A long bridge of several arches stretches over from the high road which crosses the marsh, to a steep, firm ascent, a little church with a square tower, and a few small cottages. Other cottages, mostly set amid neat gardens, border on the curves of what is more like a country lane than a village. Then suddenly, for it has been hidden by trees, one comes face to face with the colossal fragments of what must have been a nearly impregnable castle, poised on the summit of a bare, rounded hill, its huge towers buried in ivy, its outer walls sloping down to the Clwyd, and to an outer tower which has long been half in ruins, but which is so strongly built that it may still, for centuries to come, defy the malice of Time. On the partially reclaimed morass on the further side of the river, where a herd of black Welsh cows is grazing, the Saxons under Offa, King of Mercia, fought a great battle with the Welsh, under Caradoc, Prince of Wales, in 795. Caradoc and many of his principal chieftains were slain. The well-known air of "Morva Rhuddlan" commemorates the event, and the native poet sings, not without sweetness and pathos: "I seek the warrior's lowly bed On Rhuddlan's marsh; but cannot trace A vestige of the noble dead, Or aught to mark their resting place. Green rush and reeds are all that grace The graves of those in fight who fell, For freedom--for their land and race, Oh fatal field! farewell, farewell!" Where Rhuddlan Castle stands there was a fortress so early as 1015, and it was taken by Harold Godwinson, in Edward the Confessor's time. Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, rested at Rhuddlan in 1167, when he was preaching a Crusade. Edward I. took Rhuddlan Castle in 1277, and here it was that his son, recently born at Carnarvon, was proclaimed Prince of Wales. Edward made the place his grand depôt for arms and provisions, and his principal residence whilst he was engaged in the conquest of Wales. It was to Rhuddlan, too, that Llewelyn consented to repair to take the oath of fealty. The castle passed into the hands of the Black Prince in the reign of Edward III. Richard II. was here held in honourable captivity after his return from his expedition to Ireland. The forces of the Parliament unsuccessfully besieged the place in 1645, but captured it a year later, when it was ordered to be dismantled, and the long, troubled chapter of its history was finally closed.