THE WELSH DEE 



when striving to be accurate and punctilious, was 

 Owen de Glendourdy. Usually they anathematised 

 him in their military dispatches and suchlike simply 

 as ' GHndor.' The Welsh frequently omit the particle 

 in this connection, though much addicted to place- 

 names, even to that of humble cottages, owing, of 

 course, to the tautology of their patronymics. Our 

 English Smith may emblazon his four-roomed villa 

 in a terrace as Chatsworth or Hurstmonceaux, instead 

 of more sensibly giving it a number. But no one 

 save the postman pays any attention to such aspira- 

 tions. Certainly the town does not speak or think of 

 him as * Smith of Hurstmonceaux.' But in Wales 

 it is different. Mrs. Jones, who has labelled her 

 modest jerry-built cot Byrn-Hafod, is known to the 

 full extent she is known at all and spoken of invari- 

 ably as Mrs. Jones Bryn-Hafod, which has a fine 

 aristocratic ring, though nothing of that sort is 

 intended. 



Now, a little way below Carrog, a cone-shaped 

 tumulus rises high above the river bank crowned with 

 half a dozen ancient ruddy-stemmed Scotch firs. It 

 looks right down the Dee, and is so cunningly placed 

 that, in spite of many intervening bends of the valley 

 and of folding hills, it commands full view of the high- 

 perched ruins of Dinas Bran seven miles away. It is 

 doubtless prehistoric, and its signalling advantages 

 as against enemies coming up the Dee, were probably 

 appreciated by its prehistoric raisers. They must 

 have been invaluable, however, in the later Anglo- 

 Welsh wars. It may or may not have been for this 

 that Glyndwr's mansion was planted at its foot, 



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