It is at first a tame road, by comparison with the scenes left behind, and it is not until the “Druid’s Head” inn—or what once was that hostelry—is passed that its character grows wild. The old toll-house of Macs Mawr and the “Cymro Goat Inn” mark the change in pleasant fashion by a bridge at the confluence of the Alwen and the Geirw. Their _curu_ at the “Goat” (whether it be a Billy or a Nanny is no matter) is better than their English, and the traveller is little likely to make himself understood, unless he be as clever a Saxon as Borrow himself, who lost no opportunity of showing the astounded Welshmen that he understood their language. Imagination pictures what he would have done, after several highly critical pulls at his tankard. “Maes Mawr,” he would have asked, “that means ‘great meadow’; that is it, I suppose, across the road?” pointing to a pasture under the lee of the hills; and, when he had been answered in the affirmative, telling his astonished host the history of it, carefully “got-up” before-hand. Here you meet few people besides farm-hands and drovers. Of drovers plenty, urging their small Welsh sheep and their bony cattle to market. If you be at all curious you remark, perhaps, that the sheep are small. “Yess,” says the drover, “they wass ferry small sheeps whateffer. They wass take them from the mountains to makee the other sheeps petter. They will be”—here they break away suddenly, and the drover hurries after them with an opening “Tam!” swallowed up in a torrent of Welsh expletives. XL From Maerdy Post-office, half a mile onwards, commences a steady rise of nearly two miles, the uplands on the right presently culminating in the crags of Cader Dinmael, and the valley of the Geirw on the left gradually deepening and contracting into a profound and narrow gorge; the road running round cornices of rock, fenced by breast-high masonry on the one side, and overhung by rocky cliffs on the other. With boring-tools, pickaxe, and blasting-powder, Telford forced a way for his road round this shoulder of the mountain and converted what had been a narrow and dangerous track into a smooth highway, thirty-six feet in width. This is the spot rightly called in the old road-books “the romantic Pass of Glyndyffws,” and the bridge that seems to hazardously leap the gorge where the Geirw plunges and foams is identical with the “Pont-y-Glyn-Bin”—the Bridge of the Glen of Trouble—named by Borrow. Very justly he speaks of this as “one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes imaginable,” and of the bridge as “a kind of Devil’s Bridge, diabolically fantastical, flung over the deep glen and the foaming water.”