Now comes the village of Caer Ceiliog, with windmills and toll-house overlooking the descent from Anglesey into Holy Island. When the gate was first erected the Road Commissioners experienced some little trouble at the hands of a certain Reverend Mr. Griffiths, who had objections against paying tolls. It seems that when the parish had made all the necessary legal arrangements with the Commissioners for the new road constructed just here, the authority required for stopping up the old one was forgotten and not applied for; so when the old way was abandoned and fenced in, compelling travellers to pass through the gate and pay toll, the Reverend Mr. Griffiths, learned in the law, pulled down the obstructions and passed down the old road, toll free. Naturally, the neighbours all followed his example, and the horrified lessee of the tolls, who had bought them at auction for the year, saw his income going. The trouble had to be remedied by a special Act. [Illustration: CAER CEILIOG.] From Caer Ceiliog the crest of Holyhead Mountain, ten miles distant, is seen; a dark-blue mass suspended, to all appearance, in mid-air, like some fabled scene of _Arabian Nights_ adventures. It is the original Holy Head; in Welsh “Pen Caer Cybi,” or the Head of Cybi’s town—Cybi himself a Welsh saint who somewhere about the year 500 founded a college where Holyhead town now stands. That rugged mountain rises from the sea to a height of 719 feet, and is rarely free from the dense sea-fogs that make the neighbourhood of Holyhead so dangerous to mariners. The billowy vapours, often leaving the upper part of the mountain clear, create this startlingly complete illusion of a suspended island, and dispose the stranger to come into Holyhead expectant of marvels. Coming, thus expectant, down from Caer Ceiliog, the old road is crossed at Valley, a modern village with a railway station. A quarter of a mile beyond, road and rail go side by side across the Stanley Sands, dividing Anglesey and Holy Island: the road on Telford’s great mile-long embankment and the rail on the left, hid from sight by a dull masonry wall some sixteen or twenty feet high. The scene is still as melancholy as it was when Borrow tramped past, with the broad channel a waste of sand at low tide, and a furious salt-water stream at the flood, rushing with great force through the arches in the middle of the embankment. The winds that boom and buzz across the flat shores and rank grasses, and the waves lapping about the seaweed and rotting timbers of ancient wrecks, give the place a sinister and mournful air. At the Holy Island end of the embankment stands the last toll-house, and thenceforward the town of Holyhead begins. LVI