Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/177

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the lands of Rhuddlan were wasted, the Marquess Robert was busy far away at the siege of Rochester. This would make us think that, like Earl Roger, he changed sides early, and that he was now in the royal camp, helping to besiege Odo and his accomplices. After the surrender of Rochester, the news of the grievous blow which had been dealt to himself and his lands brought Robert back to North Wales, wrathful and full of threats. The enemy must by this time have withdrawn from the neighbourhood of Rhuddlan; for we now hear of the Marquess in the north-western corner of the land which he had brought under his rule. He was now in the peninsula which ends to the north in that vast headland which, like the other headland which ends the peninsula of Gower to the west, bears the name of the Orm's Head. The mountain itself, thick set with remains which were most likely ancient when Suetonius passed by to Mona, forms a strong contrast to the flat ground at its foot which stretches southward towards the tidal mouth of the Conwy. But that flat ground is broken by several isolated hills, once doubtless, like the Head itself, islands. Of these the two most conspicuous, two peaks of no great height but of marked steepness and ruggedness, rise close together, one almost immediately above the Conwy shore, the other landwards behind it. They are in fact two peaks of a single hill, with a dip between the two, as on the Capitoline hill of Rome.