-half inches by two I

Here is the psychological situation as regards North Wales in a nutshell.

But having plumped for North Wales as the holiday place in Britain for those who want to see and to enjoy things easily, and obtainable alike for youth and age, the place which suits all tastes in out-of-door holidays, one comes to the question, " What part of North Wales ? " To answer this question too closely would be a dangerous venture. Little towns and " pleasantly situated villages " with " attractive inns " look amiable and innocent beyond words as they bask in the sun- light or bare their bosoms and their sandy beaches to the moon. But when they are excited by comparison to a rival and the competitive goat is roused and raging on his native rocks they are as fierce as the tigress over her cubs. I want to go again to many parts of Wales and am anxious to pass the streets of its towns without being stoned ! Still, I can with moderate safety venture upon a generalization or two. Here is as much as I dare. Go where the mountains meet the sea. Then you will get the best of both worlds. To transmute Sir Charles Sedley's gold, we may say of the coast of North Wales between Aberystwyth and Carnarvon :- " All that by Tourists is adored In thy dear self I see,

For the whole Earth can but afford The mountains and the sea."

In this enchanted and enchanting land the mountains come down to the shore in troops. Those that gather round Tremadoc Bay can boast as exquisite outlines as any in the world. Stand on a fine day on the little hill above the tiny harbour of Abersoeh, a miniature in a miniature, and look across to the stately sweep of mountains that ring round this inland sea. You will see no nobler, no more perfect frame to your sea-picture even in the Attic landscape. The Bay of Eleusis is justly renowned throughout the world, and through- out the ages. Its nobility, its graciousness, its compelling charm touch all beholders. The hue of the violet lingers on the bills and deeply dyes the sea. I know and love both bays—Eleusis and Tremadoc. It calls no blush to unite them. I can say without hesitation that I have seen Moelwyn and Cynicht, the line of hills above the Roman Steps, Cader Idris and the daughters that crouch around her throne, show a tint of azure deeper and even more mysterious than those on the Hellenic summits. What the hills of North Wales lose in definition they gain in magic. And yet on occasion they can be as clear cut as if it was the Mediterranean that reflected them. I have seen the frame of Tremadoc Bay,

against a sunset sky of Prussian blue, look as if it were cut out of block tin.

No doubt seaside places other than those of North Wales can boast fine mountain outlines. It is seldom, however, that you get them literally at your back door as you do in the part of North Wales which I have the courage to call the hub of the holiday universe in Britain. At Harlech and all the villages between it and Barmouth, at all the places up the tideways of the Mawddach and the Tan-y-Bwlch estuaries—places where the moon-silvered inlets send up their light voices to the listening hills—at all the coast villages between Harlech and Portmadoc, and at all between Port- maim and Pwllheli you have a bathe in front of you and a mountain climb behind.

But the practical tourist will comment : " A good guide- book is better than ten poets." Happily the new Guide to North Wales, in Burrow's Series of Guides, described in the footnote to this article, is thoroughly sensible, trustworthy, up to date, well illustrated, and well mapped, and has also some very sensible hints for walks and rock climbing. The energetic tourist will, no doubt, want to supplement the maps by sheets of the Ordnance Survey, except in the case of the very good little map showing the paths round Snowdon. But my purpose is not to describe the guide-book in detail or to tell people how to get to Wales. That would be obviously superfluous in view of the fact that our railways and our towns have now awakened to the fact that it is well worth their while to inform the public of the services they offer, and not to assume the Victorian attitude that it is the business of the public to come to them, and not for them to approach their customers with any direct information or application.

I shall end by pointing out what a " much-in-little " North Wales presents to the tourist. For example, a man who wants to see mediaeval castles cannot see them better than at Carnarvon and Conway. I have seen many castles in France, in Italy, in Switzerland, in the Tyrol and in Palestine, which, strangely enough, is the real place to see the archi- tecture of chivalry ; but I have never beheld anything more impressive than the two great strongholds just named. And to these I may add Harlech, for, though it cannot boast of such stone girdles as these immense enceintes, it is an exquisite piece of comparatively late architectural fortification. Next, the man who likes groves of oak and rocks and grottos such as are described by Theocritus, or portrayed by Poussin or Claude Lorraine, will find them to perfection in North Wales. Here are the groves of classical landscape in their full glory. Some of them, indeed, are so like seventeenth or eighteenth century illustrations to some Latin or Greek poet as to be almost uncanny. Nature appears to be aping the literary products of Amsterdam. A shepherd with a crook, and a nymph with a garland, have somehow slipped out of the natural picture ; but we feel that they are merely resting from their rhetorical love-making somewhere round the corner. Go up the enchanting little road that leads from the main road towards the Lake of the Roman Steps (I spare my readers the Welsh names), and to right and left there will be found dozens of little woods to illustrate what I mean. But, indeed, they are scattered broadcast over North Wales.

If you want Roman roads that are cast across moun- tain slopes as a fly-fisher casts his involuted line, you will find them nowhere better than in North Wales, and in North Wales nowhere better than on the hill-sides between the Croiser Valley and the bridge on the highway which spans the Glaslyn at the entrance of the Pass. Under the moun- tain of " The Black Rocks " zig-zags the Roman road, and at the top of the mountain aforesaid you will discover some of the most delicious of the egg-cup tarns of Wales.

But perhaps the Welsh Llyns are the most enchanting things that these hills afford. To sit by, to bathe in, to fish in, they are without rivals. The bareness of most of them, the clear water, the clean grey rocks, the pale flowers, have a reticence and vague reserve which is astonishingly moving.

There still remains to be said that the people of North Wales are worthy of their scenery. They are sensible,

friendly, and, above all, a musical and poetical people, and they love and cherish not only the tunes and lyrics of their kind, but also its wonderful legends, magical and historical. Every waterfall, every stone, every mountain pasture has its awn story. You ask why the Croiser Valley is called Croiser sad the answer comes back, " Because a great queen in the olden days waited there while the battle raged in the valley below." And then word has come to her that the Prince, hci only son, had fallen. In her agony she raised her arms above her head, and exclaimed, " This is my cross " The North Welsh people are to my mind the fine flower of the Celtic race. They love easy social intercourse and desire both to give pleasure and to take it.

And now that I have written about North Wales from my heart, I am beginning to wonder whether I have not been a traitor to one of the things that I love best in the world. But no That is a miserable, selfish monopoly thought. No man has a right to keep the knowledge of beautiful things to himself in order that he may be the surer of his own enjoyment. But there is a duty, and a very important duty, upon those who tell the secret of the hills and broadcast such things about which I have written to-day. That duty is never to speak about the beauties and natural scenery of districts like North Wales without urging in the strongest possible way the duty of those who enjoy them to determine that they will not only protect those beauties in every way, but that they will, be the trouble great or small, do their best to get other people to protect them. And this in the case of North Wales will become urgent in the next few years. In North Wales the people of England have an asset in the balance-sheet of beauty of incomparable value, something precious beyond words. But this precious thing can, alas be very easily killed. In the matter of Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, or the Matterhorn, the scale is too enormous and man too puny to make his scratches on the landscape of any vital importance.

It is the old story of the miniature over again. In Wales a few months' work can utterly destroy some perfect piece of natural beauty. One thumb-mark on a miniature will ruin it for ever. Hence, I would implore every man who reads these lines and who from them is induced to go to North Wales to swear an oath to himself to be a protector of the beauty that he has unveiled. Let him treat the mountains, lakes, rivers, and streams of North Wales as a damsel in distress. Let him play Theseus to her Andromeda. The great, ugly, lazy, poisonous dragon of vulgarity, squalor, folly, and futility, hung round with scales of tin cans, glass bottles and bits of greasy newspaper, spitting forth his foul and noxious pollu- tions, is already worming his way to devour Andromeda. Cut him down, drive him back, put up barriers against his insidious