But now for more intimate grips with Llangollen, that “dirty, ill-built, and disagreeable town,” as the Reverend Mr. Bingley described it in 1798. Many at that time told the same unflattering tale, and though it be out of date to-day, Llangollen as a town cannot, with the exception of the bridge across the Dee, be said to contain anything in the least beautiful or interesting. Only the lovely vale and the encircling mountainous hills render Llangollen endurable. One forgets the mean houses in the beauty of the scenery. Dividing the place in half, the Dee flows noisily over a bed of rocky slabs and under that old bridge once regarded as one of the wonders of Wales. Engineering wonders are so plentiful nowadays that the mind, supersaturated with them, and the eye, accustomed to works on a gigantic scale, refuse to marvel at anything more. Only one wonder is left to the modern visitor to Llangollen—the wonder that Llangollen Bridge should ever have been considered a wonder. One has mentally to project oneself into the period when the bridge was built, over five hundred and fifty years ago, to understand why it was so considered. It was built when times were always disturbed, and when nothing in the nature of a town or a hard road existed here; and certainly they wrought well who built, for though the Dee has come down in floods innumerable, it still stands. It was doubled in width in 1873, and modern times have witnessed the coming of the railway up the vale along the course of the Dee, causing it to be lengthened by another opening. Four old pointed stone arches and a stone and girder span now make the total sum. Let the number here be specified, for the many travellers who have written on Llangollen exhibit a curious inability to give them correctly. Turner, whose view of Llangollen may be referred to, gives six, and in addition, places a viaduct on a hillside possibly intended for Castle Dinas Bran, in a place where no viaduct or aqueduct ever was or could be. Those are, however, the merest trifles compared with his dealings with the Dee, represented as flowing in the opposite direction it takes in Nature, and upwards towards its source. [Illustration: LLANGOLLEN. _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._] XXXIV