Worcester is one of the most aristocratic looking towns in England, and presents every token of being a wealthy and flourishing place. Its cathedral, an edifice of the beginning of the thirteenth century, has drawn hither many a pilgrim foot even from foreign countries. Our present business, however, is with the works of nature, or with those of art fallen into decay, and their fragments standing amidst the eternal youth of the hills and rivers, like monuments of the insignificance of man.
Worcester is famous for its manufactures of porcelain and gloves; but our attention was more strongly attracted to exports of another kind, of which it appeared to be at least the entrepôt, if it was not the original market. At a little distance from the town, several waggons had halted near a public house, and their freight, a numerous party of peasant girls, were breakfasting by the road side. They were eating and drinking as joyously as if their laps had been filled with far more enticing food than bread and ale. They were on their way to some greater mart—perhaps to the all-devouring metropolis; and when breakfast was over, they resumed their slow journey, some few who had mounted the waggons singing in parts, and the rest, walking by the side, joining in the chorus. They had no fears, poor girls, of the result of their adventure—or rather, no forethought.
But it is not till after we pass the little town of Kington, on the eastern borders of Herefordshire, that the picturesque commences, and we must hasten on to our more immediate task. Between Kington and New Radnor, are the Stanner Rocks, with the Devil’s Garden on their summit, luxuriously planted—of course by no human hand—with wild flowers. Beyond New Radnor (formerly the county town, but now a paltry village,) opens the Vale of Radnor on one side, and on the other, a rude mountain scene, distinguished by a waterfall of some celebrity, called Water-break-its-neck. The stream rushes down a precipitous descent of seventy feet, into a hollow with craggy and unequal sides. The spot of the cascade is marked by an insulated rock, eighteen or twenty feet high, standing erect above it like a monument.
After passing the village of Penybont, the Llanbadarn Vawr, or great church of Badarn, is to the left of the road, an edifice which dates from the time of the Conqueror; and nothing else of interest is observable till we reach Rhaiadyr, on the Banks of the Wye. As it will be more convenient, however, to examine the river in descending with the stream, we shall only say here, that the journey from Rhaiadyr to the summit of Plinlimmon lies through woods, and hill passes, becoming ruder and wilder at every step we advance. The character of the population seems to change in conformity with their physical circumstances. The want of tidiness which marks the British mountaineer is the more conspicuous from the contrast it presents to the opposite quality we have admired in the plains; and already the women have assumed the round hat of the ruder sex, and destroyed with its masculine associations the charms peculiar to their own. Against this absurdity we must protest, whether we meet with it in the Welsh girl, or the fair equestrian of Hyde Park. It betrays not only the most pitiful taste, but the most profound ignorance of nature, on which is founded the theory of female beauty.