The Welsh bards who twanged their harps in Owain’s halls, and ate his food and swilled his sack and metheglin, did him an ill service when they sang of the deeds he was to do and the glory that was to be his. His halls are gone, and only traditions and the researches of the antiquary preserve his story. His Mount stands still by the roadside, and vague stories of how he stood here and watched for the approach of his enemies are told; but one may have a shrewd suspicion that it is only your literary Welshman who nowadays knows or cares much about him.
More in accord with modern Wales is Llansaintffraid, across the Dee, with its trim lodging-houses and villas, and little railway-station which the railway authorities, alarmed at the name of Llansaintffraid, have christened by the simpler title of “Carrog.” More villas, more lodging-houses, and many tourists mark the approach to Corwen, a village or townlet that does not favourably impress the stranger fresh from Llangollen. No one could with truth say that the houses of Llangollen are beautiful, but the scenery there makes full atonement: at Corwen the scene is tame, the hills recede, and the Dee flows through a wide valley. Just here, where the town should be especially attractive, it is mean at the best, and at its worst downright ugly. Moreover, the railway company has deliberately chosen to place its coal-sidings and engine-sheds alongside the road and abutting upon the old Dee bridge.
Opinions upon Corwen are singularly unanimous through the course of over a hundred years. In 1797 Wigstead must have found it at its worst. The houses were then, he says, of clay and loam, and “most miserable hovels: the people, cows, asses, hogs, and poultry all live in one apartment, and all turn out at the same time in the morning.” The following year, another tourist finds Corwen a “disagreeable little town”; and in modern times the kindliest of itinerists has nothing better to say of the place than that “the tourist will not find much to detain him” in it.
The little that does suffice to detain him centres in the old church whence the name of the town derives, Cor Wen meaning White Choir. No longer white, but on the contrary, greyish-black and unlovely, the church stands behind the houses of the long street, and immediately under a huge pile of cliff-like rocks called Pen-y-Pigyn, crowned by a flagstaff, whence Owain Glyndwr is said to have cast his dagger, in some unexplained fit of anger. It is a legend stupidly invented to account for the rudely incised figure of a cross, resembling a short sword, seen in the granite slab now built as a lintel into the south porch. A battered old churchyard cross stands near the west door, and several old slate tombstones with two semicircular hollows, are to be seen, cut in this manner to receive the knees of those who came to pray by the graveside of their dead. On the southern side of this churchyard, more melancholy than most, a row of almshouses, called “Corwen College,” may be noticed; built in 1750 for six widows of Merionethshire clergymen, who may thus meditate among the tombs from morn to eve on the evil fate that left them widows before their husbands had attained to fat prebends, decanal dignities, or the culminating honours and riches of an episcopal throne.