England, Picturesque and Descriptive: A Reminiscence of Foreign TravelCook, Joel
History
England, Picturesque and Descriptive: A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel
Cook, Joel
England -- Description and travel
Let us now journey westward from the Dee into Wales, coming first into
Flintshire. The town of Flint, it is conjectured, was originally a Roman
camp, from the design and the antiquities found there. Edward I., six
hundred years ago, built Flint Castle upon an isolated rock in a marsh
near the river, and after a checquered history it was dismantled in the
seventeenth century. From the railway between Chester and Holyhead the
ruins of this castle are visible on its low freestone rock; it is a
square, with round towers at three of the corners, and a massive keep at
the other, formed like a double tower and detached from the main castle.
This was the "dolorous castle" into which Richard II. was inveigled at
the beginning of his imprisonment, which ended with abdication, and
finally his death at Pomfret. The story is told that Richard had a fine
greyhound at Flint Castle that often caressed him, but when the Duke of
Lancaster came there the greyhound suddenly left Richard and caressed
the duke, who, not knowing the dog, asked Richard what it meant.
"Cousin," replied the king, "it means a great deal for you and very
little for me. I understand by it that this greyhound pays his court to
you as King of England, which you will surely be, and I shall be
deposed, for the natural instinct of the dog shows it to him; keep him,
therefore, by your side." Lancaster treasured this, and paid attention
to the dog, which would nevermore follow Richard, but kept by the side
of the Duke of Lancaster, "as was witnessed," says the chronicler
Froissart, "by thirty thousand men."
Rhuddlan Castle, also in Flintshire, is a red sandstone ruin of striking
appearance, standing on the Clwyd River. When it was founded no one
knows accurately, but it was rebuilt seven hundred years ago, and was
dismantled, like many other Welsh castles, in 1646. It was at Rhuddlan
that Edward I. promised the Welsh "a native prince who never spoke a
word of English, and whose life and conversation no man could impugn;"
and this promise he fulfilled to the letter by naming as the first
English Prince of Wales his infant son, then just born at Caernarvon
Castle. Six massive towers flank the walls of this famous castle, and
are in tolerably fair preservation. Not far to the southward is the
eminence known by the Welsh as "Yr-Wyddgrug," or "a lofty hill," and
which the English call Mold. On this hill was a castle of which little
remains now but tracings of the ditches, larches and other trees
peacefully growing on the site of the ancient stronghold. Off toward
Wrexham are the ruins of another castle, known as Caergwrle, or "the
camp of the giant legion." This was of Welsh origin, and commanded the
entrance to the Vale of Alen; the English called it Hope Castle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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