Leaving Pont y Glyn and its “tremendous roar” behind, “the prospect,” according to a century-old wayfarer in these wilds, “becomes as uninteresting as Bagshot Heath.” But scarcely so. That Heath has no mountains enlivening the distance, nor a clear and beautiful stream trickling in little sharps and trebles through a solitary valley, such as this. Indeed, the hamlet of Tynant passed, where a shop, an inn, a chapel, and some scattered farmsteads in the cwms or on the hillsides comprise the whole, the rest of the way to Cerrig-y-Druidion is singularly beautiful in the open and unfenced sort. The name of Tynant alone, which means the “House by the Stream,” points to a solitude once greater than now, when the inn was the only house here. It was to this quiet spot, by the sparkling trout stream, that Dick Vickers, who once drove the Holyhead Mail between here and Shrewsbury, retired, as Colonel Birch-Reynardson relates. He had been in early days a postboy, and had then performed the feat of driving “His Honour,” of Pradoe, from that place to London faster than the fastest. “His Honour” was posting up to town in a light barouche, and reached the “Lion” yard at Shrewsbury just as the “Wonder” was starting. “Dick,” said the squire, “I wonder whether I could beat the ‘Wonder’ into town; I should like to do it if I can.” And, in short, it was done, that celebrated coach coming in a bad second. But steady and careful as old Time was little Dick when on the bench. “Little Dick” they called him because “he had to get on sixpennyworth of halfpence to look on the top of a Stilton cheese,” and those cheeses are of no great stature. In an evil hour he gave up the ribbons and set up as a farmer at Tynant, where, when his day’s work was done, he had been used to fish the little stream. But farming was a very different matter from driving four horses, and he lost his money in it, and so one ill day they found him hanging from a beam in one of his barns. Flat for four miles to Cerrig-y-Druidion, with spreading moors ahead, the village itself stands prominent on a knoll, with an old road going to its bleak and hard-featured street, and the Holyhead Road just skirting its fringe. Cerrig-y-Druidion means “the rock of the Druids.” [Illustration: CERRIG-Y-DRUIDION.]