The poor little whitewashed church of Capel Curig—the original Chapel of St. Curig that gives the place its name—stands quite near the big hotel. It was dedicated to Curig and to Julitta, his mother. The missionary zeal that impelled them to come here, a thousand years or so ago, must have been at fever heat, for this was then a place of unutterable loneliness: not as now with a fine road running by, but a trackless country, deeply shadowed by the almost impenetrable oak woods that covered the mountain sides and the moorlands, now almost entirely innocent of trees of any sort. A mild specimen of what even eighteenth century roads were like will give some notion of the difficulties of approach that remained until 1820. This “awful example” is the four-mile length of deserted road between Capel Curig and Llyn Ogwen. It was once the only way, and the modern Holyhead Road between these two points is wholly of Telford’s making. The beginning of this track—for it was little better—may be sought between the Post Office and the whitewashed cottage that was once the “Tap” of the hotel down yonder. Passing immediately over a rugged bridge spanning a waterfall on the Llugwy, it mounts across the rising moorland, and climbs a boulder-strewn ridge; to descend to the shores of Ogwen under the beetling crags of Trifaen mountain. There is sufficient evidence that it is little less than the bed of a mountain torrent in winter-time, and even to pedestrians the exploration of it is difficult. XLVI Telford’s road takes an infinitely better course, although, to be sure, the four miles onward to Lake Ogwen are on a steady and uninterrupted rise, almost impossible to face with a steady head-wind, and wholly so when storms scour through the pass. Here is the summit-level of the road, 957 feet above the sea, with mountains 3,000 feet higher surrounding the lonely moorland. Infrequent farmsteads of the smallest and most cabin-like kind are scattered about the almost barren space, among the bogs and the tremendous boulders that have at some time or other come hurtling down from the mountain-sides, where there remain many more of the same sort, ready to descend. Peat-stacks to every farm tell of what fuel they use here, just as the great stones placed on the roofs of stacks and cabins alike hint of the fury of the winds. Llyn Ogwen comes at the end of this moor, where the mountains close in and narrow the passage. It borders the road for a mile; a shuddery lake of ice-cold water, sombre and austere as Trifaen the three-headed himself, or Braich Du and Carnedd Dafydd on the opposite shores; all of them mountains of the most craggy and stupendous sort.