The small village of Glasbury presents a view well worth notice. This is particularly the case at Maeslough Hall, where Gilpin characterises the scenery as “wonderfully amusing,” declaring that the situation is one of the finest in Wales. On passing the seventh milestone, the valley spreads out into a wide plain bounded by an amphitheatre of hills; and as we proceed, numerous villas peeping through the trees, show that we have now left entirely behind us the peculiarities of Welsh scenery, and are again on the borders of merry England. As we approach the Hay, the aristocratical buildings become more numerous, and the romance of the scene diminishes, till at length we enter a small, but neat and comfortable-looking town.
The Hay has some historical associations of the doings of Llewellin and King John, by the latter of whom its castle was destroyed in 1216; but with the exception of a Gothic gateway there are no remains to interest the antiquarian. There are said, indeed, to be the fragments of some Roman fortifications; but we are something like Sir Walter Scott in this respect, who had seen so many ghosts, that at last he found it difficult to believe in them. Tradition relates that the castle was built in one night by the celebrated Maud de Saint Wallery, alias Maud de Hain, alias Moll Walbee. “She built (say the gossips),” as we find in Jones’s Brecknock, “the castle of Hay in one night: the stones for which she carried in her apron. While she was thus employed, a small pebble, of about nine feet long, and one foot thick, dropped into her shoe. This she did not at first regard; but in a short time, finding it troublesome, she indignantly threw it over the river Wye into Llowes churchyard in Radnorshire (about three miles off), where it remains to this day, precisely in the position it fell, a stubborn memorial of the historical fact, to the utter confusion of all sceptics and unbelievers.”
Between Builth and the Hay ends one series of the beauties of the Wye. The stream hitherto is a mountain rivulet, sometimes almost a torrent, and its characteristics are wildness and simplicity. Its course is impeded by rocks, amidst which it runs brawling and foaming; and, generally speaking, it depends upon itself, and upon the nature of its own bed for the picturesque, the hills around forming only the back ground. We shall see, as we get on, the manner in which this will change, till the banks become the objects of admiration, and the stream itself, although much increased in volume, is considered a mere adjunct, and its bosom a convenient site from which to view them.