“Smooth to the shelving brink a copious flood Rolls fair and placid, where collected all In one impetuous torrent, down the steep It thundering shoots, and shakes the country round. At first an azure sheet, it rushes broad; Then whitening by degrees, as prone it falls, And from the loud-resounding rocks below Dash’d in a cloud of foam, it sends aloft A hoary mist, and forms a ceaseless shower. Nor can the tortur’d wave here find repose: But raging still amid the shaggy rocks, Now flashes o’er the scatter’d fragments, now Aslant the hollow channel rapid darts; And falling fast from gradual slope to slope, With wild infracted course, and lessen’d roar, It gains a safer bed, and steals, at last, Along the mazes of the quiet vale.” The following Table, taken from Walker’s _Description of the Devil’s Bridge_, gives the exact height from the top of the bridge, to the water underneath, and the different falls from thence, till the Mynach delivers itself into the Rhyddol below: FALLS, &c. Feet. From the Bridge to the Water 114 First Fall 18 Second ditto 60 Third ditto 20 Grand Cataract 110 From the Bridge to the Rhyddol 322 The rocks on each side of the fall rise perpendicularly to the height of eight hundred feet, and finely clothed with the richest vegetation, to its highest summit. Near the bason of the first fall from the bridge we entered a dark cavern, formerly inhabited by a set of robbers, two brothers and a sister, called _Plant Mat_, or _Plant Fat_, signifying Matthew’s Children. Tradition reports, that they committed various depredations in the neighbourhood, and lived concealed in this “_specus horrendum_” for many years, from the keen research of “day’s garish eye.” The entrance just admits sufficient light to make “darkness visible.” With regret we left this romantic spot; where, if Retirement ever had “local habitation,” this was her “place of dearest residence.” “One excursion (says Mr. Cumberland) to this place will not suffice common observers; nor indeed many, to the lovers of the grand sports of Nature.” The Mynach (in another place he describes) coming down from beneath the Devil’s Bridge, has no equal for height or beauty that I know of; for although a streamlet, to the famous fall of Narni in Italy, yet it rivals it in height, and surpasses it in elegance.