The river-scenery changes below Llangollen, and gives us first a glimpse of
a wooded, narrow valley, then of the unsightly accessories of the great
North Wales coalfield, after which it enters upon a typically English
phase--low undulating hills and moist, rich meadows divided by luxuriant
hedges and dotted with single spreading trees. The hedgerow timber of
Cheshire is beautiful, and to a great extent makes up for the want of
tracts of wooded land. This country is not, like the Midland counties and
the great Fen district, violently or exclusively agricultural, and these
hedges and trees, which are gratefully kept up for the sake of the shade
they afford to the cattle, show a very different temper among the farmers
from that utilitarianism which marks the men of Leicester shire, Lincoln,
Nottingham, Norfolk, or Rutland. There even great land-owners are often
obliged to humor their tenants, and keep the unwelcome hedges trimmed so as
not to interpose two feet of shade between them and the wheat-crop; and as
often as possible hedges are replaced by ugly stone walls or wooden fences.
It is only in their own grounds that landlords can afford to court
picturesqueness, and in this part of the country the American who is said
to have objected to hedges because they were unfit for seats whence to
admire the landscape, might safely sit down anywhere; only, as matters are
seldom perfectly arranged, there is very little to admire but a flat
expanse of wheat, barley and grass. This part of Cheshire has hardly more
diversity in its river-scenery, but the mere presence of trees and green
arbors makes it a pleasant picture, while here and there, as at Overton
(this is Welsh, however, and belongs to Flintshire), a church-tower comes
in to complete the scene. Here the Dee winds about a good deal, and
receives its beautiful, dashing tributary, the Alyn, which runs through the
Vale of Gresford and waters the park of Trevallyn Old Hall, one of the
loveliest of old English homes. Its pointed gables and great clustering
stacks of chimneys, its mullioned and diamond-paned windows, its