Description cannot suggest the full magnificence of the prospect which spread before us, on our arrival at the grand Fall of the Mynach; for though it may paint the grandeur of the elegance of outline, yet it cannot equal the archetypes of Nature, or draw the minute features, that reward the actual observer at every new choice of his position: reviewing this thundering cataract, in the leisure of recollection, these nervous lines of Thomson seem to describe much of the scene: “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 tortured 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 are finely clothed with the richest vegetation to the loftiest summit. Near the basin 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 Hat, 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.”