From the road high above the Fairy Glen there is a fine prospect of the mountains. Moel Siabod seems to have come nearer, and the far distance is closed in by the Glyders, Tryfan, and the Carnedd Llewelyn range. Down in the valley is the Llyn-yr-Afanc, or the Beaver's Pool, and nearer to Bettws-y-Coed the river is crossed by the fine span of the iron bridge which was built in the year of the battle of Waterloo. The /Conway/ has no particular attractiveness as it passes Bettws, where David Cox's famous signboard may still be seen at the Royal Oak Hotel. It has here a green margin of meadow-land, which grows broader as we proceed towards Llanrwst, a sweetly-placed little market town, to which small vessels seem to have made their way in the last century, for a sailor who penned a diary in 1769 wrote how "Llanrwst is situated in a very deep bottom on the river Conway, betwixt Denbigh hills and Carnarvon rocks, some of which appear to hang over the town. Nevertheless, we found a much better anchorage than we could have expected at such a bottom." [Illustration: FAIRY GLEN, BETTWS-Y-COED.] This sailor was an observing man, for he continues:--"Llanrwst is a small market-town, containing one church, a market-hall, as they call it, and about fifty or sixty houses, but never a good house among the whole lot." There are some good houses nowadays, however, and a fine stone bridge of three arches, with a peculiarly high and graceful spring. Here, again, the design is attributed to Inigo Jones, as, perhaps, ought to be the case in the immediate country of that renowned architect. Gwydir Castle, the family mansion of the Wynns, is a conspicuous object among the woods which here cluster under the feet of the craggy Carnarvonshire hills. It has now passed, through the hands of the Earl of Ancaster, whose forbears married with the Wynn family, into the possession of the Earl Carrington. The founder of the castle was Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, who represented Carnarvonshire in Parliament in 1596, and whose soul is said to be imprisoned under the Swallow Falls, "there to be punished, purged, spouted upon, and purified from the foul deeds done in his days of nature." A truly tremendous malediction! Some traces of the sixteenth-century building still remain, but the present castle belongs to our own century, though it contains carved work of the reigns of Elizabeth and James.