xvii] RESIDENCE AT NEATH 249 



and backed by mountains from fifteen hundred to eighteen 

 hundred feet high. The view up this valley is delightful, 

 its sides being varied with a few houses peeping out from the 

 woods, abundance of lateral valleys and ravines, with here 

 and there the glint of falling water, while its generally straight 

 direction affords fine perspective effects, sometimes fading in 

 the distance into a warm yellow haze, at others affording a 

 view of the distant mountain ranges beyond. 



At twelve miles from the town we come to the little 

 village of Pont-nedd-fychan (the bridge of the little Neath 

 river), where we enter upon a quite distinct type of scenery, 

 dependent on our passing out of the South Wales coal basin, 

 crossing the hard rock-belt of the millstone grit, succeeded by 

 the picturesque crags of the mountain limestone, and then 

 entering on the extensive formation of the Old Red Sand- 

 stone. The river here divides first into two, and a little 

 further on into four branches, each in a deep ravine with 

 wooded slopes or precipices, above which is an undulating 

 hilly and rocky country backed by the range of the great 

 forest of Brecon, with its series of isolated summits or vans, 

 more than two thousand feet high, and culminating in the re- 

 markable twin summits of the Brecknock Beacons, which reach 

 over twenty-nine hundred feet. Within a four-mile walk of 

 Pont-nedd-fychan there are six or eight picturesque waterfalls 

 or cascades, one of the most interesting, named Ysgwd Gladys, 

 being a miniature of Niagara, inasmuch as it falls over an 

 overhanging rock, so that it is easy to walk across behind it. 

 A photograph of this fall is given here. Another, Ysgwd 

 Einon Gam, is much higher, while five miles to the west, near 

 Capel Coelbren, is one of the finest waterfalls in Wales, being 

 surpassed only, so far as I know, by the celebrated falls 

 above Llanrhaiadr in the Berwyn Mountains. From the 

 open moor it drops suddenly about ninety feet into a deep 

 ravine, with vertical precipices wooded at the top all round. 

 In summer the stream is small, but after heavy rains it must 

 be a very fine sight, as it falls unbroken into a deep pool 

 below, and then flows away down a thickly wooded glen to 

 the river Tawe. 



