7 
with its fragments of rock, amid which the scanty thread of water made its way, 
and the noble glen of the Edw, with its huge masses overhanging the steep sides 
of the ravine, as if threatening every moment to join the equally large rocks 
below, around which the stream usually raves and foams, would have been 
perfectly beautiful had there been a little more water to give animation to the 
scene. Up as far as Builth there was no lack of water in the Wye, but above 
that town, as well as in the tributary streams of which we have written, there was 
too strong a resemblance to the Highland river described by Bailie Nicol Jarvie, 
in which “the chuckies were white in the sunshine.” At the Llanelwedd rapids, 
the curiously contorted and worn lava masses which cross the bed of the river 
stood out bare and dry, so that the stream might have been crossed by a careful 
pedestrian without wetting his feet; and Roger Vaughan’s hole, noted for its 
supposed unfathomable depth, had very little of its usual depth of ten feet of water. 
The botanists of the party were indeed able to gather without inconvenience 
specimens of the characteristic plant of these rocks, the purple-flowered chives 
(Allium schenoprasum), which had lost none of its pungent onion-like odour from 
the drought. The view of the valley from the lawn of Welfield House, on the 
hill above the rapids, where the members held their meeting about 3 p.m. under 
the shade of the magnificent pines, limes, and cedars, was wonderfully beautiful. 
The rich valley, the pretty town, and the winding Wye, were set in a glorious 
amphitheatre of lofty hills almost worthy to be called mountains. From the 
towering Drygarn on the west, the eye passed along the lofty range of the Epynt, 
thence across the elevated valley to the distant hills of Talgarth, until the magnifi- 
cent group near at hand, composed of the Garth, the Aberedw Hills, and the 
stern and solemn-looking Carneddau shut out the scene in the east. 
The view thus charming to the eye of the mere lover of natural beauty was 
still more interesting to the gaze of the geologist. Standing on the floor of an 
ancient ocean, he saw in the Carneddau the “ root ” (as the Rev. W. J. Symonds 
graphically called it) of an extinct volcano ; he traced the course of the lava cur- 
rents that once poured streams of fire across the land; and he noticed how 
successive ages of life had left their traces in the beds which lie under, over, or 
against the lava, in almost every possible condition, here roasted with the heat of 
the lava—there full of fossils which have lain undisturbed since the rock was the 
mud of the ocean bed into which the trilobite sank when its life work was over. 
Raising his eyes, the spectator beheld in the varied forms of the hills the traces of 
the action of mighty waters; and by the help of Mr. Symonds’s eloquent 
explanations, he might form a dim conception of the latter but still remote scene 
when the Wye flowed along a course not much lower than the top of Carneddau, 
and when the bay-like curves of the hillsides were actual bays of the mighty river. 
Thence downward how vast must have been the period of subaerial action, of 
elevations and depressions of surface, of denudation and sinking, until we reach 
the historic period. Judging from the fact that the little fort of Breinton, near 
Hereford, commands the British road which yet runs at its side and the ford at its 
foot, while in the same way the ford near Llanelwedd, which was used in Roman 
times, is still available, it is evident that the bed’of the Wye has not been lowered 
