THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 


By 


THOMAS BURKE 




























England, with all thy faults . , 




N K W Y O R K ; 1934 
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 



ALL/RIGHTS RESERVED 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
OF AMERICA , 

FIRST PUBLISHED, MARCH, '1934 



CONTENTS 

1HAPTER PAGE 

I. THE ENGLISH SCENE n 

The English Landscape America on England The Call of 
the Land The English Village Seeing England. 

II. THE SWEET SOUTH 36 

Towards the Sea and the Hills From Guildford to Win- 
chester Marwcll Hall and The Mistletoe Bough The New 
Forest Cranborne Chase and the Vale of Chalk Abbey 
Villages of Dorset Blandford's Link with Cockaigne The 
Treachery of Elfrida Across Poole Harbour The Home 
of the Turbcrviiles The Making of Wcymouth In the 
Track of Charles II Coast Villages of Devon A Wood- 
land Forge The Dartmoor Country The Resurrection of 
an Abbey Herrick in Exile Totnes and the Legend of 
Brutus the Trojan The English Inn The Coast of Corn- 
wall Falmouth The Foot of England St Ivcs Haunted 
Villages Tintagcl and the Story of Arthur The North 
of Devon Over the Quantock Hills Old Villages of 
Somerset The Last Battlefield of EnglandWassail at 
Twelfth Night Glastonbury and the Holy Thorn The 
Heart of Somerset On to Bath Mystery Temple of Avc- 
bury Changeless Villages of the Cots wolds The Tragedy 
of Chipping Campden A Corner of Wiltshire The Prize 
Village of England Through Berkshire Paddington. 

III. THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 131 

The Great North Road From Welwyn to the Bunyan 
Country Into Huntingdon Five Miles from Anywhere 
A Retreat of Hcreward the Wake Two Churches in One 
Churchyard The Sullen Fcnlands Treasures of King's 
Lynn Melancholy of the East Coast " Unto the Town 
of Walsingham" The City and County of Norwich The 
Maid's Head Unvisitcd Rutland Boston and a Land- 
mark of Lincoln A Link with Hawthorne The Other 
New York The Mood of an Inn Sherwood Villages 
The East Riding and the Wolds The Glory of Rievaulx 
An Eighteenth-century Vicar To Glaisdalc Moor 
Whitby Through Durham Morpcth The Family of Mit- 

5 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

ford Villages of Northumberland Hamburgh Castle The 
Fame Islands and Lindisfarnc A Heroine and a Saint 
Northumbrian Hospitality The End of the Great North 
Road. 

IV. A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 205 

The Spirit of the Midlands Nottingham Along the Trent 
The Wise Men of Gotham The Country of Adam Bedc 
The Noble Savage of Wotton Hall The Birthplace of 
Johnson Hawthorne at Lichficld Cannock Chase The 
Sign' of Shropshire BoscobcPs Royal Fugitive A Shrop- 
shire Lad Clungunford Unvisited Ludlow of Shropshire 
Church Strctton Peril on the Long Mynd Pitchford 
Hall A Hans Andersen Town Leominstcr Gardens and 
Villages of Herefordshire Orchard Country Lcdbury and 
the Middle West The Malvcrn Hills Fielding the Father 
of the Comic Film Pcrshore in Plum-time The Boun- 
daries of Worcestershire Vale of the Red Horse Hidden 
Villages of Warwickshire A Battlefield of the Civil War 
A Tragedy of Shuckburgh Hall Gunpowder Country 
A Lady of Coombc Abbey George Eliot The Centre of 
England. 

V. THE LONDON COUNTRY 264 

Temper of the Home Counties Surrey Uplands and 
Valleys of Hindhcad and Haslemerc The Fold Country 
The Barrier of the North Downs Chiddingstonc Tun- 
bridge Wells Hop-gardens and Villages of Kent A Shrine 
of Ellen Terry Spirit of the Marsh Sussex and the Poets 
The Weald The Sussex Downs Valley of the Cuck- 
mere Cinderella of the Counties Maldon Between the 
Blackwater and the Crouch Constable's Country Western 
Essex Children of Suffolk Suffolk Towns and Granges 
Famous Inns of Suffolk Lavcnham and Long Mcljford 
Bury St Edmunds The Grave of Fitzgerald Character of 
the Suffolk Village The Red Barn Murder Ware Park 
in Hertfordshire. 

VI. A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 302 

Rothbury and Ottcrburn By Hadrian's Wall The Genius 
of Battlefields Hard Towns of the North The Inns of 
Penrith A Gate Town of Lancashire An Innkeeper's 
Memorial The Devil's Bridge A Botanist of Letters 
Giggleswick and Settle Beauty of the Dales Old Customs 
of the Second Oldest Town Wcnslcydalc and Aldborough 
Two Characters of Knarcsborough The Air of the 
Moors Queen of the Dale Towns Country of Fells and 
6 



CONTENTS 

Waterfalls A Pied Piper Village Pastoral Lancashire 
Lancaster The Furncss Peninsula Anglers' Country 
The Ugliest Road in England Caliban Villages of Indus- 
trial Lancashire The Brontes, of Havvorth Yorkshire 
Humour A String of Tarns in the Pennines Perilous Hills 
of Derbyshire Yesterday at the Flash Inn Cheshire to 
come Leek Dovedale and the Manifold Valley The 
Compleat Angler Books and Inns Thomas Moore Ash- 
bourne and Some Celebrities. 

INDEX 355 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

ON THE SOUTH DEVON COAST: BLACKPOOL SANDS Frontispiece 

THE SIR JOHN BARLEYCORN, CADNAM, NEW FOREST 44 

CERNE ABBAS, DORSET 45 

THE VILLAGE AND CASTLE OF CORFE, DORSET 54 

STURMINSTER NEWTON, DORSET 55 

THE OLD MANOR-HOUSE OF WOOLBRIDGE, DORSET 58 

A DEVONSHIRE LANE 59 

THE RIVER DART, NEAR BUCKFAST 68 

COCKINGTON, NEAR TORQUAY 69 

BOLT TAIL, NEAR KINGSBRIDGE 76 

DAFFODIL FIELDS ON THE CORNISH CLIFFS 77 

LOOKING TOWARDS DARTMOOR FROM BROWN WILLY, BODMIN 

MOOR 84 

BADGEWORTHY VALLEY, AT CLOUD, SOMERSET 85 

CHEDDAR GORGE, NEAR WELLS no 

THE VILLAGE OF CASTLE COMBE, SEEN THROUGH THE MARKET 

CROSS in 

IN THE COTSWOLDS 122 

THE BRIDGE, HUNTINGDON 123 

A PEACEFUL SCENE IN THE NORFOLK FEN COUNTRY 146 

NORWICH CATHEDRAL FROM THE SOUTH-EAST 147 

SHERWOOD FOREST 174 

RIEVAULX ABBEY: THE SOUTH TRANSEPT 175 

SALTERSGATE, YORKSHIRE 184 

9 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

PACE 

DURHAM CATHEDRAL 185 

DOVEDALE 224 

LICHFIELP CATHEDRAL 225 

LUDLOW 240 

A * BLACK-AND-WHITE * HOUSE AT BRITTON BROCKIIURST 241 

THE ABBEY GATEWAY, EVESHAM 252 

SHOTTERY VILLAGE 253 

TlLLINGBOURNE 268 

CHERRY ORCHARDS AND OAST HOUSES 269 

A VIEW IN ASHDOWN FOREST 276 

A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY HOUSE 277 

IN CONSTABLE'S ESSEX 284 
THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY WOOL HALL, LAVENHAM, 

SUFFOLK 285 

RIVER SWALE, REETH, YORKSHIRE 324 

FOUNTAINS ABBEY 325 

THE LOWER FALLS: AYSGARTH, YORKSHIRE 342 

THE PEAK DISTRICT 343 



ro 



CHAPTER I 
THE ENGLISH SCENE 

EVERY country has its peculiar genius of landscape, and to the 
people of a country its landscapes remain for ever the stan- 
dard against which all others are set. For the genius of a 
landscape is the genius of the people around it. Each has 
influenced the other. In the course of their centuries of story 
the people of every country have been unconscious landscape- 
gardeners. From the chaos of vegetation and swamp in which 
their earliest forefathers lived they have, by centuries of labour 
upon the development of their land, arrived at the perfection 
of landscape upon which modern eyes so lovingly dwell. Each 
country's landscapes are that country's work. Hence that 
pride in them which, while admitting that there may be others 
better, is satisfied only with its own. 

For the English there is something in this or that corner of 
England which no majesty of other countries can give. No 
matter how widely they travel, or how critical of England 
their travels may render them, no matter how deep a layer of 
cosmopolitanism they acquire, beneath it all there lies, and in 
later years emerges, an affection for English fields and hills 
and streams which no other fields and hills and streams can 
evoke. With the English, above all races, it is an affection 
not only too deep for tears, but too deep for any words of 
theirs. Indeed, the very criticism, by half-travelled English 
travellers, of English scenes and manners, and hostile com- 
parison of them with the scenes and manners of enlightened 
Latins or Hindus, is often only a crude and shy concealment 
of their love. Most men are from time to time bored with 
their homes and their wives, but that very boredom is an 

XI 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

almost ecu tain symptom of basic affection. The people an 
things we most care about can often bore us more heavily an 
make us more critical of them than those to which we ai 
indifferent. Yet when, driven to revolt against the borcdon 
we escape from them for a space it is not long before we di; 
cover that there is nothing so satisfying as the things we flee 
There is nothing we want so much as to see them again. 

Many an Englishman, professing himself bored with En 
land, makes what he thinks is a happy escape from it; only t 
find, in later years, that the " secret sweetness in the stream,' 
the " distant clearness in the hill," arc tearing at his heart an< 
drawing him, willingly or not, back to them. This impulsiv< 
return of the wanderer, in middle age, to his first-knowi 
scenes and pastures was, and, indeed, still is, so much a con 
stant fact of life that it became a standard situation of ok 
melodramas and old novels. He settled into a type the Eng- 
lishman who has seen the Ganges and the Volga, the Danube 
and the Mississippi, and, when all their wonder is known and 
assimilated, returns to find still deeper wonder in his little 
Wiltshire Avon or the banks of his northern Tyne. 

When you hear your sour young devotee of Montparnassc 
cajts talking of the dullness of the English country and the 
English people, and the horror of English towns, and of the 
exquisite beauty of France, and the glory of Italy, the charms 
of Czechoslovakia, and the glamour of the East, keep an eye 
on that youth and listen to him when he has passed forty. 
You will then find, I think, that he has had as much of other 
countries as he wants, and that his final conclusion will be 
that which Arnold Bennett once delivered to me. " After run- 
ning away from England," he said, in his halting style, " and 
living in all sorts of countries I feel there's no place so 
comfortable and pleasant and good to look at as England." 
Bennett had learned, as they all learn, that though England 
may not be the greatest country in the world, with the finest 

12 



THE ENGLISH SCENE 

men, the loveliest women, and the fairest scenery, it is yet, 
with all its faults, so pleasant a country that the man who cannot 
be happy in England can hardly hope to be happy anywhere. 
If a wanderer lives long enough he has to come back, if 
only mentally, and acknowledge his own country. He cannot 
jdo otherwise. He is of its soil; his physical chemistry is linked 
" with its fields; and all his early culture the only culture that 
jv is truly himself is related to its story, its songs, its music, 
and its scenes. The honest middle-aged Englishman confesses 
lis to himself. He seldom confesses it to other people. It is 
Lto him so personal an affair that he would no more tell a 
foreigner that he loved his own English scenes than he would 
 Hill Newcastle- 
under-Lyne Stone Haywood Rugeley Brereton Lichfield 
Coleshill Meredin Coventry Dunchurch Da ventry 
Weedon Towcester and so by the Holyhead road to London. 
Then by the Great North Road: London Waltham Cross 
Hoddesdon Ware Puckeridge Royston Cambridge 

33 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Godmanchester Huntingdon Harrington Sawtry Stilton 
~-Wansford~-Burleigh~- Stamford Witham Grantham 
Newark Tuxford RctfordScrooby BawtryDoncaster 
Ferrybridge Pontefract Sherburn Bramham Tadcaster 
York Towlerton Topcliff Thirsk Northallerton Smc- 
ton Darlington Richmond RcdmireWenchly Aysgarth 
Worton Cambridge Askrig Hardraw Sedbcrgh Kil- 
lington Kcndal. 

Or there is the tour, made in the late eighteenth century, 
of the German Carl Philipp Moritz, described in his Travels 
in England', and Defoe's Journey ; and Arthur Young's Six 
Weeds' Tour:, and the journeys of Taylor,, the waterman- 
poet; and Sorrow's wanderings; and the Lazy Tour of 
Dickens and Wilkie Collins; and Celia Ficnncs* journeys 
(Through England on a Side Saddle (1695), published 
1888); and Cobbett's Rural Rides \ and, of course, the wander- 
ings of the Pickwickians; and history and old novels will 
afford fifty more. 

But of the tours and wanderings on which this hook is 
based, and which have carried me through a good portion of 
England's beauty, the majority were unplanned; and I think 
that is the better way. The chapters that follow make no 
attempt at the impossible task of covering the whole of Eng- 
land. The stoutest book on England can do no more than 
make a selection of its scenes. Indeed, a book on even one 
county can do no more than that, since many a royal octavo 
has been devoted to a single village, and then not exhaustively. 
No matter how widely and frequently you may travel this 
little island (not so large as the state of Illinois) there is al- 
ways something new to be discovered some by-road you 
have overlooked, leading to an unknown happy valley; some 
hamlet named by no book; some village or small town which 
even the chroniclers of its district ignore or do not know. 
This book, then, is merely an anthology of favourite scenes 

34 



THE ENGLISH SCENE 

and places; but in exercising the anthologist's privilege of 
pleasing himself I hope that I may here and there please 
you, by introducing to you some treasure of landscape or 
some Sweet Auburn outside the lines of your own wanderings. 
That I shall displease you by my omissions is so certain that 
the book itself must be taken as my apology for not writing 
some other kind of book. 



35 



CHAPTER II 
THE SWEET SOUTH 

A HAPHAZARD tour through the South and South-west, made 
from London in the early spring of 1932, remains with me as 
a complete expression of spring in England. It was a clear 
spring, and the tour, which lasted three weeks, began just 
before Easter. 

Easter is not only the Church's New Year; it is Everyman's 
New Year. January, in its bleak damp, suggests rather the 
death of an old year than the beginning of a new. We call it 
the New Year, but it is that only by courtesy of the calendar. 
The true New Year begins when the earth is yielding to the 
thrust of new life, and the softening air allows the sun to reach 
us. Then the New Year of the earth moves in our blood and 
our spirit. Our horizons widen. We open our house windows 
and we open our mental windows. Through the cold first 
quarter of the calendar year life has a raw, nagging tone, 
Easter sets it in tune. As the first open-air holiday of the year 
it has a zest that no later festival has. For many people it 
means their first sight, that year, of green fields and primroses, 
their first smell of country things, their first breath of vivid 
air. At all times these things are good, but the first meeting 
with them each year is ecstasy. It is a meeting between long- 
parted lovers. We delight in summer's profusion of blossom, 
but by summer-time we are accustomed to blossom, and lilies 
and roses do not evoke the thrill of the pale, sharp flowers of 
Easter. 

The face of England at this time suggests that the less 
fortunate of the population have been kept in school for six 
months, and have all at once been released. Every road has 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

its stream of wayfarers. Every hill its assembly of hill-wor- 
shippers. Every coast its congregation of sea- worshippers. The 
pagan instincts die hard. Civilization, cities, machinery- 
nothing can stifle the deep poetic sense which sends men at the 
opening of the year to the woods and the fields and the sea. 
They are our mother, and it is to them that we turn for refresh- 
ment and renewal. All life is making its resurrection from 
darkness into flower, and all men, young and old, hale and 
infirm, are conscious of it. 

It is this that makes Easter the apt time for the first tour 
or ramble of the year: we come to it with keen mind and 
hungry eyes. 

Having no plan except that of going south and south-west, 
we left London by the Portsmouth Road. Leaving London 
by road is always a tedious business, and on this road notably 
so. London's traffic is with you long after you think you have 
left it, and not until Farnham is well behind are you free of 
the pull and rumour of it. Once that is accomplished you 
begin to catch the odour of the country. We had already, in 
the squares and parks of London, caught the first faint hint 
of spring in a moist and bland air, and just beyond Farnham 
we saw and heard its tokens the first p'rimrose and the first 
blackbird. 

The road from Guildford to Farnham and Winchester goes 
over the hill known as the Hog's Back, past the commonplace 
little villa where Edward Carpenter spent his last years and 
died, and through Alton and Alresford. To the left of the Hog's 
Back one looks across the Wey valley to the heights of Hind- 
head, which, even as late as the early ninteenth century, no 
traveller crossed without a guide. A fairer road to Winchester, 
I think, is that by way of Petersfield, part of which we followed 
after leaving Alton. It is a not much frequented road, and its 
few villages are scarcely more than hamlets; hence, by its 

37 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

solitude and its pastoral calm, it is a little epitome of rural 
England. 

Two miles out of Guildforcl a sign on the left directs to 
Compton, which stands on what was the old Pilgrims' Way 
between Winchester and Canterbury. It is not in itself remark- 
able; it is just one of those pleasant everyday villages which 
Surrey offers in such plenty. But you do not often find picture- 
galleries in the middle of green fields, and it is this that draws 
visitors off the main roads. Here you will find the G. F. Watts 
Memorial Gallery, holding a large collection of his work; also 
the pottery works of the Potters' Art Guild. You may return to 
the main road by way of Puttenham, and so on to Farnham. 

The heavily scented pine country of Hampshire is impres- 
sive rather than beautiful, and until you get beyond Winchester 
it is to human interest that you must turn, 

Farnham is a quiet little town, concerned mainly with hops. 
It has little that is really old: a bishop's castle of the seventeenth 
century, a church of the sixteenth, and a good inn of the later 
coaching days the Bushwith charming garden. Here we 
found both the birthplace and the tomb of that sturdy fighter 
William Cobbett. His birthplace, which in his lifetime was 
a farmhouse, is now a tavern the Jolly Farmer. His grave is 
in the parish churchyard. He was an example of those English- 
men, mentioned earlier, who, after their wanderings and ad- 
ventures, are drawn back to setde among the dearest of all 
scenes the fields of their boyhood, One does not easily associ- 
ate him with moments of sentimental emotion, but in the 
garden of the Bush, on the day he returned, after many years, 
to live again at Farnham, he suffered such a moment. 

I had to cross in my post-chaise the long and dreary heath 
of Bagshot. Then, at the end of it, to mount a hill called Hun- 
gary Hill; and from that hill I knew I should look down into 
the beautiful and fertile vale of Farnham. My heart fluttered 
with impatience, mixed with a sort of fear, to sec all the scenes 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

of my childhood; for 1 had learnt before of the death of my 
father and mother. . . . The post-boy, going downhill, whisked 
me in a few minutes to the Bush Inn, from the garden of 
which I could see the prodigious sandhill where I had begun 
my gardening work, What a nothing! But now came rushing 
into my mind, all at once, my pretty little garden, my little 
blue smock frock, my little nailed shoes, my pretty pigeons, 
that I used to feed out of my hands; the last kind words and 
tears of my gentle and tender-hearted and affectionate mother. 
I hastened back into the room. If I had looked a moment 
longer I should have dropped. 

Farnham knew not only Cobbett, but Swift, and the two are 
curiously linked. For it was a reading of A Tale of a Tub, 
bought casually in London for threepence, on its title, that was 
Cobbett's ' intellectual awakening'; and A Talc of a Tub was 
written at Moor Park, just outside Farnham, when Swift was 
secretary to Sir William Temple. 

Alton, something over twelve miles beyond Farnham, is just 
another little English town, but from the Middle Ages it has 
had, and still has, its tide of traffic between the past capital of 
England and the present. From it a side-road leads to a village 
which, if not so much visited as Haworth and Rydal Mount 
and Sulgrave and Jordans, still has its pilgrims. Selborne, 
although on a road leading nowhere in particular, is not now 
the sequestered hamlet which Gilbert White knew, but it re- 
tains some odour of the charm which he took from and gave 
to it. His house, though altered, is there, and his church and 
his grave; and most of the birds he loved still nest there. A mile 
beyond Alton, on the main road, is another shrine. This is 
Chawton, in whose one street, at a corner, stands the cottage 
home of Jane Austen. Jane Austen, like Scott, has suffered of 
late years from the over-enthusiasm of her admirers, but, despite 
this, her work remains a part of literature, and no amount of 
solemn studies of her art and genius can shake her from our 

39 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

affection for the world she created and the people she put in it. 
At Chawton she spent seven of the last eight years of her life, 
and while here she gave the world anonymously her first two 
novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. They had 
been written earlier. In this miniature dwelling, which seems 
so suitable to her style, she wrote Mansfield Parf( and Emma. 
Her birthplace, the parsonage of Steventon, is not far from 
here: a mile to the south of the Exeter Road, midway between 
Basingstoke and Whitchurch. She died in a house in College 
Street, Winchester, now marked by a tablet. 

We joined the road from Petersfield to Winchester by a lane 
leading through a village which has given its name to one of 
the most delightful of seventeenth-century dance tunes. Ropley 
is its name, and the tune is Greenstoc flings, or Ropley Village. 
You will find it in most collections of old country dances. The 
lane comes out on the road at a point named West Meon Hut, 
or George Inn. * Hut ' is a term frequently met in this part of 
the South Country. There is Ball's Hut Inn, near Chichester; 
the Royal Huts Hotel, on Hindhead; the Deer's Hut, on the 
edge of Woolmer Forest; and Winterslow Hut, Hazlitt's home 
on the Exeter Road; and I have met two or three others in 
the district. From here to Winchester the road, as I say, is a 
delight. It is one of the half-forgotten roads of which England 
has many, and it has been able to develop its beauty free from 
the violence of modern man. It is not the Pilgrims' Way, but 
it is near it, and the green, unstirring England that you here 
see, though tidier, is in its elements the green, unstirring Eng- 
land that was seen by hundreds of pilgrims in Aprils of 
centuries ago. 

Winchester is so much a feature of the South of England 
that it is only necessary to indicate it. Less known, perhaps, is 
that institution which stands a mile outside the city on the 
road to Southampton, where is perpetuated a custom unique in 
these days. It is the ancient hospital of St Cross church and 

40 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

almshousc founded in 1 136 to give lodging and keep to thir- 
teen poor men and a daily meal to a hundred poor wayfarers. 
The " wayfarer's dole," a small roll and a horn of beer, has been 
handed out daily since the time of King Stephen, and is still 
handed out to all who ask. In the past beer was the common 
drink at all times and among all classes,, even in schools. Queen 
Elizabeth's breakfast drink was beer, and as late as the nine- 
teenth century, when Trollope was a Winchester boy, they 
had, he says, " no tea or coffee, but beer as much beer as you 
liked; beer at breakfast, beer at dinner, beer at supper, beer 
under your bed." 

If the early nineteenth-century ballad of The Mistletoe 
Bough, now accepted as a Christmas carol, has ever stirred 
your heart you may like to know that Hampshire makes 
several claims for the scene of the story. A few miles south 
of Winchester is Marwell Hall, which has a legend of a similar 
tragedy; and at Malsanger, near Basingstokc, and at Bramshall 
are other houses which have both the legend and the chest. A 
claim is also made for Minster Lovel, in Gloucestershire, which 
may be sounder, since in Bayly's ballad the bridegroom is a 
Lord Lovel. With all these claimants it looks as though hiding 
in chests was a favourite diversion among the Bright Young 
People of the past; but the story is older than any of the 
houses and families to which it has been attached. It appears 
in European folk-lore, and half a dozen countries claim it. 

Beyond Winchester we took the road to the New Forest by 
way of Romsey. Romsey is known chiefly by its well-preserved 
Norman abbey, but it has also a good old inn the White 
Horse dating from the sixteenth century. This was, in the 
past, a posting-house, and the gallery in the yard leading to 
the bedrooms may still be seen, though it is now enclosed. 
Many of its original features remain in the form of Tudor 
beams and panelling and a Tudor cellar; and most of its old 
furniture is furniture which has always belonged there, not, as 

4* 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

with some old inns, imported furniture. One of its relics, 
though of recent date, the late seventies, has perhaps a more 
historic glow than its old panelling. It carries us to a world 
much farther away from us than the world of old oak the 
world of high feeding. It is a bill of one day's ordinary, which 
was: Turbot, fried soles, lobster sauce, leg of mutton, wether 
lamb and sparagrass, grass beef. In those days right-thinking 
people took something of everything, and often twice of each. 

You enter the New Forest at Cadnam, and here is another 
old innthe Sir John Barleycorn. It is only a wayside inn, 
but it makes a charming picture in its old thatch and white- 
wash, and it must have served many a generation of verderers 
and rangers and forest folk, and heard many stories. 

Whenever I pass through the New Forest in spring I feel 
that spring is the true season for it, and whenever I pass through 
it in autumn I feel that autumn is its season; and when once I 
passed through it in winter, after a fall of snow upon its oak 
and birch and beech, I felt that winter was its season. It is one 
of those beauties which at any time are at their best for some 
one. Its groves and open heaths, its unhedged roads and rides, 
its natural glory and long history, are a part of England's 
heritage. It stands with Sherwood in the popular imagination 
and in foreign fame as the figure of English forests. In many 
parts you may walk for almost a mile in a green cathedral of 
beech which the brightest sun can scarcely penetrate, and pass 
suddenly from its corridors into brilliant lawns and banks of 
wild flowers. You may find glades so solitary, in so profound a 
peace, that you may indulge the fancy that yours is the first 
foot to tread their earth. And under moonlight its woodland 
mood is so intense that its beauty seems something more than 
a beauty of trees. It is charged with that abiding sorrow which 
is the soul of all beauty. 

Here and there you may come upon the charcoal-burner's 
hut, evoking old fairy-tales; or the truffle-hunter; or you may 

42 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

witness the long-drawn and exciting business of rounding up 
the wild ponies. They say that in some cottages of the Forest 
they still naake and drink mead, " the good liquor that our 
honest forefathers did use to drink of." There were various 
recipes for this drink; a favourite one was honey, lemon, cow- 
slip, and sweetbrier. 

Good points for exploring the Forest are Lyndhurst (the 
largest of its villages) > Brockenhurst 3 and Beaulieu. Each of 
them has good hotels. The finest trees are to be seen at Mark 
Ash and Queen's Bower, where in spring you may find every 
hue, known or imagined, of the green which is its symbol. The 
hunting with which the forest has been concerned since Nor- 
man days may still be had to-day, though the prey is no longer 
boar or deer. 

We left the forest by way of Ringwood, meaning to go to 
Wimborne, whose minster I had never seen. It possesses, I am 
told, two curiosities, one of them rare its Chained Library of 
over two hundred books. The other is an astronomical clack, 
but such clocks are not uncommon: Wells and Exeter have 
them. Thomas Hardy is said to have had a hand, in his early 
days as a pupil-architect, in some restoration work here. But 
I did not see any of these things, and have not yet seen them. 
We took the wrong road and came, through a sweet country 
made grave by the early twilight,, to the dark red town of 
Blandford. It is an old town, but it has little that is very old; 
its buildings look older than they really are. It has been 
visited many times by fire, and in 1731 the whole town, save a 
few houses-, was destroyed. It was rebuilt by public subscrip- 
tion, and, being rebuilt altogether to a set design, it has an air 
of central solidity and long growth. Possibly the quick matur- 
ing of its red brick has also helped in this. Edward Gibbon, in 
his youth a captain in the Hampshire Militia, had some high 
times in Blandford when his regiment was on manoeuvres there, 
and he speaks of it with affection for its hospitality and some 

43 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

regret for wasted time. We too sampled its hospitality for a 
day or so, and took some necessary exercise by exploring on 
foot (and occasionally by train) the remoter villages of Dorset 
and the Wiltshire border. 

Cranborne Chase and the Vale of Chalk are not much 
visited by tourists, but (or should I say, * and '?) they have an 
undemanding charm. The villages, strung sparsely between 
the chalk track and the downs, are severe to austerity. Only 
the spring flowers or an occasional spreading tree soften the 
lines of grey stone beneath the thatch of the cottages. But 
their severity is fitting to this hilly country of green and grey, 
where the low downs receive all the changing light and shade 
of the sky, and only the sheep bells stress the silence. Broad 
Chalk, Bower Chalk, Ebbesbourne Wake, Berwick St John, 
Donhead St Mary each of them is a village of pale tints, and 
each of them is a picture. 

Broad Chalk was for many years the home of John Aubrey, 
the antiquary, but to-day, if you ask about famous figures, you 
will be told of Maurice Hewlett, who occupied the Rectory 
for some years, and to whose memory a stone has been erected 
in a hollow of the downs. In his later years the creator of those 
fiery romances Richard Yea-and-Nay, The Queen's Quair, and 
The Forest Lovers became a passionate lover of the soil, and 
he wrote of the country like a true countryman. 

A little south of Bower Chalk, on the edge of the Chase, is 
Woodyates. You may not give more than a glance to its not very 
impressive inn on the road, known as Woodyates Inn, but it is 
worth more than a glance. It is an historic house : it has associa- 
tions with Monmouth's rebellion as his last stopping-place on his 
flight from Sedgemoor, on that disastrous 6th of July, 1685* 
With two companions he had got thus far when their horses 
gave out. They thereupon turned them loose, buried the 
saddles and bridles, and separated. Monmouth at the Wood- 

44 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

yates Inn disguised himself as a shepherd, and began to tramp 
southward to Poole and a possible ship. One of his companions 
was captured on the morning of July 7, and the other that 
evening. The second admitted that he had parted from Mon- 
mouth in that district, and, since a reward of five thousand 
pounds was set upon his head, search-parties went out in all 
directions. At seven o'clock on the morning of July 8 Mon- 
mouth, covered with mud, haggard, and half starved, was 
discovered in a ditch at Woodlands and handed over to the 
military, and a week later was beheaded on Tower Hill. The 
whole story of that rebellion is pitifu! 3 but most pitiful is his 
capture so near to Poole. One day more and he would have 
got away. 

Another tragic story, or rather its sequel, touches this Wood- 
yates Inn. It concerns a murderer who lived peaceably for six 
years after his crime, and was then by remorse driven to confess. 
This man, Gervase Matcham, had been jockey, sailor, and 
soldier. In 1780, while a soldier stationed at Huntingdon, he 
was ordered to the house of the commanding officer of his 
regiment, who lived outside the town, on the Great North 
Road, to draw a sum of money for the men's pay. A drummer 
boy of sixteen was sent with him. Having drawn the money, 
they set out on the return journey, with pauses, on the part of 
Matcham, at each inn they reached. Neither of them arrived at 
Huntingdon. Matcham persisted in pursuing the Great North 
Road instead of turning off to Huntingdon, and when the 
boy remonstrated and continued to remonstrate Matcham lured 
him into a wood and there killed him. He then made for the 
East Coast with the money, and was not heard of in Hunting- 
don for six years. He shipped as a sailor in the Navy, under 
Admiral Rodney, and was present at several engagements with 
the Spanish. But in 1786 he was discharged at Plymouth, and 
from there, with a friend, he set out to walk to London. They 
had reached the Woodyates Inn when a heavy storm of thunder 

45 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

and lightning came on, and the friend was surprised to see the 
bold Matcham shivering and retreating before some invisible 
apparition. On his inquiring the cause, Matcham, who was 
smitten out of himself by the something that had happened to 
him at that moment, made a full confession of the crime on 
the Great North Road, and said that he wished nothing more 
than to be handed over to the justices. This his companion 
did, and when full inquiries had been made he was put to trial 
at Huntingdon, and a few weeks later was hanged. His body 
was afterwards gibbeted near the scene of his crime. 

Woodyates touches two other stories, of somewhat homelier 
cast. At a farm at the near-by hamlet of Pentridge was born 
William Barnes, the sweet Dorset poet; and Sir Frederick 
Treves, in his Highways and Byways in Dorset, tells us that he 
discovered in the church of that hamlet a wall memorial 
reading as follows : 

TO THE MEMORY OF 

ROBERT BROWNING 

OF WOODYATES, IN THIS PARISH, WHO DIED NOV. 25, 1746 
AND IS THE FIRST KNOWN FOREFATHER OF 

ROBERT BROWNING, THE POET 

HE WAS FORMERLY FOOTMAN AND BUTLER IN THE 
BANKES FAMILY 

Going westward the road descends into a green cup which 
holds Ebbesbourne Wake, through which runs the little Ebble, 
and then climbs out of it to Donhead St Mary. The belt of 
close-knit woodland on the hill is a part of Cranborne Chase, 
which once spread through the whole valley from Salisbury 
to Shaftesbury westward, and from Wilton, in the north, to 
Christchurch, in the south. On the top you come to the old 
Roman road, and from here you have a view of a vast plain 
which might cover three counties if the distant haze did not 
obscure all points of recognition, In the immediate foreground, 
to the south, lies the little that remains of the forest, and behind 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

you lies Tollard Royal, where the house of King John, whose 
favourite hunting-ground this was, still stands, though much 
restored. Elsewhere you can pick out the Roman-British village 
of Woodcutts; the little town that gives its name to the Chase; 
and the queer-named hamlet of Sixpenny Handley, whose chief 
charm is in its name. It is at almost all times a lonely country, 
especially on the hills, and its beauty, in the form of flower- 
laden glades, park lands, and miles of soft turf, and wide-spread 
views, lives unseen. 

Some people find the essence of Wiltshire in that gentle 
country to the north of the Vale of Chalk and south of the 
Plain, the valley of the Nadder and the Wylye; and certainly 
it has personality. At the head of the Wylye valley stands the 
grey old town of Wilton, which is known to the mass of 
people as a trade name and to others as the home of the 
Pembrokes, where Sir Philip Sidney wrote that work which 
they all know and few of them have read The Countess of 
Pembroke's Arcadia. 

Wilton is of such an age that it gave its name to the county, 
and at one time was of more importance than Salisbury. But 
after the dissolution of its abbey it decayed and shrank. Wilton 
House, raised on the ruins of the abbey, like so many of our 
great houses, is in the grand style, and it has to-day, as it had 
in the past, a splendid collection of pictures. Its features are 
the Lobby, the Great Hall, the White Marble Room, the 
King's Bedchamber, the Geometrical Staircase, and, in the 
beautiful gardens, the Palladian Bridge. 

The Wylye flows through reedy meadows and beneath little 
grey bridges and past grey churches and thatched hamlets. The 
best of these hamlets is that from which the river takes, or to 
which it gives, its name. It has a modest beauty which remains 
in the memory longer than the more opulent or advertised. 
It is one of those parcels of England: a little of everything fused 
into a satisfying whole. Nothing more is required for comment 

47 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

on a spring morning in the country than this scene of cows 
in the water-meadow, the bridge, the church, the inn, the mill, 
and the desultory sounds of village gossip and traffic. 

Across the folding hills to the south, between them and the 
Vale of Chalk, are other villages equally refreshing to the eye 
and mind. Teffont Magna is older than Domesday, but it does 
not dress itself to the claim. It is a straight street of little stone 
cottages whose gardens are served by the stream which runs be- 
side them. Each entrance is a miniature bridge. Quite near it 
is Teffont Evias, which is mainly manor-house and church 
and wood, the three arranging themselves into one of those 
impromptu pictures which England is always offering you. 

Five miles away is Fonthill Bishop, where the fantastic 
William Beckford, millionaire, dilettante, romancer, Member 
of Parliament, was born and where he built his Fonthill Abbey, 
with its tower of 278 feet. This extraordinary folly created 
amusement even in the early nineteenth century, which was 
not remarkable for its taste in these matters. The only people 
who did not laugh at it were those who did have some taste, 
and they were too pained to laugh. " A desert of magnifi- 
cence," Hazlitt called it; 

a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into 
a toyshop, an immense museum of all that is most curious and 
costly, and at the same time the most worthless in the produc- 
tions of art and nature. 

When Nelson visited Fonthill with Sir William and Lady 
Hamilton they were received in the " Cardinal's Parlour," and 
were entertained by an unseen orchestra, and dined from 
massive plate. After some fifteen years' residence Beckford sold 
it at a great loss, and soon afterwards the tower crashed down. 
But by that time he had moved to Bath, and there he satisfied 
his tower-complex by building Lansdown Tower, which still 
stands and covers his bones. 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

To pass from memory of this exquisite to the little town of 
Tisbury, not two miles away, is refreshing. Most of its buildings 
are recent, but it has a long history. Its chief interest is to be 
found on its outskirts, where, close to the river, is a good 
example of fifteenth-century domestic building: Place Farm 
and its great barn. The gateway, part of it thirteenth-century, 
is massive and imposing, and within, the chimney of the fire- 
place, set in what was once the great hall, is worth inspection. 
The thatched tithe-barn is, I believe, the largest in England, 
measuring 188 feet by 32, with thirteen buttresses, two porches, 
and four other doorways. 

Turning into Dorset, one notes at once a change of scenery. 
Bare downs become leafy, and outlines softer, and the air more 
gracious. The villages have not the strait dignity of those of 
Wiltshire, but their carelessness is compensated by charm. The 
best view of Dorset that I know though Dorset people will 
probably know of many better is to be had near Blandford. 
From Durweston, a mile outside the town, climb the hill to the 
hamlet of Turnworth, and go on up, through the deer park and 
the forest, to Bulbarrow Hill. Soon you are on the hummocks 
of open down, and when you are on the very top Dorset 
lies spread out before you, a carpet of green and blue and 
silver. 

South-west of Blandford is the queer little village of Milton 
Abbas, created in the eighteenth century by the then owner of 
the abbey. It lies in a glen of the steep and woody hills, and 
from almost any approach you come upon it suddenly. We 
came to it by the Winterbourne road, and came at a moment 
when the atmosphere dramatized it for us. A cloud had settled 
across the afternoon sun, and from beneath it a shower of silver 
rays poured upon a wide street of square thatched cottages 
and grassy lawns lined with chestnut-trees, steep gardens 
mounting the hillside, and, at the end of the street, where 
the hills met, a lake, a bridge, and deep woods. So wide 

49 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

was the road and so little life was to be seen that the church, 
the bay-windowed store, and the inn seemed to belong to a 
toy town. 

The glory of Mil ton Abbas is the abbey church, which adjoins 
the mansion of Milton Park. They stand side by side, lonely 
amid velvet lawns which roll away to the circle of wooded 
hills. The mansion is modern, late eighteenth-century, I fancy; 
but the church is of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. On 
our visit it was locked, but it was sufficient, in the late after- 
noon sun, to wander around its soaring stone and absorb some- 
thing of that beauty which had once been vital and now was 
frozen and forlorn. 

Between Dorchester and Sherborne is another decayed abbey 
village Cerne Abbas. A century ago, had you been writing 
to a friend in Dorchester, you would have addressed your letter 
to Dorchester, near Cerne Abbas, for in those days Cerne was 
a country town with a bi-weekly market, thirteen inns, a 
tannery, a glove factory, and a flourishing coach service; and 
Dorchester was not then on the mental map. But the making 
of the railway some miles to its south, a common cause of 
decay 3 left it in a backwater, and to-day the inns are but four, 
the shops not half a dozen, and the grass literally grows in its 
streets. But if it is deserted in its old age it takes its desertion 
with the sweet complacency that good characters in their old 
age display. The green and chequered hills enclose it in a bowl, 
where it snuggles peacefully. It is a village whose clock has 
stopped, and you are sensible of this at the moment of your 
entering. All is quiet, very quiet; you feel that in any of its 
houses the Sleeping Beauty may be lying. It is not the quiet of 
a village which is nothing but a village; it is the quiet of a 
village which has known the stir and doings of a town. It 
is not living a naturally simple life, as villages do; it is living on 
memories of past greatness. Every year its quiet increases, the 
breath of life becomes more slow, as of an old person dozing 

5 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

towards the last sleep. The ring of boots upon the cobbles is 
almost a noise. 

At the end of its narrow street stands its abbey manor-house, 
and beyond an iron gate stands all that remains of its once 
famous abbey. It is said to have been founded by Augustine in 
the seventh century, and you may hear local legends of him. 
A well, near eleven trees, has been given his name, and you 
may be told that there were once twelve trees. The twelfth was 
removed because of the treachery of the twelfth Apostle. The 
local guide-book mentions an ancient superstition connected 
with this well: 

If you pluck up a laurel leaf growing near by, and make it 
into a little cup, and dip it in the well, then stand and face the 
church and drink the water and wish something that your 
heart desires silently and keep your wish secret, in time your 
wish will come true. 

At one time in its history the abbey was plundered by the wise 
King Canute, but he was wise enough to repent, and later he 
made up for his plundering by giving it further grants of land. 
All that remains to-day is the gate-house tower, and that is 
half buried in the trees and shrubs of a neglected garden. 
Through the leaves one may catch a suggestion of its former 
beauty, where a two-tiered oriel window is barred by 
escutcheons wonderfully carved. This rank vegetation, which 
seeks to hide the last stern beauty of the relics, though to be 
deplored, is in character with the atmosphere of Cerne. You 
expect the stone to crumble at your touch, and you would not 
be surprised if next week Cerne were a vacant site. 

Just outside the village is a curiosity with more power of 
attraction than the old abbey. Cut on the hillside above the 
Sherborne road is the famous Cerne giant. This belligerent 
figure of unknown origin measures 180 feet. His every finger 
is seven feet long, and the notched club which he brandishes 
is 120 feet. He is as crude in drawing as the Long Man of 

5* 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Wilmington, in Sussex, but much fiercer in appearance, and his 
origin is as obscure. Not so long ago the children of Cernc 
believed that he came down every night to the village to drink, 
and unruly conduct was quickly subdued by mention of his 
name. Some say that the fairies pinned him to the hillside 
for sheep-stealing, or that in pagan days his limbs were filled 
with the remains of men who were consumed in the sacrificial 
fires. 

In the hill country which shelters the village you will see 
some of the richest pasture of the South. It is a country which 
for miles on end is bound in solitude and silence. Farms and 
hamlets are met ordy at distances, and the roads which climb 
and twist about them are long and narrow. Here and there 
a hamlet hides under a wooded flank, or farm buildings spread 
alongside a stream; but you may easily miss them in the large 
and flowing landscape which claims all your eyes. Sometimes, 
for days together, these green and lovely shoulders are hidden 
by clouds, and when the rains are over, and they lift, it is as 
though a forgotten world were revealed : the whole valley is 
flooded with rich scents drifting down from the moist pine and 
gorse and hedgerow and wild thyme. 

By a hilly road from Cerne you come to Cattistock, where 
they say they have the sweetest chimes in all Dorset; and thence 
you go by Maiden Newton up to the ridge and towards the 
sea by another cluster of hamlets. They are: Compton 
Valence, Litton Cheney, Chilcombe, Long Bredy, Pucknowle, 
and Swyre. From Swyre you may reach Abbotsbury and Portis- 
ham. Abbotsbury is worth seeing for its ruined abbey, its 
fifteenth-century chapel of St Catherine on its hill by the sea, 
and its swannery. The swannery to-day protects the largest 
number of birds in the country, and it was doing so in the 
days of the abbey's glory. At Portisham are the nine stones 
of an ancient sepulchre known as the Hel Stone, and near them 
is the dolmen of the Grey Mare and her Colts. South-east of 

52 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

Cerne is the string of 'puddle ' villages Af puddle, Briants- 
puddle, Tolpuddle, and Puddletown all of them simple, 
rustic places of thatch and whitewash alongside their stripling 
river and stone bridges. 

Blandford itself is a pleasant place for a short stay, and the 
Crown Hotel (now, as in the past, its principal inn) is bright 
and comfortable. Among the many stories of the town's past 
the story that most attracted me is one which links it incongru- 
ously with the world of Cockney. Nothing more remote from 
the raffish life of London's nineteenth-century Strand could be 
conceived than this quiet old town in the hills; but, by an 
accident of fortune, they have met. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century the Crown was 
kept by a professional and practising musician a fact which 
casual visitors to the house discovered when they inquired why 
the rooms were dressed with portraits of the great composers 
and executants. It is through him that Blandford's graveyard 
holds the remains of a lion of London's night-life of the 1840*5 
and '50*5 Sam Co well, the first singer of The Rat-catcher's 
Daughter and Villi\ins and his Dinah. The host, whose name 
I cannot discover, had spent some rime in the * professional ' 
world of London, and occasionally revisited the old walks and 
heard their chimes at midnight. On one of these visits he met 
Sam Cowell, no longer a highly paid star and popular favourite, 
but very much down and almost out. With the instinctive 
generosity of the profession, the host carried him down to 
Blandford to recuperate. His fame was not limited to town : his 
name was known and his songs were sung in tap-rooms and 
farmyards hundreds of miles from the Cyder Cellars and the 
Coal Hole. So that, though he was eclipsed in town, his 
arrival in Blandford made something of the stir which the 
arrival of an old-time film star would make to-day in Parva- 
cum-Magna. His kindly host lodged him at the Crown, fed 

53 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

him, provided him with doctor, and set no stint to his demands 
upon the cellar. But the lionizing an unfailing tonic to the 
half-forgotten professionalthe doctoring, and the country air 
began their work too late, and after a few weeks the pride of 
the Cyder Cellars and the Supper Rooms and the Cave of 
Harmony was laid under the wide and starry sky of Dorset. 
So deeply had his presence impressed the town that for a few 
years thereafter visitors inquiring about the sights of Bland- 
ford were first directed to " Sam Cowell's Grave." 

From Blandford we made for Wareham, and then to the 
miscalled ' Isle ' of Purbeck, and over the Purbeck hills, through 
Corfe, to Swanage. But Corfe would not let us go through. It 
was my first sight of it, and though in the last day or so we had 
seen so many villages with so much quality that each seemed 
the prize village, Corfc came as a superlative. It is an old 
grey-stone, grey-tiled village centring on a litde market square, 
with the ruins of the casde towering above it. It is built of tht 
local Purbeck stone which fits so well, as local material always 
does, with the local landscape. It has the air of having grown 
there all at once, just as it is, and one can stand in its square 
and look and look at it without any knowledge of the passing 
of time. Charming is not the word for it; it has none of the 
young-girl grace of the Berkshire and Warwickshire villages. 
It has had a different life, wider and harsher experience, and 
its rough strength seems fit to its story. It inspires respect 
rather than affection, though its grey hues are not so hard as 
those of the Border towns. From its earliest days up to the 
end of the Civil War its record is of violence. It was here that 
the young King Edward the Martyr was murdered at the order 
of his stepmother, Elfrida, Elfrida was one of those stick-at- 
nothing women, and the murder of her stepson was not her 
first essay in clearing obstacles from her path; she had already 
caused the murder of her first husband. Married to Earl Ethel- 
wold, she turned her eyes to King Edgar, whom she had first 

54 




STURMINSTER NEWTON, DORSET 

Showing a view of the river Stour. 

Photo Will F. Taylor 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

intended to marry; and at Dead Man's Plack, in Hampshire, 
King Edgar did the business of getting the Earl for ever out of 
the way. Having made the royal marriage, and borne a son, 
she had ambitions of the throne for this son. But the King's 
son, Edward, by a former wife, had already, on the King's 
death, succeeded to it. Opportunity, however, placed him in 
her hands. While hunting in the district in A.D. 979 he 
became separated from his court, and decided to seek repose at 
his stepmother's lodge at Corfe. She readily entertained him, 
and on his departure brought him a stirrup-cup. Then, while 
he was drinking it, and his hands were occupied, she gave 
an arranged signal to a serving rpan, and the King was stabbed 
in the back. His horse dashed away with him, and at some 
distance from the house he was hurled from the saddle dead. 
The body, when at last found, was conveyed to Shaftesbury and 
there buried on a hill. By his death Elfrida had her way, and 
her son became King; but his character seems to have been 
the opposite of his mother's. He has passed into history as 
Ethelred the Unready. 

Corfe is one of those many places there are more than 
people guess where curfew is still sounded. From its array 
of old houses, all possessing some feature of interest, it is not 
easy to make choice of the most striking; but you should look 
at the Town House and at the stone-porched Greyhound and 
the garden of Bankes Inn. 

Swanage, at any time but the holiday season, is a place that 
wins you. There are some places which, like some people, 
* shut up * in the presence of a crowd, and refuse to let them- 
selves be properly seen or even guessed at. Swanage in the 
holiday season is like that. But when ' empty ' it will reveal 
to quiet people a charming personality. It will then allow you 
to see the features native to it before it was ' developed/ and 
before two of its sons, who became London contractors, dressed 
it up with thrown-out bits of London. One can fully sec 

55 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

then the beautiful bay in which it is set, its crumbling stone 
cottages hidden at its back, its steep, cobbled lanes, and its old 
taverns; and one can feel the aged repose which is natural to it 
and which, I think, it would always live in if it might. It was 
never meant for a popular resort, and it plays the part 
unwillingly. 

The visitor who knows nothing of its story may be surprised 
at finding in the streets lamp-posts bearing the stamp of the 
City of Westminster or the arms of the City of London. 
And more surprised to find imposed upon the Town Hall the 
front of the Mercers' Hall of Cheapside, E.G., and to learn 
that the clock-tower near the jetty, which looks much like 
other seaside clock-towers, originally stood near London 
Bridge. These extraneous dressings were the gift of the two 
contractors. 

The Victoria Hotel, on its little front, is quietly bright, and 
I noted a friendly atmosphere welling from no obtrusive source. 
I found it one of those country hotels they are not many 
where I would like to stay for some time. 

The by-road from Swanage to the ferry which crosses Poole 
Harbour for Bournemouth deserves a lyric. It goes uphill, by 
Ballard Down, and through the village of Studland, and, until 
a mile before the ferry, it is beautiful all the way. Studland is 
one of those villages which, when presented to us on an artist's 
canvas, make us accuse him of over-drawing on sentimental 
imagination. Thatched cottages, lattice windows, rose-trees 
climbing the porch, little orchards all the properties. England 
is dowered with these villages. The most luscious Christmas- 
card artist, letting himself go to the extreme of the idyllic, can 
never outdo the reality. One can readily understand men dying 
for such beauty and dying happily. You cannot genuinely stir 
the average Englishman with talk about glory or flag or empire ; 
or the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods. These 
are words. His altar is visible to him in some such place as 

56 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

this, and his choice, I think, is as wise as the choice of those 
who seek for the unknown heaven. 

On the other side of Swanage is St Alban's or St Aldhelm's 
Head, which thrusts its cliffs of over 300 feet boldly out to sea. 
Close to its green edge is a little Norman chapel, whose stout 
walls have withstood the wind and rain of centuries. It is 
the church of seamen, and here has been held through those 
centuries regular services for the coastguards. In its cresset, 
which you will notice, a nightly light was set for the guidance 
of ships passing this perilous coast. 

On leaving Swanage we again passed through Corfe, and, 
by desolate by-roads twisting over and round the hills, came to 
Wool, a little, quiet town on the river Frome. On its riverside 
you will see an old Jacobean manor-house, now a farm. Noth- 
ing very striking about it, but it was the ancestral home of the 
Turbervilles, who, by one novel, have been made the most 
famous family of Dorset. On its bridge this notice still con- 
fronts you to charge you with fear of the law : 

ANY PERSON WILFULLY INJURING 

ANY PART OF THIS COUNTY BRIDGE 

WILL BE GUILTY OF FELONY, AND 

UPON CONVICTION LIABLE TO BE 

TRANSPORTED FOR LIFE 

7 & 8 Gco. IV, c. 30, s. 13 

Through two other little towns, or large villages, Winfrith 
and Warmwell, we went direct, though by winding roads, to 
Bridport, leaving Dorchester on our north and Weymouth on 
our south. Dorchester is a town of many charms, but these are 
so widely known that they need not be repeated here. Wey- 
mouth is just a seaside town which has grown around an old 
fishing town. Many of its old streets and alleys remain, with 
queer old cottages inhabited by people who have no concern 
with the Weymouth of the visitor. An exploration of these 

57 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

alleys after dark, if you like losing your way and catching 
glimpses of odd interiors and of life out of key with the life 
about it, may provide a little thrill. 

Weymouth is popularly supposed to have been ' made ' as a 
resort by George III, as his son ' made ' Brighton. But it was 
really ' made ' by a commoner. It was c made ' by Ralph Allen, 
of Bath, the original of Fielding's Mr Allworthy in Tom 
]oncs, and the hero of Pope's line about doing good by stealth 
and blushing to find it fame. It was he who introduced the 
place to the royal family, after he had introduced himself to it 
by a daring experiment. Suffering from some complaint in the 
1760'$, he consulted his physician, and was advised to try a cure 
which at that time suggested to most minds something worse 
than any disease something, indeed, amounting to self- 
destruction. This cure was nothing less than bathing bodily 
in the sea without clothes! The honest and daring philanthro- 
pist decided to follow the prescription, and chose the little 
port of Weymouth as a quiet setting for the critical experi- 
ment. 

He did not die of it. He found benefit, and by advertising 
the benefit he had found he opened the way to a pastime which 
is pursued to-day on almost every mile of our coast. His cure 
gave the seaside generally, and Weymouth in particular, its 
first real publicitya publicity as startling then as the publicity 
given to certain places to-day by our nudists and sun-bathers. 
But his success with it did not convince all doubters. For, 
when George III visited Weymouth, and, having been gently 
prepared for the shock of sea-bathing by a series of warm sea- 
water baths in his bedroom, actually .took the water from a 
royal enclosure, the town band, on the shore, broke into 
" God save great George our King." Fanny Burney records 
in her diary that she risked it for the first time in 1773, at 
Teignmouth, having been told it was a sure cure for a 
cold. 

58 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

I was terribly frightened, and really thought I should never 
have recovered from the plunge. I had not breath enough to 
speak for a minute or two, the shock was beyond expression 
great; but after I got back to the machine, I presently felt 
myself in a glow that was delightful it is the finest feeling in 
the world, and will induce me to bathe as often as will be safe. 

Bridport is one of those small wide-streeted towns which 
seem to be self-reliant and self-sufficient. In the mornings it 
presents an air of busy-ness which to a casual observer seems 
to have no relation to the outside world. Its affairs no doubt 
do connect with the outside world, but all the talk and all the 
interest suggest that there is nothing worth much attention but 
Bridport. And I can imagine that if you live in Bridport it is 
easy to develop that attitude. It has a number of old houses 
of charm and beauty, and from its main street you look straight 
on to open country. The inn at which Charles II was resting 
during his flight from Worcester, and where he was disturbed 
by the arrival of a search-party of Roundheads, is not now an 
inn. It stood in the main street, opposite where the Town Hall 
now stands. Behind the building which to-day covers the site 
a few traces of its yard may be seen. On the arrival of the 
troopers Charles, disguised as Colonel Wyndham's servant, 
moved nonchalantly through them as they crowded into the 
yard, and got to horse. But an osder had recognized him, and 
soon after he had gone the alarm was given and the troopers 
set off in pursuit. But Charles, instead of keeping to the 
Dorchester road, turned into a lane just outside Bridport, while 
the pursuers went straight on. A stone at the corner of the 
lane, Lee Lane, records the incident. 

At Charmouth, on the coast, we are still on his trail. At an 
inn there, the Queen's Arms, he had another escape. While 
waiting for a promised boat, which never came, one of the 
party sent his horse, which had cast a shoe, to the blacksmith. 
By markings on its other shoes the blacksmith recognized their 

59 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Worcestershire origin. Having heard that the fugitives were 
in this part of the country, he privately went to the parson; 
but by the time his suspicion had got round Charles was gone. 

Between Charmouth and Axminster, at Hunter's Lodge 
Inn, which lies in a cutting between gorgeously wooded hills, 
you enter Devonshire and the region of the red earth. 
Travelling in the West and South-west, the line and colour of 
the scenery of each county give you distinct advice of the 
county you are in. It is the only part of England where county 
boundaries do so assert themselves. From London to the 
Midlands you may pass through Bedfordshire, Northampton- 
shire, Huntingdon, Rutland, and Nottinghamshire, and never 
know until Derbyshire that you have passed from one county 
to another. But the divisions of Dorset, Somerset, Devon, and 
Cornwall are marked to the casual eye. 

" Some shires, Joseph-like," said old Fuller, " have a better- 
coloured coat than others." And some shires are more belauded 
and celebrated than others. Devonshire can stand in no need 
of a Publicity Council. All that a Publicity Council could do 
has been done spontaneously during the last hundred years by 
its native song-makers and writers, and by visitors who had 
never heard the word * publicity ' and would not h^ve known 
what game it stood for. How many concert ballads there are 
in praise of Devon I cannot guess, nor how many hundred 
local poems. I know that up to a few years ago it was impos- 
sible to attend a concert without hearing at least one reference 
to Glorious Devon or one ' quaint ' ditty in its dialect. But 
though this song and prose sentiment has reached so vast a 
bulk and become so insistent as almost to drive the sensitive 
visitor away, one has to admit, on seeing Devonshire, that it 
merits all that has been said or sung about it. (More than one 
can admit of Sussex, which has been given, by people who 
cannot have seen a great deal of England, an almost equal 
bulk of superlative tribute.) By its abundance of song, its glori- 

60 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

fying of its heroes, its intense county patriotism, and the num- 
ber of novels set within its boundaries Devon must be, I think, 
better known to foreigners than any other English county. In- 
deed, to a large part of the world it is England; at least, when 
foreigners speak of English country I have found that almost 
always they speak of Devon. For many Americans it is the 
first England they see Plymouth being by them preferred to 
Southampton as a landing-place, when possible, because of the 
Pilgrim Fathers. To them it is the country, and the next thing 
they see is London; which recalls to me an early American 
film which showed a London business-man leaving his office 
remarkably like the Royal Exchange and departing by taxi 
" to his home at Devonshire, near London." 

Seriously, Devon does possess a loveliness different from and 
unmatched by that of any other county deeper in colour, 
more profuse, more kind. Even in winter it has something of 
the summer of other counties, and in spring and summer its 
luxuriance and beauty put chocolate-boxes out of competition. 
It is as though to this geographical sector all that is beautiful 
in England has sent something of itself streaming down to 
settle there and fuse and fructify. There is nothing here of 
austere or single-minded beauty. It is rich, ardent, and laugh- 
ing, a patchwork counterpane of the colours of England. Few 
people, I think, not even those who prefer other counties, will 
agree with the outburst against it made by Keats in one of his 
letters. It must have been an out-of-sorts morning that led him 
to this : 

You may say what you will of Devonshire; the truth is it is 
a splashy, rainy, misty, snowy, foggy, haily, floody, muddy, 
slipshod county. The hills are very beautiful when you get a 
sight of J em: the primroses are out but you are in; the cliffs are 
of a fine deep colour, but then the clouds are continually vicing 
with them. . . . The flowers here wait as naturally twice a day 
for the rain as mussels do for the tide. This Devonshire is like 

61 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Lydia Languish, very entertaining when it smiles, but cursedly 
subject to sympathetic moisture. 

Most counties with a coastline keep their best selves to the 
interior, for the most zealous patriot cannot, I think, claim 
that England is happy in its seaside places. But with Devon 
it is the reverse. Dartmoor and Exmoor, rich and swelling 
as they are, and softer than the Northern moors, are not, I 
think, the best of Devon. Its best is to be found upon its 
coast and along its many river-mouths. The shortcomings 
of the rest of our seaside places are here compensated by 
litde coast villages that evoke all the adjectives of affection. 
Beer, Branscombe, Budleigh Salterton, Lynmouth, Salcombe, 
Mortehoe, Torcross, and Slapton are little havens which have 
grown just as they are, but which look as though some ex- 
ploiter has deliberately framed them for those few who pre- 
fer their sea plain and like to take it without metropolitan 
sauce or garnish. Here you are sensible in all ways of being 
in the country. Beer, where I have spent many quiet days, 
has a litde stream running through its main street, and here 
the fishermen bring their catch and cleanse it outside your 
parlour window and sell it to you through the window. 
Newspapers arrive at midday, or later, and what do you care? 
At Slapton Sands you are seven miles from the nearest small 
town, but with a good little hotel stocked with comforts, the 
sea on one side of it and a great lake on the other, the town 
is as near as it need be. In these places you can turn the 
clock to the wall and forget its face. Time is a human in- 
vention of which you are no longer aware. You live and 
dream through a long golden daylight and silver evening 
broken only by sleep, and when you have sunk into this life 
you cannot tell whether you have been living it for a few days 
or two months. You may even lose the habit of conversation 
and will not feel that you have lost a habit of great virtue, 

62 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

You may come to realize after a few days that the noises of 
modern life from which professors tell us we are suffering 
electric drills and unsilenced motor-bikes are perhaps less 
insidious in their attack upon our nerves than the ever- 
lasting cackle of the human voice. In these places you may 
be free from it. Their delicate beauty and gentle pace of 
life are an effective silencer upon the most brook-like 
gossip. 

Axminster is a little town whose name has gone round the 
English world in connexion with carpets, but it is not the 
busy place it once was. It still has an industrial life, but loom- 
ing over this are memories of its former importance, of which 
its stately eighteenth-century George Hotel is an indication. 
Each of the little towns which are scattered by the score in 
every English county has its individual personality, though 
how to isolate and identify that personality I do not know. 
Human creatures and their peculiar spice are easy subjects, but 
places are elusive. Axminster c has something,' but I cannot 
tell you what it is. The same with Honiton. This too is a 
famous name, but lace is now out of fashion, and the industry 
merely survives. It is a town of one long, wide street, and so 
quiet that, although the hour was early evening, I saw but 
two people. All the shops into which I looked were empty. 
At one, where I bought cigarettes, I asked what Honiton was 
like on early-closing day, and I was told that it was a bit 
quieter then. But there was a quality in its quiet. I wanted 
to linger and define it. But it would have meant too much 
lingering. These secrets are not given readily; they have to be 
wooed and waited upon for their own time. 

From Honiton we went by narrow lanes to Crediton, and 
thence on to Dartmoor. The lanes of Devonshire have their 
own style. They are cut deep, and are often of break-neck 
steepness. Their banks are sometimes ten feet high and rich 
in spring-time with all the shrubs and flowers of spring 

63 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

primrose, celandine, hyacinth, violet, kingcup, and ferns found 
only here. Spring comes first to England in the two south- 
western counties, and long before other counties are showing 
their earliest flowers the lanes here are a blaze of blossom. The 
primrose and daffodil are here in February, and iris and blue- 
bell in March. Even in autumn they are flowered, and if the 
songs of spring have fled from other places at the approach of 
the west wind the poet may still find an echo of them in these 
lanes. I am not going to repeat the old boast that Devon and 
Cornwall are as beautiful as the French or Russian or Italian 
Riviera. They are not. But they are beautiful in their own 
English way, and you must like them for that and not for their 
faint resemblance to something else. 

Had we gone to Exeter instead of Crediton we should have 
paused for a word with a remarkable blacksmith. Between 
Honiton and Exeter, where the road forks for Ottery St Mary, 
stands the smithy of Mr J. A. R. Stevenson, who has been air- 
man, journalist, sailor, and is now blacksmith and author of a 
delightful paean of his craft, The Din of a Smithy y published in 
1932. Mr Stevenson's is no ordinary smithy. It is a picturesque 
structure, set in a small wood, and about it are distributed ex- 
amples of the best work in iron of himself and his men, from 
classic gates to scrolls and devices. It suggests the bottega of 
one of the early Italian painters, and it is a happy addition to 
that intelligent revival of country crafts which is quietly going 
on in many a valley and village up and down England. There 
is Mr Arnold Dolmetsch's studio at Haslemere, where he and 
his family produce the musical instruments of the past. There 
is Mr Robert Gibbings' Golden Cockerel Press at Waltham St 
Lawrence. There is the Potters' Art Guild at Compton, 
already mentioned. There is the studio for modern bronzes in 
the woods of Speen. There is the furniture studio of Mr 
Gordon Russell (proprietor of the famous Lygon Arms) at 
Broadway. And you may find fifty others run by people like 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

Mr Stevenson, who have found their life-work in the creation 
of beautiful things amid beautiful surroundings. His book be- 
longs with the farming books of Mr A. G. Street and Mr 
Adrian Bell books of practical craftsmen whose passion 
makes their books literature. 

We arrived late at Crediton, and left early in the morning 
for Totnes by way of Dartmoor. We entered the moor at 
Chagford, an old market town on the Teign, which has re- 
turned to life as a tourist centre. Its principal features are its 
market hall once a centre for the tin trade its old mill, and 
its inn, the Three Crowns, which was once a Tudor manor- 
house. This is of stone, with a stone porch in which are 
rough stone seats, one of which is pathetically linked with the 
Civil War. Among those young members of West Country 
families who joined Sir Bevil Grenville for the King was 
Sidney Godolphin, "a young gentleman," sajs Clarendon, 
" of incomparable parts, doomed like the rest to quick death 
and long remembrance." During a wait for the gathering of 
forces and concerted action a number of minor skirmishes took 
place, one of them at Chagfbrd. Stepping out of this manor- 
house, Godolphin received a mortal shot and sank on one of 
those seats and there died. 

By ways so remote that we neither met nor passed a single 
human creature we crossed the moor and came leisurely to 
Buckfast Abbey. Dartmoor at its centre is desolate, but one 
does not find here the dead desolation of some of the northern 
moors. It is a living desolation. There are flowers, old pack- 
horse bridges, bridges of pre-Roman times, abandoned huts, 
stepping-stones over streams, and the sky is alive. That day 
the sky was of that Cambridge blue which fits so well with 
English landscape. Only for a few weeks of the year is the 
English sky of that hot azure which we associate with true 
summer, and, agreeable as it is, it seems a foreign visitor. 

65 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Light blue is our colour, and it is the shade of most of our blue 
flowers. 

George Meredith, describing in a letter to a friend the large 
windows he was having fitted in his cottage, explained that he 
" must have as a daily meal a good plateful of sky." On the 
plateaux of Dartmoor the eye has a whole basinful; one moves 
under a wide dome of sky whose rim appears to reach to the 
ends of the earth. Space here is a presence, and a spring morn- 
ing is a living thing, a creature which has its hour of beautiful 
existence and then perishes, never to be met again. We 
remember these mornings out of the hundreds of new-born 
mornings of each year, as we remember lost friends. Each 
morning, and each sunset and dawn, each evening and night, 
has its individual spirit and individual life. They are manifes- 
tations of the invisible being, born into this world as one of 
its creatures, and some of them come close to us and permit 
us to know them in their brief sojourn. 

The morning of our visit was Sunday, and Sunday morning 
In England has a quality which may be perceived in the most 
solitary places, whether we are aware that the day is Sunday 
or not. No definite token is needed : no bells or peculiar hush 
or cessation of labour, or any of the material signs of Sunday. 
We are informed by the very feeling of the morning, and it 
is a feeling which compels our response. We, on the top of 
Dartmoor, responded to it, and might have sat in that votive 
response for a full hour but for a crude mischance. We had 
stopped the car in order to be tranquil enough to catch the 
tranquillity about us, and we sat silent and rapt, each living in 
the mystery of that bird^pierced silence. At least, I thought 
we were, but, hearing a rustling behind me, I turned. And 
there was one of the party callously engaged with The Sunday 
Times and its music article. 

From no disrespect to our greatest authority on music, but 
from a desire to teach our friend better manners in the presence 

66 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

of beauty, we tore the paper from him and buried it under a 
shrub. Mr Ernest Newman, I am sure, will agree that we did 
the only thing. 

Our way to Buckfastleigh took us through John Galsworthy's 
Manaton, a pleasant little village showing no sign of life; 
thence through Widecombe-in-the-Moor, whose name is known 
wherever men have sung together; and thence to Dartmeet, 
where we had to pause. Here the East and West Darts join 
on a rocky bed in a hollow between the hills for their journey 
across the moor to Totnes. This is the true beginning of the 
Dart, and added to the natural loveliness of the scene is the 
thrill which most people feel at the birthplace of a river. 
Another two miles brought us to Holne, a hamlet of no special 
charm, but well set on a ridge on the eastern edge of the moor. 
It claims a moment's notice as the birthplace of Charles 
Kingsley, whose father was the curate of its thirteenth-century 
church. At Holne we were on the direct road to Buckfastleigh, 
and it was just outside this little town that we had our first 
encounter with humanity. We met an old lady in her Sunday 
best jogging along, side-saddle, on her market pony. This is 
still a common form of conveyance on the moor, and on 
Saturday evenings you may meet many a woman returning on 
her pony from a small town, with her weekly shopping in the 
panniers. 

Any wanderer in this corner of Devon should, I think, 
seek out Buckfastleigh, whether interested in cathedrals and 
churches or not. It is a place to which all of us may pay tribute 
and from which we may receive stimulation. All our old 
cathedrals are, of course, monuments of human endeavour, 
but we do not know the story of that endeavour. Of Buckfast 
Abbey we do; some of its builders, its actual labouring builders, 
are still living. No hired labour built this abbey. It was built 
stone by stone and brick by brick by the hands of the monks 
themselves. In 1882 it was a heap of ruins. It was then bought 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

by a Benedictine community, and five monks settled there. 
Of these, two were familiar with masonry and brick-laying, 
and these two began the work of rebuilding. Later four more 
brothers joined them, and the abbey which you now see and 
which was completed and consecrated in 1932, fifty years after 
its beginning, has risen from the manual labour of no more 
than twelve Benedictine monks. 

About two miles from Buckfastleigh, southward, we came 
without design to a spot with associations which, though of 
the Church, are scarcely monastic. We came to the little 
hamlet of Dean Prior, and not until we were wandering in its 
church did I learn that we had come to the home and the tomb 
of the sweetest of English singers Robert Herrick of the 
golden mouth. Born in London, and always thinking of 
London, he was fated to spend the greater part of his life in 
this little hamlet far away from even a small town. 

More discontents I never had 

Since I was born, than here, 
Where I have been and still am sad 

In this dull Devonshire. 

Here is his church, of no special distinction, and in the church- 
yard is his grave, though in what part nobody knows. A brass 
plate on the interior wall of the church merely tells you : 

In this churchyard lie the remains of Robert Herrick, author 
of The Hesperides and Other Poems. Presented to this living 
by King Charles I in the year 1629, ejected during the Common- 
wealth, and reinstated soon after the Restoration. 

Small as Dean Prior is to-day it was, of course, smaller and 
much more cut off in his day, and one can understand that the 
friend of the London wits and poets was often sunk in fits of 
ennui and irritation by the isolation and monotony of his life 
in this corner. It was from here that he addressed to Ben 
Jonson that ode which sighs for London : 

68 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

Ah, Ben! 
Say how or when 
Shall we, thy guests, 
Meet at those lyric feasts 
Made at the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun ? 

But it was good for him and good for poetry. Had he lived in 
his London he might never have found the leisure for the 
making of his exquisite songs: it was the enforced solitude of 
life at Dean Prior which drove him to verses. And when one 
remembers the fates of the convivial wits and poets of his 
youth who remained in London it looks as though the dull 
country life had its compensation: he died at an age reached by 
no other poet of his time eighty-three. This litde church- 
yard seems the right resting-place for him not for Robert 
Herrick, the ardent Londoner, but for the poet who, while 
longing for London, sang so sweetly of the country and of 
country things: 

... of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, 
Of April, May, of June, of July flowers; 
I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, 
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes. 

Herrick was a devotional materialist. It is a common error 
to regard the materialist as a Gradgrind, but the better kind of 
materialist is one who knows and sees nothing but this present 
life, but sees it with mystic fervour. Herrick saw it so, and the 
true religious note is much clearer in his Hespcrides than in 
his deliberately religious Noble Numbers. 

Totnes is an old town deep in years, full of evidence of its 
years, but living briskly in the tide of to-day's life. It is an 
endearing spot, beautifully set on the estuary of a beautiful 
river, the Dart, and it is a spot to linger in: the Dart is worth 
exploring. But there is one way only of exploring it, or ex- 
ploring any river, and that is to get on it. Take a sculler and 
row yourself up to Luscombe and down to Kingswear, by the 

69 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

lovely villages of Sharpham and Dittisham. Here you have 
English river scenery at its best. The banks are hilly, and their 
trees sweep down to the water's edge as though to view their 
own beauty. It is varied, too, breaking here and there into a 
lake and here and there into backwaters and inlets. When the 
steamers which run from Dartmouth to Totnes are not visible 
or audible life seems to be arrested and crystallized into the 
way of peace which all men seek. Handel once wrote for an 
English sovereign a suite of water music. I hope he was aware 
that he was gilding the lily. The serene beauty of English 
rivers needs no music save the half-heard music of their own 
movement and the movement of the alders and aspens and 
oaks along their banks. On the Dart, above and below Totnes, 
you may drift for hours and forget that you are human and 
forget all rumour of humankind. You know only the beauty 
of water and the beauty of trees and the beauty of mere being. 
The prospect of turning back and landing among the matters 
to which you belong is one from which you recoil as you recoil 
from the awakening out of the dream which is giving you the 
life you should have had. Even the salve of dinner does not 
ease the pain of that return. 

Our hotel was the Seven Stars, a long, two-storied inn of the 
late eighteenth century, with a porch which carries above it a 
little glazed room giving views up and down the street. Out- 
side the hotel stands a little memorial of interest to Australians. 
It is erected to the memory of a son of the town, John Wills, 
who, with his comrade, Robert O'Hara Burke, was the first to 
cross the Australian desert. Both died on the return journey, 
in 1861, but Wills left a record of the expedition, which was 
published in 1863. The streets are steep, and many of the 
houses jut over the pavement and make a covered way. A 
legend, long since disproved, has it that Brutus the Trojan 
landed here when it was on the sea, and a stone in the pave- 
ment of the main street is known as the Stone of Brutus. By 

70 



THE SWEET SOUTH 

long custom it is the point at which the mayor stands for all 
solemn mayoral occasions. This legend, and similar legends 
relating to other towns, seems to show that the old chroniclers 
had much in common with the new. If you haven't got a good 
story find one true, if possible, but, anyhow, find one. Keep 
it bright, as the editors say. Some of these chroniclers, judging 
by the bricks they made, and dropped, with scarcely any strav^, 
could have commanded high money from Hollywood. Their 
successors, in writing the thrilling biographies of film stars to 
whom nothing has happened, do pretty well, but they lack the 
abandon of the earlier masters. 

Totnes is one of the oldest of English boroughs, its charter 
dating from 1215, and it is said to have been the smallest of the 
walled towns. The ruins of its Norman castle may still be 
seen, and portions of the old wall. The Guildhall, near tie 
church, is the last remnant of a Benedictine priory. More 
beautiful, I think, are its bridge and its old Tudor gate at the 
entrance to the main street. 

I found the Seven Stars neat and comfortable and in the good 
tradition of our inns. Which reminds me that at one point 
of this tour we lunched in a town which I shall not name and 
must not name. We lunched at its principal hotel a hotel 
which from the outside looked the principal hotel of a largish 
town and we were given the kind of treatment which makes 
Americans wonder at our long-suffering. The rooms were 
untidy, the dining-room tablecloth was stained, the carte was 
dog-eared, and the general decors would have sent Mr John 
Fothergill into a swoon or brought him out in one of his rashes 
of urbane but sulphuretted epigram. The food was bad s to 
begin with, and badly presented, and a complaint was treated 
with frozen silence. I would like to warn you against that 
place, but I may not. The law allows a hotel proprietor to 
obtain your money by the pretence of providing you with a 
lunch for your four shillings and then serving you with a meal 

7 1 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

which only a hungry cattle-ranger could eat; but it does not 
allow you, the victim, to circulate a warning to other possible 
victims. 

But as a general rule we found the inns alive to their busi- 
ness. When, with the opening of the roads by the car, the inn 
awoke out of its long sleep through the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century, great things were expected of it by those who 
based their ideas on novels of the coaching days. But it did 
not rise to these great things. It fell half asleep again; not 
through neglect, but through the sickness of prosperity. 
Business came its way without its seeking it business and no 
complaints; for the pioneers of the road, sick from wrestling 
with those early cars, were thankful for any food and accom- 
modation. The landlords found that the sale of third-rate 
goods at first-rate prices was first-rate business. But there arose 
a few people who would not let well alone; who wanted to 
know why an institution which pretended to exist for the 
comfort of travellers could not do its job; why they had to pay 
West-End- Wellow, possessing a maypole on its green. Others are 
Edwinstowe, near to which is the veteran of the forest, the 
Major Oak; Budby, Cuckney, Carburton, and Clipstone; and 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

these and the country about them are of such sweetness that 
often those who have merely stopped to see find themselves a 
week later still there. But to talk of Sherwood leads one only 
into tiresome superlatives; even the poet can carry to us 
nothing of its beauty. Its name is enough to evoke in most 
people all that they know of youth and spring and legend and 
adventure; those whom the name does not move no picture of 
it could move. All true travellers who are in this district and 
have not seen it will surely hear the call of the horns of enchant- 
ment and leave their road to answer it; or forfeit their tide of 
true traveller. 

Northward from Retford you come to Barnby Moor, stand- 
ing on a breezy upland, and if you follow the turn of the road 
past the famous old Bell you will see a signpost directing to 
Blyth. This is a characteristic Nottingham village, but it is 
something more. It has the oldest church of the county and 
one of the oldest inns of England. The earliest portion of the 
church dates from 1088, the tower from 1400, the notable 
feature being the Early Norman nave. It is a work of beauty 
and dignity, and with so many points that students of archi- 
tecture and antiquarians spend many hours in the study of it. 
At one time it formed part of a convent which was destroyed 
at the Dissolution, and portions of the walls may still be seen. 
It stands on a little rise at the head of a tree-lined village green, 
facing a row of red-tiled cottages and the usual two or three 
shops of a village. 

Blyth is quiet, very quiet; a village rich in years, most of 
which have been peaceful. It is away from the great roads, 
tucked in a little enclosed slip of country, and is not worried 
by much traffic; perhaps, since the Dissolution, never has been. 
In these conditions a village can grow old naturally, instead 
of by fits and starts, as others at more exposed points do. It 
can come to its old age and an atmosphere of lace with no 
weariness or lagging, but moving still to the equable rhythms 

J 74 




- 2 




RIEVAULX ABBEY : THE SOUTH TRANSEPT 
Courtesy of L.M.S. Railway 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

of its youth. I stood one morning for some half-hour on its 
green, and it was so still that I could scarcely believe it to be 
inhabited. I saw and heard nothing but birds and one dog; 
and when, in the midst of the silence which had almost drugged 
me into sleep, the door of the butcher's shop snapped open 
and a man came out the movement had the effect of the lifting 
of a curtain and an explosion of carnival life. 

Its inn, the Angel, is a long, two-storied building which, 
from its front, you would guess to be eighteenth-century. But 
it is not that kind of baby. It began its life in 1270, and it has, 
or did bave, as one of its treasures, a bill which it rendered 
to a guest some years ago 1274. To-day it has not grown 
old; it is still in process of growing old, and it carries its 
six hundred odd years with vigour. It is mellow and com- 
fortable, and, living where it does, it stands no risk of being 
hustled into any change out of keeping with its character and 
story. 

Bawtry, the next point on the Great North Road, is a large 
village or small town which is just a part of the road. It 
presents a fresh and pleasant appearance, with strings of shops 
and market-stalls and some dignified late Georgian houses, all 
very trim in their deep red brick and white sashes. Trees line 
the road on either side, and in the mornings it is quietly and 
contentedly busy. Its atmosphere may best be caught if you 
think of Hugh Thomson's illustrations to early Victorian 
books. A place that invites you to stay, and next time I reach it 
I shall accept the invitation and lodge myself at the attractive 
Crown. Its Georgian houses alone give it grace and dignity, 
and it seems odd to us, who know what hideous things builders 
of to-day can do, that people should ever have thought these 
houses ugly. But when they were first put up they were modern 
and despised. Ages seldom know their own beauties and 
blemishes, and a Yorkshire guide-book of the late eighteenth 
century speaks deploringly of those very houses which now 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

we find so comfortable and well proportioned and so pleasing 
to the eye. Writing in 1780, the author says: 

Almost every other house presents us with the antique 
gables and muUioned windows of a former time, mixing with 
the more commodious but less picturesque habitations of the 
present. 

Just the line people are taking to-day in contrasting the 
baroque magnificence of the few remaining old-world 
houses of Park Lane with the more serviceable Dorchester 
Hotel; unaware that a hundred years hence the Dorchester 
Hotel will be a model of the picturesque and the old-world. 

You are now in Yorkshire, but the road, climbing out of the 
valley in which Bawtry lies, offers litde of beauty or interest 
until you reach Selby and turn aside into the East Riding and 
the wolds. Yorkshire can offer you the extremes of ugliness 
and the extremes of beauty, and often within a few miles of 
each other. It has graceless towns and venerable towns; it has 
villages that seem to be fashioned out of dream, and drab 
villages that are mere collections of stone dwellings. You pass 
from flat, drear country into country of shining hills and happy 
valleys. Outside the gates of its black industrial cities, which 
give no hint of anything fairer than themselves > you come upon 
the Delectable Mountains. But not only does it offer this 
extreme beauty sorted with drabness, which the experienced 
traveller knows how to avoid; it offers every variety of beauty 
for every taste. There are the delightful little villages of its 
coast as well as its more famous resorts. There are the wolds 
and the Cleveland Hills of the east. There are the five gorgeous 
dales Wensleydale, Wharfedale, Niddersdale, Ryedale, and 
Swaledale gorgeous in their beauty and touched to gravity by 
their ruined abbeys. Wensleydale has Jervaulx Abbey ; Wharfe- 
dale has Bolton Abbey; Niddersdale has Fountains Abbey; 
Ryedale has Rievaulx Abbey; and Swaledale has Easby Abbey. 

176 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

Between Thirsk and Whitby are the moors, and to the west 
there is the fell scenery of the Pennines* 

Turning into the East Riding, a little south of the wolds, you 
come through a pastoral country to the quiet old town of 
Beverley. Its entrance is not impressive, but when you have 
crossed the large market-square, with its assembly of buses 
and wagons, you come to a wide street of trees and Queen 
Anne houses which gives you the true feeling of Beverley. 
From miles around, its minster towers may be seen, and in the 
past many a man saw them with a gasp of relief. In those days 
Beverley was a sanctuary town, and the sanctuary was not 
limited to the minster doors, but ran within a radius of a mile. 
Once the fugitive was within a mile of the minster hue and cry 
had to cease. He was then safe for thirty days, at the end of 
which time he was branded on the hand and ordered to take 
ship out of the kingdom. The minster was founded in the 
eighth century, but destroyed by the Danes in the ninth. Later 
it was rebuilt, and what we now see is the result of many 
careful restorations. Its chief features are its beautiful Early 
English work and the grandiose Percy tomb. It is not effectively 
set, so many houses having grown round it in place of the 
necessary approach of velvet lawns and aged trees. But it is a 
work of greatness, and within its vast nave one is in touch 
with centuries of humble faith. 

Opposite the large sixteenth-century church of St Mary's, 
which has a finely carved Minstrel's Pillar, stands an interesting 
old inn, the Beverley Arms. Its front is kte Georgian, but it 
dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and its 
interest lies in its kitchen, which is the original kitchen. This 
has attracted many visitors, and, besides being much photo- 
graphed, it has more than once * sat ' to artists. 

From Beverley you may take a breezy journey through the 
cornlands of the wolds to New Malton, and thence to the 
moors. You go through Middleton-on-the- Wolds and North 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Dalton, and then, by winding and sometimes difficult roads, 
you cross Huggate Wold and Thixendale Wold; and, skirt- 
ing Cow Wold, you come to Wharram-le-Street, and so, by 
Langton Wold and past the training-ground and the race- 
course, to New Malton. Between New Malton, Pickering, and 
Helmsley is the country known as Ryedale, full of villages of 
character (some beautiful, some not), of marvellous scenery, 
and with the crowning glory, just beyond Helmsley, of 
Rievaulx Abbey (pronounced ' Rivers ') . 

New Malton, on the Derwent, is the litde capital of its 
district, and it makes a good centre for the full exploration of 
both the wolds and the moors; though York, if you have not 
already exhausted it, makes obviously a richer and a better. 
Or there is Scarborough. The whole of this country is a 
country for the artist, the angler, the archaeologist, the architect, 
the naturalist, and the general lover of beautiful things. In the 
past, so distant that our mental eyes cannot reconstruct it, it 
was well inhabited, and all about it are remains of peoples of 
whom we have no other traces. There are the Roman camps 
and the British camps to be found in other parts, and there are 
also relics of earlier settlements to which no date can be given. 
It offers agreeable short walks or long tramps, and splendid 
car or cycle runs, in which every few minutes bears some 
stimulant for eye and mind. 

Helmsley is a quiet old market town, full of survivals of its 
past; but it cannot hold you long when Rievaulx Abbey is but 
two miles up the lane. The Yorkshire abbeys, more than any 
others, are blessed in their surroundings. They are jewels set 
in Eden. Genius and Nature have met in a beautiful wedding 
of spirit and earth, and, when you stand before them, it is 
scarcely credible that they were the work of human minds 
and human hands. The mere approach to Rievaulx is of a 
loveliness that goes through the eyes to the heart, but to savour 
that loveliness you must make the approach slowly. Rievaulx 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

must not be rushed at by car. Beautiful things, especially 
beautiful dead things, must be approached leisurely and in 
quietness of spirit, so that one * feels ' them in the landscapes 
to which they belong and which they have influenced, before 
one actually sees them. You come to it by a grass terrace set 
high above it and looking across three distances of wooded 
slopes dressed with white ribbons of road. These engage you 
first and fill you with their beauty. Then, as you look down, 
you see the greater beauty. There, in the foreground of the 
hollow, a pearl in a green cup, is the abbey, perhaps more 
spiritually potent in its frozen decay than in its years of active 
being. The guides will tell you that it is a Cistercian abbey 
founded in the twelfth century, and that the remains are choir 
and transept and nave and refectory. But you need know 
nothing of this. You need only descend from the terrace and 
look at it; and not only with your eyes, but with that extra 
sense which has the powers of all the other senses with the 
power of receiving what they cannot receive. Stand or sit 
among its stones an hour, and let it work upon you. Here is 
peace not the peace of the grave, but the living peace that 
feeds and creates: the peace which men imagine when they 
think of heaven, for heaven may not be so far from the earth 
as their dreams have set it. Under such inspiration all that you 
know of beauty and majesty pours upon you: memories of 
noble music, of poetry, of spiritually charged prose, and of 
those phrases which are the earliest we learn and which, though 
many of us cease to accept their meaning, remain with us for 
ever the phrases of the English Prayer Book. Charles Lamb, 
in one of his essays or letters, says that he feels we should 
always say grace before reading Milton. I think we should say 
grace before approaching Rievaulx. I am sure that many 
people, agnostics and believers, say grace on leaving it. Our 
abbeys in ruin possess that power which the living churches 
and cathedrals have long since sacrificed. 

179 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

In the preceding chapter we went from Buckfast Abbey to 
the village of a churchman who was not all that a churchman 
should be. So here, we leave this sacred spot and come, a few 
miles south of Helmsley, to a village with similar association. 
We come to Coxwold, a sweet old village, so prim in appear- 
ance that one wonders how it tolerated such a vicar as the Rev. 
Laurence Sterne; until one remembers that in the eighteenth 
century the less prim a vicar was the more popular he was. 
Shandy Hall, where the Sentimental Journey and parts of 
Tristram Shandy were written, is still there, at the end of the 
main street. It is now in private occupation, but I believe it has 
suffered little alteration since his day. The word ' shandy/ I 
arn told, is a Yorkshire word having the same meaning as a 
Cockney word; but the Yorkshire word is more pleasing than 
the Cockney word, which is ' barmy.' 

Pickering is another good centre for exploring this district. 
It is a dignified, grey-and-red old town, set between the wolds 
and the moors. The ruins of its castle, the home of many 
kings at a time when Scarborough was a hamlet of Pickering, 
may be seen on a little hill above the town, and its church is 
worth a visit for its series of remarkable mural paintings of the 
fifteenth century. These were not discovered till the middle of 
the nineteenth century, when some restoration work revealed 
them. 

The moors are on its north, divided by the five little dales of 
Bilsdale, Bransdale, Farndale, Rosedale, and Newtondale. Of 
these my favourite is Rosedale, with its village of Rosedale 
Abbey and its memory only a memory of an abbey. An 
inspiring car-run or two-day walk may be taken to Whitby 
across these moors, by way of Rosedale, and when I was there 
the summer weather and the spirit of the landscapes told me 
to savour their beauty slowly. I made the two-day walk. I did 
this by way of Cropton, Lastingham, Rosedale, Glaisdale, 
Egton, Grosmont, and Sleights. 

180 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

One climbs to Cropton and is rewarded by a marvellous view 
from its churchyard across Rosedale and its adjacent rnoor. 
From Lastingham one descends through hillsides thick with 
trees, through which one gets glimpses of the little hollow 
holding the village where Bishop Cedd in the seventh century 
founded a monastery. Remains of it may be seen to-day, the 
notable feature being the crypt, which is a church in little. As 
you go down the worn steps, possibly trodden by the Venerable 
Bede, who wrote a history of Lastingham, it presents itself as 
a well of darkness, cold and still and silent. From the damp 
walls and the massive piers, just as they were twelve hundred 
years ago, presses the stillness that follows centuries of sound, 
the coldness that follows the end of religious fire. There is 
nothing here of the sleeping immortality of Rievaulx; only 
dank air, and stones that do not even sigh. The village itself 
has more of piety the piety of happy living; children playing, 
an old woman clipping roses from her garden, men returning 
from the fields to dinner. 

Climbing out of it again, you come to the moor, where a 
streak of path, leading to Rosedale Abbey, makes the only 
break in the purple of the heather. It is not an easy path; at 
times it loses itself in the heather; and it is as well to get clear 
direction at Lastingham. Once or twice I found myself in a 
little jungle of heather, with no sign of path, and only the 
arrival of a blithe and handsome young shepherd saved me 
from returning. There are some disused mines, begun in the 
thirteenth century, at Rosedale Abbey, and the chimneys of 
these are the first indication of the village, which is as sweet as 
its name. A little river, the Seven, runs through the dale, 
chattering over brown stones and diving impulsively into green 
hollows and taking sudden turns round the hills. The meadows 
through which it runs are floors of daisies, clover, coltsfoot, and 
thyme, and you may lie in them for hours and hear nothing but 
skylarks and sheep-bells. Its old cottages, with their gardens 

181 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

and flowered porches, look like delicious sweetmeats rather 
than human habitations; one thinks of the cottage which 
Hansel and Gretel started to eat. And the litde inn at which I 
stayed was fit companion to the cottages, providing a simple 
and exquisite country rneal in the key of summer and in the 
key of Rosedale. 

To Glaisdale Moor I went by a lane thick with ferns and 
foxgloves, and soon was cut off from sight of Rosedale and 
from all apparent concerns of men. My only company were 
rustlings in the hedge, the whirr of wings above, the tinkling 
of litde becks, and bees among the snapdragons. The air of 
the moor was as sharp as a blade and as bright as crystal. Here 
and there half-wild sheep with fierce horns came to inspect me 
and gravely retreated into nowhere, as the really wild catde 
of Chillingham, in Northumberland, do on the approach of a 
human ; but apart from that I was alone. Only the road before 
me and the blue sky above me, as Pagliacci's Prologue says. 

Then, after an hour's steady walking, I noticed that the moor 
was sloping downward, and soon I came into a road which 
wound through wooded land and past large estates. In the 
hedges and ditches on either side the tall foxglove ran thick, 
mixed with banks of honeysuckle, and at points one could see 
warm farms enclosed in litde hollows. This is the England of 
the dales, passionate and tender, and touched with that pathos 
which is the distinction of English scenery. Soon the road 
entered the valley of the Esk, and I came to a spot known to 
all Northern anglers Egton Bridge, where the trees cluster like 
green towers. Nature has worked fastidiously here, with clean 
lines of water and noble curves of bank and branch. With 
bridge and roofs, smooth lawns and farms, and white stepping- 
stones over the quieter points of the river, man has completed 
the picture she began. 

Grosmont and Sleights are not, as I remember them, villages 
of much charm, but the road between the pastures and the 

182 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

moors which links them is pleasant enough. At Sleights it joins 
the main road to Whitby, and follows the Esk right to the sea, 
offering on the way many a lovely glen and many a backwater. 
It has not, of course, the rural peace of the by-roads, but after 
a day's solitude one is willing to exchange this for a little of 
the commerce of men, and to welcome the distant view of the 
great abbey on the cliff. 

Whitby is not one of those towns that inspire love at first 
sight, but if you live with it for a week it will hold you more 
closely than many candidly dignified towns. It sits back quietly 
like an old sailor, whose reticence is a veil to the gleam of past 
doings. Like an old sailor, too, it benevolently surveys the 
holiday-makers in their child-play on the sea, which here has 
been such frequent setting for nights of storm and shipwreck. 
The sands to-day know litde more excitement than the frivolity 
of the bathing-tent and the cries of the hawker, and the cliff- 
top where women once stood with eyes straining out to the 
waters is now a trysting-place. The Esk, on its way to the sea, 
definitely divides the town in two the West Cliff, as is usual 
in seaside towns, holding the smart hotels and the new houses, 
and the East and harbour side, holding the true Whitby. The 
old, curving quay, with its ever-wheeling gulls over the heads 
of the fishwives, who sell their stock as it comes ashore, framed 
against the clustering roofs and the ruined abbey, is one of the 
best-known scenes of the North, and one does not quickly tire 
of it. In the old alleys, narrow and dark, twisting and steep, 
one finds the old Whitby still living: leather-faced men and 
dark women; old cottages with doorways of ships' timbers; 
litde yards, shadowy and odorous. 

It is a coast that has known the throb of human movement 
for many centuries. Excavations upon the ancient sites have 
discovered many of the jet ornaments and weapons of the 
Romans who fortified it, and jet is still a small local industry. 
From those times, through the Middle Ages, when it was in 

183 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

demand for the working of spells., it went on up to the late 
nineteenth century, when every middle-class woman had some 
kind of jet ornament among her personal bric-a-brac, and when 
the value of the yearly output reached many thousands of 
pounds. To-day, though scarcely half a hundred people are 
engaged in it, it still finds a public among the visitors. 

To reach the abbey from the harbour one goes through a 
tangle of alleys known as the Cragg, and climbs a long stair- 
case, high above the roofs of the cottages, into a smart and 
blowing air. St Hilda's Abbey is again different in its atmos- 
phere from others; something of the fierce austerity of the 
seventh-century princess-abbess lingers here. St Hilda's was 
not only a religious house, but a retiring place of Christian 
families and a centre of learning known throughout Europe. 
On this grassy summit, on a certain morning, an assembly of 
monks and learned men listened to the songs of the cowherd 
Caedmon, who, in his humble old age, while sleeping with the 
beasts he tended, received the spirit of God and of poetry; and 
from him they learned. In the ninth century the abbey was 
destroyed by the Danes, who, in return, founded the port of 
Whitby; but in the eleventh century it was rebuilt, and con- 
tinued to grow until the thirteenth. Then trouble came to it: 
grants of land and money ceased, and it fell into debt, and so 
continued until the Dissolution, when it was dismantled and 
left to the wind and the weather. The lead from the roof was 
used for the adjoining church of St Mary's, and the bells were 
sold. A legend says that upon a calm morning a boat set out 
for London with the bells, and off the Black Nab, in the sight 
of the sorrowing monks,, she foundered and sank, with bells 
and hands. And, of course, at the turn of the tide, the bells 
may still be heard. 

The most prosperous period of Whitby's history was the 
eighteenth century, when it was a whaling centre and its ships 
were known on all the seas. Captain Cook, who was born at 

184 




DURHAM CATHEDRAL 

From the opposite bank of the river Wear. 

Photo Will F. Taylor 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

Marton, in the Cleveland Hills, had close associations with 
Whitby, and sailed in three Whitby ships; and it was held that 
none were stronger. His first voyage, as a hand, was made in 
the oddly named Free Love. In the public library may be seen 
a table of cedar-wood made from the timber brought by him 
from Queensland; in Grape Lane is the little house where he 
was apprentice, and in Church Street is the White Horse and 
Griffin, where he sometimes spent an hour. Two other 
explorers are associated with the town the Scoresbys, father 
and son, born at Crop ton. The son sailed the Arctic Circle with 
his father when he was nine years old, and continued with the 
sea until middle age, when he turned to the Church and became 
Vicar of Bradford. He was the author of over ninety books 
and pamphlets and founder of a floating church, an old man- 
o'-war which accommodated a congregation of a thousand. 
When Whitby's harbour became silted, and the country called 
for larger ships than it could build, its great days declined. It 
still flourishes in its fisheries, but the high period described in 
Miss Storm Jameson's fine novel The Lovely Ship, when the 
hammers made music all day in the shipyards and Whitby was 
one of the first of English ports, is gone. 

Do young readers of to-day know those once popular novels 
The Haven under the Hill and Between the Heather and the 
Northern Sea, or the name of their author, Mary Linskill? She 
was born in Whitby, of a poor family, and apprenticed to a 
milliner, but took to shopkeeping and novel-writing. She died 
in 1891. Her story and temperament and the quality of her 
work have an echo in a later author to whom fame and money 
came too late Mary Webb. Mary Linskill wrote in the 
intervals of serving the customers of her little provision-shop 
in Church Street; Mary Webb wrote in the intervals of 
domestic duties and the care of any poor people who happened 
to be around her. Both had genius, " though the later Mary's 
was of much higher quality. Both lived quiet, retiring lives; 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

both died as quietly as they had lived; and both received the 
approbation of a Prime Minister. On Mary Linskill's only visit 
to London she was entertained by Gladstone, as a mark of his 
admiration; and the larger public heard of Mary Webb only 
through the introduction of Mr Stanley Baldwin. Outside 
Whitby> Mary Linskill is doubtless forgotten, but Whitby has 
remembered her by naming the yard in which she was born 
Linskill Square. 

Picking up the Great North Road at Darlington, we may 
skip over that town and over the road between it and Durham 
City. Durham County is not without its beauties, but they do 
not grace its eastern half, and the towns, though of interest, are 
somewhat forbidding. They are towns of iron, strong but 
bleak. Durharri City itself, but for its cathedral and castle, 
makes little invitation, though just outside it, up the Wear, you 
come upon delightful river scenery. So frigid is it that I think 
the more impressive way of seeing both cathedral and castle is 
to avoid the city and see them from a distance. Actually visit- 
ing them will give you intimate points of interest if you are a 
cathedral student, but if you ask no more than to be moved by 
beauty you must get away from them. Go along the Wear by 
boat, upstream, or, if you arc in the city, go out on the Prebend's 
Bridge, or even the shabby Framwellgate Bridge. You will 
then not see the city. Your eyes will be drawn upward to 
where, detached from the city, an immensity of stone rears 
itself on an immensity of rock, with the river almost enclosing 
them. Seen thus, dreaming on the heights, their full majesty is 
revealed, to remain with you in all the beauty of a half- 
remembered song; and I feel that they were meant to be seen 
thus. As the artist designs his picture to be seen, not at six 
inches* distance, but at so many feet' or yards, so these artists 
designed their cathedral and casdc; and for such an effect the 
work is supreme among all similar work in England. No other 

186 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

cathedral has such a site and such surroundings; even the hard 
and graceless city at its feet is a tributary to its glory; and the 
winding river far below, with its high banks and hanging 
woods, finishes a picture in which no artist can find anything 
to correct. Approach it, and you are apt to lose the magnificence 
of the whole in some petty detail, such as choir or chapel. You 
will exchange a vision for a fact, and only death can give you a 
greater shock than that. 

The road between Durham and Newcasde, and for some 
miles beyond, may also be skipped, but from Morpeth onward 
there are good country and fine coast. We are now in 
Northumberland, and are aware of a change from purely 
English scenery. We are nearing the Border, and there is a 
feeling of Scotland in the landscape, and hints of Scotland in 
the many casdes and peels and other old defences against the 
ruthless invader. Northumberland, indeed, seems by all 
physical features to belong to Scotland, and if borders were 
natural and human the England-Scotland border, I think, 
would be a line at the south of Northumberland the South 
Tyne and Hadrian's Wall, not the Cheviots and the Tweed. 
The scenery is not quite Scotland, but it is not pure England; 
it is a mellow Scotland or a stern England. One catches in 
other matters a memory of the time when this was a debatable 
land. The place-names have a Scots flavour; some of the local 
terms are half Scots; and the people, in face and figure, suggest 
something of Scodand. (I hope * Scots * is right; I am never 
sure when to use ' Scots,* ' Scottish,' or * Scotch.') A Scot 
might say that Northumbrian speech is nowhere near the 
Doric, but to a Southerner it is as close as makes no difference 
to his ear. The old Northumbrian ballads are written in what 
seems a variant of the Scots dialect; the generic term for a 
pitman is * Geordie,' a Scots diminutive; and a stream is a 
'burn* and a small-holding a 'shieling' both Scots terms. 
Cullercoats, Heiferlaw, Flodden, Kirkwhelpington, Wark, 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Lindisfarne, Kirknewton, Hamburgh, Dunstanburgh these 
have a distinct Scots (Scottish, Scotch?) flavour. But, as 
political developments have tacked it on to England, Northum- 
berland must be considered English; and what is Scodand's 
loss is our gain, since it is a county rich in scenery, in history, 
and in venerable memorials. It is markedly Scottish in the 
characteristics and tendencies of its sons of the past and 
the present. It has produced but one true poet Swinburne 
(and he was born in London) ; no novelist and no musician. 
Of notable artists it has given us only two Bewick and 
Birket Foster. But, like Scotland, it has given us in great 
numbers saints, warriors, lawyers, scholars, adventurers, and 
engineers; and the face of the country is in harmony with its 
people. 

Do not expect here any l pretty * villages. All along its rivers 
and on its moors you will find scores of pleasant villages, but 
their note is character and strength, not charm. The North- 
umbrian village is as different from the Yorkshire village as the 
Dorset village is from the Kentish village, or the general English 
village from the Irish. Of Warkworth, Mitfbrd, Otterburn, 
Bellingham, Sirnonburn, Chollerford, and a few others I may 
have something to say later. All of them are picturesque, but 
not in the soft, easygoing way of the South. For the moment, 
before we go northward, let me direct you to three litde places 
which have the interest of association. They are on the South 
Tyne, some twelve miles from Newcasde Wylam, Cherry- 
burn, and Ovingham. The first was the birthplace of George 
Stephenson, whose cottage, standing appropriately by the 
railway, is still there; the second and third are the birthplace 
and the resting-place of the litde master of the woodcut, 
Thomas Bewick. At Ovingham, even to-day, you may note 
many a fragment of scene which was the inspiration of one or 
another of his exquisite tail-pieces. On the flat gravestones of 
the churchyard he made his first essays in drawing (like Birket 

188 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

Foster, he was self-taught), and many a time the church 
appears in the miniature scenes which he delighted to draw. 
In size it is somewhat beyond the average village church, but 
Ovingham is an ancient spot, and a church, portions of which 
are incorporated in the present building, stood here before the 
Conquest. Against the wall of the church, in a little enclosed 
plot, is his tomb, and a tablet on the wall makes the simple 
announcement " The burial-place of Thomas Bewick, 
engraver, of Newcasde." In the hundred-odd years since his 
death the village has changed but little, and is almost as retired 
now as in the days when he walked here twice weekly from 
Newcastle to see his people. He was the complete country- 
man, never happy away from his native village. A town for 
him was merely a place where one worked, and he cared 
nothing for drawing-rooms and company. He wanted only 
trees and fields and streams, and did not ask them to be beauti- 
ful. Although he is known by his Birds, and his Gay's and 
jEsop's Fables and his Quadrupeds, his secret fame rests on 
those tail-pieces in which he gave full play to his fancy and his 
observation. These were his real work, and that they were 
near to his heart is proved by a remark quoted by Austin 
Dobson in his essay on Bewick. In his last hours, when his 
mind was fading and returning, he was observed, in a clear 
moment, to be smiling, and was asked what he was thinking 
of. His answer was that he had been thinking of new subjects 
for tail-pieces. 

Morpeth makes a good centre, but is not lovable for itself 
alone. It has some remains of an old chapel and a casde, a 
clock-tower from which curfew is rung each night, and a 
comfortable hotel. It was market-day when I was last there, 
and in the smoking-room of the hotel I found myself in a 
crowd of the largest human creatures I have seen gathered in 
one place. Farming, we are told, is a dying industry, but the 
height and girth and organ voices of Northumbrian farmers 

189 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

suggest that it is more vital in its decay than other industries 
in their flower. 

It is the surrounding country, rather than Morpeth itself, 
that draws visitors. Many delightful walks may be taken along 
the banks of its river, the Wansbeck, or in the Vale of 
Stannington, between the Wansbeck and the Blyth. One, a 
mere two miles through woods or meadows, with the river 
bubbling alongside, brings you to the river-village of Mitfbrd. 
It is beautifully set, arnid luscious country, and it is very old; 
the family from whom it takes its name has been in constant 
occupation here since Norman days. Memorials of this occupa- 
tion may be seen in three still existing homes of the family, 
representing three different styles of living. On a little hill are 
the ruins of their casde. At another point of the village is 
their manor-house. And on another little hill is their present 
mansion. Prominent members of this family were the historian 
of Greece; his brother, who became Lord Redcsdale; Captain 
Meadows Taylor, whose Confessions of a Thug is a minor 
classic; the author of Our Village, a distant connexion; and 
one unfortunate who wrote, among other things, The Adven- 
tures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy. 

William Howitt, in his Visits, tells the story of this unfortu- 
nate, and it is the more poignant when you think of the lovely 
valley and the stately home from which he came, and the 
serenity and grace of the earliest scenes he knew. But he was 
not a Bewick; fields and streams were not for him; and he 
went down and down to lower depths even than the London 
beggars. Howitt gives an extract from a register of events in 
Northumberland which puts the tragedy in outline: 

December, 1831, died in St Giles' Workhouse, London, Mr 
John Mitfbrd. He was born at Mitfbrd Castle, in Northumber- 
land; had served as a sub-officer under Hood and Nelson, and 
was related to the noble family of Redesdale. 

190 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

Further details given by Howitt show that after Mitford left 
the Navy he lived mainly as a sponger, and towards the end 
of his life he slept out in the parks when he had not the neces- 
sary threepence for a St Giles doss-house. During those years 
his appearance was so utterly ragged and offensive that even the 
regular users of these places shunned his company. Many 
efforts were made by his family to reclaim him, but he would 
not be reclaimed. The then Lord Redesdale was always ready 
to support him in decency, but he objected to the decency part 
of it; and when his lordship provided him with clothes, to 
help him to present a respectable appearance, the clothes were 
sold for gin. While he was writing Johnny Newcome the 
publisher gave him a shilling a day. He wrote it on the 
publisher's premises, and at night slept in Bayswater fields on 
a self-made bed of grass, and washed himself and his shirt 
(sometimes) in the pond. His day's food was one meal of 
bread and cheese; the rest of the allowance went on gin. One 
of the Seven Dials publishers, for whom he did all sorts of 
hack-work, had to keep him in a cellar furnished only with 
table and chair and a bottle of gin to get any work out of him, 
and when no more gin was forthcoming he once or twice went 
out in winter and exchanged his coat and shoes for a bottle. 
Many a poet has gone to the dogs, but none so completely as 
Jack Mitford. Many a poet has fallen, but none had so far to 
fall. Many an individual story reverses the log-cabin-to- White- 
House story; but Mitford's fall was deeper. He went far below 
the log cabin from Northumbrian casde to the gutters of St 
Giles. 

Let us turn again to the thatched cottages and the flowers 
and the brown river and the wild coast. Let us go to Wark- 
worth, on the winding and happily named Coquet, with woods 
on one side and, a mile or so on the other, the sea. The road 
passes through a gentler country than one finds in the western 
parts of the county. Being near the coast, it is mainly flat, 

191 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

with little rises, and has some concern with minerals, but 
generally with agriculture. If you are travelling by car or bus, 
and it should be market-day in the district, you will have 
intimate evidence of this. In the narrow lanes which you must 
take to reach the coast road you will be met every five minutes 
or so by a flock of sheep or a dozen cattle, each member having 
a different mind as to the way to get round you, and most of 
them, on the way round, trying to charge the radiator or 
thrusting horns into the car. 

Warkworth's principal feature is its ruined casde, standing 
on a mound, which again stands on the top of a hill its main 
street. But castles and casde ruins are as frequent in North- 
umberland as hop-fields in Kent (the Scots are responsible for 
this) ; and if we stop to look at all we come to we shall have to 
ignore every other interest. I will only say that Warkworth's 
is not only instructive as a specimen of early domestic building, 
and perhaps unique in its course of water-pipes, but beautiful; 
though Shakespeare (The Second Part of Henry the Fourth^ 
Induction) thought otherwise. Just outside the village, on 
the river, is the well-preserved relic of the fourteenth-century 
Hermitage of that Bertram of Bothal who, as the Percy ballad 
tells, by accident slew his lady and her brother, thinking she 
was being carried off by a stranger, when her brother was 
actually rescuing her from the fortress where she was detained. 
In remorse he retired from the world and built himself this 
hermitage. 

The village itself is a not very happy blend of old and new, 
but, like Morpeth, its outskirts, along the Coquet or north- 
ward, are delightful quiet, high-hedged roads going up to 
little eminences and down into thick, darkling glades. It is 
pleasant all the way to Alnmouth, and Alnmouth is a typical 
Northumbrian coast resort of the smaller kind. You see it 
long before you reach it, and for a mile or so you approach it 
over sandy wastes by the twisting estuary of its river, the Aln. 

192 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

It offers river scenery, seascapes, an important golf-course, and 
a town of old stone houses which look as though they have 
withstood centuries of north-eastern tempests and can with- 
stand centuries more. In any time but summer it has a sad, 
deserted air, but in summer it returns to life and has its regular 
patrons who come year after year, as others do to the little 
places on this coast Cullercoats, Newbiggin, Amble, Bead- 
nell, Bamburgh, Budle, Craster, Howick, Sea Houses, North 
Sunderland, Goswick, Boulmer, Hauxley, Cresswell. Most 
of these are fishing villages, of the kind sought and loved by 
those who like holidays of rest and quiet, but they are little 
known outside the North, and those who frequent them are 
not anxious to make them known. Fame does to most places 
what it does to most people. Izaak Walton gave sound advice 
in the closing sentence of his book, quoted from the Thessa- 
lonian epistle " Study to be quiet.'* Only in quietness can 
places, as well as people, came to their natural maturity, and 
these places have not allowed themselves to be hustled or 
artificially developed. They live their own lives, and if you 
like to go and share it you may; but to go to them and expect 
them to adapt themselves to a different way of life would be 
not only useless, but an exhibition of gross manners as gross 
as taking in a botde of wine when you are dining with poor 
people who are going to give you beer. If you don't know them 
you might like to try one of them for your next English holiday 
with family. They have splendid sands for the children, and 
nothing to distract yourself from the duty of idleness save that 
other idleness, fishing. But don't say I told you about them, 
or their regular patrons might write me nasty letters. 

About eight miles inland is Alnwick, a hillside town of cold, 
iron spirit, famous only for its castle. It is the little capital of 
this part of the county, and is such a mass of old houses that 
those interested in such things are distracted in their attention 
to one by thought of the twenty others close at hand. Like 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

most castle towns in which the castle is still occupied, it seems 
to be numbed by the mere presence of the castle. At any hour 
of the day it looks half dead; a mere annexe to the castle, 
breathing, it seems, by permission of the castle. I have made 
two brief calls at it, and on neither occasion did I perceive in 
the town itself anything but the stony feeling that one per- 
ceives in mining towns. On the second visit I found one touch 
of warmth at the inn where I stopped for lunch, but it did not 
come from Alnwick; it came from the inn's landlady, who was 
a Londoner and was looking for the time when she could go 
back. Few people fall in love with Alnwick, and many people 
with whom I have spoken of it actively dislike it. Which is 
a proof, I think, that, whatever it lacks, it doesn't lack 
character. 

Going northward, and downward, from Alnwick, you cross 
the ducal bridge over the Aln, and come, by a continuous 
ascent, to moor country, with little to break it save the distant 
slopes of the Cheviots and Heiferlaw Tower, an old peel or 
defence work. From here it is an almost straight road through 
Scotch heather to Belfbrd, with only four little hamlets clothing 
its bareness. Belford is a quiet old village which, like many 
another old village, sets the stranger wondering whether its 
inhabitants are all of independent means or how they support 
themselves what they do and when they do it. It has a neat 
old inn and one or two shops that seem to belong to Cranford\ 
and just outside it you have a view over Budle Bay, with Holy 
Island to the north, and to the east the tower of Bamburgn 
Castle and a dark smudge, which is the Fame Islands. Turn- 
ing east (which you have to do, because no Northumbrian 
will let you rest until you have seen Bamburgh Castle), you 
leave the moorland and come to peaceful pastoral country 
dotted with sturdy old farmhouses. Bamburgh itself is only 
another village with a castle; but a pleasant village, and what a 
castle! Like Boston Stump, the castle may be seen everywhere 

194 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

about here far out at sea and from any hillside within miles; 
a huge pile on a huge basaltic mount. Day after day it is so 
much within your view that you become tired of it. Its age is 
at least fourteen hundred years, and it is said to have been the 
Joyous Gard of Lancelot, which is also said of Alnwick and 
of many another northern castle. Its situation is remarkable 
not only for strength, but for beauty. The scene all round is of 
light but definite colouring yellow sand, blue sky, brown 
rocks, cornfields, meadows, and a sea constantly alive with all 
colours and shades. 

The story of its long life has been told many times, and much 
of that story is necessarily of ferocity and bloodshed; but it has 
come now to times of peace. In the early nineteenth century it 
was fitted up as a charitable trust (part of the Lord Crewe 
charities), and within its walls were established a corn- 
chandler's shop, a grocery stores, and a chemist's, which sold 
supplies to the poorer villagers at cost price; a free infirmary, 
and a library of which anybody within ten miles of Bam- 
burgh could become a life member on payment of half a 
crown. There was also a school for the village children and a 
home for twenty orphan girls. A pleasant change from its 
sword and rapine and dungeon life. In addition to all this, 
other parts of the castle were equipped for sea service. There 
were furnished sitting-rooms and bedrooms for shipwrecked 
sailors to the number of thirty; store-rooms where stocks from 
wrecked vessels were kept for the space of a year awaiting 
claimants; a mortuary for bodies recovered from the sea, which 
were buried in the village church at the expense of the charity; 
and all the necessary tackle for raising sunken vessels or haul- 
ing stranded vessels off the rocks. A constant look-out, day 
and night, was kept from the castle tower for signs of ships in 
distress, and in times of storm two men of the staff patrolled 
the coast in cither direction. To-day the castle is private 
property. 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

The Fame Islands^ seventeen in number, lie just off the 
coast, and are now inhabited only by birds, for whom they 
are kept as a sanctuary. They are of brown basalt, and make 
a striking picture, whether seen from the coast, from Holy 
Island, or from the sea. The birds have their regular gathering 
times in the spring, and they come in multitudes so thick that 
often no rock can be seen only a mass of white and grey or 
brown and silver. They are chiefly gull, cormorant, guillemot, 
puffin, tern, eider duck, plover, heron, lapwing, and sea- 
swallow. Their gathering is one of the sights of the northern 
coast, and the screaming and chattering and the tempest of 
beating wings is something to remember. In the little dales 
of the islands the chief animal life is white rabbits, and in the 
waters around one may see seals at play. Up to the nineteenth 
century the eggs of these various birds were collected and 
marketed, and William Howitt says that the gulls' eggs were 
considered " a breakfast luxury by many wealthy families," 
while the eggs of the others were used for puddings. No eggs 
are collected now; the birds are left completely free to live and 
breed in natural wildness. 

Two great names stand out of the story of the Fame Islands 
that of St Cuthbert, who used them as a place of retirement, 
and died there; and that of another. But St Cuthbert, with all 
his learning and piety, and all his beautiful deeds, and his her- 
mit's cell on the House Island, made them famous only among 
the religious. He did not make them famous through the 
greater part of the world. That was done by the other a girl 
of twenty-three. 

Her story affords an interesting study of the public imagina- 
tion. Why one particular rescue of the survivors of a broken 
ship, out of the many that were happening every week on our 
coasts, should have been seized on, and should have remained 
in public memory nearly a century, is one of those mysteries 
that neither psychologists nor astrologers can expound. Ship- 

196 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

wreck was a more frequent event then than now; heroic deeds 
were as common as they always were; and lighthouse-keepers 
and their families were constantly doing their duty. If the 
mystery turns on a girl going out to the rescue well, girls 
have gone out in rescue boats before and since; and to this 
particular girl it was no uncommon event. There must have 
been some nice co-ordination of dull time, no news, lack of 
popular heroes and heroines, a smart fellow who made a song 
about it with a good tune, a public that hadn't had a good song 
for some time, and the girl's name. Had Grace Darling's 
name been Sally Biggs, or had she performed her truly gallant 
act at any other time, the act might have been noted and 
praised, and would certainly have been forgotten. But she 
performed it in the right place at the right time, and she had 
the right name for a modest heroine. There are occasions of 
heroic deeds when the public will pay no attention to them; it 
hears of them and turns to its own affairs. And there are 
occasions when it goes crazy over the kind of thing that a 
month ago it ignored. 

When, in September 1838, the For far shire ran on to the 
Staple Islands or rocks and broke in two, and forty of its 
members perished, the remaining nine being taken off by the 
keeper of the Longstone lighthouse and his daughter, the news 
spread over England and setded in every mind it touched. The 
country became as hysterical about that daughter as it does 
to-day about film stars, who may have learned from her story 
the value of a euphonious name. And poor Grace Darling, 
who, her father told William Hewitt, had made the same f(ind 
of rescue many times before., found herself suddenly the victim 
of a curiosity-hunting mob. Rich county people swooped down 
upon her, and travellers in other parts of the country went out 
of their way to visit the northern coast and look at this side- 
show. She was invited to great houses by notoriety hounds. 
The story "went round the world. Europeans came to see her, 

197 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

from as far as Russia, and those who couldn't come com- 
missioned others to bring them home pieces of the rock on 
which she lived. Madam Greta Garbo may be interested to 
learn that even a lighthouse, with a tempestuous crossing 
between it and the coast, is no defence for a modest person. 
For nearly a year after the event two steamers were running 
regularly from the coast to the lighthouse, taking a full load 
of sightseers each trip and filling every story of the lighthouse 
with their loads. The Duke of Northumberland summoned 
Grace and her father to the castle and presented her with a gold 
watch; the Royal Humane Society presented her with a certi- 
ficate and a silver teapot; dozens of cranks proposed marriage; 
the public subscribed a sum of joo> her portrait was painted 
and hung; and a London theatre-manager offered her 120 
a week to appear at the Adelphi in a shipwreck scene. 

None of this nonsense had the slightest effect upon this noble 
girl, except possibly that of private smiles with her father. She 
refused all offers to leave the lighthouse; she politely but firmly 
refused all suggestions of exploitation; and after a few weeks 
she refused even to appear in the lower rooms of the lighthouse, 
and visitors made their journey for nothing. She kept in retire- 
ment, and was as surprised as Madam Garbo when the fact of 
her keeping in retirement was as much talked about as the 
fact of her journey through the storm. William Howitt has 
left a description of his meeting with her which shows her, in 
other matters than heroism, as of finer cast than those who em- 
barrassed her by their noise about what was to her an incident 
of duty: 

Grace Darling is as perfect a realisation of a Jeannie Deans 
in an English form as it is possible for a woman to be. She is 
not like any of the portraits of her. She is a little, simple, 
modest young woman, I should say of five or six and twenty. 
She is neither tall nor handsome; but she has the most gentle, 
quiet, amiable look, and the sweetest smile that I ever saw. You 

108 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

see that she is a thoroughly good creature; and that under her 
modest exterior lies a spirit capable of the most exalted devotion 
a devotion so entire that daring is not so much a quality of 
her nature, as that the most perfect sympathy with suffering, or 
endangered humanity, swallows up and annihilates everything 
like fear or self-considerationputs out, in fact, every sentiment 
but itself. The action that she performed was so natural, and to 
her so necessary, that it would be the most impossible of things 
to convince her that she did anything extraordinary. . . . She 
shuns public notice, and is troubled at the visits of the curious. 

I think the neatest comment on the world's uproar is the 
entry made by William Darling in his log on the morning of 
the rescue: " Forfarshire totally wrecked on Staples. Nine per- 
sons held on to the rock and were rescued by the Darlings." 

Grace was born in Bamburgh, and died there of consump- 
tion, at the age of twenty-seven, four years after her gallant 
deed. In the litde church you may see her sculptured tomb, 
with an oar at the side; and in the churchyard is another 
memorial. Both of them were splendidly earned, not by one 
solitary act, but by many unrecorded instances of selfless con- 
cern with what she saw to be her duty. 

North of the Fames is the island of Lindisfarne, known, 
through St Cuthbert, as Holy Isle. It may be reached by turn- 
ing off the Great North Road at a point some eight miles be- 
yond Belford, where a cross-road, marked by a litde inn, leads 
to Beal. But for a picturesque route to Beal the train is better, 
since the railway, from Alnwick to Berwick, runs close to the 
coast, while the road runs some distance from it. From Beal 
one may go to it at low tide across the sands, as one goes to 
St Michael's Mount. One may walk it or take a car. The 
passage (about three miles) goes between palisades marking 
the firm sand from the quicksand, and the safe time is within 
two hours after ebb. Should a traveller, cutting the time too 

199 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

fine, be caught by the inrush he need not drown, as scores of 
travellers did in the past. At intervals along the route are 
raised embrasures, on which he may rest in safety until the 
turn of the tide or until a boat can take him off. 

In the long past, before the Normans, it was the centre of 
Northern Christianity, if not of all English Christianity. Its 
monastery was founded by Aiden, of the great settlement of 
lona, but was made famous by the shepherd monk St Cuthbert, 
who was first its prior and later its bishop. He was of the true 
saints, humble and utterly unworldly. The offices he held he 
took with reluctance; they had to be forced upon him, that of 
bishop being taken only after a personal visit from Eagfrith, 
King of Northumbria, to his hermitage on the Fames. Even 
when he was prior he refused to wear the distinctive robes of 
a prior, and continued to perform his duties in the plain garb 
of a monk. But his simplicity was not permitted to follow 
him in death: his embalmed body was wrapped in many layers 
of the costliest cloth of gold and purple, and in the coffin were 
placed many emblems of gold and silver and rare missals. He 
died A.D. 687, and for two hundred years his sacred remains 
rested under the church of that little island. But then came 
the Danes, and the body was subjected to a series of cross- 
country journeys. Whatever else the monks left or surrendered, 
they would not leave the body of St Cuthbert, When they fled 
from the island they carried it with them across the North, 
with the intention of finding a place for it and themselves in 
Ireland. Defeated in this, they carried it to Durham and de- 
posited it at Chester-le-Street. There, through more than one 
lifetime, it remained, when further danger compelled its re- 
moval, and it found a resting-place at Ripon. As things became 
quieter an attempt was made to carry it again to Chester-le- 
Street, but the carriers received divine orders, according to 
legend, to follow a cow and to place the body where the cow 
stopped. The cow stopped at Durham, and there a little chapel 

200 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

was built around the remains. But it was still not given peace. 
After the Danes came the Normans, and the monks once again 
packed up and carried the body to its original resting-place on 
Lindisfarne. Some years later it found final peace. It was 
carried again from Lindisfarne to Durham, and there it now 
rests. 

Two relics of those days remain: the beautiful illuminated 
manuscript the Lindisfarne Gospels, made by the monks in 
Cuthbert's time, and now in the British Museum; and a manu- 
script of one of the gospels which was taken from the coffin in 
the twelfth century, and is now in one of the Roman Catholic 
colleges. 

To-day the island is a little community of less than a 
thousand souls, most of whom are engaged in fishery and 
farming. Rocky as it is, it has some fertile valleys and many 
species of beautiful flowers, and the people seem contented 
enough. Perhaps an island breeds contentment; one seldom 
hears of island people yearning for the mainland; and the 
handful of people who inhabit the little English islands 
Lundy, off Bidefbrd, Bardsey, off North Wales, Ramsey, off 
Pembrokeshire, Caldy, in Carmarthen Bay, and Walney, off 
Morecambe seem to live and die there. These little com- 
munities (there is a King of Bardsey and there was a King 
of Lundy) lead a life of their own; English, yet strange Eng- 
lish; on the English map, yet less visited by the English than 
the Balearic or Canary Islands. Holy Island gets a few visitors 
to see the ruins of the Benedictine priory and the castle; and 
it gets others, of the sort who can enjoy a very quiet holiday. 
It has a village and an interesting little inn, and, though it is 
no more than three miles long and two miles wide, it has 
enough natural and unexploited beauty to make an island 
holiday agreeable to those with island minds. The Priory ruins 
are indeed beautiful. The Priory was modelled on Dur- 
ham Cathedral, and the portions that remain bear a close 

201 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

resemblance to similar portions of Durham. But their chief 
beauty rests in their situation far from the noise of man and 
right against the angry noise of the sea and in the memory 
of the lonely company whose hands laid their stones. The 
castle on the hill, which crowns the whole, as at St Michael's 
Mount and Mont Saint-Michel, was built about the middle of 
the sixteenth century for national defence against the Scots, 
and for foundation the stones of the old priory were used. Until 
one begins to travel about England one does not realize how 
the Civil War carried its violence into the most obscure corners 
of the country. I had not thought that it affected the far north, 
and certainly did not know that this island was concerned in 
it. But it was. The casde was manned by the royalist forces, 
who were driven out, just before Marston Moor, by the Crom- 
well men. 

The island is so set that the views of it and from it are 
equally beautiful. Seen from the mainland in the morning 
sun, it recalls all the legends of all the islands you have heard 
of. Its life was made by mystics, and much of the force of their 
dreamings remains to tinge its everyday life of these years. But 
in its physical aspect alone it affects you with a little thrill. At 
summer-time the visibility in these parts is crystal. Colour is 
as fresh, and things stand out as clearly, as if they had been 
newly made that morning. The air has a living zest; breath- 
ing it is like drinking actual colour; and the island, lying along 
the sea with the casde rising out of it, seems, under the en- 
chantment of the morning, one of the Islands of the Blest. It 
invites you to visit it, but you feel that, like them, it may vanish 
into cloud before you can reach it. Sometimes, in autumn, it 
does vanish. It may be visible at eleven o'clock, and five 
minutes later you can see no sign of it; only sea and a white 
vapour. It may be visible three miles away, and invisible 
within half a mile. 

From the top of its casde you have a clear and long-extended 

202 



THE SPINE OF ENGLAND 

view of that stretch of the Northumbrian coast from Bam- 
burgh to Berwick, with Bamburgh Castle well defined. It is 
a coast stern and cold to the eye, but with gracious moods; not 
so wholly fierce as the far Cornish edge. Its people are like their 
coast. They display no warmth, and they are not talkative, 
but they have kindly manners and friendly eyes; and when 
you have lived some time among them you find their quiet 
dignity and courtesy as agreeable as the more effusive feeling 
of the South. I remember taking tea at a little inn near the 
coast, in circumstances which illustrate their attitude. Enter- 
ing the inn, we went into a sort of parlour, and asked if we 
might have tea. We expected that it would be served in the 
little parlour, but, instead, we were bidden to " Come along 
in," and were led down a long stone passage into an old-style 
kitchen. We saw a large range with a coal fire and a ketde 
hanging above it by a chain; an oak ingle seat, big enough to 
take six people; a large kitchen table; and, on a series of wires 
strung across the rafters of the ceiling, the family washing. 
By the fire was sitting a young girl of about nineteen, and, 
after we had chosen between a Proper Tea and a Plain Tea, 
she was ordered to get two Plain Teas, which she leisurely set 
about getting. While she was doing this two small girls came 
running in from afternoon school, and buzzed about her with 
newly acquired information concerning Thomas Cranmer and 
Stephen Gardiner. A cloth was laid on the large table, and 
cups and saucers were set at either end* Then the Plain Tea 
began to appear. First a large cheese; then a whole loaf; then 
a pound of butter; then an earthenware basin full of some sort 
of potted meat; then a plate of biscuits; then a vast wedge of 
currant cake; and then a dish of jam tarts. All this was placed 
at one end of the table for us two visitors. A duplicate of it was 
set at the other end. When the teapot was filled we were told 
that " Tea was ready/* and were directed to chairs at the top 
end of the table, while the children seated themselves at the 

203 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

lower end. The girl then filled our cups, and took the teapot 
to the other end and had her own tea with the children. 
Neither she nor the children, after one glance, showed any 
curiosity about us. They discussed their affairs as though we 
were not there, and we discussed ours; and our two remarks 
were answered, but not followed up. Once or twice the girl 
asked if we had enough of everything, and brought the tea- 
pot to refill our cups, but otherwise the length of the table 
separated us as though we were in another room. No doubt if 
we had demanded to be one party we should have been 
admitted, but it is their way of courtesy to wait for the visitor 
to make the advance. They had already shown their gracious- 
ness by giving us a casual tea in their kitchen, instead of in the 
lonely parlour, and for the moment that was as far as they 
would go. Acquaintance with them and the other folk of these 
parts does not happen ; it develops. 

Looking from the castle through the washed blue air to the 
mainland, you have, on the south, the yellow Fenham Flats, 
Budle Point, the dark Bamburgh Castle, and the still darker 
Farnes. To the north you have a low-lying fringe of land 
marked only by the hamlets of Goswick, Scremerston, and 
Spittal, with a distant blur which you cannot identify, and 
which might be spray and spume, but which you know to be 
Berwick-upon-Tweed. You are looking at the end of Eng- 
land's Great North Road and the beginning of Scotland; and 
at something more. For Berwick holds a unique position in 
these islands. It is a neutral point between England and 
Scotland, and theoretically it is not part of the England of 
Northumberland, nor is it part of the Scotland of Berwick- 
shire. It is itself Berwick-upon-Tweed, in Europe. 



204 



CHAPTER IV 
A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

WHEN Mr Belloc, making his psean to Sussex, took a con- 
temptuous fling at the Midlands, " which are sodden and un- 
kind," he too was unkind and unjust. His remark moves 
one to wonder how much he had then seen of the Midlands. 
It is true that the country in some eastern parts is insipid, but 
it is never unkind, and within a short distance of the insipid 
you have some of the happiest and most English of scenes. 
There are the soft hills of Shropshire, the old villages of 
Staffordshire, the rich pastures of Warwickshire and Western 
Worcestershire, the vales of Leicestershire, the orchards of 
Herefordshire, and that cluster of old towns which make a 
starry jewel upon the waist of England. Each lies within a 
short run of its neighbour Stratford, Alcester, Warwick, 
Leamington, Kenilworth, Coventry, Lichfield, Abbot's 
Bromley, Shrewsbury, Bridgnorth, Ludlow, Leominster, Led- 
bury, Tewkesbury, and Evesham; and each has personality, 
treasured possessions, and story. 

It is strange that all this beauty and interest has had so few 
celebrants. This centre of England has produced many a poet, 
but most of them hastened from it, and, though its scenes were 
the inspiration of their verse, they do not, save here and there, 
acknowledge them by name. Langland, the first truly English 
poet, was of these shires; others were Francis Beaumont, Sir 
Thomas Malory, Thomas Randolph, Thomas Traherne, 
Walter Savage Landor, John Drinkwater, and the present 
Laureate, John Masefield. But none of them has deliberately 
devoted himself to his country, as the natives of Devon and 
Somerset and other parts of the South have done; even in 

205 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

collections of folk songs it is poorly represented. True, we 
have.y4 Shropshire Lad and Mr Drinkwater's lyric to The Mid- 
lands, and a few sporting writers have let themselves go in 
praise of Leicestershire, though not as a county of pleasant 
villages and sweet pastures only for the * runs ' it has afforded. 
For due tribute to the Midlands and for the right retort to Mr 
Belioc we must go, I think, to the novels of George Eliot. 

Yet it is a country, one feels, which should have instandy 
moved all its sons to celebrate it. Within every few miles it 
offers pictures of deep-hearted England, which, caught in a 
flash from train or car, are such crystallizations of all our ideas 
of English country that they remain in the memory as an 
eternal image of it. 

Whether the author of the plays of Shakespeare really came 
from these fields we do not know, but it is only poetic fitness 
that our greatest poet should have been born at the middle of 
England. Certainly, a reading of the country passages of the 
plays after a tour of these counties brings the reflection that 
the author, whoever he was, must have known their scenes. 
The spirit reflected in the casual allusions and in the songs is 
the very spirit one receives from every lane and village and 
woodland of these parts. So strongly marked is it that phrases 
of the plays and verses of the songs come uninvited to the 
mind when looking upon them. As they are a crystallization of 
England, so our author crystallized their spirit in the plays 
and gave them double power. Rural scenes of other districts 
have the power to evoke memories of past reflections of them, 
but none of them brings immediately and spontaneously, as 
these do, the verse of Shakespeare. It belongs here, and here 
only; and if later we are told that the author of the plays was 
a Northumbrian or a Cornishman I shall still believe that he 
spent his early years in the Midlands. It is he who brings pil- 
grims to one of its towns, and it is he who should have been 
its great celebrant. But beyond the naming of the Forest of 

206 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

Arden, and a side reference or so to Gloucestershire and the 
Cotswolds and Staffordshire, he is silent upon its scenes and 
features; though, names or no names, they are fixed for ever 
in the plays in all their charm. 

For the purpose of this little scamper I am considering the 
Midlands as that part of England enclosed by Nottingham, 
Stafford, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Banbury, and Leicester. It 
is a rough circle, with Birmingham as its centre and a radius 
of about fifty miles. Let us run round it and take a few bites 
into it. 

We will start from Nottingham, This is a friendly city; not 
beautiful, but full of strong features and pleasant people. It is 
an industrial city, but it has not been industrialized to the point 
of losing its local flavour and its local culture. It is still Notting- 
ham, and not, like so many industrial towns, a mere collection 
of factories: With the solid exuberance common to all pros- 
perous industrial towns goes a sparkle which is its own. The 
behaviour of its people shows them to be humanly happy. Ask- 
ing the way in the streets of a strange town is a good test of its 
tone. In some towns you get a curt word and a nod; in others 
not even that. In Nottingham I have always had more than 
courtesy; I have had smiles and a sincere concern for the 
stranger's troubles. This may derive from its original industry, 
which was that light, almost frivolous, matter lace. The lace 
business is not what it was in the days when every middle- 
class household had Nottingham lace curtains to its drawing- 
room, but enough remains to sweeten the many other in- 
dustries of the city, and to give its people those pleasant 
manners, and its girls light steps and smiles. 

Nottingham, indeed, is noted for its young girls, and has 
often claimed to have the prettiest young girls, and the best- 
dressed, of any town in the Provinces. The claim is not ill- 
founded. If you spend an evening hour or so in its vast market- 

207 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

place (which is a real and busy market-place, and the largest 
in England) , and observe the girls promenading that section 
called Long Row, you will, I think, be impressed not only by 
their clothes, but by the way they wear them. Dress itself a 
manifestation of the beauty instinct here takes first place 
among the amenities of life, and even the poorer girls give so 
much attention to it that the stranger could not pick out the 
poor girls from the well-to-do. In appearance too they are 
different from the girls of other industrial towns; no heavy 
carriage or hard manner. They are sturdy, but their figures are 
slim and their faces dainty; and they know how to walk. They 
mix the robust Maid Marian with the delicate Mimi Pinson. 
Most likely this, and their love of dress, is an inheritance from 
French ancestors of the days when lace was first made here, 
and has been nourished by Nottingham's large art colony. You 
know what an art colony can do in stimulating the girls around 
it to be pretty and chic. Or it may have its origins in the blithe 
Sherwood Forest, which in the past was just at the gates of 
Nottingham. Whatever the cause, the Nottingham girls are 
distinct from other provincial girls, and they are a feature of 
Nottingham which the sensible stranger perceives without any 
pointer from the guide-book. 

Features which also present themselves immediately are its 
castle> its rock, its river, its old inns and taverns 3 and the old 
houses of its back streets. The castle, rising high above the 
city on the summit of the rock, and affording a wide view over 
the Trent Valley, is a youngster as castles go successor to two 
earlier piles. The Norman castle which originally stood here 
was destroyed by the Commonwealth after the Civil War, and 
a second castle, of the late seventeenth century, was largely 
burned down in the Reform riots of 1830. The present castle 
is a restoration which mixes a few of the original features 
such as the dungeon and the underground passage known as 
Mortimer's Hole with some of the intermediate and a number 

208 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

of new features. It was in the shadow of the original Norman 
castle that Charles I, when his words with Parliament had 
made him decide upon blows, set up his standard and called 
upon England to rally to him. But he made an unwise choice 
for the opening of his campaign. He could hardly have gone 
to a worse place, unless his desire was to test the majority feel- 
ing towards him. Nottingham was not interested in his 
troubles; his reception was more than chilly; and the town's 
response to his call by keeping aloof from the standard-raising 
ceremony was a reflection of the general Midland attitude. 
The standard was raised in August 1642 in the presence only 
of unarmed trained bands and a high wind which seemed to be 
an expression of Nottingham and of fate. No sooner was the 
standard up than the wind had it down, and not until two days 
later was it properly fixed. This, of course, was looked upon 
as a sign. But Charles, certain of the divinity that hedges about 
a king, ignored it, and began at Nottingham the dreadful 
business which was to end for him at the banqueting palace of 
Whitehall and for thousands of his subjects in agony and an 
unmarked grave. Within a month or so he was in the West, 
and the castle was in the hands of Parliament to the end of the 
war. To-day it is the local museum and art gallery, and is one 
of the most impressive of its kind. 

Mortimer's Hole, in which Edward III imprisoned Mortimer, 
Earl of March, is only one of the many passages with which 
the foundations of Nottingham are riddled. These passages 
are hewn through the solid rock on which it stands, but in 
what dark age they were made nobody knows; nor has their 
purpose been decided. If they were made as a refuge, or as 
means of entry and exit during a siege, they seem to be far too 
numerous in comparison with the size of the town in those 
days. Buildings far away from the castle have found in their 
cellars traces of other cellars, two stories below, and many of 
these are so deep that even to-day they have never been fully 

209 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

explored. They make a sort of underground city, so vast that 
it is believed that most of the Nottingham on the surface could 
be accommodated in it. 

At the point where the rock on which the castle is built dips 
down to the town a whole street of houses has been made by 
burrowing into it, and very comfortable houses they are. Being 
enclosed by solid rock, they are what London's underground 
railway claims to be cool in summer, warm in winter. Jyst 
below the castle, and set in the rock, is one of the queer old 
inns the Trip to Jerusalem a connexion of some sort with 
the days of the Crusaders. The present building, I think, is of 
the fifteenth century, and it is said to have been used in the 
past as a secret entrance to the casde. It goes far into the rock, 
and its cellars are far deeper than even a tavern's cellars need to 
be. They will draw you from these cellars a mug of Nottingham 
home-brewed a genuine ale, which, coming from the depths, 
is as cold a drink as any ice-loving American could want. 
Some half-dozen of the old inns here still make their own 
brew; you may recognize them by the announcement on their 
signs Home-brewed; and it is this home-brewing which made 
Nottingham ales famous throughout England. I do not know 
of any other town where the custom is continued, and those 
who usually drink only the lighter bottled ale should remember 
that the home-brewed must be approached with discretion. A 
fine sixteenth-century house is the Flying Horse, also with vast 
cellars, and caverns beneath the cellars. It has had long 
associations with the life of Nottingham. In the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries it was a sort of * town * house of call 
for the best people of the district, and a posting-house for those 
travelling in private chaises, as well as a meeting-place for the 
civic dignitaries of the town. To-day it is a hotel of modern 
comforts, with its sixteenth-century beauties untarnished. 
Other old inns worth looking at are the Punch Bowl, the Horse 
and Chaise, the Salutation, the Eight Bells, the Black Boy, and 

210 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

a house near the theatre whose name I do not recall. But for 
those with theatrical interests it is a museum. How many 
thousands of pictures of actors and actresses of the past it 
possesses even the owners do not know. Every inch of the 
walls of its passages and its rooms, and of the tops of the 
tables at which you sit, and even the ceilings, is covered by 
signed photographs of those who have entertained us and our 
fathers and, in some cases, our grandfathers. Nottingham, as 
early as the late eighteenth century, was an important theatrical 
point on the map of England, and this house is a Hall of 
Thespis which every week receives a new decoration. The 
house which had a literary association and a long history is 
unfortunately gone. This was the Blackamoor's Head, one 
of Nottingham's oldest, in whose lower room the body of 
Byron rested for a day and a night on its way to burial at 
Hucknall Torkard. No national hero could have received more 
honour to his bones. All through that day and night the place 
was besieged by visitors passing through* the inn and filing 
round the bier; and for years afterwards those who had done 
this kept it in their memories and bored their young people 
by talk of it When the body was moved on to Hucknall the 
greater part of the town turned out, and the mayor and corpora- 
tion led a procession a quarter of a mile in length. 

In one or two of the older taverns you may catch the spirit 
of the Montmartre of the past* When I was last there I wit- 
nessed several occasions of spontaneous entertainment by 
members of the company, not for the gratification of visitors, 
but just among themselves. This is the true cabaret casual 
and unrehearsed. They do not, as they did in Paris, get up 
and spout verses, but they do get up and sing popular songs, 
or play the piano, mandolin, or concertina; and they do not 
seem to care whether they have your attention or not. They 
are not playing to you, but to themselves and their friends. 

The old and more picturesque parts of the city will be found 

211 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

in the poorer streets behind the main thoroughfares. Here are 
some delightful remains of the centuries old stone cottages, 
gabled shops, projecting eaves, and dormer casements, and 
collections of buildings so patched with the work of different 
ages that it is difficult to tell which age can really claim them 
as its own. 

A feature of the town's life which used to draw crowds from 
all parts of England was its October Goose Fair; but this is 
now only a shadow of itself. It was once almost the chief event 
of the Midland year; the biggest of all its fairs; and in its hey- 
day it was a complete carnival a period of high feasting and 
wild junketing, Latin in its abandon and Tudor in its vigour. 
The Midlands always have been, and still are, a country of 
great feeding and great cooking. Its housewives, even among 
the rich, pride themselves, not on giving bright ideas to the 
cook, but on carrying out the bright ideas themselves. 
No Midland lady of a baronet is ashamed of being found 
in the kitchen in white overalls, and she will present a 
dish at table from her own hands with as much interest as an 
actress takes in luring you to see her in her new part; and with 
more justification for the interest. Good food and good clothes 
are essentials of every life, and the Midlands are first and 
always concerned with essentials. They have a gusto for the 
material things; the frugality and thrift of the leaner counties 
makes no appeal to this jocund heart of England. Its deep 
pastures fill the mind with ideas of plenty, and to a Midland 
host a table which is not laden with much more than is required 
is a mock-beggar table. He knows that enough is not as good 
as a feast, and he likes to make every meal a feast. The pleasure 
which past centuries took in seeing abundance around them 
and in sharing abundance he still cultivates, and he has a 
vitality of body and spirit which makes diet-charts look as 
pathetic as they are. He does not limit his abundance to lunch 
and dinner; every meal is an occasion for good and lavish 

212 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

food. Americans and other strangers to the Midlands should 
take notice that if they are invited home to tea/ that invitation 
does not imply the four o'clock cup of tea and fctits fours of 
London. * Tea,' in all but the most modern houses, is not a 
drawing-room affair. It is set in the dining-room, and it is a 
five o'clock or six o'clock affair of three or four courses, in- 
cluding cold meats and all sorts of invented side-dishes in the 
way of cakes and breads of a kind never seen in London. It 
is called ' tea ' only because tea is served throughout the meal. 
To me it seems a bad mixture of a meal, but that may be my 
metropolitan prejudice. In the Midlands and the North it is 
an established function, honoured by long tradition and not 
likely for some time to be relinquished in favour of London's 
smarter ways. They also know much more about breakfast 
than London does. You may stay a fortnight in a Midland 
home and have fourteen different breakfasts, all of them a de- 
parture from the London breakfast, all of them good, and 
many of the dishes quite new to you. 

If you get to Nottingham you might take the opportunity 
of visiting a lace factory and inspecting the intricate and un- 
lovely machines which produce this loveliness. And if you 
want a new aesthetic sensation watch the men at the machines. 
Watch some of these stout fellows, with their large and 
apparently clumsy hands, and watch how every large finger of 
those hands knows its office and, doing what you would think 
fat fingers could never do, can disentangle the frailest strand 
of silk from its neighbour. Their movements are so exquisite 
that the performance is as exciting as Lindrum playing an 
awkward shot or Sir Thomas Beecham conducting a Brahms 
symphony without a score. I have seen them at it, and I had 
to be dragged away. I had thought that for the business of 
lace only small hands and fragile fingers would do, and the 
sight of these large hands and fat fingers performing the work 
of fairies held me with the fascination of magic. To see a 

213 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

skilled artisan at work is to me as keen a pleasure as reading 
beautiful prose or watching a great actor or looking upon a 
marvellous sunset. This pleasure may be had in almost all 
factories. 

The country to the south-west of Nottingham, along the 
Trent, is demure country, with a constant atmosphere of Sun- 
day afternoon. It shows its fairest face in the spring. It is not 
markedly beautiful; England has some hundreds of similar 
stretches; but when you are in it, and are looking at it without 
memory of greater country, its charm will come out to you. I 
was helped in perceiving the charm by having for company, in 
a walk through Clifton Grove, the doyen of Nottingham's 
artists, Mr William Kiddier, who showed me colours which 
the layman cannot see until the painter names them, Clifton 
Grove is the city's nearest rural spot. It stands just beyond 
Wilford Bridge, and is part of the road from Wiiford to the 
hamlet of Clifton, the road running level with the river for a 
mile or so, and then making an ascent high above the river to 
this avenue. In the past it was a favourite retreat for lovers and 
for the contemplative, and it is still so used to-day. The nearest 
Kirke White ever got to poetry was in his poem in praise of 
it Clifton Grove y the title of the book which attracted atten- 
tion to him. Clifton Grove is still pleasant and still receives 
praise, but Kirke White, if it is not cruel to speak so of one 
who died before fulfilment, received perhaps too much praise, 
with the result that, outside Nottingham and biographical 
dictionaries, his name is to-day unknown. 

Beyond Clifton, whose happy cottages in the summer are 
busy with " Teas and Minerals, " lies a village whose name is 
known all over England and to a large part of the English- 
speaking world Gotham. Everybody has heard of the Wise 
Men of Gotham, and no doubt everybody has wondered why 
so many tales of idiocy should have been fathered upon one 

214 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

ordinary village whose people were no more stupid or clever 
than the people of other villages. If these tales had been re- 
cently issued we should probably hail them as a Publicity Stunt 
for Gotham, assuming the motive behind them to be the motive 
behind the stories that ridiculed the Ford car or the stories that 
ridicule Aberdeen. But the stories were current in the six- 
teenth century, and at that time it had not been discovered that 
ridicule or slander, or any kind of contumely that gets you 
talked about, is a valuable and desirable thing. I doubt if the 
Gotham of those days welcomed the stories as cheerfully as 
Aberdeen to-day welcomes the stories of Scotch parsimony. 
Most likely it used every endeavour to show that the stories 
referred to some other Gotham, in the North or the South, 
thus unconsciously trying to spoil the work which was to carry 
its name through the centuries. The Tales of the Wise Men 
of Gotham run to some twenty, and they embrace all examples 
of cloddish simplicity. Before long we may expect some 
Learned Smelfungus or Dr Strabismus to tell us that they were 
not mere Tales and had nothing to do with a village called 
Gotham, but were mystic formulae in which the word Gotham 
was a kind of Sesame; or else that they are part of the ritual of 
the Druids, who to-day get blamed for everything which anti- 
quarians can't understand. The ordinary man, not ready to 
see concealed subtleties in everything which is not as mystically 
clear as daylight, is probably right in assuming that they were 
a collection of anecdotes of rustic stupidity which had to have 
some setting and were given the setting of Gotham at random, 
as a place which happened to be far away from the localities 
where the chap-book would most readily sell, or because of 
the quaint name of the place. Or they may have been attri- 
buted to Gotham by the malice of a son of Gotham; or, since 
local jealousies then ran high and resorted to mutual nick- 
names, they may have been compiled by the son of a neighbour- 
ing village. Whatever their origin, there is little point in them; 

215 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

they go too far beyond human probability. The two best 
known are the story of the Gotham men raking in a pond on 
a moonlit night to fish out the moon, and the story of the 
attempt to keep the cuckoo in Gotham by building a hedge 
round it. Others are of the men who hoped to punish an eel, 
which had cleared their pond of fish, by drowning it, and of 
those who thought of the bright idea of saving themselves a 
journey to their landlord at Newark by sending him their rent 
in a packet tied to the neck of a hare foolish stories, which 
then aroused laughter among other rustics* To-day they do not 
even do that, and, though everybody knows about Gotham, it 
still has no rush of visitors. It is not an attractive place, and it 
has never been thick-skinned enough to make capital out of 
the stories or invest them with dark significances, despite its 
possession of a Cuckoo Hill. 

The Derbyshire country immediately around Derby is by 
no means so rich as that of the northern half, and, going west 
from Gotham, there is little to hold the connoisseur of country 
until Staffordshire is reached. But there are some good villages 
and churches on the way. There is Melbourne, with its old Hall 
and wonderful gardens, and Sudbury and Egginton and 
Marton-upon-Dove and half a dozen more to be come upon by 
accident the right way of coming upon pleasant places. But 
if you would like to know beforehand all that there is to be 
come upon in these parts you should take with you the three 
excellent volumes of Mr J. B. Firth in the " Highways and 
Byways " series, on Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Notting- 
hamshire. 

Staffordshire is strangely neglected as a touring district. It 
is true that it contains the Potteries and part of Birmingham's 
Black Country (which once was the open country where 
Lavengro wandered), and with most people that knowledge 
stops their ears to any other. But these are not the whole of it, 
and in the sections outside the industrial areas, and often quite 

216 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

near them, it has fine landscapes and dainty villages. England 
is erratic in the spacing and display of its charms. Beauty 
springs at you round the most unpromising corners. You 
climb a hill out of a slummy town, and there before you is the 
Glittering Plain or the Happy Valley. You seek fair scenes hi 
a country empty of factories, and do not find them ; you corne 
by accident to a mining village whose name has always filled 
you with a sense of woe, and opposite its pit-heads stretches a 
champaign of coloured fields and streams and rural delight, or 
perhaps the darkling glory of the woods of Westermain. I 
have known one or two marvellous mornings on London's 
Hampstead Heath and some miserably tepid mornings among 
the Lakes. The finest English sunset I have ever seen I saw 
from one of our ugliest spots from the top of a slag-heap 
outside Hanley. 

Just inside the Staffordshire border, south-west of Ash- 
bourne, are two spots of literary interest. One is Ellaston, with 
George Eliot associations; the other is Wotton Hall, with 
Rousseau associations. George Eliot is not to-day the high 
priestess she once was, but she is still a member of the order, 
and, as I have said, she is the chief delineator of Midland 
scenes. EUaston is perhaps the most important point in George 
Eliot topography more important than her birthplace or her 
homes since it is the background of the book by which she is 
generally known. It is the Hayslope of Adam Bede. The 
whole country of that book centres on this village, and even 
to-day readers can check the Dutch fidelity of her painting at 
point after point. Ellaston itself has no special charm, but it 
derives charm from the extra life given to it by the novelist. 
One sees these originals of great novels in high relief. The 
scenes which the novelists have set in them, and the people 
they have created to move through those scenes, are more alive 
than the daily happenings and the daily people of the actual 
place. Ellnston may some time disappear, but under its other 

217 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

name of Hayslope it and its houses will live as long as Adam 
Beds remains in human memory. 

Wotton Hall, not far from Ellaston, was in the eighteenth 
century the property of a Mr Davenport, who, by the good 
offices of David Hume, was induced to lend it to Rousseau, 
who was seeking a retreat in England. At that time he was 
suffering from what we should now call persecution-mania : 
he was convinced that he was beset by enemies who were bent 
upon his destruction, and that England was the only asylum 
and Hume his only friend. Hume, having secured the loan of 
Wotton Hall, journeyed to Paris, escorted him to London, 
and thence to Wotton. There both Hume and the owner set 
themselves to making every arrangement for the guest's 
comfort, and these kindnesses Rousseau at first acknowledged 
to the point of saying that Wotton was the one place he had 
found which satisfied him, and a place where he would wish 
to end his days. " The master of the house is a very worthy 
man. ... He docs everything in his power to make his house 
agreeable to me.** But towards the end of his stay, which 
lasted something over a year in great content, the imaginary 
enemies appeared again. It seems that content, which he was 
constantly seeking, was a state he quickly tired of; and this 
time he discovered that his arch-enemy was David Hume, and 
that the kitchen of Wotton Hall was trying to poison him! 
He walked out of the house that minute, just as he was, and 
posted in haste to Ashbourne, and continued his wanderings 
about Europe in search of a home free from molestation by 
his enemies. 

William Howitt, who has left an interesting description of 
a visit to Wotton, where he discovered two aged people who 
remembered the visitor, is of the opinion that Rousseau was 
already a mental case, though his friends did not then 
recognize it. He spent his time in botanizing, in writing his 
Confessions, and in avoiding people and suspecting everybody. 

218 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

Erasmus Darwin, who was then living at Derby, was most 
anxious for a meeting, but his approaches met a flat refusal. 
He was not, however, to be put off, and, knowing the walks 
that Rousseau took, he waited one morning in a lane, and 
appeared to be deeply engaged in examination of a plant. 
Rousseau approached him and addressed him: " Etes-vous 
botaniste, monsieur? " Darwin admitted that he was, and 
they fell into botanical talk, and spent the day in rambling 
through the lanes and collecting specimens, and got on very 
well together. Only at evening, when they were parting, did 
Rousseau ask the name of his agreeable companion. When 
the agreeable companion gave it he became violently agitated, 
declared it was " A plot, a plot! " and walked off, and barred 
any further communication. In a remote place like Wotton, 
where they had never seen French people, he and his lady 
friend, Therese le Vasseur, naturally caused much consterna- 
tion by their queer talk, eccentric behaviour, and eccentric 
dress. Rousseau was not even French in his dress; he wore 
Armenian costume a fur cap and a long, belted robe and 
if he was not, as Howitt suggests, incipiently mad, the villagers 
believed that he was, and more. These geniuses ought to be 
careful how they plant themselves in remote villages. The 
proper places for them are towns, which are accustomed to the 
vagaries of appearance and behaviour; but if they must have 
villages they might consider the susceptibilities of the rustics. 
Rousseau's effect upon Wotton was somewhat stronger than 
the effect of Coleridge and his friends upon Nether Stowey, 
or Watertoii's upon Walton Hill, or Stephen Crane's upon 
Brede. There seems to be some sort of moral though I can't 
find it in the fact that the man who had once frightened the 
kings and princes and bishops of Europe should in his old age 
become a terror to the little children of an English hamlet. Not 
consciously, of course; merely by his outlandish appearance, 
which, Armenian though it might be, was to the villagers, and 

219 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

particularly the children, that of a fee-faw-fum bogy. Intensify- 
ing his appearance was his habit of grubbing about for botanical 
specimens in the banks of the lanes, or rising suddenly from 
behind a wall where he was grubbing for moss. Even when 
the children got to know that this anomalous figure was a 
harmless guest of the Hall they went by roundabout ways to 
avoid it, and, as Rousseau had scarcely any English, he was 
unable to placate them. From his habit of going about at nights 
in parts which the villagers themselves avoided, believing them 
to be haunted, it was assumed that the strange creature had 
dealings with the Evil One. 

Howitt says that the two villagers whom he met remem- 
bered meeting Rousseau in the lanes when they were children, 
and spoke of him as " Old Ross Hall " their version of 
" Rousseau " and of his lady, who was called by the house 
servants " Mam'selle," as " Madam Zell." One of them said 
that in the village " it was thought that he was some king who 
had been driven from his dominions " in a sense a rather apt 
conjecture. So strong was the impression he had made, and so 
surely had the people passed to their children their suspicion of 
something dark behind his presence in their village, that 
Howitt's visit, though he made it fifty years after the event, 
caused quite a stir. When it was known that somebody was 
inquiring about the Frenchman people came from their cottages 
and surrounded him, asking, " What is it? Is the Government 
inquiring about Ross Hall?" Howitt learned that tangible 
relics of him had remained for some time in the village. By 
way of showing himself to be human and amiable, which he 
could not do in conversation, It was his habit to give away to 
the villagers his tasselled astrakhan caps when he had finished 
with them. It appeared that several cottagers had possessed 
one of these caps, but Howitt was able to locate only one, and 
that a moth-eaten specimen. All the others had been bought 
or otherwise acquired by souvenir-hunters. 

220 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

If Rousseau wanted rural quiet, beautiful and varied scenery, 
and a botanical treasury, Hume did very well for him. And, 
indeed, he had no fault to find with the place itself, and was 
constandy writing to his friends in praise of it. It stands on a 
ridge above Ellaston, with pleasant prospects from three sides 
of it woodlands, dells, hills, and valleys; and the country 
around, though not now so. naturally romantic as in the 
eighteenth century, still merits all that he said of it. To those 
who share his hobby it makes special appeal; this part of North 
Staffs, bordering a tract of Dovedale, has a flora of its own. As 
spring comes early and with a rush in Cornwall and Devon, in 
Staffordshire it comes slowly and late, and its blossoms linger, 
so that you may have one spring in Devon, and then, two 
months later, move northward and have another. It is spring 
here when it is summer in South Devon, and not only does it 
show the usual spring flowers, but many others which the 
spring does not bring to the South and whose names only a 
botanist would know. The garden of the Shakespeare house at 
Stratford has been so stocked as to show only the flowers 
mentioned in the plays and the poems; all the wild flowers are 
to be found in the Midlands, and some in the Midlands only. 

Going south into the county from Ellaston, the tourist will 
find no town to engage him by its interest or charm until he 
reaches Lichfield; but there is much fine open country and 
numbers of * black-and-white ' villages to make one pause. It 
is a country which has been left much to itself, never hurried by 
exploitation or too much praise, and those villages which are 
some distance from a town have not suffered from expansion. 
They remain at the point where the railway age forgot them, 
as it forgot the interior of Suffolk, and sent its lines widely 
round them, without even the tribute of a one-track branch- 
line. Doubdess many visitors, happening upon them, will 
approve this neglect, and will hope that future developments of 
arterial roads will follow the example of the railways. There is 

221 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Alton, and near it the ruins of Croxden Abbey; Tutbury a 
sweet place on the sweet Dove; and Marchington, and Abbot's 
Bromley, with lots of gables and half-timbering and old streets 
where every autumn the people dance the hobby-horse dance. 
And Yoxall and Wichnor and Hamstall Rid ware; and in 
between them many tiny slumbering hamlets, as secluded as 
the most modern Rousseau could desire; most of them of the 
kind for which the only sudden word is the overworked 
* picturesque,' and all of them speaking peace. And when you 
come to Lichfield, though you come to a * city/ you come into 
deeper peace: the cultivated peace of centuries. 

Lichfield is a favourite of mine among cathedral cities and 
among cathedrals. Cathedral cities, I think, should be 
restricted in their development, since no cathedral can be 
properly seen and felt without something of the space and 
quiet in which it was originally set. Cathedrals were not built 
in towns; towns were built round cathedrals; and only those 
cathedrals which have nothing more around them than a large 
village or small town achieve their foil effect. A cathedral in 
a large and busy town is incongruous, and I have never been 
able to feel the foil beauty of the cathedrals of Canterbury, 
Lincoln, Exeter, and Worcester, because of their workaday 
surroundings; the necessary quiet out of which their orchestral 
tones should fitly emerge is lacking. But Lichfield affords just 
the right setting; and so do Southwell, Ripon, Chichester, and 
Ely. The cathedral is constantly seen from every point, and its 
influence touches every street. These places have their due 
number of visitors, but they are never, like the others, swarm- 
ing with townspeople and sightseers. They are oases, thinly 
populated, in which the cathedral is not an adjunct, but the 
chief creature; one can really see it and move in its presence 
without discordant interruptions. 

Lichfield is a little town which, though living with these 
days, moves to an eighteenth-century temfo. That century 

222 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

seems to have marked its climacteric. It knew then Samuel 
Johnson, Anna Seward (its literary queen), Joseph Addison, 
George Farquhar, David Garrick, and John Andre*, the spy 
a goodly company for so small a place. It is a town of old inns, 
of antique- furniture shops, of old bookshops (as befits the 
birthplace of the famous son of a second-hand bookseller), of 
old shops devoted to new businesses, and of old houses. 
Despite the new businesses, it is so dated in atmosphere that 
one can almost see Farquhar's Aimwell and Archer arriving at 
the inn, and that arch-type of innkeepers, Boniface, recom- 
mending his Lichfifld ale and drawing the attention of the 
beaux to his daughter, Cherry. 

Aimwell. I have heard your town of Lichfield much famed 
for ale. I think I'll taste that. 

Boniface. Sir, I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best 
ale in Staffordshire; 'tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as 
amber, and strong as brandy; and will be just fourteen year 
old the fifth day of next March, old style. 

Aimwell. You're very exact, I find, in the age of your ale. 

Boniface. As punctual, sir, as I am in the age of my chil- 
dren. Fll show you such ale! ... Sir, you shall taste my Anno 
Domini. I have lived in Lichfield, man and boy, above eight 
and fifty years, and I believe have not consumed eight and fifty 
ounces of meat. 

AimwelL At a meal, you mean, if one may guess by your 
bulk. 

Boniface. Not in my life, sir. I have fed purely upon ale. I 
have eat my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale. 

Years later, Boswell, making his tour of the Midlands with 
Johnson, made free with that Lichfield ale; and even to-day 
the town possesses a large brewery. They put up at the Three 
Crowns, 

not one of the great inns, but a good old-fashioned one, which 
was kept by Mr Wilkins, and was the very next house to that 

223 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

in which Johnson was born and brought up, and which was 
still his own property. We had a comfortable supper, and got 
into high spirits. I felt all my Toryism glow in this old capital 
of Staffordshire. I could have offered incense genio loci; and 
I indulged in libations of that ale which Boniface recommends 
with such eloquent jollity. 

BoswelPs account of the town needs little editing. He found, 
as he would find to-day, " very little business going forward," 
and challenged Johnson that his townspeople must be a very 
idle set of people. "Sir, we are a city of philosophers; we 
work with our heads, and make the boobies of Birmingham 
work for us with their hands." 

Later still, Hawthorne came to Lichfield, and found it much 
as Boswell found it, and as you may find it. In most of the 
papers of Our Old Home he describes old, slow-changing 
towns, so that he can be read to-day as a reliable guide, if not 
to detail, at least to atmosphere. The houses about the 
cathedral still fit his picture, with their 

air of the deepest quiet, repose, and well-protected though not 
inaccessible seclusion. They seemed capable of including every- 
thing that a saint could desire and a great many more things 
than most of us sinners generally succeed in acquiring. Their 
most marked feature is a dignified comfort, looking as if no 
disturbance of vulgar intrusiveness could ever cross their 
thresholds. 

And the rest of the town, despite the buses running to Birming- 
ham and other parts, gives one the feeling that round the 
corner one might come upon Addison, Johnson, Garrick, Miss 
Seward, and Hawthorne himself, all chatting together in easy 
indifference to the laws of time. It still moves at that pace 
which caused the middle-aged of 1760 to talk of the frantic 
rush and bustle of modern life. 

Its sandstone cathedral is for those who are more drawn by 

224 




L1CHFIELD CATHEDRAL 
Courtesy of L.M,S. Ratiway 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

grace than by grandeur. Set in its almost reverential close, its 
three slender spires soar upward, to make a landmark for miles 
around. Though different in style, it has much of the delicacy 
of Salisbury; it does not overawe; it invites you to draw near 
and take to yourself its music of stone. The feelings which it 
inspired in Hawthorne are so general that his beautiful tribute 
may serve to express what others cannot: 

The traces remaining in my memory present it as airy rather 
than massive. A multitude of beautiful shapes appeared to be 
comprehended within its single outline; it was a kind of 
kaleidoscopic mystery. . . . Not that I felt, or was worthy to 
feel, an unmingled enjoyment in gazing at this wonder. I 
could not elevate myself to its spiritual height, any more than 
I could have climbed from the ground to the summit of one 
of its pinnacles. Ascending but a little way, I continually fell 
back and lay in a kind of despair, conscious that a flood of tin- 
comprehended beauty was pouring down upon me of which I 
could appropriate only the minutest portion. After a hundred 
years, incalculably as my higher sympathies might be invigor- 
ated by so divine an employment, I should still be a gazer from 
below and at an awful distance, as yet remotely excluded from 
the interior mystery. But it was something gained, even to 
have that painful sense of my limitations and that half 
smothered yearning to soar beyond them. The cathedral showed 
me how earthly I was, but yet whispered deeply of immor- 
tality. 

North-west of Lichfield lies the open, hilly stretch of 
Cannock Chase, a mixture of moorland and wood. It is not 
easy to approach, since it is guarded by the colliery towns of 
Cannock and Rugeley, and, though these are no material bar, 
they act as a deterrent. But do not let them frighten you. 
Break through their guard and find Cannock Chase. It has 
nothing wonderful to offer, no beauty to move you to rapture. 
But, as with much English country, a haunting aroma of beauty 

225 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

rises from it, and, being so near these towns, it comes as a 
pleasant surprise. Unfortunately it is also near other places; 
wherefore few people from outside Staffordshire visit it. Some 
counties, fair enough in themselves, are set at a disadvantage 
by their neighbours. Staffordshire is one of them. To its north 
is the wild Peak country of Derbyshire; to its west is the more 
beautiful Shropshire; and to its south is the more charming 
Warwickshire. The tourist who knows these places usually 
hurries through it to one or other of them, and regards a pause 
to look at the perhaps secondary beauty of Cannock Chase as 
a waste of time. That is human nature. Many things which 
isolated are beautiful become commonplace when we see some- 
thing better. The more we know, the less we appreciate. The 
child who has been happy with a toy made of a few rags and 
painted sticks turns from it with disgust after he has seen the 
windows of the West End toyshops. But there is always some- 
thing better somewhere. There is no fixed beauty; there is 
only one's own response to the thing seen or experienced. 
People of the nineties thought their I' art nouveau drawing- 
rooms the ultimate note of beauty; we of to-day think them 
tawdry. We think Mozart the clearest and loveliest voice of 
music; to those who have heard the music of another sphere it 
is probably no more than the jangling of milk-bo ttles. There 
is always something better, and the sensible thing to do is to 
appreciate the beauty in what we have before our eyes. Every 
part of England is beautiful to somebody, and if that some- 
body can, by his skill, hold us and show it to us we too can see 
its beauty. When we recall the tributes paid by votaries to quite 
ordinary towns and villages and country we realize that there 
is nothing common or unclean. Miss Mitford on Three Mile 
Cross, George Borrow on Dereham, Matthew Arnold on 
Oxford, Mr Belloc on Petworth, Mr E. V. Lucas on Lewes, 
Mr J. B. Priestley on Bradford all these offer us the fall bloom 
of England. 

226 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

I once talked in Battersea Park to an old lady from the work- 
house. Do you know Battersea Park? I had never been moved 
to much delight in Battersea Park, but after the talk I found 
that the fault was mine, not the park's. She told me that she 
came there twice a week, on her afternoons out, and that it was 
lovely to be there the lovely grass and the lovely trees and the 
lovely flowers and she ended a long ode to Battersea Park on 
a grand crescendo \ "Yes, if I was a lady with thousands of 
pounds I'd come and sit here every day." After that I looked 
again at Battersea Park. The old lady unconsciously did for me 
what the artist does for all of us: she made me see everyday 
things for the first time. 

Measured by aesthetics, there are more beautiful places than 
Battersea Park and Cannock Chase, and there are more beauti- 
ful places than the Lake District; and, if we only knew, more 
beautiful places than the Italian Riviera and the Greek islands 
and the coast of Japan and the highlands of Cathay. But many 
a man, as I have said earlier, will turn from the burning beauty 
of the Himalayas, and find his beauty in some quiet lane or 
hillside of his own land. So the rushing tourist might find 
some beauty in this Cannock Chase if he would stop to look 
at it for itself. Mood and time have, of course, much to do 
with our response to things and our judgment of them. If we 
first see a landscape in some mood with which sun and weather 
and the time of year and our personal occasion make friendly 
conspiracy we shall find it beautiful, and thereafter will set it 
above other places which conform to all the standards of 
beauty, but lack our particular salt. You, if you cross Cannock 
Chase, may find nothing in it. But I first met it as one should 
on coming out of the Black Country, and I thought it, and 
still think it, delightful. I came to it on a spring morning, when 
the very air and light were as affectionate as a young sweet- 
heart, and the clouds were many-tinted Alps, and distance was 
so deceptive that they seemed to be within reach. It was one 

227 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

of those mornings when the country seems to hold all the 
happiness of all the springs you have known as perhaps any 
country does on a spring morning. Since then I have twice 
gone back to it which is a dangerous thing to do to a place 
that has once pleased you. Nor did I go back to it through the 
Black Country; I went back to it from more romantic country, 
and it stood the test It still had my salt. 

A litde south of Penkridge, on the edge of the Chase, you 
come to a portion of Wading Street, the great road from Dover 
to Chester and Carnarvon, which is sometimes absorbed into 
our own main roads and sometimes, as here, keeps its own 
individual and unpopulated way. These stretches of it in its 
native form are a delight to the motorist; they have few 
villages and few side-turnings, and give a long, straight, and 
open run. Just beyond the hamlet of Weston-under-Lizard it 
enters Shropshire, and before you looms that violet mass which 
is the accepted sign of Shropshire among Shropshire men 
throughout the world the Wrekin. But if you are travelling 
this road you will probably turn off it before reaching Weston. 
You will turn into a litde road leading south to a spot of which 
all Scots and most Englishmen have heard BoscobeL The 
Penderel family, in whose hands Charles II placed himself, had 
two homes here Whiteladies, of which only the site remains, 
and Boscobel House, still to be seen. Also to be seen is the 
Royal Oak, but it is not the oak. That perished, and the present 
is one that was planted on the same spot in its place. In 
Boscobel House the Penderel family harboured Charles for 
some time before he was able to start on that erratic flight to 
the Sussex coast. At night he was hidden in the priests' holes 
of the house, and during the day in the thick screen of the 
oak. For details of the adventure see the local guide-books, 
and for the full story see Mr Allan Fea's books After Worcester 
Fight and The Flight of the King. Richard Penderel, who did 
most of the organizing of sheltering the fugitive, died in 

228 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

London, and his handsome but time-worn tomb, with the 
story of his service recorded on it, may be seen just off the 
top of Charing Cross Road in the churchyard of St Giles's. 
Here, too, is the tomb of a Commonwealth sympathizer, 
remembered to-day as one of the great minor poets Andrew 
Marvell. 

For those curious in topographical points the country about 
here affords some interesting examples of odd names of 
hamlets, farms, and manors. Besides Weston-under-Lizard, 
there are Shushions, Brewersoak, Litde Onn, Sheriff Hales, 
Crackleybank, Tong, Wergs, Gatherwind, and Havannah. 
Enough to keep the antiquarian and philologist busy for a 
month. And when you remember that any ten square miles of 
England are equally rich in oddities and puzzles of place and 
name and site and burrow you will pity the enthusiastic English 
antiquarian in having only one life. A friend of mine who has 
taken some of the most beautiful photographs ever taken of 
English scenery Edgar Ward has expressed to me more 
than once the rebellion of the enthusiast against mortality. 
There was so much to do, so much to see, so much to experi- 
ence, he said, that one life was nothing; it was only a looking 
over and apprenticeship. To do all he wished to do in his own 
profession he wanted fifty lives of the allotted span. 

Perhaps if he lived on the kindly acres around the Wrekin 
he would have his wish, or a semblance of it. Judging by the 
appearance of some of the peasantry, they have lived far past 
the prophet's pronouncement, and they appear to have time for 
anything and everything. Or rather, they are unaware of time; 
they just carry on with the things they want to do and get 
them done, and, without any hurry, seem to get three lives' 
work into one, with playtime thrown in. Some of the elders are 
so indifferent to the passing of time that they cannot tell you 
whether their age is ninety-one or a hundred and twenty-four. 
There is a fatness in the Shropshire earth and a warmth about 

229 



THE i3EAUTY OF ENGLAND 

its towns, especially in the west, that suggests and encourages 
long and easy living. Mr Housman's insistence upon the high 
mortality among the young of Shropshire is not borne out by 
the dates upon the tombstones of Shropshire churchyards; 
and, notwithstanding his elegies upon Shropshire lads who 
have shot themselves or got themselves hanged, pessimism and 
violence, among young or old, are not readily perceived. But 
then Mr Houseman was a poet, and was concerned only with 
making poems. They are not the poems of a Shropshire lad, 
or any English lad; they are his creation of a country and his 
creation of a lad. That lad does exist, but you would have as 
long a search for him in Shropshire as you would have in 
Dorset for a Tess or in Exmoor for a Lorna Doone. 

When I was a youth Shropshire worked a curious fascination 
upon me. Other parts of England were just parts of England, 
and I could get along very well without them; but I felt that 
life would not be complete until I had visited Shropshire. How 
this arose I cannot say. I knew nothing about Shropshire, and 
I had not then been fired by A Shropshire Lad\ but the very 
word Shropshire, and the names of its towns, held my imagina- 
tion. It must have been the unusual * Shrop ' part of it work- 
ing upon my ear; odd syllables or combinations of syllables do 
affect the young, and work upon them like a rune or an abra- 
cadabra. I only know that for years I longed to see Shropshire, 
and for years my wish was unfulfilled. I saw Rouen and 
Brussels and Antwerp and Paris before I saw Shropshire. 
When, at twenty-two, I did see it I suffered the At Last feeling 
of Charles Kingsley when> after long desiring, he saw the West 
Indies. This haunting by the names of places is a common ex- 
perience. The Anglo-American novelist William McFee pub- 
lished, a few years ago, a book which had its genesis in his 
North London schooldays. The book itself, Sunlight in New 
Granada (New Granada is -the old name for the Central 
American republic of Colombia), was the ultimate expression 

230 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

of a dream which was built from an old atlas. His story is the 
story of many of us : 

... a boy of twelve years or so used to occupy the big cane 
chair, with a history book of the Conquest of Mexico or Peru 
on his knee, and an atlas at hand, when he would set off on 
his long journeys through " the realms of gold." And some- 
times, when he had gone up to Cuzo with Pizarro or along 
the causeway of Mexico City with Cortes, when he had made 
that dreadful journey across the Isthmus of Darien with Bal- 
boa, or mourned the latter's stoic end, while the sanguinary 
Pedrarias watched through a lattice, that small boy would turn 
again to the atlas and find the name of a mysterious city high 
up amid the great clusters of mountain ranges. Of all the 
places on that map of many colours, he wanted to go to Bogota. 
It is impossible now to discover the origin of that wistful fancy. 
He felt the same about Zanzibar and Rangoon, Trichinopoli 
and California, Erzerum and Cambodia, and of all the rivers 
of the world none lured him so strongly as the Yang-tse-Kiang 
and the Hoang-Ho. Perhaps it was an illusion, the reaction 
from the actual, since the towns he knew had homely names 
like Edmonton and Tottenham, and the only river near by was 
the New River, a man-made aqueduct owned by a water-com- 
pany and garnished with notices against trespass. However that 
may be, the small boy with the worn old atlas was destined to 
go to a good many of those places^ and so become a living wit- 
ness to Goethe's shrewd remark, that what we long for in youth 
we get in our age. Unfortunately, we often get it after we have 
ceased to long for it. 

That, however, does not apply to Bogota. The small boy, as 
he grew up, wanted many things, some of which he got, and 
he wanted them more than Bogota, but the desire to clirnb the 
Andes and compare it with the city of his dreams remained 
always somewhere at the back of his mind. 

That was my feeling about Shropshire. Of course, I too had 
fancies for those far-off places with sunset names Venezuela, 

231 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Guatemala, Bangkok, Antananarivo, Trebizond, Seringapa- 
tam but, assuming that they never could, save by fairy-tale 
processes, be realized, I turned to the map of England and set 
my fancy upon Shropshire and upon its Ludlow, Much Wen- 
lock, Clungunford, and Ellesmere. These were places that I 
could easily get to once I had the means of getting to them : the 
railway fare. Naturally I had my surprises; sometimes it was 
the delightful surprise of finding a portion of Shropshire finer 
in the fact than in the dream, and sometimes, in other portions, 
the " Is this Yarrow? " kind of surprise. I still have a few of 
these English map-dreams unrealized, and I am not eager to 
strike them off my list. These days of rapid improvements 
bring the Yarrow surprise too monotonously often. Some that 
I have tried to strike off, and so ease myself of their haunting, 
have unaccountably eluded me; others I am deliberately cherish- 
ing for what they might be and probably are not. How many 
times I have passed through Shropshire since I was twenty- 
two I cannot guess, but at each visit I have proposed to see a 
spot that has been calling me from the age of fifteen, and at 
each visit I have failed to see it. Clungunford remains unvisited. 
Often I have been within a few miles of it, but each time, when 
I have thought, " Clungunford at last! " something has frus- 
trated me: one of the party wanted to go another way, or 
wanted to get back to town, or wanted lunch at the spot where 
we were; or the car had a fit. Perhaps I have missed nothing 
but a dull fact; you, who have seen it, may be able to tell me 
that its grapes are very small and hardly worth gathering; 
and in that case I am the gainer. I still have my Clungrinfbrd, 
which is lovelier than the highest bloom on the thickest cluster 
of Colmars. 

But one realization which carried no Yarrow taint came 
when I first saw Ludlow. Apart from my original fancy, which 
had been caught by its name, I had wanted to see it, not because 
Milton's Cormts was first performed there, but for its wonder- 

232 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

ful Feathers inn, which I had learned about from an early 
reading of Mr Charles Harper's books and from his drawings. 
But when I had seen and duly worshipped the Feathers I found 
with surprise that the Feathers was only one of its beauties. I 
had visualized a small, dead town, with the superb Feathers 
set in the, middle, like a ruby in a bowler hat. Instead of the 
bowler hat I found a coronet studded with precious stones, to 
which it gave the perfect setting, illuminating and being illu- 
minated by them. This coronet may best be seen as a whole 
from the river, or from the fourteenth-century Ludford Bridge, 
to which it presents a beauty complete, but promising many 
undisclosed component charms. To get the gradual and most 
effective impact of those charms you should approach it through 
the Broadgate, and up the hill of Broad Street, and when you 
have passed up that serene old street you will find, at different 
points, the Norman casde, where the two little princes lived 
just before they were taken to the Tower, and where the 
seventeenth-century Butler, who was its steward, wrote his 
Hudibras', the fifteenth-century church; the almshouse; 
the Reader's House; the Butter Cross; the ancient chapel; the 
Feathers, with its carved ceilings and panels; houses of all 
centuries from the fifteenth onward; the bull-ring; the ... 

But it is not necessary for you to know what is there. People 
may go eight times round a town with a complete and exact 
guide-book as their companion, and see everything it possesses 
and learn all about them, yet never once catch that town's 
special flavour. The only way to see a town and to know it 
is to have no knowledge of it, but to be in it, to loaf about it 
and look at nothing in particular. Then, one morning, will 
come the needle-sharp moment which will tell you that you 
know it; Ludlow, or whatever the town is, will be yours for 
ever. You may go through Paris or Florence, faithful to the 
canons of Baedeker or Muirhead, and after a week, though 
you will know all about your city, you will be no nearer to it. 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Then, in some odd hour at a cafe, Paris will burst upon you 
through a waiter's style in pouring coffee, or through the smell 
of a cigarette; or Florence will admit you through a voice in 
a back street singing Pimpinella. So with all old towns. 
Ludlow's castle may say nothing to you. You may be indiffer- 
ent to its Feathers and to its Gate, and to all its show-pieces; 
yet you may still find your own Ludlow in some little half- 
timbered house in a side-street or in some old kitchen seen 
through an open doorway. You may even be of the fellowship 
of a friend of mine, and I will not criticize you if you are. He 
knows as many old towns as any antiquarian, and knows them 
well and has them firmly registered, though with a different 
stamp. "Ludlow? Yes Shropshire Norman castle and 
beautiful river. Lovely old house in the churchyard. I 
remember. Ludlow yes, that's where we had those wonderful 
cheese-cakes and had a talk with the old lady, and she gave us 
the recipe." "Dorchester? Yes Thomas Hardy's place. You 
come into it through a gorgeous avenue of trees. Got a Roman 
amphitheatre just outside, nd the main street's on a slope lot 
of eighteenth-century houses. That's the place where we had 
that filthy beer remember? we poured it into the aspidistra." 
This method of indexing beautiful scenes in the memory may 
cause the serious tourist to frown, but it is as good as any other. 
My friend knows Ludlow via cheese-cakes, but it has many 
things besides cheese-cakes and a Norman castle, and if you 
go there you will not fail to find them. But these older 
towns give nothing to the rushing tourist. If you park your 
car for two hours and give Ludlow the once-over you will 
not find them. It has never been accustomed to scraping 
quick acquaintance, and you will get nothing in return for 
your gift; but if you rest there awhile you will not only come 
to know Ludlow, through your own channel of contact, but 
to know that it is worth knowing. Even more than Shrews- 
bury, the county town, it expresses Shropshire at its best. It 

234 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

is comfortable and sufficiently prosperous, and its old ' town 
houses,' dating from the days when Shropshire was far from 
London, and Shrewsbury and Ludlow were the * town * of the 
local landed gentry, give one a sense of the continuity of 
English life. You have here the Tudor and Stuart England 
living on into the Georgian. Days have passed over Ludlow, 
but not centuries; life has gone on from sunrise to sunrise, with 
nothing to mark the sweeping changes recorded in history 
books save a gradual change of costume and commodity and 
idiom of speech; and it is still going on. By Ludlow, and old 
towns of its sort., you may have direct contact with the whole 
line of country-town life. The houses occupied by its early 
citizens or local landowners are still in .occupation. The stairs 
they trod are still being trod. The knockers which they lifted 
are still being lifted. The inns in which they sat and the walls 
against which they leaned in the reign of Henry VII are still 
being used by shopkeepers in the reign of George V. It is not 
a museum town; its old is still its new. Its pieces are not under 
glass cases, but are in everyday use. Through this long-enduring 
morning-and-evening life from year to year Ludlow has grown 
to a richness of personal colouring that is absent from towns 
which have been developed or transformed by intruders from 
afar. It is a Shropshire town, and always has been a Shropshire 
town. There is nothing very Warwickshire about Birmingham^ 
and nothing very Berkshire about Reading; they might exist 
anywhere, and one must look for the spirit of those counties 
in their smaller towns. But Ludlow has kept its essential self 
unaffected by outside influence. It belongs where it is, a town 
of Shropshire and a town of all ages. 

Between Ludlow and Shrewsbury, in a hollow enclosed by 
Wenlock Edge, the Caradoc Hills, and the Long Mynd, lies 
Church Stretton, which lives chiefly as a pleasure resort of 
Shropshire. For this service it is well set. It is not itself beauti- 
ful, and its houses and shops are almost wholly late nineteenth- 

235 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

or early twentieth-century, but it is surrounded by beauty, and 
all the best of Shropshire may be reached from it. It has a 
string of good hotels, scores of boarding houses, and no 
industry save the bottling of the aerated water, the Stretton 
Water, from its natural spring. If your pleasure in a country 
lies in wandering without purpose, and merely looking at 
whatever chance sets under your eye, I recommend Ludlow as 
a centre. But if your taste turns to * seeing ' things, then 
Church Stretton is your place. From that centre you can visit 
castles, ruined abbeys, British camps, Roman remains and one 
Roman city, Saxon remains, tumuli^ old manors, and churches 
by the score; and you may have all the golf you want, on a 
hill-top course from 800 to 1000 feet up; and in the autumn 
all the hunting and shooting you want. 

The immediate feature of the town is the Long Mynd, a 
ten-mile hump of moorland 1700 feet above sea-level. I once, 
unwarrantably, climbed to its top by car an indecent thing to 
do, since these trackless spaces should not be polluted by the 
machinery and petrol of the lazy tourist; their beauty and 
interest and the marvellous views they offer should be earned 
by personal effort. You may like to know that we were suit- 
ably punished. On the very top the sloping ground was wet, 
and while we were lost in the beauty of the scene we suddenly 
saw the car sliding, with rigid wheels, towards the edge of a 
400-feet drop. Only by a furious two minutes of tearing up 
bracken and twigs, and thus blocking the wheels, were we 
able to save it; and then we had to spend a half-hour in getting 
it to turn for the descent a half-hour in which we all suffered 
vicariously on account of the driver, who had his own half- 
hour. He was working six feet from the edge; if the wheels 
had missed the bracken he would have had no chance to jump 
out. I have never since then taken a car to any of these remote 
and roadless heights. The place for the car is the road; any- 
where else it is an anomaly and an affront. The ghosts of the 

236 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

old warriors who sleep on the top of the Long Mynd clearly 
objected to our profaning their solitude with our ungallant 
and unhuman Crossley, and we accepted the lesson they taught 
us. We went next time by our legs, as I hope you will. The 
superb view is in itself sufficient reward for the effort, and 
there is the further reward of the zest which follows physical 
effort in this electric air. From the top you have a vast half- 
circle view across the Marches into Montgomeryshire, a view 
that melts into many distances; while far below you, between 
yourself and the horizon, the acres of cornfields and flowered 
meadows and fallow make the valley a dazzling patchwork. 
How many counties may be seen from the highest point, known 
as the Pole, I cannot say, but identifiable features are Plinlim- 
mon, Cader Idris, Radnor Forest, the Wrekin, and the 
Malverns. The other great hill of Church Stretton is Caer 
Caradoc, the camp of Caractacus, where, as on the Long Mynd, 
many Roman remains are traceable. 

But I have to confess that I am of the wandering and wonder- 
ing sort, rather than the prying, sort, and I can tell you little 
about ruins and remains. If I happen upon them I look at 
them, but I do not go to see them. I ought, while at Church 
Stretton, to have seen numbers of things, but I did not; I saw 
only the country. But here are some things you may like to 
know about, which lie just around Church Stretton or within 
a rough triangle whose points are Ludlow, Bridgnorth, and 
Shrewsbury. A mile or so south, and just west of the road 
under the Long Mynd, is Minton, a Saxon village; a little 
farther south is Acton Scott and its Roman site and Elizabethan 
manor; and still farther towards Ludlow is the beautiful Stoke- 
say Castle which I have seen a splendid specimen of the forti- 
fied home of the early fourteenth century, with hall and tower 
and moat and wonderfully carved gate-house. There are the 
Roman camp of Bodbury Ring and the Saxon site of Brock- 
hurst. Within the triangle are remains of the twelfth-century 

237 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Buildwas Abbey; the Saxon church of Diddlebury; the 
Roman city of Uriconium, near Wroxeter; Acton Burnell, 
with ruins of castle and thirteenth-century manor, and the 
" Parliament Barn "; a dozen or more old churches; Carding- 
ton Castle; the Halls of Condover and Botvyle; and, just 
north of Acton Burnell, the treasure of the lot- Pitchford Hall, 
an E-shaped Elizabethan half-timbered home, whose front is a 
chequer-board of black and white. 

This too I have seen, and I could have looked at it for an 
hour. I could never be tempted to crime by desire of money, 
but I could, I believe, be tempted by desire of certain beautiful 
homes. Happily the temptation is remote; it is unlikely that 
possession of Pitchford Hall could result from any up-to-date 
Robin Hoodery or other law-breaking, and thus I am saved 
from wresding with the Deceiver. But what a house it is! 
What grace it offers from all angles! It is not an assembly of 
stone and brick and wood, but a being, made by art, brought 
to life by genius, and nurtured by love. Perhaps, when the 
twentieth century has recovered its breath, it will recover the 
art which it lost in the time of the first George, of building 
homes that gratify the instincts, not only of their own age, but 
of all ages. The most ardent devotee of modern Scandinavian 
and German domestic architecture could not, I think, have 
anything but approval for such a home as Pitchford Hall or 
for those other dream homes Compton Winyates, Holme 
Lacy, Parham Moat Hall, Boxsted Hall. They are the English 
home, and not all the modern * castles ' and * towers ' in the 
imitation Versailles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries, nor all the strict and clean ideas of M. Le Corbusier, 
can turn the English heart from adoring them. 

This rough triangle has another and more modern interest, 
and it is possible that in future it will be visited not only for its 
Roman remains and old halls and churches, but for certain 
literary associations. Possible, though one cannot be sure; it 

238 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

may be that Mary Webb will be as suddenly forgotten as she 
was suddenly remembered. But here and around here is the 
scenery of her novels Precious Bane, The House in Dormer 
Forest, Seven for a Secret, The Golden Arrow. She was born 
under the Wrekin, at the little hamlet of Leighton, and among 
the hills and fields whose spirit she so loved and tried to 
interpret she lies buried. Since her death she has been lavishly 
and enthusiastically written about, and it may be that this will 
have the effect of bringing a period of neglect; but there is 
life in her books, and when the noise has passed she may be 
again discovered, and may draw many a pilgrim to her scenes. 
Also within easy reach of Church Stretton are the pleasant 
towns of Much Wenlock and Bridgnorth, and the larger and 
more famous county town. Much Wenlock, beautifully set on 
the end of Wenlock Edge, is a little place whose story and 
importance belong more to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
the great days of its monastery and abbey than to this. But 
its lovely abbey ruins and its Guildhall and its half-timbered 
houses win your affection. It is the largest of the small towns 
of Shropshire, and has three times the population of Ludlow 
and Bridgnorth, but it is just as quiet, and carries its age with 
dignity and reserve. Bridgnorth, its slightly older neighbour, 
is of the same style, but perhaps more picturesque, since it is 
built on a slope and divided by the Severn. Part of it is on the 
top of the slope, and the other part runs down (via lift, if you 
like) to the river and continues on its other side. To its impres- 
sive position the river adds grace, and the narrow, twisting 
streets of the * old ' town and their clusters of half-timbered 
and gabled houses make it one more place that will interfere 
with your tour and keep you lingering. Enter it in darkness 
by the town gate, and you will have the feeling of entering a 
page torn out of Hans Andersen. Among the old houses may 
be found the home of Bishop Percy, of the Reliques, who was 
the son of a Bridgnorth grocer; and many another house looks 

2 39 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

as if it should have been the home of a poet, a gallant, a sword- 
and-cloak adventurer, or the belle of the town for whom they 
all fought. Its seventeenth-century Town Hall stands in its 
main thoroughfare, occupying the middle of the road, and 
unusually sylvan surroundings make a romantic setting for the 
ruins of its Norman castle in the form of broken walls and a 
leaning tower. In the Civil War Bridgnorth was Royal, and 
made such a stubborn defence against Cromwell's men that 
when at last it fell the invaders punished it by blowing its 
castle to pieces. But the tower remains, apparently about to 
topple, but never toppling. 

Bridgnorth cannot be described, nor can any of these old 
towns of Shropshire and Herefordshire. Their atmosphere 
eludes the word; it must be experienced. They touch the 
extreme of the picturesque, and no extravagance of the 
chocolate-box artist or the scenic designer of the theatre, faking 
his old-world town, can exceed them. Whatever flourishes of 
the ' olden time ' he may indulge in, however he may pile on 
the gables and the king-posts and the carvings, there is always 
some actual model which has outdone him. Many a stranger 
who has laughed at our calendars and our stage-sets has 
suffered a shock in Herefordshire. There he sees the very 
bodily substance of the whimsy-whamsy fairyland of the stage 
at which he has scoffed as the futile sentimentalizing of the 
English over a past that never existed. There, before him, is 
the very stuff of the past. It tnay appear to him to be the stuff 
of dreams, but they were dreams that came to life. The English 
are not as dreamy as the Scotch or the Irish, but when they do 
dream they dream with alert senses, splendidly, and endeavour 
to translate their dreams for the blessing of our daily life. These 
counties are full of dreams made whole. Within every few 
miles of them the stranger may touch the material of that idea 
of old England which Mark Twain sought to annihilate. Here 
he may learn that the feeling of the Britisher for the past is not 

240 




LUBIOW 
Courtesy of LMS. 




A " BLACK-AND-WHITE " HOUSE AT BRITTON BROCKHURST 
Photo J. Dixan-Scott 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

a yearning after phantasmic poetry and picture, but comes from 
a living, everyday contact with the genuine and tangible objects 
of it. 

Going south from Ludlow, the first Herefordshire town one 
reaches is Leorninster, which they pronounce Lemster. It is, 
of course, old, and has some beauties of its own; not so many 
as Ludlow or Bridgnorth, but enough; and it has sweet 
country at its doors, and on its outskirts some of the most 
exquisite villages ever made. Its chief attraction is its great 
church, sometimes called the Minster or the Priory Church, 
which has three naves in three different styles. It has a good 
assortment of half-timbered houses in the streets called Pop- 
lands, Bargates, and Corn Square, but the best example is a 
house called the Grange, now a private residence, but once the 
Market House or Butter Gross. It originally stood in the 
centre of the town, but in the middle of the nineteenth century 
it was considered an obstruction and was put up to auction. It 
was bought at ^95 by the owner of the manor, removed from 
its then site, re-erected on its present site, and offered as a gift to 
the town. But the town did not want it, and it became, and 
still is, a private house. The town built a new Town Hall, and 
as it built it in 1856 you can guess how it compares with the 
Market House of 1633. 

Two or three miles outside the town is the manor-house, 
surprisingly named Hampton Court. But, though not so large 
as the Middlesex Hampton Court, it is its senior: it dates from 
Henry V, and was built by an officer on his return from the 
French wars. The local guide to Leominster says that the 
manor of Leominster was bought in 1808 by Sir Richard 
Arkwright, of the " Spinning Jenny," and with it Hampton 
Court, which he made his home. But, as Sir Richard Ark- 
wright died in 1792, there seems to be some confusion with 
another Arkwright. 

A few miles to the west and south-west you find the 

241 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

exquisite villages of Eardisland, Pembridge, Brinsop, Weobley, 
and Willersley, They are so exquisite that there is nothing to 
be said about them. The Tudor streets of the towns are 
delightful, but here you have this same black-and-white archi- 
tecture in clustering cottages dropped into paradisal country. 
They stand with their church amid hills and gardens and 
streams, offering a superb picture at every bend of their main 
street, and a picture which, in almost all its details, is the 
picture that was seen by those whose home it was in the 
seventeenth century. When you come upon them there is 
nothing to do but to stand and stare and give them the supreme 
applause of silence. If ever you have thought harshly of 
England these villages, I think, will compel you to a peccavi 
and to a murmuring of that line of Cowper's. 

When I think of the most beautiful English scenery and 
for England the most beautiful means not the grand (which is 
in the North) , but the rich and soft and the sunny I usually 
think of Devonshire. But on reflection I feel that the prize is 
not so easily won. After a week in Herefordshire I am satisfied 
that there cannot, anywhere in England, be scenery so appeal- 
ingly lovely. My last tour through it remains with me as an 
impression of black-and-white villages and towns; of orchards 
and, by implication, Hereford cider; of the Golden Valley (or 
valley of the little Dore) ; of frustrated efforts to see another 
hamlet which I have long wished to see England's Gate; of 
the Black Mountains; Offa's Dyke (the remains nothing so im- 
pressive as Hadrian's Wall) ; the Wye, which is with you in so 
many parts of the county; and, one upon another, gardens, 
gardens, gardens. 

England is a land of sweet gardens and of garden literature; 
and so varied are the gardens that it is almost futile to attempt 
to judge between them. Each has its own law and justification. 
Yet, somewhat rashly, I am prepared to say that I have seen 
none to compare with these Herefordshire gardens, and if in 

242 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

the past I said the same about the gardens of the Upper 
Thames, and later may say the same about some of the Isle of 
Wight gardens, that is not because I am fickle, but because of 
England's richness of gardens. There are the gardens of the 
great, usually open to the public at a small fee, which goes 
to the local hospital; there are the gardens of the smaller 
country house; there are the gardens of the middle-class 
country villa, and the cottage gardens of the peasantry; and 
all are glorious. 

The English garden, like the English landscape, has its own 
quality. Profusely furnished as the larger gardens are with 
blooms from all corners of the world, their main quality is still 
delicacy, the gift of our meek skies and tender rains. They 
may use the flowers of Southern Europe or Australia, but they 
never show the blaze of the gardens of Southern Europe or the 
enamelled splendour of the gardens of Australia. Our gar- 
deners (I believe the best English gardeners, like the best 
English engineers, come from Scodand) are highly skilled, but, 
with all their skill, they can do no more than make an English 
garden; they can work only upon what is there. No man can 
say that his garden is wholly of his making. It is mainly of 
Nature's making. In each district you can have only the 
garden which the operations of Nature in that district allow 
you to have. You may think that you choose, but you do not; 
and the garden you have in the North, the garden you have by 
the Severn, and the garden you have on the South Coast or on 
the East Coast must conform to the laws of the air and soil of 
these districts. Nothing you can do can side-track those laws. 
Follow them, and your garden will grow in happiness and 
luxuriance. Ignore them, and it will be a cause of incessant 
struggle, and will look like it. 

The happiest and most representative English gardens, I 
think, are those casual gardens of the medium house, which 
the owner himself, with the assistance of one gardener and a 

243 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

boy, has created out of undirected passion sometimes, if the 
passion were fiery enough, creating a work of genius. The 
park-like gardens of the great, where the wild ' garden and 
the rock garden are as cunningly designed as the Italian garden 
and the French garden and the topiary garden, and all are 
tended by an army of gardeners and under-gardeners, have 
their special beauty the beauty of perfected works of art- 5 - 
and England has hundreds of them. But the garden that 
comes to mind at thought of the word is the small garden 
owned by nobody in particular, made with no art, carelessly 
arranged, but lit with flashes of inspiration. All over England 
you find these modest gardens, large enough to provide several 
sorts of garden, and lawns and tennis-courts and trees and 
shrubbery, but not large enough to get lost in; and all unmis- 
takably and fragrantly English. And nowhere, as I say, do 
they so achieve such aching loveliness as in Herefordshire. At 
every mile or so of this county they spread the enchantment 
of their high midsummer pomp. Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis 
garden is any English garden: 

. . . gold-dusted snap-dragon, 
Sweet william with its homely cottage smell, 

And stocks in fragrant blow; 
Roses that down the alleys shine afar, 

And open, jasmine-muffled lattices, 
And groups under the dreaming garden trees, 

And the full moon and the white evening star. 

The road from Leominster to Ledbury, by way of Bromyard 
and another Golden Valley and Bishop's Frome, is not the 
shortest way, but it gives a run of interest and colour. The 
best time for the gardens is, naturally, summer, but if you go 
in spring you will still have graceful gardens around you 
those other gardens which stretch acre by acre from here into 
Worcestershire: the orchards of apple, cherry, pear, and plum. 
The whole country, indeed, from Evesham to the Lugg and 

244 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

Wye rivers, is a country of orchards, and, on either side, par- 
ticularly between Leominster and Evesham, the slopes are seas 
of maiden pink and a white so rich that in darkness it glows. 
The blossoms, which come by sunlight and rain, seem actually 
to be made of sunlight and rain, likely, at any touch of ours, 
to resolve themselves into air. Yet, more gentle than any jewels 
and more delicate than drawn gold, only a gale can shatter 
them from their trees before their rime. These orchards, as I 
said earlier, are one of the sights of the English spring, and if 
Hereford and Worcester had nothing but them they would still 
have claims upon those who would fully see the treasures of 
England. Even the smallest orchard adds a benediction to a 
scene, and here are orchards filling the eye's range and crowd- 
ing upon the heart. It is odd that our poets should have given 
us so many songs upon gardens and scarcely any upon orchards, 
whose beauty, one would think, added to their service to man, 
would have inspired the song of songs. The local seventeenth- 
century poet, John Philips (the "cyder poet"), concerned 
himself with the product rather than the orchards themselves. 
MarvelPs Thoughts in a Garden just mentions apples and 
peaches; William Barnes gave us one or two which are per- 
haps beautiful to those who can understand the language; and 
there are Norman Gale's Orchard Songs. I can recall no others 
definitely celebrating the orchard; the poets seem to have left 
that duty to the local rhymesters of the orchard countries who 
made our orchard- wassail songs. This is an injustice, and if 
I were a poet I would make you such a song upon orchards that 
a fruiterer's shop would never again be the same to you, and 
the sight of apple blossom would make your heart leap to the 
throb of my verses. Every time you saw an orchard you would 
see an orchard for the first time. But, since no poet has yet 
rolled his eye to full effect, let us hear the prose of a Hereford- 
shire writer of Jacobean times, Thomas Dingley, whose diary 
was published by the Camden Society: 

245 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

The parish wherein syder is plentiful hath and doth afford 
many people that have and do enjoy this blessing of long life, 
neither are the aged here bed-ridden or decrepit as elsewhere, 
but for the most part lively and vigorous; next to God, we 
ascribe it to our flourishing orchards, which are not only the 
ornament but pride of our contrey, and that in a double respect 
first that the bloomed trees in spring do not only sweeten but 
purifye the ambient air; next that they yield us plenty of rich 
and winy liquors which long experience hath taught do con- 
duce very much to the constant health and long life of our in- 
habitants; the cottagers, as well as the wealthier, using for the 
most part litde other liquors in their families than restorative 
syder. The ordinary course among the servants is to breakfast 
and sup with toast and syder through the whole Lent, and the 
same diet in the neighbourhood continues on fasting days all 
the year after, which heightens their appetites and creates in 
them durable strength to labour. Syder is their physic and our 
orchards their apothecaries shops. 

Ledbury is another black-and-white town which is justly 
proud of its beautiful Town Market Hall. It stands in the 
centre of the town, supported on sixteen pillars of wood, and 
is the work of a seventeenth-century builder, the " King's 
Carpenter," John Abel, whose work is found all over Hereford- 
shire. The Leominster Market House was his work. It has 
also a Feathers inn, not, I think, so ornate as Ludlow's, but 
of great age and beautifully carved. Its sixteenth- and seven- 
teenth-century houses are in good preservation, and one short 
street has almost nothing else. Since the end of the Border 
wars, when all these towns lived a life of alarums and excur- 
sions, it has been a peaceful market town, and litde has 
happened to it or in it. But it may in future, like the Church 
Stretton country, be visited for another reason than its remain- 
ing charms. Here was born (in the family of a local solicitor) 
John Masefield. It is a town that should have produced a poet, 
and it is fortunate in having done it. Poets, as I have said, 

246 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

usually choose unseemly birthplaces, but with Mr Masefield 
the fitness of things for once was served. If environment has 
any significance the sons of these gracious towns must surely 
be richer in spirit than those born in factory towns or in the 
horrid country houses of the 1850'$, and if the man should be 
a poet his verses should have a music of profound tones. But 
this immediate country of our Middle West has had more to 
do with music and the theatre than with poetry. From this 
country came Nell Gwynn, David Garrick, William Betty, 
and Sarah Siddons and her brothers, Stephen and Charles 
Kemble. Of modern musicians it has given us, among others, 
Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Walford Davies, Mr Gustav Hoist, and 
Mr Julius Harrison. 

Black-and-white towns are as numerous here as orchards, 
and, besides those I have mentioned, there are Bewdley, 
Tenbury, Bishop's Casde, Knighton, Kington, and, of course, 
Hereford (the High Town) , Ross, and Tewkesbury. 

The approach to Great Malvera from Tenbury, under the 
Worcestershire Beacon, makes an impressive prologue to the 
beauty of the place itself. It stands upon a series of terraces cut 
in the hills, the tower of its Priory Church rising like a flower 
from the foliage of its bright, trim houses set against the purple 
of the hills. Whether viewed from below or looked down upon 
from the summit it makes a happy picture, and seems always 
to have been freshly built that day. Yet it is not much talked 
of among spas. We hear much of the beauty of Buxton, 
Matlock, Harrogate, and Cheltenham, but litde about Mal- 
vern, save in connexion with musical and dramatic festivals. 
It seems to be better known by these than by its beauty, and of 
late years has become for certain modern plays a f first-night ' 
town. Yet of all the spas I put it first. The others have their 
beautiful settings and beautiful surroundings, but not more 
beautiful, I think, than Malvern. The Malvern Hills are as 
lovely as any range south of Cumberland, and the general 

247 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

polish and holiday feeling of the town, and the impression it 
gives of constant sun, set it apart. It has not the elderly, vale- 
tudinarian atmosphere of some spas nor the coarse ' gaiety ' of 
holiday places of the coast. It is dignified but vital, and from 
its post half-way up the hill it shines upon the countryside with 
a face of youth. Life here seems to be delectable; never vexed, 
never tepid, never confused, but always suave and fluent. I 
wish the people who run our coast resorts would take a look at 
our inland spas and see how a town may be a holiday town 
and yet be comely both in its appearance and in its pleasure. 
It is the centre of a group of Malverns which lie scattered 
around it on the hillside North Malvern, West Malvern, 
Little Malvern, Malvern Link, and Malvern Wells. They are 
so aptly set that you can walk out of their streets and are at 
once on the hills; those hills where William Langland lay and 
dreamed his dream of Piers Plowman. The chief points are 
the Worcestershire Beacon, about 1400 feet above sea-level, 
the North Hill, and Midsummer Hill, not so high. Each of 
these commands an immense sweep of England, but you have 
to be very lucky in your weather to see in a week all that can 
be seen from them. Not that there is much point in being able 
to give a name to a particular gleam or smudge fifty miles 
away; the reward for the climb is the immensity and variety 
of scene; the abundance and superb grading of colours; the 
play of light and cloud; the chequered plain; the silver threads 
which are rivers; the snowy patches which are orchards; and 
the rapture afforded to physical vision by vast prospects. To 
those not content with vast prospect the hills offer other 
interest in the numerous remains of British camps, Roman 
camps, Saxon camps, Norman camps, and the hill dwellings of 
remoter tribes. Down in the town itself you have the gay 
gardens of Rose Bank and Prior Park; the Winter Garden, 
where the * festivals * are held; the Priory Gate-house and 
Priory church; and the terraces of glossy shops. The Gate- 

248 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

house and church are all that remain of the once great Priory, 
founded in the eleventh century. The church, which has been 
much restored, contains work of all periods from Norman 
onward; and its chief possessions are its fifteenth-century 
stained glass and its pictorial tiles of the same period. These 
are held to be among the finest of their kind in England. 

My visits to Malvern have been few (three, I think) and 
short, and it is one of many places which are constantly calling 
me to an extended visit. I want to see it and the hills in their 
fullness and take them to myself, and I hope some day to achieve 
this. But I am so used to being thwarted in the visiting of 
places that appeal to me, and in having unsought, but no less 
pleasant, places thrust upon me, that I have put the hope away 
in the box of patience, that stepsister of despair. 

Not far from Malvern is a small town which I wanted to 
see for memories of Henry Fielding. Upton-on-Severn is a 
neat and oldish town of clean lines, the kind of town one 
might comfortably settle in when one is about seventy; hardly 
the town one would pick as fit for the uproarious scenes which 
Fielding set in it. If you remember Torn Jones you will 
remember that it was to the chief inn of Upton that Jones 
brought the half-naked lady whom he encountered after leaving 
the Man of the Hill; and that in this inn during the evening 
there were three fights, half a dozen quarrels, furious entrances, 
and furious exits. Through eleven chapters the scene remains 
at the Upton inn, and if Fielding gave even a near picture of 
inn life of his day nobody, I think, will regret that rimes have 
changed. Of the dozen or so violent episodes of those eleven 
chapters any one would upset the routine of a modern hotel 
for a whole week, and would echo for a month or more in 
summonses and prosecutions. But the landlord and landlady 
and Susan the chambermaid seemed to take them as all in the 
day's and night's work. In those Upton scenes Fielding was 
before his time. He gave us there a complete scenario for an 

249 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

early 'comic' film. The half-naked lady; Tom Jones, her 
champion, fighting the landlord; Partridge fighting the land- 
lady; the chambermaid fighting Partridge; the half-naked 
lady fighting the chambermaid; the sergeant fighting the 
coachman; Tom Jones sharing a room with the half-naked 
lady; the arrival of Sophia Western, and her learning that 
Jones was in bed and not alone; the fight between Jones and 
the c husband ' of the now quite naked lady; the arrival of 
Squire Western; Tom Jones accused of theft what could 
Hollywood add to that? To-day all is quiet in Upton, quiet 
and green and cool; but so vividly has Fielding drawn his 
people that one has only to look again at the doorway of the 
inn to see them all come tumbling out Squire Western, with 
his view-halloo; Jones and Partridge footing it for London: 
Mrs Waters; Mrs Fitzpatrick; Sophia and Mrs Honour; Mr 
Fitzpatrick; Mr Maclachlan; the sergeant; footmen, post- 
boys, the termagant landlady, and the horse-marine chamber- 
maid. And the quiet streets are suddenly all hot and raucous 
and odorous and mazy with the life of that period which 
Austin Dobson saw as all elegance and blue china. 

From Upton to Pershore you have a pleasant drive, which 
leaves the hills behind, but keeps you still in the orchard 
country, as the word Pershore says; orchards and woods. 
Pershore is famous for the remains of its ancient abbey, now 
the parish church, but the euphonious name itself is an invita- 
tion, and there is its other and greater title to fame. England 
is strewn with the grey lace of abbey remains, but the Pershore 
plum is a thing unique, of a richness and integrity that have 
made its name synonymous throughout the world with plum 
perfection. I tried them on the spot, and, tasting their sweet- 
ness in their sweet birthplace, I felt that they deserved to be 
written of with the ardour and elegance which M. Andre 
Simon brings to his essays on Bordeaux vintages. The word 
* plum ' alone is good. It bursts forth, round and satisfying on 

250 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

the lips; full, yet not fat. An elderly, well-fed country rector 
among words; a port- wine word for, surely, in poetic fitness, 
port should spring from the Plum rather than from the Grape, 
which is a niggardly, B.B.C. sort of word. When a man has 
won the chief rewards of his profession our richest metaphor 
is that he has won its plums. When the Chinese seek a fit 
name for a lovely maid they can go little higher than Plum- 
blossom-in-morning-sun. When a man had .100,000 put away 
they used to say, not that he had a pearl or a crown or an 
asparagus or an apricot, but that he had a plum. When things 
are true we say they are plumb, and when women are not 
stout and not thin, but have ample bosoms for the ease of a 
poet's weary brow, we say they are plump. The Pershore plum 
is lovely and excellent in birth, in maturity, and in all phases 
between. Think of the plum in its honeyed flower; the young 
plum in its first amber; the ripe plum in its green bower, with 
its gold or purple surface, on which the hues chase each other 
as in a prism; and you have images from dainty to profound. 
It gives its best when eaten from the tree or the wall, but it is 
good in its sugared juice, good in a tart with a velvet clothing 
of cream, and even as plum jam, that third atrocity of the 
Great War, it can be, if made with love, as good as your Mount 
Hymettus honey. 

Go to Pershore hi plum- time; pay your respects to the 
remains of the abbey; but keep your deeper obeisances for the 
plum. Whether they have at Pershore any ceremony of blessing 
the plums, akin to the wassailing of apple-trees and the blessing 
of the seas at our fishing towns and the blessing of the vines in 
France and Italy, I do not know. If not, there should be such 
a ceremony both at the flowering and at the harvest, and it 
should be beautiful and pagan, with bells to open it, and with 
white-robed young girls leading the baskets in with song, and 
at evening dancing into the sunset. On Exmoor in the past, 
according to Blackmore, they had some rough sort of 

251 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

ceremony for the corn harvest, at which appointed songs were 
sung. There was little beauty in the ceremony, but some of 
the songs had a touch that lifted them out of the doggerel of 
the wassailing songs: 

The corn, oh, the corn, 'tis the ripening of the corn ! 
Go unto the door, my lad, and look beneath the moon, 
Thou canst see, beyond the woodrick, how it is yelloon; 
'Tis the harvesting of wheat and the barley must be shorn. 

The wheat, oh, the wheat, 'tis the ripening of the wheat I 
All the day it has been hanging down its heavy head, 
Bowing over on our bosoms with a beard of red; 
Tis the harvest and the value makes the labour sweet. 

The barley, oh, the barley, and the barley is in prime ! 
All the day it has been rustling with its bristles brown, 
Waiting with its beard a-bowing till it can be mown; 
'Tis the harvest and the barley must abide its time. 

The oats, oh, the oats, 'tis the ripening of the oats ! 

All the day they have been dancing with their flakes of white, 

Waiting for the girding-hook, to be the nags* delight; 

*Tis the harvest; let them dangle in their skirted coats. 

The corn, oh, the corn, and the blessing of the corn ! 
Come unto the door, my lads, and look beneath the moon; 
We can see on hill and valley how it is yelloon, 
With a breadth of glory, as when our Lord was born. 

That is one of the old corn songs of the West. I wonder 
whether Pershore has a plum song or the Vale of Evesham a 
blossom song ? I know of no such song, but in the moment of 
writing I recall that the plum is not without its celebration. 
One of the movements of Mr Julius Harrison's Worcestershire 
Suite is devoted to the theme of Pershore plums. 

Lovely as Worcestershire is, with its orchards and pastures, 
it is a perplexity to those who wish really to explore it. Even 
after leaving it you can never be sure that you have finished 
with it. Many of our counties are of ungainly shape and 

252 




i^kLJiikiL^ 



SHOTTERY VILLAGE 
Courtesy of L.M.S. Railway 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

thrust little limbs into other counties, but Worcester is not 
content with that; it claims isolated tracts of them far away 
from its and their general borders. Long after you have crossed 
its defined borders you find you are again under its County 
Council. In the interior of Gloucestershire you find four 
circular tracts which are Worcester, but have no connecting 
link with Worcester; and after you have left the county just 
beyond Evesham, and have crossed North Gloucestershire and 
got well into Warwickshire, you come into another detached 
piece of Worcester. You find the same thing in the country 
west of Birmingham. Although the county boundary is Stour- 
bridge, and north of that is Staffordshire, and Dudley and its 
environs are in Staffordshire, some miles from the Worcester 
border, they are nevertheless part of Worcester and are so 
ringed on the map. This odd possession of territory outside 
the borders proper goes back, I believe, to the days of the old 
religious establishments, when Worcester was a force in eccle- 
siastical (and business) afl&irs, and when its cathedrals and 
priories acquired land or accepted gifts of land wherever and 
whenever they could. They did not extend the borders of their 
county; if the gift was far afield they ignored the intervening 
country and ringed their distant possession as part of 
Worcester. 

The black-and-white architecture prevails here as in Shrop- 
shire and Herefordshire, and many delightful and unknown, 
or very little known, villages are to be found along its byways 
and even on the edges of Birmingham. Some years ago Mr 
Cecil Aldin gave me a copy of his book of pictures of old inns 
(which he embellished with a brilliant two-minute pencil- 
drawing on the half-tide) , and from this book I learned of two 
Worcester villages which then I had never heard the names of 
Ombersley and Chaddesley Corbet. Each is a Tudor village, 
of litde more than one broad street, and each has a small but 
beautiful inn the King's Arms at Ombersley and the Talbot 

253 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

at Chaddesley Corbet with gables and projecting eaves and 
lattice windows and lichened roofs. Ombersley is on the main 
road between Worcester and Kidderminster, and Chaddesley 
Corbet is perilously on the fringe of the Black Country. But 
both remain unsmutted and keep their even tenor unshaken. 
From any gateway of their long streets one would not be 
surprised to see a sedan chair emerge, or that eternal figure of 
past business the ' solitary horseman,* They appear to have 
grown into the eighteenth century and then to have halted. 
Smollett's Matthew Bramble would feel at home in them, as 
old towns of the style he knew; even earlier travellers, John 
Taylor, for example, or Mistress Celia Fiennes, or Daniel 
Defoe; would find them little changed; and, earlier still, the 
Scots soldiers who accompanied Charles II at Worcester would, 
if they could see them, find them recognizable. If recapturing 
the past is a hobby of yours you could do it very well by dream- 
ing away an hour or so in Ombersley or Chaddesley Corbet. 
You have there the perfect settings ready to people themselves 
at your will with the speech and costume of all generations 
from Elizabeth's time up to motor-bus time. 

When you cross into Warwickshire from Worcestershire you 
leave the black-and-white villages and come into the humbler 
but equally pleasing stone and thatch. All along the southern 
part of Warwickshire, below Stratford, lies a tangle of 
thatched villages strung so closely on the cat's-cradle string of 
byways that you find one at every few miles. Stratford is the 
best centre for exploring this part, and for the middle and 
northern part, whose country and villages are of a different 
type, either Warwick or Leamington is convenient. The part 
between Edge Hill and the Cotswolds, known as the Vale of 
the Red Horse, is not much visited; yet its villages are so rural, 
such rosebud villages, that, after praising two score other 
villages, I have little to say about them. That is the nuisance 

2 54 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

which visits every writer of English tours. Beauty crowds 
upon beauty. England is so fair and so rich that at point after 
point, when one feels that it cannot offer anything more worthy 
of superlatives, the crescendo is maintained, and deeper beauty 
or charm presents itself and finds one wordless. 

After many years of wandering about the country I find a 
certain consolation in the fact that I have never acquired suffi- 
cient money to consider the purchase of a country home the 
consolation of relief from the racking trouble of deciding 
where that country home shall be. Wherever you go in England 
you are constantly finding the perfect spot. And on your next 
run you find something better. And on the next something 
better still.- In a fortnight's tour you may find twenty spots, 
each of which is just the spot where you could be content, and 
how anybody with the power to choose makes a choice I cannot 
guess. I fancy it must be a business of getting a map of 
England and a pin, and blindfolding yourself and turning 
round three times and jabbing; with a safeguard that if the 
pin descends on a seaside e resort * or a large town you have 
another jab. I am certain that if I were able to buy a country 
home, and, after the weighing of this and that, or tossing up, 
did make a decision and a purchase, I should in a few weeks 
see another ideal spot and sell out and move. I know so many 
of these ideal spots that, as I cannot live in all of them, it is 
perhaps a kindness that I have no chance of living in any of 
them. It may be that those who do live in them are in what 
would be my condition restless with a desire to live in that 
more beautiful valley, forty miles away. It may be that my 
present enforced condition, of merely tasting them for a week 
at a time from hotel or inn, is the happier. In Shropshire and 
Herefordshire and Worcestershire I know ten ideal spots for 
a home, and I feel that nothing could excel them; and then I 
come to these Warwickshire villages, and feel that here at last 
is what I have unconsciously been seeking, and that all the 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

others were makeshifts. And a fortnight later I come upon a 
Derbyshire village, and away goes Warwickshire. 

But for the moment Warwickshire holds me, and I feel that 
anything I may have said in the way of glorias to other villages 
rightly belongs here. The very nomenclature of these Red 
Horse villages has a pleasing ring of its own. They lie in a 
litde stocking of land below the Stratford-Kineton road, and 
they fill the stocking with a handful of jewels Butler's Mar- 
ston, Pillerton-Hersey, Oxhill, Whatcote, Idlicote, Honington, 
Barcheston, Burmington, Cherington, Brailes, and, that marvel 
of old homes, Compton Winyates. They are villages such as 
the author of the Shakespeare plays would have seen, and, 
since they are far from the world, you may see them much as he 
saw them. There are other villages nearer to Stratford, which 
he must have seen, but they are so known and so much visited 
that virtue is gone out of them. Their aroma has been dis- 
sipated by too much contact with the crowd, and, pleasant 
though they still are in their cultivated neatness, they are not 
as he saw them. These others are. Pilgrims seldom find them. 
Their lanes are massed to-day, as they were three hundred 
years ago> with wild violet and hyacinth and daffodil, bloom- 
ing secure from any meddling of incontinent hand. They lie 
in their lovely lost countryside untroubled by the world and un- 
tarnished by Rosalind tea cottages or Falstaff inns or Anne 
Page postcard and souvenir shops. They are just old villages 
which have moved from the days of their foundations at snail- 
power, and if you ask about their history you will be told of 
the battle of Edge Hill. 

Between Leamington and the Northants boundary is another 
group, with mellow brick houses and greens, and old bridges 
and odd names Bubbenhall, Cubbington, Birdingbury, Rad- 
ford Semele. Along the Foss Way, which runs across the whole 
county to Leicester, meeting the Wading Street at a point near 
Nuneaton called High Cross, are still more, and, as this is now 

256 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

an almost unused road, they are even deeper out of the world. 
Happening upon them by obscure lanes is like happening upon 
an otherwise invisible life; a life existing with us, but in another 
dimension, and only perceptible by some accident with time 
and space. You may have passed near them a dozen times 
without perceiving any hint of them or guessing that they were 
there; and then a misturn in a lane brings you to them, as it 
may bring you to the hidden glory of Compton Winyates, 
and you feel the surprise of a pilot when he strikes a rock 
which wasn't there yesterday. Warwickshire, I think, must 
have more of these unguessed and delightful villages than any 
other county. Its main roads are four only, and they are made 
to serve Birmingham, touching in their way Warwick and 
Leamington, Stratford and Coventry the points most sought 
by travellers. The spaces between these roads, having nothing 
' important,* are served only by minor roads, and these roads 
are but thinly trafficked. The villages therefore keep their 
native charm, living a life characteristic to Warwickshire vil- 
lages, neither spoiled by commerce nor glorified by ' romance/ 
They are out of the procession, and are never likely to be 
in it, but they have their landscapes and their memories, 
and those landscapes are just the soft green-and-gold land- 
scapes in which things and people may most happily fade 
away. For their full story I direct you to a delightful book by 
Miss Mary Dormer Harris, Unknown Warwickshire, which 
gives, not only story, but description and routes for finding 
them. Meantime, when you are tired of Stratford and Warwick 
and Kenil worth, you might wind about the unfrequented lanes 
and find some which perhaps even Miss Harris has not 
found. 

The Vale of the Red Horse, like the Vale of the White 
Horse, got its name from the figure of a horse cut in the earth 
(which here is slightly red) at nobody knows what period. 
Some say Saxon, and some put it later. It -was cut on the slope 

257 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

of Edge Hill, near the site of the battle, but you cannot find it 
to-day. Until the end of the eighteenth century it was a promi- 
nent landmark and carefully tended, but about that time it was 
allowed to become overgrown, and its exact position is now 
a matter of conjecture. The battle of Edge Hill, fought in the 
autumn of 1642 at a spot half-way between Kineton and Rad- 
way, was the first encounter of Charles and his Parliament in 
their four years' war, and it was of that indecisive kind which 
enabled each side to claim a victory. Indecisive, but bloody. 
By some accounts it was the most murderous of all; others 
state that no more than fifteen hundred of both sides were 
killed. Cottages and houses in this district are still pointed out 
as places where Charles slept, or where he breakfasted, before 
the battle, with the Princes Charles and James; and at the Sun- 
rising inn, which used to stand at the top of Sunrising Hill, 
leading out of Banbury, they kept a collection of swords and 
cannon balls and bullets which had been turned up in neigh- 
bouring fields. William Howitt, during an exploration of Edge 
Hill, from whose plateau you look right across the Vale to the 
Cotswolds, paid a visit to this inn and spent a pleasant evening: 

I reached this house in the dusk of evening, after a long day's 
ramble, and was greatly struck with its solitary elevation in the 
dimness of a wild twilight. The country far below me showed 
through the mists and shadows of coming night, wide and vast. 
The door, contrary to the wont of inns, I found fast; and on 
knocking I was answered by a female voice within, demanding 
who was there. When I had satisfied the inquirer, I heard the 
slow and seemingly reluctant fall of chains and withdrawal of 
bolts and bars, and presently an elderly face took a peep at me 
through the partially opened door. When admitted, I found 
that this respectable-looking matron and myself were the sole 
persons in this large old house. It was Michaelmas, and all the 
servants were at liberty, and gone off to the towns to the mops 
and bull-roastings, which are the regular places of rehiring for 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

all the servants, men and women, throughout the country at 
that time of year. The landlady's son was gone to market, and 
thus she was left alone, and naturally apprehensive of rude and 
thievish strollers who are on the alert on such occasions in soli- 
tary districts* The good woman soon introduced me into a 
well-furnished and well-carpeted room, with a blazing fire and 
tea and toast before me, and Hooper's History of the Rebellion 
and Richard Jago's poem of Edge Hill to ponder over; and 
with a sense of the high wild country in which I was, upon 
me, and the winds of autumn whistling and roaring round the 
house, I do not know that I ever spent a more pleasantly soli- 
tary evening. 

I have quoted once or twice from Howitt, for his Visits con- 
tain a number of stories not found in similar books of English 
travel. (A point about this book, not widely known, is that it 
includes, without indication of authorship, the work of one 
greater than Howitt. A large section of his Visit to Stratford 
was actually the work of Mrs Gaskell, inserted by private 
arrangement.) His Warwickshire story of how Charles, on the 
morning of Edge Hill, met Richard Shuckburgh, squire of 
Shuckburgh Hall, going a-hunting; how he wondered that a 
gentleman should hunt when his king was fighting for his 
crown; how the squire returned and armed his peasantry and 
joined the battle, is a common story. But a later story of the 
same family, told by Howitt, is not. 

In 1809, a few years before Howitt told the story, some 
officers of a regiment stationed at Daventry, a few miles across 
the border from Shuckburgh, were invited by the then squire 
to dine and hunt and generally be free of the hall and estate. 
They came frequendy, and received the best English hospitality 
from the squire arid his daughter, a girl of twenty and of great 
beauty. It was not long before one of the officers, a young 
Lieutenant Sharp, was deeply in love, and, as open house was 
kept, he had every opportunity of meeting the girl, walking 

259 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

with her about the estate, and moving her to his own feelings. 
These were soon mutual, and it might have been a happy affair, 
and was happy until the squire heard of it. It was he who 
turned it to tragedy. Perhaps, in common with all parents of 
that period, he was against young people choosing for them- 
selves, or perhaps he knew something against the lieutenant. 
Whatever his reason, he ordered his daughter to sever the 
friendship at once, and closed his door to the lieutenant. The 
daughter, in common with most daughters of that period, 
obeyed orders. She wrote to the lieutenant breaking off the 
connexion, and after some further correspondence it was 
agreed between them that it should be broken and that they 
should return to each other the letters and presents which had 
passed. She was to leave his packet in a summer-house in the 
grounds, and he was to collect it during the night and leave 
her packet in its place. It appears that she left his packet as 
arranged, and early on the following morning slipped out to 
collect hers. As she entered the summer-house she was seen by 
a gardener, who, wondering what she could be about at so early 
an hour, moved to follow her. But before he could reach the 
summer-house there came a crack of a pistol and a bump, 
and another crack and another bump. On entering he found 
her and the lieutenant dead. 

Whether, in a fit of frustrated love, her suitor had shot her 
unawares, or whether, finding life, in the form of a father's 
dictates, too cruel to be endured, they had agreed on self-des- 
truction, was never known. No clue was left, no last words 
spoken, by either. The only witness to the act was the sum- 
mer-house, and that, according to Howitt, was soon afterwards 
demolished. Everything, indeed, that could remind the stricken 
father of the garden in which his girl had walked was changed. 
Trees were felled, lawns taken up, flower-beds redisposed, all 
in such a way that within a few weeks those who had known 
the garden before the tragedy would not have recognized it. 

260 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

Not far from Shuckburgh are three other places with tragic 
connexions, not emotional, but political Ashby St Ledgers, 
Dimchurch, and Coombe Abbey. Here is Gunpowder Plot 
country. Ashby St Ledgers was the seat of the moving spirit 
of the plot. At an extinct inn at Dunchurch, the Lion, which 
lives as a farmhouse, assembled that * hunting party ' of 
Catesby, Lytdeton, Percy, Everard Digby, the two Winters, 
Rookwood, and the brothers Wright, to plan the rising which 
was to centre on Dunsmoor Heath after the blowing up of the 
Protestant Parliament. And at Coombe Abbey lived the 
Princess Elizabeth, the young daughter of James I (subse- 
quently Queen of Bohemia), who, on the destruction of Parlia- 
ment, was to be seized and proclaimed queen and educated in 
the true faith. All these places on the 6th of November, 1605, 
were in a state of alarum, flight, and battle. On the midnight 
of the 4th Digby was waiting at the Lion for the word from 
London which should be the signal for the rising throughout 
Warwickshire, which was the centre of the plot. Catesby and 
the Wrights, having seen the thing in train, were on their way 
to join him, while Rookwood and Winter remained in London 
to follow immediately the explosion was accomplished. But 
that night Guy Fawkes was discovered in his retreat, and in 
the morning rumour and gossip of his arrest reached Rook- 
wood and Winter. As soon as possible they started to warn 
the others, and, by a ride which outdid in m.p.h. any stretch 
of the mythical Turpin ride, they came up with Catesby at a 
point near Fenny Stratford. The party then galloped furiously 
to Ashby St Ledgers, which they reached at six in the evening. 
There a consultation was held, and they decided to push on to 
Dunchurch, and, though all seemed lost, to go on with the 
arranged plan to summon the followers, seize the Princess, 
and declare civil war. They reached the Lion that night, broke 
the news of the arrest to Digby, and attempted to put their 
plan into action. But there had been too many concerned in 

261 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

it; too much going and coming; too many meetings at the 
Lion; too many arrangements for relays of horses at inns up 
and down the Holyhead Road; too much talk of the * hunting 
party * at which all the county was to assemble on Dunsmore 
Heath. Suspicion had been aroused that there was something 
more than hunting behind all this, and, no doubt, there was a 
traitor, as there is in almost every conspiracy. Something of 
their plan was certainly known, for when they turned out they 
found that the Princess had been removed from Coombe Abbey 
to Coventry, that Sir Fulke Greville was awaiting them with 
an armed force, and that the whole countryside had been raised 
against them. There was then nothing left for them but a 
scattered flight, and they went their different ways to death. 

Elizabeth of Bohemia lived to the age of sixty-six, not as 
Queen of England, but as Queen of Bohemia for a year, as 
an exile in Holland, as the mother of thirteen children, and for 
thirty years as a widow. Her closing years, after the death of 
her dethroned husband, were spent among the scenes of her 
early years at Coombe Abbey. It was a badgered and often 
sordid life into which she was forced, but her English days were 
happy, and if she wore a solid crown for only a year she has 
worn another crown for centuries the crown of a poet's song. 
This lady of Coombe Abbey is indeed remembered to-day by 
most readers solely because she was the subject of a beautiful 
lyric Sir Henry Wotton's " You meaner beauties of the night, 
that poorly satisfy our eyes . . ." 

As Dunsmore Heath is Gunpowder country, and all around 
Stratford is As You Life It country, so all the villages around 
Nuneaton are George Eliot country. Arbury (her birthplace), 
Griff (where her early years were passed), Chilvers Coton, 
Astley, Corley these form the scenery, and the still recogniz- 
able scenery, of the bulk of the novels. How much George 
Eliot is read to-day by the younger people I do not know, but 
two or three of her works continue to appear in the popular 

262 



A MIDLAND HOLIDAY 

libraries of reprints, which is proof of something. So long 
as they are read, so long will readers be moving about that 
cheerful Warwickshire country of a hundred years ago, which, 
in essence, is little different from the cheerful Warwickshire 
country of to-day. Warwickshire is fortunate in having had 
a poet to express its poetry and a novelist to express the worka- 
day but warm-hearted prose of it. Together they give you full 
Warwickshire, as you will see if you wander about it. 

Due, perhaps, to its situation, in the middle of England, it 
is kind at all times. Some districts, as I have said, have their 
seasons for being * seen ' their at-homes, when they are dressed 
and ready to receive; but Warwickshire is itself in the green 
of spring, in the bloom of summer, in the bronze of autumn, 
and in the white or black of winter. There is a stability about 
its landscapes and a sense of permanence in its life. It lacks 
any suggestion of an earthly paradise, but it suggests and is 
something almost as good a common denominator of Eng- 
lish country life and scenes in which any Englishman can find 
response to his moods. Within its boundaries you may see and 
feel all England in a day. It is the central county of England, 
the shrine of English poetry, the object of more pilgrimages 
than perhaps any other county, and, at one point, where this 
Midland scamper may fidy end, it is the very core of England. 
If you follow the road between Coventry and Birmingham you 
will come, about midway, to a village in a little hollow not a 
very pleasing village, since it is a highway village, but worth 
a pause. When you are in its main street you are in the ad- 
judged centre of England, and its tripping name, when you 
remember its position, is an echo of a geographical term. It is 
called Meriden. But it did not get that name from its position; 
it got it long before any measurements had discovered it as a 
centre. It got it because in the long ago it was situated in a 
mire. 

263 



CHAPTER V 
THE LONDON COUNTRY 

LONDON makes a big black blot upon the south-eastern sector 
of England, but, as with the Black Country of the Midlands 
and of Yorkshire, good, even lovely, country may be found on 
the very edges of the blot. Despite the feverish spread of the 
city, and the encroachment upon the hills of the villas and 
bungalows of the poor and the ugly palaces of the rich, you 
may still find sequestered corners into which these things have 
not penetrated. Rusticity has been obliterated in counties 
much more distant from London, but on the very flanks of 
the enemy it survives. In these corners an odd life is going on 
which is unaware of London a life as rustic in speech and 
character as the life of the depths of Gloucestershire or Somer- 
set. Though within thirty miles or so of London, they are 
often more than ten miles from a small town, and thus they 
have no gas, no electricity, no company's water, one postal 
delivery a day, and morning papers at noon, even as the Cots- 
wolds. In Surrey, Suffolk, Kent, and Hertfordshire there are 
numbers of these isolated tracts, with sweet country for the eye 
and the happy country tone for the mind. 

They are not widely known, but those who do know them 
love them, and their season is all the year round. Not only in 
summer, but in autumn and winter, you find solitary walkers 
rambling about them and finding pleasure in them whether 
their accompaniment be sunshine or rain or snow. At all rimes 
they are good. At no time of year is the weather of the South 
really hard. Decembers and Januarys in these counties may be 
grey, but they wear their greyness blandly; often their grey is 

264 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

transmuted to silver, and they give many a day when the air 
brushes the face with the wings of spring. The landscape may 
not be markedly beautiful, but it has a gift which is perhaps 
above beauty. Both the plain and the very beautiful require a 
setting of time and circumstance before they can achieve their 
effect. The landscape of these Home Counties is neither plain 
nor beautiful : it is like some people of no special qualities it is 
charming always. You analyse these people, and you find 
nothing in them that merits attention; yet you find yourself 
turning to them with a more genuine interest than you feel 
towards the forceful and the beautiful. They do not have their 
4 moments '; they have their middle level of charm which is 
potent at all times and in all conditions. The note of the rural 
patches of the Home Counties is this middle level. They never 
go below, and they seldom go above, but they do not suffer, 
as some country does, by the changing seasons. Some country, 
glorious in summer, is unbearable in winter; but the Home 
Counties, possibly by their equable climate, have the power to 
please in any month. 

Not all, of course, retain these rural patches. The more 
pleasant a near-London district is, the more it is ' developed, 
and the sooner its charm and deep-rooted life are disturbed. 
Buckinghamshire and Sussex have suffered much in this way. 
The country must, we know, meet the needs of the people, 
and it is only right that the townsman's desire for the soil 
and the open air should be gratified. But the period of his 
setding-in and becoming part of the landscape is an awk- 
ward period, and it is this period which the greater part 
of Buckinghamshire and Sussex is now witnessing. Other 
counties have been more fortunate, and, while taking the 
townsman, have managed to preserve many a corner of their 
settled life. 

Even Surrey, so often called the Cockney hiker's backyard, 

265 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

has yet a few spots of pre-hiking and even pre-railway rusti- 
city; and on four days of the week not only these, but also 
the better-known * beauty spots/ may be enjoyed in foil tran- 
quillity. Though much of it has become suburbanized, and 
every week-end sees its more distant lanes filled by pseudo 
and costumed walkers, the thickly wooded hill country to the 
south of the North Downs has resisted the more obvious on- 
slaughts of ' development * and modern domestic architecture. 
It is true that Dorking and Guildford can hardly any longer 
be said to be ' in the country/ and that the latter is rapidly 
transforming its immediate villages into suburbs, but some- 
thing yet remains which is strongly suggestive of the country 
towns they once were. 

Beyond the familiar chalk track which climbs from Burford 
Bridge to the summit of Box Hill there is a deep grove, en- 
closed in larch woods, which at all seasons is so deserted that 
it might be in the heart of Gloucestershire. No wind disturbs 
the boughs or the hot, scented air. I have climbed out of it 
more than once into the woods above, and followed the green 
rides for hours in a vain attempt to find my right direction. 
And a certain winter day when I was lost in the woods on the 
downs above Gomshall, beyond all help of map and sense of 
country, is not far back from the Bungalow age. You may 
still, during the week, take a lonely walk, by the footpath out 
of Westcott, and over the Tillingbourne valley, through the 
grounds of John Evelyn's house at Wotton, to Friday Street. 
The little lake in the midst of the high pine-woods, not too 
easily found by the stranger who goes that way for the first 
time, is smaller than it used to be, but beyond the old cottages 
at the farther end the Stephen Langton inn is as comfortable 
as ever, and, except at week-ends, as quiet as any country inn. 
Equally quiet are Abinger Bottom a little cluster of cottages 
by a trickling stream in the woods; Wotton Hatch, on the 
hill; and the cottages and houses of Holmbury St Mary, in a 

266 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

cleft of the hills. And if you have seen Leith Hill only on a 
Sunday you may see a new Leith Hill during the week. This, 
the highest point of South-east England, is probably the best- 
known and most popular landmark in the South, as its look- 
out tower and refreshment stall suggest. But during the week 
you may have it to yourself. Friends of mine have frequently 
spent the night in its heather for the reward of a sunrise, and 
from eight o'clock in the evening until nine next morning have 
not seen one fellow-creature. 

Less known is the ridge of Pitch Hill, to the west, covered 
by the commons and scattered woodlands of Hurt Wood, and 
a favourite walk of mine used to be that from a point near 
the old windmill by the lane which skirts the hill, and through 
a green country by Madgehole, down to Shamley Green. 
Shere remains still the most charming village of Surrey, and, 
despite the Sunday crowds, the little picture of church and 
inn, of tiny bridge and ducks in the stream, and the mellow 
brick and timber cottages, is a picture of the English Village. 
The young pilgrims of to-day, as they follow part of the old 
track across the Albury Downs to St Catherine's Hill and 
Guildford, appear to serve a different god than their more 
pious ancestors, who followed it to Canterbury long ago, and 
are perhaps none the worse for that. 

Surrey is famous for the variety of its scenery, and this 
variety enables each to make his own choice and to defend it. 
For many people the best of Surrey lies in the wide-spread 
purple uplands and deep valleys of Hindhead and Haslemere. 
But this district, spattered at intervals with country houses 
of the villa type and large hotels, has become too residential 
to retain the foil country tone, though certainly it has great 
natural beauty and exhilarating air. Others prefer the sim- 
plicity of the Fold country at the eastern spur of the hills. 
Some find it dull and lacking in character, but in April, when 
the primroses are beneath the hedges and the hazel copses are 

267 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

loud with thrushes, you could not wish a sweeter nest of 
spring. And its centre, little Chiddingfold, is just the right 
human expression of it a village set squarely round its green 
and pulled together by the long, low front of the Crown inn, 
bending under its five hundred years of life. Here, in the 
shadowy interiors, are enormous solid beams, a big open 
hearth, and, above, a roof with exposed rafters which is one 
of the features of the village. Not many miles away are the 
railway and the Portsmouth Road; but when you are in these 
Fold villages, among their old cottages and farmhouses 
and the slow speech of their people, and the horses at 
plough in the brown fields, you know that you are * in the 
country. 1 

Kent, though suburban at its north-west and goodness 
knows what at its coast resorts, also keeps in its interior many 
a litde pocket of the natural Kent. Here lives still a country 
of foaming orchards, of primrose and bluebell woods, of 
sedate, unostentatious villages, and of litde surprises waiting 
to be discovered. You may find a deeper rusticity in certain 
parts of Essex and Suffolk, but the garden country of Kent 
has its own appeal, and as yet most of it has been spared the- 
exploitation of both the building contractor and the literary 
enthusiast. The North Downs make an effective barrier be- 
tween the isolated hamlets and the spread of London, and 
even near to the town, by mile measurement, a few of them 
remain pure country. There is Downe, for example, Charles 
Darwin's last home, which is within walking distance of a 
tram terminus, and yet so rurally remote that it recently re- 
ceived a column of delighted appreciation from a newspaper 
man who had discovered it. And farther south is a perfect 
type of the litde country town in Wolfe's birthplace, Wester- 
ham, which lies by the slender Darent, quiet of pulse and 
quiet of mind. 

268 




CHERRY ORCHARDS AND OAST HOUSES 

A typical Kentish scene in. early May. 

Photo /. Dixon-Scott 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

On the slope of the Northern Downs, beneath the chalk 
pit at Knockholt, which is a landmark for many miles to the 
south, you may still walk, untroubled by your fellows, part 
of the old track of the Pilgrims' Way. Or you may go south 
from Westerham by the little bridge across the stream, ana 
climb the hill to the cottages of French Street, and there turn 
into the woods and mount to Brasted Chart. As the property 
of the National Trust, this wide-spreading tract of common 
and forest belongs to the people for ever. From the sandy 
paths beside the pines and the green clearings, at a height of 
800 feet, you may look for miles across the real Kentish 
country, merging eastward into the blue Weald and south- 
ward to the darker line of the South Downs. This ridge, clad 
in gorse and heather and woodland, runs for several miles on 
either hand, and the view is good all the way along the wind- 
ing lanes which skirt it, and which here and there reveal a 
cluster of typical Kentish cottages, with red, deep-dipping 
roofs and pinafores of flowers. 

From Toys Hill, a hamlet immediately beneath the brow 
of the Chart, a road through pleasant pastoral country goes 
by Four Elms to Chiddingstone and Penshurst. Chidding- 
stone is little more than a line of old timbered houses, an inn, 
by its castle gates, and a noble church, sleeping among the 
quiet meadows that surround it. Its red roofs lend it a warm 
glow, but it has the aspect of a sleeping village, whose soul 
is in the Middle Air. The timbered fronts of the houses make 
a gracious picture almost every year Chiddingstone appears 
on the walls of the Royal Academy and the grey church 
tower, mantled in red creeper, is claimed as one of the finest 
in all Kent; but your footsteps upon the cobbles before the 
inn announce themselves almost with intrusion. Looking out 
from the latticed windows of this. Castle inn, you look upon 
a beautiful but empty scene, recalling the spirit of Walter de 
la Mare's poem The Listeners'. 

269 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

" Is there anybody there? " said the Traveller, 

Knocking on the moonlit door; 
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses 

Of the forest's ferny floor. 

A fine, snug old place is this inn. In one of its rooms the 
young Anne Boleyn is said to have slept when hindered by a 
snowstorm from reaching her home at Hever Castle. The 
casde, where Henry came to woo her, now the property of 
the Astors, is but two footpath miles away. The village has 
long remembered Anne: the local public-house, which bears 
to-day the sign of the Henry the Eighth, once bore the sign 
of the Boleyn Butchered. The charm of Chiddingstone is 
completed by the lake and the casde within the park, whose 
pastures reach to the inn's garden. Here, a stone's-throw 
from the back of the inn, stands the Chiding Stone which 
gives the village its name. Wesley is said to have preached 
from it, and many a local scold to have been trounced on it, 
but in origin it is obviously an outcrop of the natural rock 
common to many parts of Kent and Sussex. 

From Chiddingstone it is little more than two miles on 
foot and double that distance by car to lovely Penshurst, and 
a few more miles to Tunbridge Wells. In these days of 
speed Tunbridge Wells, which in the eighteenth century 
was a rival to Bath and a similar resort of monarchs, beaux, 
and poets, is now almost an outer suburb of London. But 
no actual suburb can boast its fine air and breezy commons, 
its historic associations and the real country at its doors. 
The villages around it have suffered somewhat from careless 
extension, but here and there one or two remain much as 
they were a century ago. Cowden, almost on the Sussex bor- 
der, is one of these. It lies in a shallow cup among the 
woods and furnace-ponds, and only its church-spire tells the 
stranger that it is there, with its two inns and old shops and 
flowered cottages, dreaming in sunny tranquillity. 

270 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

But perhaps the best of Kent lies in the Weald country of 
hop-gardens and oast-houses and spinneys and pastures, and 
the best of the villages, or small towns, in that central cluster 
of Headcorn, Biddenden, Cranbrook, Hawkhurst, Benenden, 
Iden Green, and Tenterden. The terminal 'den' means 
pastures in a wooded valley, and its frequent use in this part 
of the country indicates the character of the country, Tenter- 
den, once connected with the Cinque Ports and famous for 
its woollen industry, seems set unchangeably in dignity. Un- 
touched by the main coastal roads, it is a quiet centre from 
which to explore at leisure the magic of Romney Marsh, the 
Isle of Oxney, Bodiam Casde, and the silent reaches of a 
country which demands dalliance before it yields its real en- 
chantments. The village still wears the important air of the 
town it once was. The trim lawns or long gardens before its 
cottages, the trees and grass which line each side of its street, 
the soaring church and the Tudor shops and houses, create 
a scene and a spirit which compel the stranger passing 
through it to pause. Three miles to the south, on the edge 
of the Isle of Oxney, is Small Hythe, the landing-stage for 
Tenterden in the days when it was something of a litde port 
on the Rother estuary, as its name indicates. Donald Max- 
well, in A Detective in Kent, says that in the fifteenth century 
its shipyards built vessels for the Navy. To-day it comprises 
only a church and two half-timbered cottages, but such per- 
fect examples of cottage architecture that they are worth 
visiting for themselves alone. One of them, however, is 
visited by those who love the theatre as a shrine, for in that 
one Ellen Terry spent her last years and last hours. It has 
now been acquired as an Ellen Terry memorial, and to-day 
you may see the rooms exactly as she left them. 

At Small Hythe you are close upon the Marsh and upon 
haunted land. It is not likely that ghosts will meet you on 
the innumerable twists by narrow and lonely lanes to Ham 

271 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Street, or by Appledore, on its little hill, to Rye, or by Bren- 
zett to Romney and Lydd. But along those reedy streams, 
beloved of the heron and the wild duck, across those empty 
fields, and by the very walls of the old farmhouses, you will 
be aware of a presence that defies definition and whose power 
can only be named the Spirit of the Marsh. In summer the 
air shimmers with a brighter light above the sprouting corn 
than in more inhabited country, and the sculptured clouds 
seem to be visitants from another universe. In winter the 
frost-bound silence has a voice, for the Marsh never sleeps 
in any hour or season, but conveys always that sense of vital 
but invisible life which is everywhere about us, but which, 
where men are gathered in communities, is obscured and 
muted. You hate the Marsh or you love it. If you love it it 
will hold you as powerfully as the Fens or Pevensey hold 
their lovers. Its reward to your devotion is not the sweetness 
that cloys, but the strength that braces and the whispered 
hint of the unrevealed. 

The Royal Military Canal, on its northern edge, does not 
suggest by its name the neglected charm of the valley 
pastures through which this now disused waterway passes 
to the sea. As you follow its broad curves you will meet 
none but an occasional angler, until you approach Hythe, 
when you come upon the pleasure skiffs of the trippers. But, 
despite its name, its upper reaches are delightful. South- 
ward stretches the Marsh, pastel-toned under the wind or 
hazy with heat; northward a line of wooded hills, sheltering 
comfortable farms and grazing lands. A superb view of the 
Marsh may be had on a good day from a bluff of these hills 
at Lympne. From the high road a lane leads through the old 
grey village and by the castle to the church which sits at the 
cliff edge. And there a row of pines rises sharply upon the 
faintly etched picture of marsh and sea and sky, so subtly 
arranged that the flat lands below seem locked eternally in 

272 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

the embrace of the water, and the horizon in the embrace 
of the sky. 

Thousands of people go yearly to Hythe and Sandgate and 
their sprawling neighbour, Folkestone, but few of them dis- 
cover the delightful hills and valleys between these places and 
Canterbury and Dover. Yet, unless you find those little hidden 
lanes that trip about the Elham valley, and those uplands 
of Barham and Womenswold, you will not fully know what 
Kent can offer. Here, among the cornfields and the orchards 
that lie tangled in the Alkham district behind the Dover 
Road, drowses many an old village whose half-timbered cot- 
tages would be familiar on postcards if they were in Stratford 
or Warwick. And here is many a sweet hillside lane which 
would be noisy with cars if they were in more popular 
country. But the fame of Canterbury, the decoy to the north 
of this delectable tract, leaves them sweet and solitary, and I 
hope it may continue to do so. 

Sussex, after a quarter-century of the poets and the week- 
enders, has, like Buckinghamshire, little left of the spirit which 
those poets sang to the week-enders. Just what there was 
about that Sussex that so knocked the poets off their centre of 
gravity I do not know. It seems to have been a case of fbllow- 
my-leader. One man said that Sussex was good, and the others, 
having no views of their own, echoed him; so that to-day the 
topographical shelves of any library are about 20 per cent. 
Sussexiana. Scarcely one village can now be found which is 
not the favourite of a hundred other people. Many of its 
villages have little of the beautiful about them, nor even the 
village feeling, and look as though they never at any time 
had. They are like drab bits of outer London dropped into 
the downs. Others, with some pretensions to the picturesque, 
have broken out into Ye Handicrafts, Ye Olde Tea Shoppes, 
cocktail bars, refreshment booths, and car parks. 

273 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Yet people to whom I have expressed my objections, while 
agreeing with everything I say, tell me that they can still find 
something in the Sussex soil and Sussex spirit which they can- 
not find elsewhere; something which survives all the assaults 
and affectations of man, They tell me that it is like English 
bread. Lovelier Devon and grander Wales may satisfy those 
who crave the stimulus of romantic scenery, but for everyday 
refreshment they prefer the simple and the enduring, which 
in Sussex, they say, is so strong that not all the modern con- 
veniences can obliterate it. I have never been able to share 
their enthusiasm; so for the paragraphs that follow I have 
had to turn to Another Hand. This Other Hand obliges me 
thus: 

Many wild and beautiful spots may still be discovered in 
Sussex if you seek that belt of woodland which is linked by 
the names of Tilgate, St Leonards, Balcombe, and Worth 
Forests, where the bracken and willow-herb is higher in sum- 
mer than a man, and the day-long solitude is broken only by 
the play of wild things. You stumble upon them by accident; 
upon little streams that course by the iron-workings, and upon 
the hammer-ponds, once red with furnace fires when the 
Weald of Sussex was the Black Country of England. The note 
everywhere is simplicity. Neither the woods nor the hills nor 
the parks which here and there interrupt them command you 
to admire as more splendid country does; they greet you 
casually, and win ungrudgingly the interest and affection they 
do not ask for. 

One does not easily tire of the appeal of the Weald, blue 
from the summits of the downs as the sea on a summer's day, 
green and grey and of sweet variety on closer acquaintance. 
It is as good to follow its winding lanes in December as in 
May, for leafless spinneys and stubble fields and the lines of 
an harmonious landscape have a separate beauty under winter 
skies. The sharp smell of newly turned earth is as sweet then 

2 74 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

as the softer fragrances of spring. Here you never feel that 
desolation which makes some country so depressing. Larks 
and robins and finches flutter from field and hedgerow, and not 
long after the last leaf has fallen there is a sense of quickening in 
the air and the soil. All about the Weald are many good inns 
with an all-the-year welcome. There is the Dorset Arms at 
Withyam, in the midst of litde hills and valleys, sitting under 
its great tree behind a veranda of flowers; a good place to reach 
on a winter's afternoon, for its raftered lounge has one of those 
man's-size fireplaces, piled always with manVsize logs and 
beams of coal. Near it, at Hartfield, is its neighbour of the 
same sign, also standing under a tree in the one street of the 
village. 

Southward, beyond the high woods and commons of Ash- 
down Forest, one enters an unassuming countryside which for 
some is the very Sussex. There is no perceptible cause of the 
affection its villages inspire: they are not the neat, composed, 
clustering villages of Wiltshire or Devon; nor have they the 
winsomeness of the Berkshire villages. Yet they catch you 
and hold you. The country too lingers in many memories. It 
may best be seen by footpath, and among footpath walks not 
too crowded are the footpath walk from Maresfield to Uck- 
field; the roads across Piltdown; the woods of Sheffield Park 
around the chain of five lakes hidden within them; and the 
little-known track through the meadows from Framfield 
down to Hellingly and its seventeenth-century manor-house 
and water-mill. Nothing about this countryside can be named 
as a feature, but it is deeply English, and through even the 
longest acquaintance it continues to satisfy. 

But for others and one cannot challenge their taste Sussex 
means nothing but the downs. It is not easy, upon this noble 
range of fifteen miles, to capture the old sense of wide-flung 
space and solitude, but it may be done. In the forests north of 
Chichester, especially in that fine old beech wood Charlton 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Forest, which crowns the hill above Cocking and Graffham, 
the wanderer may, in any but holiday months, find solitude 
enough and probably lose his way. And in the villages below 
Bignor, and its Roman villa; Fitde worth, and its old angling 
inn; Amberley, beside its casde walls in the marshy fields; and 
little Bury, linked to Amberley by a ferry- he will find only 
memories of the vast number of visitors who pass through 
them in July and August. Arundel remains noble and 
feudal still, and Midhurst and Petworth are still slumbrous 
little towns, resting under an undisturbed counterpane of 
history. 

That vast despoiled area which spreads from Bognor to Sea- 
ford, and for several miles inland, is now avoided by the true 
lover of Sussex landscape and character, but there are a few 
hamlets in certain folds of the hills which keep their beauty 
still. Around Alfriston, despite its popularity and the proximity 
of Eastbourne, the clean spaces of the downs can still give 
to all who cross them the exhilaration and the sense of poetry 
which Hilaire Belloc has celebrated in song and essay. If you 
climb from Wilmington to the top of Long Man some morn- 
ing of wind and sun you will be hardened indeed if your 
blood does not respond to the colour of the plain, with its 
chequer-board of pastures, its little needle spires, and its tender 
horizons. And at twilight, as you cross the grassy bowl to 
Jevington, or stand on the summit in silence, looking out 
to sea, the knowledge of the little people who lived among the 
downs thousands of years ago may seem more than a sterile 
fact of history. 

The valley of the Cuckmere, seen from Hindover Hill, silver 
with the trickle of the streams through the marshes, remains 
sweet and unaltered. On many a spring and summer morn- 
ing the only sound is the lark above, the tiny chime of sheep- 
bells, or the cry of the shepherd, who is one Sussex thing 
which has not moved from its tradition. The lichened roofs of 

276 




A VIEW IN ASHDOWN FOREST 
Photo /. Dixon-Bcott 




A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY HOUSE 

Formerly part of the Angel inn. West Stockwell Street, Colchester. 
Photo /. Dixon-Scott 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

the farms in the hollows, as at Charlston, near East Dean, and 
Bo-Peep Farm, at Alciston, and many another, are fair in all 
seasons. On the slopes the gorse of summer follows the cow- 
slips of spring, which drift in their millions along the chalk 
tracks or in patches on the open downs. The hedges of deep- 
sunk lanes between the hills, beloved of smugglers in the past, 
are walled with bluebells, and the banks of the Cuckmere are 
scattered with kingcups. In the villages the apple-blossom 
foams over stone walls, and the fields of the plain are fringed 
with scabias and poppies, or yellow with charlock and sharp 
with the scent of the bean-flower. Go up on that hill any 
weekday, and I think you will agree that, despite builders, 
bungalows, and boosters, Sussex is still rural and still beautiful. 

Having let the Sussex Enthusiast have his say, I will now 
resume and turn to Essex. 

Essex has long been known as the Cinderella of our counties, 
and, though attempts have lately been made to rescue it from 
that reputation, I doubt their success. And I would not wel- 
come it. I prefer Essex as it is isolated, neglected, not beauti- 
ful, but, with all its faults, pleasing. The Cinderella reputation 
cannot seriously be challenged. Much of its interior and the 
greater part of its coast arc graceless and bleak. In many parts 
one is conscious of a bedraggled cut-off-ness, which is not the 
willing and self-contained cut-off-ness of the Cots wolds or 
other distant solitudes, but seems- to arise from a hurt sense 
of neglect which a little attention would heal. Nevertheless, 
this very difference gives it character, and, though its many 
attractive features are overshadowed by the Cinderella spirit, 
and its general appearance, save on the Suffolk border, is less 
pleasing than that of other counties with fewer attractive 
features, it has something which is definitely Essex and 
nothing else. No other county has similar profiles or perspec- 
tives. No other county has so many timbered and red-tiled 

277 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

cottages and old-fashioned gardens, nor so many market- 
gardens. It is the latter, perhaps, and its marshy coast which 
have forced it into the Cinderella position. And maybe the 
names of its villages have had something to do with this. I 
wrote earlier of the unconscious poetry of English village- 
names; but Essex appears to have had no poets, conscious or 
unconscious. If it had, the names of some of its villages, 
which, when they were first given, had no unpleasant signifi- 
cance to ancient ears, would have been edited in deference to 
later significance. It has numbers of fine old manor-houses, 
but they are not so talked about as the manor-houses of Sussex 
and Kent. Which of us would accept a fine old manor and 
all its rights if we had to head our notepaper from, say, Ugley, 
or Messing, or Maggot's End, or Mucking, or Cabbage End, 
or Rotten End? These things ugly names, market-gardens, 
and marshes are the sorrows of Essex; but do not let them 
deter you. When you have seen the more dressed-up face of 
England you may yet find pleasant surprises in touring the 
recesses of this unfashionable county. 

It is not only a county of cabbages and marshes. It is homely 
enough, with its lines of elms against the cornfields, its modest 
lanes, which make no pretensions to the picturesque, and its 
little hills, which ease its flatness; but there are the gardens 
and the old villages and churches and inns, and many other 
pleasures, all in a minor key, perhaps, but still pleasures. It is 
a rich find for the antiquarian, the yachtsman, the marine 
artist, as well as for those given to water sports and the shoot- 
ing of flying creatures. That it remains Cinderella is chiefly 
due to public neglect. If it could be a litde more visited, 
if a few people would come along and force it into attention, 
as the poets and the essayists forced Sussex into attention, it 
would quickly be discovered and would quickly discover itself 
and brush itself up. It only needs somebody to sing about it, 
and then it would show itself at its best, instead of, as at 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

present, letting you take it as it is. It would trim its straggling 
villages; it would find out what it possessed, and would learn 
that those possessions were something to be advertised; the 
villages would * feature * their local history. But for those 
like myself it may be better as it is: we have evidence of what 
enthusiasm has done for Sussex. Essex might wake up under 
the warmth of praise and cease to be Essex. Those patient 
and untidy villages valuable pictures of the real old Eng- 
land without the poetry might become Shotterys and East 
Hendreds and Broadways and Ditchlings. Those pale towns 
might shed their spirit of Essex and bloom into secondary 
Warwicks and Chesters and Ryes. 

Let us take it as it is. Let us enjoy its gardens of old Eng- 
lish flowers. Its sharp air does not favour the luscious green 
of the warmer western fields, or semi-tropic blossoms, but it 
fills the gardens with roses, and with mignonette, sweet- 
william, wallflowers, dahlias, as thick as you will see any- 
where. And let us enjoy its careless, unparaded villages and 
its rather graceless but historic old towns, and, particularly, its 
pleasant people. There is no confusing Essex folk with the 
folk of other counties; their accent and dialect alone are 
peculiar to them and are met nowhere else. Close to London 
as they are, they yet provide one of the last defences against 
the standardized B.B.C. speech. Counties far distant have sur- 
rendered their heritage, but the Essex people are still a fruitful 
field for the philologist and the student of archaisms. They 
have no rustic sweetness: they live close to a damp soil; but 
they are simple, natural, and straightforward. You may be at 
home with them in five minutes. You find no fuss with them, 
but neither do you find shyness or indifference. They display 
a quick and generous interest in you, and that quiet sense of 
humour which marks the contented mind and reflects their 
simple landscapes. For the Essex country and the Essex people 
the right word, I think, is wholesome. 

279 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Its two principal towns, Colchester and Chelmsford, being 
large, do not express it so clearly as some of its smaller towns. 
Maldon is a typical example of these, and its church tower, 
at the top of the long, sloping street, and the line of red roofs 
on either side make a picture that repeats itself all over Essex. 
It is a country town concerned with country things saddlery 
shops, farming-implement shops, carpenters' shops, seed shops. 
One of its treasures is its Blue Boar inn, a house with a late 
Georgian front which conceals work of all centuries from the 
fourteenth. It was, like many old inns, originally a private 
residence, a home of the De Veres, Earls of Oxford, and did 
not become an inn until the seventeenth century. So much 
interesting and beautiful work remains, carefully preserved, 
that a night is not sufficient for a full examination; two or 
three days could be spent in poring and poking about it. It 
stands just opposite the great church with the three-sided 
tower, and the two in combination make the most picturesque 
corner of the town. It is an old, old town, but it is not dead. 
It is still a port, and, though it does little business in that way, 
it has a maritime flavour. Down by the river a promenade, 
a bathing-pool, a bandstand, and a few small cafes are an 
effort to make the best of what at low tide is a stretch of mud, 
but very good mud, rich in ozone. Not far from it is a series 
of queer, lost little hamlets linked by a one-track railway; 
only fifty miles from London, yet as out of the world as the 
hamlets of Wales. They are all of one family Tolleshunt 
Major, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Tolleshunt Knights, Tollesbury, 
and Tollesbury Wick and they repay with their 'childish 
charm the adventure of finding them. 

South of Maldon you come into typical Essex country. It 
lies in that slice of flat landscape, roughly the shape of a boot, 
between the Blackwater and the Crouch, two rivers which are 
favourite sailing centres. The roads are a little difficult; they 
make serpentine twists around, the dykes and streams, and 

280 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

they are very lonely. All around them is quiet the quiet of 
the old rural life, the old habits, the old attitudes. You meet 
the wagonette and gig as often as the car, when you meet any- 
thing; and the sun-bonnet for women working in the fields, 
and the battered panama for men, are more often seen than 
the hat. It is, like most of rural Essex, a country of scattered 
farms whose mode of living and working has changed but 
little in the centuries. After the life of the highways that 
enclose it, its solitude and its slow pulse are more notable than 
noise. On the southern waterside, Burnham-on-Crouch is in a 
fair way of becoming a resort, and one or two of the water- 
side hamlets are endeavouring to commercialize their little 
attractions, but so far with little effect upon the general charac- 
ter of this tiny peninsula. Its largest inland villages, South- 
minster and Tillingham, pleasant to look upon, with their 
green and white cottages and old churches, rest in a serene 
decline, and few visitors come to disturb them. 

Bradwell too, a village of one curving street about a mile 
from the sea-wall, is lapped in peace. Once it knew much 
business, but the many ships which stand in the estuary are 
mostly idle, and the population lives upon its market-gardens 
and nursery-gardens. Two miles west stands all that is left of 
the once great church which stood upon the sea-wall the 
chancel only of St Peter Von-the- Wall, one of the earliest foun- 
dations in England. Unless you knew what it was you would 
take it for a farm-building; it is a bare, barn-like structure, 
standing in solitude, with wild flowers at its feet, the empty 
pastures behind it, and before it the marshes whose mud none 
can cross to the distant sea, What the tides have stolen from 
the East Anglian coast they seem to have deposited here, and 
the chancel that once echoed the pounding of the sea now 
stands derelict in a swamp. From the little hills to the north 
you may get a delightful picture of the estuary; big ships on 
blue water, green shores on the farther side, the sea-wall 

281 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

covered with yellow charlock, and the marshes themselves 
thick with sea-lavender and samphire, which the local people 
use as a pickle. On a clear and breezy day it is a picture that 
lifts up the heart, a picture owing much to a notable feature of 
Eastern Essex the quality of its light. It is not the hard blue 
light of the Mediterranean, but a white radiance, almost 
ethereal, so that, coming to it from inland, one feels that one 
has been living in twilight and inhaling mist. It gives not only 
perfect visibility for miles, but a sense of release of both body 
and spirit which comes near to ecstasy. 

The beauty spot of Essex is, of course, the valley of the 
Stour. Here is that Essex scenery which so entered the heart 
of a lad across the border that by his translation of its soft, 
clear tones, he gave delight to the world, and inspired a whole 
school of European painters. The frequent rain and sharp sun 
of this Eastern England give the sky and the landscapes a 
brilliance and lucidity found in few other countries. You sel- 
dom see anywhere in England the flat tones of French land- 
scapes, and in this corner of England, above all, the scenes are 
fragrant and dewy from distance to distance, and the vast 
sweep of sky is ever-changing. But it was left to a miller's son 
to see it and so to catch it in his colours as to make others see 
it, and to make a corner of Essex known wherever pictures 
are known. To-day so many pilgrims are drawn to Dedham 
and Flatford Mill and East Bergholt and Stratford St Mary 
that nothing need be said about 'them. They are there, and 
the pictures that their worshipper lovingly made from them 
are still to be seen at every turn of lane and hill. So much are 
they visited that when I was last there they had followed the 
usual procedure in such places. As Chalfont has its Milton 
tea-shop, and Dovedale its Izaak Walton inn, and Exmoor its 
Lorna Doone boarding-houses, and Stratford and Shottery 
every sort of Shakespeare and Hathaway refreshment place, 
so these places have their Constable tea-gardens. (It has been 

282 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

left to Haworth to go as far as possible in this celebration, with 
a Bronte Cinema.) But you may find Constable's country in 
other places than Dedham, and East Bergholt. You may find 
it all over the south and east of Suffolk; every mile or so pre- 
sents you with scenes which you instantly recognize as Con- 
stable scenes. No man ever wrought himself into a country, 
and a country into himself, as closely as Constable did with 
this. They are indissoluble, and it was a stroke of irony that 
the man who was so much a part of these fields and vales, and 
had given them so much devotion, should last have opened 
his eyes, not upon them, but upon the walls of a London bed- 
room in an unbeautiful house of that unbeautiful street off 
Tottenham Court Road Charlotte Street. 

Western Essex I have not greatly explored, but I know its old 
towns, which make fair compensation for the placid country 
around them, and I have spent some good hours in them. 
Braintree, Dunmow, Saffron Walden, Halstead, and Cogges- 
hall are towns of character, catching up the spirit of Essex in 
an urban dressing of jumbled old houses, ancient inns, and 
stately churches. They have roots, and have not overgrown 
their roots; they are part of Essex before they are part of Eng- 
land. They lack the mellow dignity of towns of the like 
age in other shires, being indifferent to self-cultivation. But in 
this they are good Essex. The county is like a curio shop whose 
owner has never tried to arrange his window or sort his stock. 
You wander around and stumble upon the precious and the 
trivial, the old and the pinchbeck, the beautiful and the girn- 
crack, standing shoulder to shoulder, dusty and unhandled, 
with nothing to distinguish them save their own power. Saffron 
Walden is a treasury of Tudor houses, the homes of past 
merchants, but you have to sort them from the imitation Tudor. 
Coggeshall has not only the wonderful Paycocke's House, but 
many another fine piece, though it makes little noise about 
them. They are there if you can find Coggeshall and like to 

283 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

rout them out. Braintree and Dunmow too have their relics, 
and each has a settled country-town air of long life and self- 
content. The spirit of these little old towns is to me as affecting 
as the spirit of the hills and deep valleys; indeed, in their 
streets, from which the open country may be seen, I feel the 
country more intensely than when I am actually with it. They 
are like little chapels, set apart from the cathedral, in which 
one may rest and absorb the greater beauty from which they 
sprang. They are the town as it should be; something rising 
from the soil and still in contact with it, warm with the blood 
of man and rich with the odour of the fields. Essex can show 
you many of them; nothing elaborate or of moving beauty, but 
just old towns careless of their past, to which the rest of Eng- 
land gives no attention, adapting themselves slowly to present 
times, as they have done through centuries, and never pre- 
tending to be anything but Essex towns in which Essex people 
live. 

Suffolk is a somewhat kinder and better-kept county than 
Essex; not so decayed; but, apart from its coast, it is not much 
more visited. Yet it has towns which, if they were on the 
main routes, would be everywhere known and talked about; 
and castles and halls and manor-houses which send the archi- 
tects and archaeologists who do see them into enthusiasm. But, 
like Essex, it does not advertise its antiquities, and would no 
more think of doing so than a duke of long line would think 
of talking of " old family." It takes them for granted, and 
assumes that others will do so, and if the others do not it is of no 
consequence. The little towns, some of the oldest of all Eng- 
land (so old that the original of one of them, Dunwich, is 
now under the sea), carry their age with a more concerned 
grace than the towns of Essex. They have perhaps known a 
fuller and wealthier and more important life; the castles and 
halls and the ruins of the abbeys hint at this; and then there 

284 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

is the long line of distinguished children Simon of Sudbury, 
John Lydgate, Thomas Wolsey, John Suckling, Thomas 
Nashe, Arthur Young, Thomas Gainsborough, Anne and Jane 
Taylor, George Crabbe, John Constable, Edward Fitzgerald, 
Robert Bloomfield and these are only a team from a larger 
company. The casdes played a considerable part in English 
history up to the seventeenth century. Suffolk was more visited 
then than now; Mary, Elizabeth, James I, and Charles II knew 
it and those casdes and manor-houses intimately; and some- 
thing of this high association remains. 

A tour of these old towns, and of the quiet roads and sweet 
corn and pasture country between them, will provide some- 
thing new for those who have dismissed Suffolk as incompar- 
able with the South and West, Suffolk towns are like no other : 
they have their own style and design, their peculiar industries, 
and their own atmosphere, and such huge churches that one 
seems to be moving through a land of cathedrals. Here is 
an itinerary which would take in the most interesting towns 
and villages and a good deal of the country, for which, in 
Suffolk, the best month is July or August: 

Ipswich, Woodbridge, Boulge, Framlingham, Peasenhall, 
Dunwich, Blythburgh, Bungay, Fressingfield, Eye, Ixworth, 
Bury St Edmunds, Lavenham, Long Melford, Sudbury, and 
Hadleigh. 

But Suffolk deserves an extended tour to itself, a leisurely 
tour, accompanied by one of the books of Mr W. A. Dutt, who 
writes most pleasantly on East Anglian topography and story. 
It is so little known that its remains of old England are fuller, 
I think, than those of any other county. Estates are not broken 
up here as in other counties; it shows no red rash of stock- 
brokers' villas and week-end cottages. Instead, it has enough 
castles and granges and churches to engage your attention for a 
month. It is almost the thinnest-populated county of its size 
in England 320,000 people to 1500 square miles; and thus has 

285 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

had little occasion to build anew or to extend the old. In this 
its railway service has been its ally. Only the more important 
parts can be reached by rail, and large interior tracks are left as 
they were before the railway era. The towns and villages and 
their old monuments have stood just as they are for centuries, 
unnoticed by any save local people and antiquarians; free of the 
attentions of intruders who might have made them fashionable 
and ugly by development and exploitation, or have destroyed 
them. Almost every town has near it an old hall. These are 
seldom noted in any work on the stately homes of England; 
yet they are beautiful and unusual specimens of domestic archi- 
tecture. There is Melford Hall, near Long Melford, a half- 
timbered Tudor home with a moat. There is Boxsted Hall, 
Elizabethan and also moated; Rushbrooke Hall, Gedding Hall, 
Kentwell Hall, Litde Wenham Hall; indeed, the country be- 
tween Bury and Sudbury is thick with halls, most of them 
moated, with bridges or drawbridges, many of them earlier 
than Tudor, and one of them, Wenham, of the thirteenth 
century and supposed to be the oldest inhabited home in Eng- 
land. These are but a few. You find them all over Suffolk, 
and each is as strangely beautiful as a missal, and in any other 
county would be the show-piece of that county. The fact that 
they still stand in such numbers, and that some of them are 
still the property of members of the family which built them, 
is a note on the character of Suffolk. 

In scores too come the villages, all, like the moated houses, 
so charming that when you see them you will wonder that you 
have never heard of them. But you will not be alone in your 
ignorance. Very few people outside Suffolk know them. They 
seek no limelight, and they do not dress themselves. They are 
content to be. Some of them have fine old inns which exist 
just as fine old inns, with no pamphlets, no advertisement, and 
no exploitation. If you are an amateur of inns you may like 
a note of some of them: the Bell at Clare; the Red Lion at 

286 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

Martlesham; the Bell at Kersey; the Red Lion at Debenham; 
the Angel at Lavenham; the Butt and Oyster at Chelmon- 
diston; the Magpie at Little Stoneham; the White Horse at 
Tattingstone; the Bull at Sudbury; the Angel at Woodbridge; 
the Australian Arms (why?) at Haverhill; the Tumbledown 
Dick at Wortham; Blind Man's Gate at Barnby; the White 
Elm at Copdock; the Botdes at Occold. 

Some of the inns of Suffolk have become well known outside 
the county ; the White Horse at Ipswich, for example, and the 
Bull at Long Melford; the Fox and Goose at Fressingfield, 
and the Angel at Bury. Those above are merely a selection 
from my memory of thirty-six little places not so well known, 
some of them with odd associations and interesting antiquities. 
Martlesham has a fine ceiling, and its sign is the figurehead of 
a Dutch warship of the past. Debenham also has a fine ceil- 
ing, and Little Stoneham has a * gallows ' sign across the road. 
Tattingstone is said to have the original sign from the Ipswich 
White Horse, and another house has within its precincts the 
tomb of one of its landlords, at which a service is held once a 
year. The Bull at Sudbury has some fine Rowlandson prints 
on the walls of the bar; they are not exhibited, but are hanging 
in the casual Suffolk way where they were first hung when they 
were the latest thing. At one litde place, fifteen miles from a 
railway and with no bus service, where I seemed to be the first 
stranger they had seen and was flattering myself that I was 
as far away from the modern world as one could get, I 
suffered a litde shock. At the cold lunch which they served 
me the cutlery bore the name of a Leicester Square night- 
club. 

Of the old towns my favourites are Lavenham, Long Melford, 
and Bury St Edmunds. They are venerable towns, and have 
much more of the cathedral atmosphere than many cathedral 
towns. They are not merely old, but encrusted with age, and 
age of a vintage character. The suns and rains of centuries 

287 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

have ripened their houses, and they have known the passionate 
events of both great and simple through the most passionate 
times of our story. Little has touched them since the middle of 
the seventeenth century, and this peace has given them time 
to assimilate and take to themselves the odour and colour of 
the things they did know. They rest now in the bloom of long 
life, their faces marked with the deep lines of experience and 
character. They are the brick and stone reality of those idyllic, 
old-world, golden-belled towns presented by the mid- Victorian 
novelists. 

Lavcnham, I think, is the quietest and most aged of them 
all; a reliquary of old houses gathered in one spot which has 
no equal in England. An archaeologist told me that if you stand 
at a particular point of its market-place every house you can see 
from that point was standing at the time of the Wars of the 
Roses. But it is more than an assembly of old houses, old 
inns, great church, and glorious seventeenth-century peal of 
bells; it is Lavenham, a presence and a fragrance, as cool as a 
cloister and as rich as a sunset. Long Melford is a large village 
rather than a town, but it has the features of a town in a 
small compass, and the feeling and dignity of a town of ex- 
perience. It is really one long street, ending in a common; a 
street of beautiful houses backed by an immense and superb 
church. The most striking of its buildings are the Tudor alms- 
house, whose inmates wear silk hats and long Spanish cloaks, 
and the Bull inn, which dates as an inn from the middle of the 
sixteenth century, but was a private residence long before that. 
It is full of old carving, fine fireplaces, and panelling, and 
enclosed galleries. Nothing leaps to the eye in these towns, 
but once you have seen them you leave them with a desire and 
determination to come back to them. Bury St Edmunds, though 
large and with enough new buildings to belie its real age, 
can also work this spell upon you. So strong is its character, 
indeed, that it can work upon the new shops and houses and 

288 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

make even them appear to be part of an old-fashioned town. 
They do not stand out as they do in some old towns; Bury 
has absorbed them and coloured them. They add the right 
touch of life to gracious antiquity, and make a whole and 
mellow thing. 

Suffolk, being flat, makes good walking country for the 
medium walker, and in the past I have made many walks 
through it, and delightful walks. While it has nothing sensa- 
tional in landscape to offer you it has no tiresome stretches. At 
all points the eye is engaged and fed by scenes as simple as 
George Crabbe's verse and as beautiful as a Constable canvas. 
They are of such clarity that one feels that they are newly 
washed each morning, and not in rain, but in light. 

The last walk that I recall was Woodbridge, Boulge, Chars- 
field, Kettleburgh, Framlingham, Debenham, Stowmarket, 
Bildeston, Kersey, Boxford, Polstead, Stratford St Mary; a walk 
which gives you three towns, some characteristic villages, and 
lanes known only to the villagers. This suggests a word of ad- 
vice. When walking in Suffolk take an Ordnance map; without 
it you may find yourself in some great gap where there is never 
an inn or a cottage for tea or a village store where you can 
buy a biscuit. Suffolk has numbers of these gaps. I was caught 
in one of them on a hot July morning walking from Boulge 
to Framlingham. I got lost in byways, and walked many a 
mile seeking refreshment, finding hamlets here and there, but 
none of them with an inn. Not until three or four miles outside 
Framlingham did an inn appear, and then I got no food. The 
landlord was 'out' of everything, and supplies would not 
arrive until the morrow. I suggested biscuits and cheese, but 
even that order could not be filled. He had no cheese, or at 
least the only cheese he had was " a bit of rind with a quarter 
of an inch of hard cheese on it," and that, he was considerate 
enough to say, he wouldn't have the face to offer me. So, 
too tired to stagger the four miles to Framlingham, I lunched 

289 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

on the five dry biscuits left in his biscuit-tin. This trouble I met 
many times for want of the right map, and was often sick 
and faint through forgetting the character of the country. 

But there was the compensation of lonely, unfrequented 
villages, lanes whose hedgerows had never known the exhaust- 
pipe of a car, and that rich country feeling, untouched by any 
whiff of town, which was the country feeling known and cele- 
brated by our earliest poets. Fitzgerald (whose lodgings at 
Woodbridge may still be seen, marked " E.F.G.") rests in one 
of these lonely spots, fitter, I feel, for one of the dayspring poets 
than for him. The church and churchyard of Boulge Hall are 
within the grounds of the estate, away from the road, and even 
that road leads nowhere. It is as quiet a spot as you may find: 
a by-road, a park, a little church, a little churchyard holding the 
dead of the family and their dependents, and in a corner of 
that churchyard a flat stone bearing the legend, " It is He that 
hath made us and not we ourselves." 

Fitzgerald was a lonely soul, and the lonely situation is not 
inappropriate; but its quiet beauty and its almost sentimental 
rurality seem out of key with the cynic and the misanthrope. 
It is the Stoke Poges of one's imagination, which is not to 
be found in the Stoke Poges of to-day. Here, one feels, is 
just the place for the tombs of the Thomas Grays of this 
world and no others, and the sight of Fitzgerald's tomb in 
this sweet acre gives one the shock of oddity. A similar shock 
comes when, after having caught the serene, monastic feeling 
of Bury, the city of Jocelyn of Brakelond, you learn that 
Ouida was born there, and in the abbey gardens you find a 
memorial to the author of Valentine Vox. Or when, drugged by 
the age and solemnity of Lavenham, you learn that it was the 
birthplace of the authors of Meddlesome Matty and Twinkle 
twinkle, Little Star, and the rest of the Original Poems for 
Children. Or when, looking at pleasant little Polstead, from 
which went some of the Pilgrim Fathers, you come across the 

290 



THE LONDON- COUNTRY 

grave of Maria Marten, and are jerked back to the sordid 
horror of the Red Barn. 

All the villages I saw on that walk and on other walks were 
villages, if not of beauty, of pensive peace, and with each of 
them I felt that it was a Suffbl{ village. This local county 
distinction, I think, adds much to village charm. A village 
which might belong to any part of England is a village without 
either salt or sugar. If it is in Warwickshire one likes to recog- 
nize that it is a village one would not find outside Warwick- 
shire; a village with points superior to Hampshire villages, per- 
haps inferior to Devonshire villages, but first and always some 
expression of the feeling of Warwickshire. County boundaries 
are now mainly political things, but, since England is divided 
into counties, I think it pleasant that the counties should insist 
on their own style in all matters, and display their characteristic 
note. Suffolk villages do. Those who have much travelled 
England could be taken blindfold into a Suffolk village, and, 
on the release of their eyes, could name it for a Suffolk village. 
Three or four other counties permit this to be done, but there 
are many whose villages are out of character and nondescript. 

As strongly ' Suffolk ' as their villages are the people. I 
cannot say in what way; it needs somebody more learned than 
myself in country ways to isolate the fine distinctions of one 
peasantry and another; but I know that they are different from 
the people of any other county. I have observed them on 
market days crowding the great common rooms of the stone- 
flagged and ingle-nooked inns; stocky men with round walnut 
faces, talking a language of which I could understand only a 
word here and there; and I knew that I was observing a 
type that could not be in Cornwall or Derbyshire. All peasantry 
is spoken of by travellers as honest and kindly, but the Suffolk 
people, in my observation, are not only honest and kindly to the 
stranger, but to each other. You may see by their eyes that 
there is no malice or bad feeling between them. They have 

291 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

not the small eyes and pursed lips of some country people, but 
eyes twinkling with the sun, and generous mouths. Human 
nature is, of course, the same everywhere, but its manifestations 
are not, and whatever devil there may be in Suffolk villages is 
not allowed many outings. Mr T. F. Powys (or one of the 
Powys brothers) has been engaged for some time in giving us 
the low-down on English village life, and possibly the peas- 
antry of his neighbourhood justify his mordant pictures; but he 
would find litde material for his kind of story in Suffolk. The 
Polstead affair, of just over a hundred years ago, is almost its 
only affair of village lust and scandal. All those villages to 
which my wanderings have taken me are as free of local bitter- 
ness as they are of sophistication. It seems as though the Suffolk 
artists have inspired them to live up to what has been said of 
them in paint. One after another, under the blue and white 
sky, they stand like pictures themselves, arrested in that innocent 
tranquillity which Constable and Gainsborough saw; and the 
people are like their homes. 

The Polstead affair caught the public imagination not by 
itself it is a common enough story but by its names and 
features. There was the alliterative Maria Marten; there was 
the Red Barn two words which burn themselves on the ear; 
and there was the fact and it was a fact that the murder was 
discovered by a mother's dream. Many versions of the story 
have appeared as fiction and as theatre, and most of them are 
dressed-up versions, centring upon a poor persecuted heroine. 
Maria Marten, if contemporary evidence does not misjudge her, 
was nothing of the sort. She very well knew her way about, 
and was not unskilled in handling men. From the full story 
of the trial of William Corder it appears that Maria was by no 
means what 1827 called " a good girl." She was not " the vic- 
tim of his passions." She was a spirited girl who at nineteen 
ruined her character by "an unfortunate step with a young 
gentleman of fortune," Soon after that she had what my report 

292 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

calls " a second mishap," with another young gentleman of 
fortune. William Corder was but the third of a line of lovers 
which might, but for his hasty action, have continued indefi- 
nitely. She had borne an illegitimate child from one of these 
love affairs before she met Corder, and she had another by 
him which died and was secretly buried by him. She seems to 
have used this fact as a hold to compel marriage, and Corder, 
who knew that she was not his innocent victim, was not too 
ready to comply. However, under her persistence, he appeared 
to give way, and agreed to a marriage by licence at Ipswich, 
the marriage to be made public later. For this purpose she 
was to meet him at night at a barn on his farm known as the 
Red Barn where they had often spent the night together. This 
arrangement was made on the plea that she should not arouse 
gossip from the villagers, which would be aroused if she were 
seen going to his house, or if he brought a carriage to her 
house. So and it was her one really innocent act on a night 
of May she went to the Red Barn, and soon after she had set 
out for the scene of her " guilty nights'* her brother saw 
Corder going towards the barn with a pickaxe over his 
shoulder. 

Next day Corder was at home, but Maria was not. She 
had often visited Corder's house and stayed there several nights, 
using a secret entrance unknown to Corder's mother, and the 
family, knowing her habits, for a time was not worried. But 
when a fortnight had passed, and she had not fulfilled the 
arrangement of returning after the marriage and living at home 
until Corder could openly acknowledge her to his mother, the 
parents asked for news of her. Corder told them that he had 
arranged lodgings for her a bizarre statement of the truth 
and for a time they were contented with the messages he passed 
them from her. But in September he suddenly discovered that 
Suffolk air did not suit him, and told his friends that he was 
going on a tour. Before going he gave orders that the Red 

2 93 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Barn should be the first barn to be filled with the harvest, and 
he did not leave until this was done. He took with him most 
of his available money, and soon after he had gone the parents 
of Maria began to receive letters from him stating that he and 
Maria were happy and comfortable in the Isle of Wight. All 
these letters bore the London postmark, which the Martens 
thought was queer, and which was certainly silly. Noting this, 
and the fact that since the day of the marriage they had received 
no letter from Maria herself, though she could write, they 
began to talk. Then came the event which made the Red 
Barn murder a dramatic domestic story. Nearly a year after the 
supposed marriage Mrs Marten dreamed three nights in suc- 
cession that Maria was in the Red Barn. This dream not only 
shocked her, as indicating that some dreadful fate had over- 
taken her daughter; it also frightened her as a visitation from 
unseen powers which might, if she did not act, work even 
greater trouble upon them than they already had. She there- 
fore insisted that her husband must search the Red Barn, and 
by some excuse he got permission to enter it. Mrs Marten 
pointed out the exact spot which she had seen in her dream, and 
Marten began to dig at that spot. A few inches from the top 
he turned up a shawl which he knew was Maria's, and less 
than two feet from the surface he came upon her body, recog- 
nizable only by her dress. The surgeon who examined the 
remains found that she had been shot, stabbed, and strangled. 
From the parents' story and from local gossip suspicion at 
once turned to Corder. Information was laid in London, and 
he was traced from point to point until Bow Street found him 
at Brentford. He was then a married man (via matrimonial 
agency) and, with the unconscious irony that often marks the 
doings of the villain, was conducting a girls' school. At the 
moment of his arrest, early morning, he was found at the 
breakfast- table with three " ladies," and was engaged in boiling 
eggs on a spirit-stove and timing them by his watch, cheerfully 

294 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

unaware that he was also timing his own last minutes of normal 
life. The officers entered in the middle of this business, and 
just as the eggs were " done " the handcuffs were slipped on 
his wrists. 

The site of the Red Barn may still be seen, and the actual 
home of Maria Marten is still standing, or was a few years ago. 
But it is a sordid story, and, though it was set in these unim- 
passioned fields, it does not belong to them. What does belong 
is a tale of large harvests, stout horses, rich meadows, 
untroubled men, ripe old song do you know the earthy 
Suffolk song u A little pig lived on the best of straw "? and 
the whole spirit of rural England, This spirit still operates in 
our modern countryside, and operates as powerfully in Suffolk 
and the other counties within fifty miles of London as in coun- 
ties two hundred miles from it perhaps more powerfully. The 
conqueror has passed them by, and, unlike most of the Midland 
and Northern counties, they have no smaller hosts of progress 
to plague them. Their men are few, and their fields are still 
the property of the breathing earth. 

As a Londoner I may be pardoned if I disclose a deeper 
affection for these fields than for any other. No country, as 
I have said, moves me so strongly as the country of Somerset 
my Heart of England; yet the homelier country of Hertford- 
shire and Suffolk and Essex and Kent, with its ' little ' scenery 
and tight landscapes, draws me with the unconscious appeal 
of a child. Somerset is my chosen sweetheart, but the London 
counties have the family pull. They are a part of what I have 
always known, and, though I have seen lovely things outside 
them, they can still draw me back, and still, with their minor 
qualities, touch chords untouched by the grand or the romantic. 
My family on one side came from Suffolk and on the other 
from Sussex; and the first country I ever saw was the country 
of Hertfordshire. Whenever I think of fields it is the fields 
of Hertfordshire that come in image to my mind, and if 

295 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

I could wipe out all that I consciously know of England there 
would still remain, running in my nerves as a distillation of all 
England, one little corner of Hertfordshire. It was there that 
I spent those early country years of which I have spoken ; years 
that gave me memories which are as much me as my eyes; 
years which, beautiful in themselves, were a curious echo of 
another man's beautiful years. 

Lamb's essay Blakesmoor in H shire is the expression of a 
child's affection and veneration for an old country mansion. 
This kind of essay has often been written by owners of ancestral 
halls, or sons of landed families, but Lamb's case was singular. 
He had no claim by blood or law upon the house. He was a 
stranger within its gates; a mere below-stairs interloper, a rela- 
tive of the housekeeper. Yet he felt the age-long dignity of 
that house as keenly as its owners could have felt it, and in the 
essay he not only expressed this, but attempted to express the 
spell which it cast upon a small guest of the servants' hall. In 
a letter to Southey he admitted that he had failed in his attempt, 
and offered the excuse that there are some things which cannot 
be told feelings which refuse to be translated. 

But, having known it all myself, I think I can guess what 
he was trying to say. It was about a hundred years after his 
experience at Blakesmoor that I caught its echo, when, in that 
very country, I too was won to affection and veneration for 
a house in which I had no part, and to spiritual kinship with 
it. Lamb's Blakesmoor was actually Blakesware, at Widford, 
in Hertfordshire. My Blakesmoor was no more than five miles 
distant from his. It was Ware Park, and it stood, and still 
stands, between the towns of Hertford and Ware. I was taken 
to it at the age of five, and my situation was Lamb's I had 
no connexion with the family, but, as a relative of the care- 
taker, I wandered at large through a great unoccupied house 
and a great estate, and came to possess it and be coloured by it 
as much as any of its children. 

296 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

Lamb's picture of the grounds of Blakesmoor fits Ware Park 
very well: 

. . . the fruit-garden with its sun-baked southern wall; the 
ampler pleasure-garden rising backward from the house in 
triple terraces; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, 
stretching still beyond, in old formality, the firry wilderness, 
the haunt of the squirrel and the day-long murmuring wood- 
pigeon, with that antique image in the centre. 

It was not so ancient as Blakesmoor nor so architecturally 
splendid; it was just a dignified country house dating from the 
late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. But to my inex- 
perienced eye it was the Mansion in excelsis, and when, a year 
or so later, I came upon the New Testament reference to 
" many mansions " I visualized heaven as a sky full of Ware 
Parks. Even to-day, despite sufficient experience to see it 
relatively, it always conies to mind, before I have time to 
think, as a standard against which all country houses- are good 
Ware Parks or bad. It is forty years since I saw it, but I recall 
its white front shining in the sun, and its long drive and carriage 
sweep, and its portico and black double doors; and I recall 
its rooms. How many rooms it had I cannot say. At that 
time they seemed to me endless, and so vast and lofty that I 
seemed to be living in some palace of the stories of Grimm 
which were then being read to me. I would go on journeys of 
exploration through its upper floors, and almost every week 
I would discover a new room. 

Like Lamb, I had before that seen only the any rooms of 
London villas. The translation, therefore, from those cells into 
great halls and stretching gardens was itself a fairy-tale event, 
and my life amid the life of the house and its estate took on the 
true fairy-tale essence of the at once actual and fabulous. It is 
all so clear to me; yet so distant that I find it difficult to believe 
that the feet now serving me are the feet that trod its velvet 

297 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

lawns, and that the hands which typed these lines are the 
hands that picked its miraculous bluebells. It seems like some- 
thing that I knew when I was some other creature than I am in 
some other world than this. 

We lived at Ware Park, as Lamb lived at his Blakesmoor, 
only when the family were in town. Thus, I knew the house 
and its gardens in still life, as it were; a sleeping beauty. There 
was no improper sound or motion to disturb its essential self; 
it was as open to study as a picture. Not that I could, at the age 
of five, in any sense study it. But I could, and I now know did, 
absorb it, and it gave itself to me in its temporary repose with- 
out let or hindrance, and was to remain with me for ever as a 
symbol of all summers and the bliss of mere living. I would 
lie on its lawn or on a hedge-bank of white violets and celan- 
dines, through a whole blue morning, staring at it as it stared 
back at me, white and glistening in the hot air. Before long it 
was mine, as Blakesmoor was Lamb's, in all but title. I could 
walk its stairs and, corridors with full sense of possession. Each 
of its fifty windows was there for me to look through; all its 
gardens were mine to wander in ; all its paddocks mine to frisk 
in. After some days (the child's memory operating only from 
day to day) I should have told any questioner not only that I 
lived there, but that I always had lived there. It seemed that 
it must be so, because life there held everything I wanted. But 
maybe my view of it was given to me as a fragment of the 
cloud of glory trailed from elsewhere; the resumption of a fair 
existence which had been interrupted by a sleep and a for- 
getting. 

I was, as I say, five, and the first spring and summer of my 
consciously sentient life were passed on its lawns and in its 
fields and gardens. The English country house of that period 
the early nineties was, I think, the English country house at 
its best. Those years indeed marked the closing years of its 
long tradition. Country houses then were still country houses; 

298 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

the country was still rural and had its own life and its own 
thought and its own speech, un jarred by any strains of the 
town. And, while still in and of the country, the country house 
had by then developed a standard of civilized comfort which, 
though it did not trespass upon the luxury of town, as it now 
does, realized the best of both worlds. In these days a country 
house which is deep set in the country, and of it, and un- 
affected by the quick pulse of London, and is at the same time 
really comfortable, is hard to find. 

At Ware Park I lived though that is too tame a word in 
the real country, under a singing sky and in golden light. I 
lived in a world utterly cut off from the London world I had 
previously known, among people who knew nothing of that 
world save by hearsay. There have been no other springs and 
summers in my life. They have come, but they have come only 
as echoes of the springs and summers of Ware Park. Its grass 
was the first grass I smelled, and to-day the sudden smell of 
mown grass brings an image of no other lawns than those of 
Ware Park. Its wild roses, its dog-daisies, its lilac, its honey- 
suckle, gave me my first thrill of flowers. Its sunsets were the 
first sunsets I saw; its rooks and skylarks my first birds; and 
the bells of Bengeo gave me my first knowledge of the aching 
beauty of village bells at evening. All that the words 
' England ' and ' country ' mean to each of us is crystallized 
for me, as I expect it would be for the children of its then 
owner, in the memory of Ware Park. 

There I first saw cows and calves, sheep and lambs; stables 
and traps and horses; gamekeepers and grooms; dairies and 
conservatories; lanes and streams and daffodil patches and blue 
distances. There I first knew the kindness of strangers. I re- 
call Piggott, the cow-keeper, who took my sister and myself 
for bumping rides in his cattle cart. Walter, the under- 
gardener, who gave us rides on barrow-loads of grass, and in 
the evenings played the dulcimer in the kitchen. Hollo wood, 

299 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

the groom, who took us for celestial drives in the high dog- 
cart or the little governess-cart. And my first dog friends, the 
two retrievers Juno and Flo. There, too, in the servants' hall, 
I spent my first remembered Christmas a true country Christ- 
mas with Christmas-tree, snapdragon, dressing up* and Sir 
Roger de Coverley. 

An outsider, an intruder even, I developed that love for itself 
and that spiritual welding with its life at which Lamb has 
hinted. No son of that house, I think, can have been more 
jealous of its honour or religious to its memory than I. It was 
not my paternal roof I was not of its soil or its stones, nor of 
its founder's blood; and its rooms had received no breath of 
my forefathers. But I claimed it by piety. I felt that I was part 
of it, and ever since those years it has been part of me. It 
was my first known home, and to-day when I think of it I 
feel like the usurped heir. I feel that it and its fields belong to 
me, and I to them, by right of early ties and affection given 
and received. And had my dream at twelve years old fitly 
rounded itself I should have gone to Australia in early man- 
hood, have returned in early middle age with a fortune, and 
should have found it waiting for me, and none other, to pur- 
chase and to cherish. That dream never took shape, and 
perhaps it is as well that it did not: the gain of a granted dream 
often carries the loss of something more precious. 

The only point where Lamb's experience breaks from mine 
is that in later life he went back to look at his Blakesmoor, and 
found it in the hands of housebreakers. My Blakesmoor, as 
I say, is still standing/ But I have never dared to go back to it, 
and even if it were in my power to purchase it to-day I would 
purchase something else. One cannot recross the immaterial 
thresholds of the past, save in fancy. One cannot re-enter the 
kingdom of heaven, save as a little child; and it may be that 
if one did become a little child one yet would find that Time, 
" which hath an art to make dust of all things," had corroded 

300 



THE LONDON COUNTRY 

one's little kingdom. That is what I have feared that its 
essence would have evaporated, or that I should see it, as men 
in later years see the girl they once would have died for, as a 
plain and commonplace object which would make me ashamed 
of ever having loved it. And were I assured that it remains as 
it was, in all its glory and morning air, I still would refrain. 
The sight of it, and the other-world memories it would evoke, 
would bring a pang as keen as the pang Lamb suffered at 
sight of the broken stones of his idolized Blakesmoor. It 
would dislocate me for ever from this sober life of labour and 
responsibilities which is one's justification and the price one 
pays for manhood. I prefer to hold it as a perpetual image of 
all English country life. 



301 



CHAPTER VI 
A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

MY tours of the North-west have been made at long intervals, 
and two of them were concerned with industrial towns; but I 
have seen enough of its country to keep me wanting to see 
more. The last tour I made began at the North-east at Aln- 
wick; and I reached the beginning of the North-west at Pen- 
rith, by crossing the Northumbrian moors and Hadrian's Wall. 
The time was late autumn and the weather golden. It is a 
fashion with those who have only glanced at the North-west on 
a run through to Scotland to speak of it as rugged and chill, 
but all its country I have seen, at any time of the year, though 
dark in aspect and often damp, has been no more rugged and 
chill than the South Downs; and I have met icier weather on 
the Cotswolds than on the Cumbrian group. This tour, late 
in 1932, moved through that weather which De Quincey des- 
cribes as the weather he met in North Wales in that November 
when he was setting out for London. It was not summer, and 
not full autumn, but the dying breath of one mingling with 
the first breath of the other, and creating an abstract being as 
beautiful as either: 

The day on which I left Oswestry was a day of golden sun- 
shine amongst the closing days of November. As truly as 
Jessica's moonlight this golden sunshine might be said to sleep 
upon the woods and the fields; so awful was the universal 
silence, so profound the death-like stillness. It was a day be- 
longing to a brief and pathetic season of farewell summer 
resurrection, which, under one name or other, is known almost 
everywhere. In North America it is called the " Indian Sum- 
mer." In North Germany and Midland Germany it is called 

302 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

the " Old Wives' Summer," and more rarely the " Girls' Sum- 
mer." It is that last brief resurrection of summer in its most 
brilliant memorials, a resurrection that has no root in the past 
nor steady hold upon the future, like the lambent and fitful 
gleams from an expiring lamp, mimicking what is called the 
" lightning before death " in sick patients, when close upon 
their end. There is the feeling of a conflict that has been going 
on between the lingering powers of summer and the strength- 
ening powers of winter, not unlike that which moves by an- 
tagonist forces in some deadly inflammation hurrying forwards 
through fierce struggles into the final repose of mortification. 
... So sweet, so ghostly in its soft golden smiles, silent as a 
dream, and quiet as the dying trance of a saint, faded through 
all its stages this departing day. 

It was on such a day that we climbed out of stony Alnwick 
and made for Rothbury and Otterburn. The road rises at once 
into a moorland country flanked by rocky heathered hills, 
which, in the near distance, are of the hue of watered purple, 
and which faint by degrees into the blue dusk of the far-away 
Cheviots. I recall nothing about Rothbury except that we 
passed through it, along with the babbling Coquet, and that it 
was a large village in a hollow of the hills which made no 
instant impression. From Rothbury to Otterburn the road 
winds among similar scenery, but, as I remember, on a higher 
level, where at times the view was wide and open, and at others 
was blinded by the bulky Simonside and the smaller hills. It is 
a country of spaces, showing only at rare intervals a farmstead, 
and no hamlets for some miles'. It is mainly sterile country, 
and is, I fancy, the loneliest country of all England, lonelier than 
the Cotswolds or the Mendips or the dales. There are not 
many parts of England to-day where one may find untrodden 
ways or a maid with none to praise and very few to love her, 
but if one could find a Lucy anywhere, a violet by a mossy 
stone, half hidden from the eye, it might be here. It is a country 

303 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

for the car, and, though its best is to be seen by footpath in 
the dim, pool-like valleys, the stoutest of walkers only should 
make the venture. Distances are great and climbs are many. 

The car in which I made this trip had been cast off by a 
second-hand bookseller of London, but it bore no comparison 
to the stock of his shop. Second-hand in no way describes it, 
and even if some of his stock is tenth- and twentieth-hand none 
of it wears the condition that car wore. The only good thing 
about it was its engine, and upon that we dropped blessings. 
For a breakdown on these moorland solitudes, or, at later 
stages of the trip, on byways of the Cumbrians or the Peak 
hills, would have meant a disagreeable adventure: a twelve-mile 
tramp to the nearest garage or telephone; a mere nothing in 
Canada or South Africa, but in little England unusual and ex- 
asperating. It is useless in such places to hope for help from 
fellow-motorists. On this stretch, travelling for four hours, 
we neither met nor overtook one vehicle or person. During 
the trip we went into many of these hour-by-hour solitudes, 
but the decrepit 1927 did not once let us down. All sorts of 
things went wrong, but never the engine. It did the northern 
moors, the Cumbrians to Skipton, the Peak route from Hud- 
dersfield to Ashbourne, and skimmed back to London with no 
other trouble than the loss of a rear lamp, two burst tyres, a 
defective brake, a leak in the petrol-tank, a shattered wind- 
screen, and the collapse of the floor of the back seats. 

Otterburn is a pleasant, well-kept village, with an inviting 
inn the Percy Arms; a long, long-roofed, white-washed inn 
and two streams and an old mill where they make a local cloth. 
The word Otterburn at once recalls the batde of Chevy Chace, 
between the forces of Hotspur and Douglas, but a recent de- 
velopment may give it another significance to future historians. 
In my book The English Inn I predicted that within a year 
or so the more up-to-date country Inns and hotels would cease 
to talk of their garages and inspection-pits, and would talk of 

34 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

their landing-grounds for light 'planes. It has happened. At 
Otterburn, besides the inn, is a hotel, the Otterburn Hall Hotel, 
which advertises " landing-ground for aeroplanes." So far as I 
know, this Otterburn hotel thus has the honour of making the 
first recognition of the new age of private travel, and it should 
pass into the history of English travel along with the Anchor 
at Ripley, which did not slam its doors on cyclists, and the inn 
on the Brighton Road which first fitted up a garage. 

From Otterburn we took the road to Bellingham, and here 
the sterile hills rose to grandeur. The slopes, covered with 
bracken or what-not, faded to the horizon in increasing shades, 
from apricot to brown, brown to umber, and umber to black, 
so folding into each other with deceit of distance that often the 
first shade lay alongside the last, or a ray of sun brought the 
black forward into violet. This scenery is with you all the way 
to Bellingham (a small village with an air of a wild past about 
it) , and, though you lose it here, you have the compensation 
of the quieter and more appealing beauty of the North Tyne. 
The reach of this river from Bellingham to Chollerford has 
more of the quality of a Southern than a Northern river. It is 
not torrential or impetuous, though in other parts it can be 
both; it is as placid as the Thames, and its scenery is as soft and 
sylvan as the scenery between Pangbourne and Goring. Even 
in that late autumn it tempted one to linger by it, and in sum- 
mer I should think it would be so enchanting that one would 
be compelled to linger. The road, in the form of green lanes, 
so deep that the very sunlight was green, runs alongside it 
most of the way to Chollerford, and continues with- it to the 
point, north-east of Hexham, where it joins the South Tyne. 
We parted with it at Chollerfordj where it meets the Roman 
Wall. 

Hadrian's Wall is not beautiful, but it is certainly the most 
impressive historic monument in all England. It runs from 
Newcastle-on-Tyne to Bowness, on Solway Firth over seventy 

35 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

miles; with a height in some places of about twelve feet and a 
breadth of eight. Much of it, of course, has disappeared, 
especially near Newcastle, and farther westward one strikes 
many gaps in it. But sufficient lengths of it remain to impress 
the eye with its massive march across this open country, and 
the mind with the greatness of those who, eighteen hundred 
years ago, planned and built it. Its best stretch is from Choller- 
ford to Carlisle, but it can be tracked for nearly its whole dis- 
tance, and a favourite walking tour for Northerners is a week's 
walk along its grass-grown top. The region around it still retains 
many relics of the period when the vallum, or ditch between 
the Wall and the highway, was in busy occupation. Many 
stations and camps have been unearthed, and one of the mile 
castles exists almost as it was. At Chesters, near Chollerford, 
are the Roman station of Cilurnum and a museum of domestic 
and military pieces, and close to it are portions of a Roman 
bridge once spanning the North Tyne. Farther westward, at 
Housesteads, near the little Northumbrian lakes, is the camp 
of Borcovicus, the remains of which are so well preserved that 
with a little imagination one can see it as it was when the Wall 
was a centre of an activity like that of the Great North Road's 
to-day. 

Forlorn and useless it stands now, and, save at beautiful 
Chesters, the country around it, which once hummed with 
human presences, seems to have caught the infection of its long 
decay. It too is forlorn and elegiac, tired with its tale of battles 
long ago, of which no record remains, and whose sites are 
now one with the miles of grasses which have their roots in 
nameless bones. Over all battlefields, even of the remote past, 
hangs some aroma of the despair and agony of their occasions, 
so that whether one knows or not that a certain country was 
the setting of great battles, one's inner sense is informed. 
Throughout the country of the Wall one is aware of a 
quiet which is deeper than the usual country quiet; a marble 

306 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

quiet in which all memory is eternally frozen. Its secrets 
are locked away, but so impressive is the casket in which 
they lie that for many years men have been seeking to open it, 
and to read its riddles. The unearthing of camps and sites 
still goes on, and the Wall is the subject of a large literature, 
both for scholars and for the general student. But even these 
many volumes of researches can tell us litde; less, indeed, than 
one member of the dark Iberian band who peopled it under 
the Romans could tell us in two hours of talk. The historian 
can but put two and two together and conjecture, while the 
contemporary actors could, by a sidelight or two, illuminate the 
whole thing to us. But they are silent. A thousand years from 
now historians may be pondering over the real and docu- 
mentary remains of London, building up from them their own 
logical picture of its early twentieth-century life, and yet mak- 
ing a picture far away from the reality known to-day to any 
London postman or shopkeeper. And our conjectured pictures 
of the life in the vallum below the Wall may be as erroneous 
as that of the future investigators of our own life. Better, 
perhaps, to be content with looking and wondering, and 
admiring the indomitable spirit that conceived and made 
this Work. 

From Chesters to Haltwhistle it is with you all the way, and 
Chesters, with its dainty riverside hotel, the George, is a good 
centre for exploring it. (Or, if you like a larger centre, the old 
town of Hexham stands at a point from which you may visit 
iome of the best-preserved parts of it.) Haltwhistle, on the 
moors, is a dull, hard mining town, in which I found but one 
point of interest the Red Lion inn, where we had tea. This 
is an old place which had a history long before it was an inn. 
It has been newly fronted, but at the back of it are portions of 
a defensive castle erected in the long-ago of the Border raids. 
Ruined castles stand against the horizon all along this road, and 
at every mile or so the country speaks of war in some battered 

307 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

symbol of it. It was almost a relief to get away from it and to 
turn south to Pcnrith and the larger hills and more pastoral 
valleys. We went by way of Alston, another hard town, stand- 
ing high on the hills so high that it claims to be the highest 
market town in England. Hard as it is, it makes a good centre 
for the moors and the fells, and Northern folk do not seem to 
be affected by what those of the South call hard towns. They 
spend holidays here. In time, I suppose, one gets accustomed 
to the dark, stony aspect of these towns, and may even find 
a rough poetry in them, but at first meeting with them one 
thinks at once of everything dour and thick and unsym- 
pathetic. But the country outside them is certain compensa- 
tion for the charm they lack. Just outside Alston you have the 
first reaches of the South Tyne, and the run from Alston to 
Penrith, underneath Cross Fell, is a run that remains in the 
visual memory; a run, if made in the autumn, through a land 
of gold and purple. 

Penrith, though no more than twenty-five miles from Alston, 
is of quite different character easy and of pleasant face. The 
houses of its little market-place, which has the odd name of 
Great Dockwray, are of all ages and make an effective picture. 
Among them are two historic inns the Two Golden Lions 
and the Gloucester Arms. The latter bears a notice that it was 
once a lodge of Richard III, and one of its rooms is marked 
as the room he used. The Two Golden Lions, reached by a 
little alley, was also once a private home; in the sixteenth 
century it was one of the homes of the great local family of 
Lowthers. Both are delightful inns, full of interesting rooms, 
decorated ceilings, and old panelling. They are much restored, 
of course, since their early days, but still have definite archi- 
tectural character and that rich atmosphere which belongs to 
an inn of great age and long contact with men of many genera- 
tions. Penrith will tell you about its ruined castle, the home of 
Richard when he was Duke of Gloucester, and about the 

308 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

Giant's Grave, in the churchyard; but these two inns, I think, 
are of much keener appeal, and sufficient to the pride of any 
town. No need, while these remain, to drag in castles and 
giants. Even without inn or castle it can stand scrutiny. It is 
both a market town and a holiday town; a good combination. 
It is a centre for the farmers of its district, and it is within 
walking distance of Ullswater and within car distance of the 
other lakes. The Lakes are the Lakes, and I will add no word 
to the fifty million words that have been written about them. 
You know where they are, and you can find their story in a 
hundred books. Let us pass them by, and look at Lancashire 
and the western dales of Yorkshire. 

We reach the Lancashire border at Kirkby Lonsdale, which 
makes a pleasant gate to any county. I had always thought of 
Kirkby Lonsdale, possibly because of its name, as one of the 
hard little towns, and I found a town which, though mainly of 
stone, was not stony, but had a graceful personality and a 
gentle setting for it. It is little more than a market-place and 
three or four streets, yet it has the tight town feeling which is 
often lacking in towns of greater acreage. It is definitely a 
place Kirkby Lonsdale; not a haphazard collection of streets 
and buildings which have had a name attached to them, but a 
body whose character appears in all its lines. The market- 
place is small, but it is clearly a market-place, and is large 
enough to hold a covered market cross, the chief hotel of the 
town, and one or two smaller inns and restaurants where they 
advertise and serve in local pride " Lune salmon." The hotel 
where we stayed has the air of having been the chief hotel of 
Kirkby Lonsdale long before our grandfathers. Its yard, which 
runs alongside and behind it, and its range of lock-up garages 
which obviously once were the stalls of a great range o stabling, 
prove this. Inside, its age is equally patent, and it has one linger- 
ing touch not of age, but of the near past, which pleased 
me. It is modernized to the extent of hot and cold water 

39 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

basins in the bedrooms, but is nineteenth-century in its light- 
ing. All the bedrooms are lit by gas. So many years had 
crossed rny brow since last I lit a gas-mantle that the per- 
formance of the old trick gave me a little thrill, and gave my 
American friend, born and bred in Chicago within the last 
twenty-two years, some ten minutes of thrill. He had never 
seen a gas-bracket, with or without mantle, and when I went to 
his room I found him turning the tap on and off in a puzzled 
effort to switch the thing into light. 

All around Kirkby Lonsdale the scenery takes a lyrical note 
from the Lune, which gives Lancashire its name; and the 
superb view from the churchyard across the valley to the soft 
hills on the outskirts is a view that should fix the churchgoers, 
as they leave the church, in that mood of worship which so 
often is left behind in the church. The church itself is of the 
thirteenth century, with a noble Norman doorway, and it is not 
set away from the town; it is alongside the main street; so close, 
indeed, that the old Sun inn, with the stone porch, backs on 
to the railings of its yard. 

In the yard I noted the tomb of a former landlord of the Sun, 
whose body was laid to rest within a few yards of the house 
where he presided over the entertainment of visitors and of 
his fellow-townsmen. I think it pleasant that his calling should 
be thus recorded on his memorial, for innkeepers are as much 
worthy of celebration as vicars or mayors or other dignitaries. 
I would like to see our inns employ the practice of the church 
and fix within their halls a panel giving a table of landlords 
from the inn's foundation and their period of ministration. 
With our older inns this is not now, of course, possible, 
since their records no longer exist; but a beginning might be 
made as from these days by owners of the newer inns. We 
might, indeed, have had a full tale, going back two or three 
centuries, if all travellers had been as scrupulous in detail as the 
author of a diary I lately picked up of a journey from Scotland 

310 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

to London in the early eighteenth century. Few travellers, 
more's the pity, had such an eye for the minutiae of travel as 
this diarist. He not only tells you where he rested each night, 
and the name of his inn and the size of it, and how its beds 
suited him, but in each case he adds the landlord's name. 
Thus: "Arrive at Kendal and breakfast at the White Hart 
(Maskew) ." " Reach Lancaster and put up at the King's 
Arms (Coulthwaite)." "Arrive in the evening at Disley, 
about nine miles from Buxton. Put up at the Ram's Head 
(Hancock)." Many an innkeeper of the coaching days was 
famous up and down the road as a character, and made an im- 
portant figure in his town; and it is to be wished that their 
names and records had remained as part of the history of their 
houses. But anything to be done in that way to-day must be 
done by the owners of the houses; only here and there could 
a modern traveller note the names of the landlords of his 
inns and hotels, since, as I said earlier, landlords are seldom 
visible. 

We found Kirkby Lonsdale so pleasant that for a few days 
we used it as a base for runs into Lancashire and the dales of 
Central Yorkshire Nidderdale, Wensleydale, Swaledale, and 
their abbeys. 

Our 'first run was round Ingleborough to Skip ton, and thence 
by Pateley Bridge to Ripon, through country that was a bene- 
diction to the eyes a succession of coloured slopes, glens, 
valleys, and racing little streams. Just outside Kirkby Lonsdale 
is its striking little river scene, the Devil's Bridge, where, at a 
widening of the river, the water tumbles over in a grand little 
cascade. It is not a real waterfall, but one comes upon it so 
suddenly in a spot away from the waterfall country, and it fits 
so well with the old bridge, that it evokes always an exclama- 
tion from those seeing it for the first time. A little beyond it is 
an old inn of not only picturesque appearance, but picturesque 

311 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

name. It is one of those long, low, half-timbered places, and its 
name is the Whoop Hall inn. 

Tourists of literary interests who get to Kirkby Lonsdale will 
no doubt want to go to Cowan Bridge to see the house which 
figures in Jane Eyre as Lowood School, but I was too much 
concerned in a more modern shrine to find time for Lowood. 
The shrine I was seeking lies under Ingleborough. It is a 
garden. 

It is to be found near Clapham, a trim litde stone village of 
flowery cottages in a wonderful setting. There, in the grounds 
of one of the larger houses, is a rock garden famous among 
botanists and flower-lovers throughout the world. Merged 
harmoniously into the spacious landscape in which it is set, a 
testimony to years of labour and fastidious taste, it glows 
beneath the old house as the memorial and epitaph of a great 
botanist. Beneath a yew-tree on the bank, above the colour 
and fragrance which he loved and for which he gave his life, 
is a copper memorial tablet to Reginald Farrer, botanist, 
traveller, mystic, and more than that a master of English 
prose. 

It was his books, not his botany, that drew me to Reginald 
Farrer. On the Eaves of the World and The Rainbow Bridge, 
published by Mr Edward Arnold, are classics in the literature 
of travel; the expression of a great spirit. They are not as 
widely known as they should be, but I think they will one day 
be found by the larger public. In many libraries they are 
catalogued under Botany. The time will come when they will 
be catalogued under Literature, for, though his theme was 
flowers, he used it as a foundation of literature, as Gilbert 
White used birds and Izaak Walton fish. He was the poet of 
flowers, and wrote of them as poets should, not from detached 
adoration, but from the full understanding possible to the 
practical man. 

His passion for flowers dated from babyhood. He began at 

312 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

three years old to find his chief pleasure in the garden, and at 
ten was an ardent collector, so that his development as a botan- 
ist was assured and inevitable from those early years. But break- 
ing through the bounds of his calling was a quality which would 
have revealed itself forcibly, I feel, in whatever calling he had 
followed. He had something of the fecundity of genius, and 
from youth onward produced plays, novels, essays, and the 
books which recorded his wanderings. It was in these last that 
he found himself. In them his wide culture and clear vision, 
his irony and humour, came to fruit. He was an adventurer 
not only of the body, but of the mind and the spirit. Behind 
his brilliant mind beat a deep sympathy with struggling man 
and a sensibility to all forms of suffering, while under his hard- 
ships and misfortunes he was always the amused and iron- 
willed spectator. The pilgrimage of this ardent personality, 
expressed in his travel books, had a quality of the heroic. 

To many people the word botanist suggests a timid, profes- 
sorial figure in spectacles. There was nothing of this about 
Reginald Farrer. Shy and retiring he was, but of rather burly 
frame; and the perils and privations he endured in his passion- 
ate service of flowers rank him with the doughty explorers. He 
loved adventure, and his journeys among the highlands of 
China and Tibet gave him full measure of it. They under- 
mined his health, but in return they gave him beauty, to which 
he responded as sharply as to adventure. Also, they drew him 
into the Buddhist faith. He was not only a seeker of flowers, 
but a seeker of wisdom, and in the high latitudes of Tibet he 
found his path as, in Burma, still following it, he found 
deadi. But when he speaks, no matter what his topic, whether 
flowers or Buddhism or mountains, it is a poet who speaks. 
Quotation gives only a faint breath of the cumulative power 
of his style, but even a paragraph or so shows, I think, that he 
was a writer. Here is his description of a Buddhist settlement, 
the Halls of Heaven: 

313 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Huddled into its bay of warmth the Halls of Heaven fronts 
the south. No cold winds ever visit it; no snow lies; winter 
never comes near it. The clifrs embrace it and keep off all cold 
and concentrate all warmth. In front lies the broad sweep of 
the Iris plain, and then the poplar belt of the river, and then 
the fantastic, pinnacled blackness of the fir-forest, the only one 
in these ranges, and the cherished property of the Abbey. Even 
on first sight my heart went out ahead of me to Tien Tang. 
. . In the powdered gold of early sunset I rode leisurely into 
the Halls of Heaven, and in and out among its tortuous streets 
to where a crowd, gathered in the doorway of a white wall, 
indicated our quarters. . . . Stupid with a blank delight I wan- 
dered spell-bound over those unharvested lawns, agonising with 
the effort to contain without breaking the infinite flood of glory 
they were so mercilessly pouring into so frail and finite a vessel. 
It twisted one's very being to absorb that sight wholly, to get 
outside it, to possess it, delay its passing, tear it away from its 
native hills and keep it with one for ever flesh of one's flesh 
and brain of one's brain. But beauty is so big and enduring, 
and we so small and evanescent, that for us the almost physical 
pain of trying to pack the incommensurable inside the infini- 
tesimal is, indeed, as if one should try to decant the Yellow 
River into a thimble. Let us hope that even a drop remains 
inside the poor little vessel round which so titanic an overflow 
goes inevitably lost, roaring and seething in a spate that would 
bafHe any holding capacity. 

And here is the last paragraph of his last bpok. The Rainbow 
Bridge, which, if he had not already that beautiful memorial 
under Ingleborough, might serve as his epitaph : 

And if you declare that all this babble about beauty and 
flowers is a vain impertinence, then I must tell you that you 
err, and that your perspectives are false. Mortal dooms and 
dynasties are brief things, but beauty is indestructible and eter- 
nal, if its tabernacle be only in a petal that is shed to-morrow. 
. . . This is no idle fantasy; little happinesses may look little, 
and find no place in the plans of diplomats and prophets, but 

3M 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

they outlast the worst catastrophes and survive the plans and 
the diplomats and the prophets and all. Dead bones in their 
graves lie Mary and Elizabeth, queens; and dead dust of death 
is all they did; but the flowers they grew in their gardens still 
continue giving comfort and delight perpetually, down through 
the continuing generations to whom the people of the past are 
mere phantasmal fictions in books, diaphanous, desiccated as 
dried flowers themselves. All the wars of the world, all the 
Caesars, have not the staying power of a lily in a cottage border. 
Man creates the storms of his tea-cup, and dies of them, but 
there remains a something standing outside, a something im- 
pregnable, as far beyond reach of man's destructiveness as is 
man's own self. The immortality of marbles and miseries is a 
vain, small thing compared to the immortality of a flower that 
blooms and is dead by dusk. 

That is Farrer, the botanist, on flowers; in another phase he 
could write the centenary essay on Jane Austen for The Times 
Literary Supplement. After The Rainbow Bridge he planned 
to return to " The Radiant Places " of Tibet, but it was not to 
be. He went seeking new flowers in Upper Burma, and there, 
in 1919, towards the end of a difficult and depressing sojourn 
among the wet j ungles of that lonely land, he took a fever, and 
died alone, save for a native servant. Mr E. H. M. Cox, editor 
of Flora and Sylva^ who had been his companion for a .few 
months of the trip, has told the full story in his sympathetic 
book Farrer 's Last Journey. Though nervously strained by 
months of hardship, alone in that luscious country which had 
never known the humanizing influences of the older civiliza- 
tions, wearied by the long rainy season and by indifferent luck 
in his collecting, he remained buoyant and full of plans to the 
end. His letters reveal the unquenchable spirit that sustained 
him; they show him, in his dripping bamboo shack in the 
hills, rereading Emma or starting work on a novel, or devising 
ideas for books that might be written. His end was sudden; 

3*5 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

it came in a few days, following a chill; but all through those 
few days he was devotedly nursed by his servant, whom he had 
drawn to himself as he drew most people with whom he came 
in contact. The servant remained with him to the last, buried 
him, marked the spot with an inscribed plank, and then 
marched day and night with his effects to their base. 

Famous in the world of botany and horticulture, he was 
little known outside it, and he did not cultivate random 
acquaintances. Here and there a quiet corner of the literary 
world was aware of him, but he was not seen in that world. 
Yet it is as a literary figure, I think, that he will survive; years 
hence, maybe, as many people will go to look at that Yorkshire 
garden as now go to look at Cowan Bridge. He died in action, 
as he would have wished to die, and his body lies in the jungle 
of Burma. But his garden, as he has himself suggested, goes 
on, blooming through the hundred sweet short lives of its 
flowers, under those Yorkshire hills and skies which were the 
first he knew, and which not even the radiant skies of Asia 
could blot from his affections. If you care for prose, if you care 
for things of the spirit, for flowers, for travel, for adventure, 
then seek out On the Eaves of the World, The Rainbow Bridge, 
and The Garden of Asia. Something of all these matters you 
will find in those books. 

From Clapham to Settle, through Giggleswick, the road 
keeps its note of varied beauty. Giggleswick, said by some to 
be the centre of Great Britain, is much like Clapham. The 
Ribble, very shallow here, runs through it, bubbling over aged 
stones, and adding that completing touch which a river always 
adds even to an already charming village. Settle is an old town 
set in a hollow of the moors; a stone town, as all the towns 
hereabouts are, with some very old houses. One which I noted, 
used as an antique-furniture shop, looked almost Plantagenet, 
and there was an attractive old inn, the Golden Lion. We tried 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

to get from Settle to Pateley Bridge across the moors of Wharfe- 
dale, but could find no road, and a farm-hand told us there 
was none and that we must go round by Skipton. This we did, 
and by much twisting found ourselves out on the moor in a 
storm of rain, but fortunately only a mile or so from a delight- 
ful village, which we learned was Burnsall, and where we found 
the Fell Hotel. 

Impressive as they are in their serenity, the moors and dales, 
to be fully known, should be seen not only under sun, but under 
the weather's ferocity. Their dreaming beauty then becomes 
terrible. The great basin of sky is a wrath of cloud, the valleys 
are turmoils of conflicting rains, and the wind rips across them 
with the fury of a coast hurricane. Mists close upon you and 
retreat. Under the veil of rain the landscape shivers. The moor 
is a grey blanket of wetness. Yet still it is beautiful. Under 
vehement assaults of weather humans and animals become only 
bedraggled miseries, all dignity, all decency even, shaken out 
of them. But country cannot be so shaken. The lightnings of 
the universe and the floods of heaven may change its aspects, 
but its power is untouched. In all aspects it retains its dignity. 
As we rested at the Fell Hotel we saw the moor ravaged by 
most of the mechanics of Nature, and an hour later we saw it 
in its serenity, gleaming under the sun as though no storm had 
been. 

While resting I picked up in the hotel a leaflet, issued by the 
management, giving detailed itineraries for walks in the 
district. Most hotels in their booklets indicate Places of Interest 
in the neighbourhood, but this descriptive, point-by-point guide 
for walkers I had not met before. Other country hotels might 
copy. It outlines a series of seven walks, chosen for their 
scenery, and gives you precise directions to hidden hamlets 
which you, as a stranger, might not otherwise find. Most of 
them I had never heard of. The dales have many little corners 
made by a fold of the hills, which only a local man can reveal 

3*7 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

to you; and Drebley and Appletreewick and the Valley of 
Desolation and Grassington and its famous murder were all 
new to me. Thorpe too I did not know, nor that in the Middle 
Ages its small population was engaged wholly in cobbling for 
the monks of Fountains Abbey. Nor did I know of the caverns 
of Stump Cross and Troller's Ghyll, and that moor in Wharfe- 
dale whose very name is an invitation Blubberhouses Moor. 
I noted them for a future visit, and when the downpour had 
ceased we went on through Nidderdale to Ripon. 

Nidderdale, I think, is the loveliest of these western dales. 
Perhaps I think so because it holds the august ruins of 
Fountains Abbey, but even without these it has its tale of 
beauties and blessings. If you have never seen one of these 
Yorkshire dales you have something yet to see and to feel. You 
may have seen much of the beauty of Europe to the point of 
surfeit, but still these dales will have something for you that you 
have not found elsewhere. I hardly know how to hint their 
quality to those who have never seen them. Some of the most 
glorious scenery of Southern Europe is glorious only; it lacks 
temperament; it has not been closely lived with. But the 
Yorkshire dales have not only beauty, but each its peculiar 
temperament, the legacy of the men who have breathed with 
it and given their thought to it and died with it. Looking upon 
them from the moors or the little fells, you have a sweep of 
country stretching to the horizon and broken into all forms 
and colours a plate of happy England, rimmed by tree- 
covered slopes. You may count fifty meadows, tidy and snug 
within their stone hedges, and intersecting their green you 
have the thread-like trails of white roads and streams, with 
here and there a rocky glen or waterfall, or the clean darkness 
of a wood, and here and there white dots, with a tower rising 
out of them, which are Yorkshire villages and church. It is a 
scene that catches the most vagrant attention. There is no 
grandeur about it. It is peasant country, but it has, like the 

3*8 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

voice of that famous peasant Enrico Caruso, a nobility more 
substantial than grandeur. If you are sensitive to the spirit of 
country you will feel rushing upon you here the whole beauty 
and power of England, which, in its origins, is the beauty and 
power of simplicity. You may view these dales at any season 
and any hour; in summer-morning mist, in noonday sunshine 
of spring, or, as I saw Nidderdale, in the silver pallor of a 
dying November afternoon; and always they will fill you with 
a more than visual awareness of their nobility. 

Ripon and its little cathedral stand at a point where the fells 
cease and the country is a green agricultural country. It is 
a pleasant little town, with a pleasant little river and a large 
market-square in which many of its older houses are preserved. 
It is said to be the second oldest town of England, and one or 
two of its houses suggest that there can be few that are much 
older. Its chief treasure, more interesting, I think, than its 
cathedral, is the Wakeman's House, of the thirteenth century, 
which, until the beginning of the seventeenth century, was the 
official lodging of the wakeman, or mayor, of Ripon. It is a 
delightful piece of period domestic work, full of old oak and 
revealing odd tricks of building. The roof stones are fixed into 
place with the bones of deer, and the oak frame of the house 
is supported by staves set in a mixture of dung and lime. It 
has the usual secret chamber of old houses, a neat musician's 
gallery, and, now that it is the folk museum of the town, it 
contains many relics of the past, including a bridle for nagging 
wives. The mayor is now lodged elsewhere, but there is still 
a town official called the wakeman, who performs, in ancient 
costume, the old ceremony of sounding curfew at nine o'clock 
each night on a huge curled horn. He first sounds it under the 
market cross four blasts, one for each point and then 
proceeds to the mayor's residence and again sounds it. In the 
old days the mayor, or wakeman, performed the ceremony 
himself, and if, between nine o'clock and morning, any house- 

319 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

holder's home was burgled he could claim compensation from 
the wakeman for that he and his servants had not attended to 
their duties of preserving the night peace. For this he paid a 
yearly tax of fourpence per door of his house. A similar custom 
of horn-blowing is maintained at the moorland village of 
Bainbridge, about thirty miles away, but there it is sounded at 
ten o'clock at night during the winter months as a direction- 
signal to travellers, who, in the past, were often lost on the 
moor. Other old customs of Ripon are the celebration of its 
saint's day, when a chosen citizen, dressed in robes and mounted 
upon a white horse, impersonates the saint and rides round the 
town with a full retinue and a band of ancient instruments; 
and the ceremony of installing the new mayor by summoning 
him to the town, conducting him to his home, and there fixing 
to his gate the official Mayor's Lamp. 

The Unicorn, in the market-square, where we stayed the 
night, is a comfortable place of about the late eighteenth 
century, though its story as an inn goes much farther back. 
This was one inn where I did see a landlord. The landlord 
received us cheerily in the hall, and during the evening he was 
about the smoke-room, the dining-room, and the lounge and 
elsewhere, seeing that things were right. And, of course, they 
were right. If the commander-in-chief is about, things are 
pretty sure to go smartly and efficiently. My bedroom was one 
of the pleasantest country-inn bedrooms I have known. The 
market-square of Ripon is the summit of a little hill, and the 
Unicorn stands high above the houses around and behind it. 
My room was a back room on the third floor, and thus there 
was nothing between my windows and distance. Below the 
window ran a shelving beach of roofs, but the level view gave 
a vast half-circle of the green and golden plain of Swaledale 
and its soft dumpling hills. I would have liked to stay there 
for a month and work. With such an inspiring window the 
room would have made a perfect study. 

320 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

The Unicorn was always a famous house on this road, but in 
the middle eighteenth century it acquired wider fame by its 
boots, a queer and unprepossessing fellow whose picture appears 
on the stationery and menus of the hotel. By some malfor- 
mation of features his nose and chin almost met, as they do in 
fancy pictures of fairy-tale witches; and he capitalized this 
defect, and made himself popular with travellers and famous 
through Yorkshire, by always taking his proffered tips with his 
nose and chin. He could take and hold the smallest coin in 
this way. 

After a glance next morning at Aldborough and Knares- 
borough we returned to Kirkby Lonsdale through Swaledale 
and Wensleydale. The name Wensleydale, with all the beauty 
of its landscapes and waterfalls, does not immediately suggest 
beauty; it suggests to most of us the more mundane fact of 
cheese, and here I am moved to a complaint. Both Yorkshire 
and Cumberland are famous cheese districts, but it is as 
vain to expect to get the local cheese in all their inns as to 
expect the best fish at the seaside or fresh vegetables in 
market-garden towns. In too many places where we expected 
Wensleydale we were offered imported stuff; it was only 
in the smaller places that we found the real thing. But when 
you do find it on its own soil, what a cheese it is ! A 
lunch of right Wensleydale, with salad or celery, is a true 
country lunch and a gourmet's lunch. The noble cheese 
that Humphrey Pump of The Flying Inn carried with him 
as mate to his keg of rum must, I think, have been a 
Wensleydale. It is a cheese that fits that book; a cheese 
for warriors and honest men; an open-air cheese. 

Aldborough, a little to the south-east of Ripon, is not quite 
up to the beauty standard of many of these parts, but it has 
historic interest. It was once a Roman city Isurium and 
traces of the walls and of the original paving may still be 
perceived. It claims to have a larger collection of relics of the 

321 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Roman past than any other village, and for this it owes some- 
thing to luck, since I was told that before they were collected 
these relics and mosaics of the pavements were lying about in 
the cottage gardens where they were dug up. The beauty of 
their material and workmanship suggests that they were part 
of no everyday domestic architecture, but of palaces. Many 
years ago so many coins were being dug up that they came into 
use as a local currency and were called * Aldborough pennies '; 
but they have long since disappeared. The city of Isurium 
itself disappeared with the coming of the Danes. They 
stripped the city of its treasures, and' left it burning and 
desolate, with the weak and aged dying beneath its walls. 
Year by year the temples and towers crumbled and fell, and 
grass covered the places where they had been; until, centuries 
later, upon the site of an * old burgh ' arose gradually the 
hamlet of Aldborough. 

Knaresborough is not an impressive town, but it has an 
impressive situation in the lovely vale of Nidd, with castle 
ruins rising above it. Usually it is a sleepy enough place, 
but we happened on a market day, when the coloured 
booths and fruit and flowers and dairy produce fired the 
small grey square on the hill into a little carnival. From 
the hill, steep flights of worn steps lead down through the 
terraces of stone houses clinging to the cliff to the road by the 
river and the three-arched bridge which is one of Knares- 
borough J s ' sights.' The other two are Mother Ship ton's Cave 
and St Robert's Cave the cave in which Eugene Aram buried 
the body of Daniel Clark. Mother Shipton was a native of 
the town; Aram came from Ramsgill, a few miles away, and 
at the time of the robbery and murder was occupied in the 
town as a (doubtless underpaid) schoolmaster. No town, I 
think, need be ashamed of owning two such characters, for 
Aram was no ordinary murderer, and Mother Shipton was no 
ordinary sibyl. Except for her date of the end of the world, 

322 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

she * came off * in better proportion than most prophets if the 
prophecies ascribed to her were really made by her. Born in 
the early 1500*5, extremely ugly, she had a witch for mother 
and for grandmother, so that dark doings were in the blood. 
She began at quite an early age to disappear into lonely places, 
doubtless to consort with invisible powers, and to some effect 
if, in the middle of the sixteenth century, she was confident 
that carriages without horses would go and that many acci- 
dents would come of it; that iron would float on the sea; that 
a palace of glass would be built, and that soon afterwards there 
would be war with the pagan and the Turk; and that gold 
would be found in a land at that time not on the map. 

Seen from below, the town is more serious than when you 
are in it. Looking up to the great soaring arches of the bridge 
and the lichened roofs that appear through the trees by the 
church, you are moved by its dignity, and if you prowl about 
the narrow alleys that lace it up and down, and note the 
crumbling walls and uneven grey roofs and gables and the fire- 
blackened ruins of its casde, you catch the flavour of its 
Edward III beginnings. 

The road from Ripon up Wen slcy dale to Richmond, and 
over the moors, through Swaledale to Kirkby Lonsdale is 
mainly a good road, and, as it runs alongside the more speedy 
Great North Road, it is not too thickly trafficked. But it is 
better in these dales to get off the road and to wander, either 
on foot, if you are a good walker, or by cycle or car, unless 
your car is one of those which cannot wander at less than forty. 
You will find some terrible roads and will no doubt lose your 
way, but you will find a lot of which the highway will not 
give you even a hint; and if you are of the chameleon nature, 
and feed on light and air, the moors and fells will banquet you. 
This air is not like wine, which is a heavy human concoction; 
it is invisible honeydew and milk of paradise, clean as snow, 
light as gossamer, full as the sea's flood, and as keen as music. 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

Three days of wandering in it will heal any lacerated nerves 
or melancholy humour, and will add a strength of richer 
quality than any other country air I know. But not if you 
wander with that travelling rabbit-hutch called the saloon car, 
which in the country is as much an abomination as silk hat and 
spats. In such a car you see no more of the country and get 
no more benefit than if you were sitting at home over a gas- 
fire. The only car for the country is the hood-and-curtains car, 
and the hood and curtains should be raised only against a 
hailstorm or snowstorm. In all other weather keep them down, 
and let the sun fall upon you, and let the wind play round 
about you and over you; let it wash your face and cannonade 
your ears and stream into your lungs. Better still, get out and 
walk. (If you find some of the roads we found you will wish 
that you had walked.) Get out and walk, and let the wind get 
right at you, and let your blood meet it in harmonious pulsing. 
In a few hours your vague disquietments will begin to allay 
themselves. 

Richmond is, I think, the prize of these dale towns. Its 
situation is that of Knaresborough a steep town rising from a 
river and old bridge, and crowned by a castle. But it is 
brighter than Knaresborough, as befits the home of the lovely 
Lass of Richmond Hill, and its riverside is more picturesque. 
Its castle is Norman, of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and 
the cobbled streets and dark stone houses still keep the town 
in a medieval aspect. This is helped by another touch of the 
past, which was common in the days when the middle aisle of 
St Paul's was a rendezvous of gallants and merchants: into the 
walls of one of its churches have been built various shops. 
West of Richmond, following the course of the Swale, is 
Reeth, smaller, but picturesque in its own way, with village 
green and bridge and shallow river rushing over its rocky bed. 

Round about this portion of the dale you have so many 
ruined abbeys, priories, and castles that after a time the eye 

324 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

ceases to note them. They seem to be equal in number to the 
towns and villages, if not in excess, and as most ruined abbeys 
and priories are very much like each other, with the exception 
of such symphonies as Tintern, Glastonbury, Rievaulx, and 
Fountains, we gave them no more than a backward glance. 
Two diamonds in a poor man's house make an effect, but in 
Hatton Garden they make no more effect than a comely 
chorus-girl makes on Mr Cochran. Of more immediate and 
insistent appeal are the moors and fells and the string of water- 
falls and forces around Aysgarth and Aisgill and Askrigg. 
These are set in rocky and wooded glens, and on a summer day 
they make little poems of coolness and green shade and all 
those words which Henley got into his Ballade of Hot 
Weather. Even when furnished with directions you seldom 
find them : you turn a corner and come upon them, and in an 
instant you are gathered into their atmosphere of darkling 
silver and drumming silence. They are not so frequent as the 
ruined priories and castles, but there is a good succession of 
them, and each, if you come to it by accident, is entrancing. 
Near Askrigg you have Whitfield Gill and Mill Gill Foss or 
Force. At Aysgarth you have the Aysgarth Falls three of 
them. At Redmire the Redmire Force- At Hardraw you have 
the Hardraw Force. And at Semerwater you have a lovely 
mere lying among the hills, which, according to local legend, 
covers an engulfed city. None of them would evoke much 
response from those who have seen the greater falls of Europe 
and America, but they are in scale to little England, and in the 
scenery of these dales they are as potent upon the eye as the 
more imposing falls in wilder scenery. 

A minor road from Reeth, followed to its endj will bring 
you to a little village hidden in a hollow of the hills under 
Buttertubs. It lies in a green basin, with the Swale running 
round it, and in relation to the fells it looks like a toy village 
in one piece which has been dropped on a green carpet; a 

3 2 5 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

village one could hold on the palm of one's hand. There is 
but one road into and out of it, except for a pass over the fells; 
the hills tuck it in on all sides, and there is no sign of it until 
you are sure you have lost your way and then abruptly come 
upon it. It is away from first-class roads, petrol-pumps, refresh- 
ment-stalls, and all the less agreeable manifestations of progress, 
as well, of course, as the more agreeable. It has no story that 
I can find, and no special charm; yet in its situation it is 
appealing. Once you got there and stayed a night it would be 
long, I think, before you got out. The pull of its surroundings, 
and the bother of getting out, would do their own work upon 
you, and would add one more to the radio appeals of " Missing 
from his home. . . .*' Perhaps that has already happened; per- 
haps half of its inhabitants are people who once went to look 
and have ever since been going to climb out to-morrow. Or 
perhaps some Pied Piper of the past led a band of children 
there, and they found it so pleasant that they lost the idea of 
finding their way out, and married and lived in that hollow of 
the hills, forgetting and forgotten. It could have been done, 
since the village is not on the way to anywhere; it is a surprise 
village which travellers only find by taking a wrong turning. 
It is just such a place to keep in mind against the time when 
you are ready to say, " Good-bye, ' proud world; Fm going 
home." Its name should be Grey vale or Lone Hollow or Silver 
Roofs or Deep Holme; but it happens to be Muker. 

Resisting its pull, we got out of it, but how we got from it 
to Kirkby Lonsdale I cannot clearly say. We went, I know, 
through a darker and deeper country than that of the other 
dales. In every few miles it changed. It was still moor and fell, 
but differing kinds of moor and fell; sometimes heathered and 
wooded, sometimes barren and rocky, sometimes brown, and 
sometimes indigo. But under the old gold of that November 
sun it had no stern aspects. Its lines were soft, and its spirit 
was as elusive as a dream. It was Pennine country, but wholly 

326 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

different from the Pennine country to the south of Bradford; 
sad and ruminant, yet with a passion in its sadness. We went, 
I remember, both high and low, sometimes on the top of every- 
thing and sometimes almost covered in by the crowding of the 
heights. We went through limestone gorges, and up by a series 
of double hairpins and down by a series of snake-bends. We 
went through coal-black avenues of meeting trees and out 
again to plains almost treeless and blank of ail expression in 
the dove-grey light of the late afternoon. We passed many a 
beck and many a waterfall. But all through the variety of 
scene the note of sadness was persistent not a chill sadness, 
but the childlike sadness of that little air in the first movement 
of Tschaikowski's B flat minor piano concerto. 

Not until we got into Kirkby Lonsdale did we discover that 
the rear lamp was gone, though when it went we could not 
guess. Probably in one of the snake-bends, for it was there 
that the floor of the back seats fell in. Happily only a suitcase 
was sitting on it. 

We left Kirkby Lonsdale next morning, and in three minutes' 
drive from the hotel were in Lancashire, following the river 
through a country that does not * go * with all that the word 
Lancashire has come to imply to the common ear. It is a country 
sweet and kind, a country which has been belied to Lancashire 
by that squalor of towns in its south which are the nineteenth 
century's altar to the god of industry, and which, by the efforts 
of the mean-souled men who made them, have become the 
formula of Lancashire throughout the world. They represent 
Lancashire as a county of everything unblessed and cruelly 
comic, and, emphatic as they are, they shout a falsehood. There 
is beauty in Lancashire, and if you are careful to dodge that 
circle of Manchester-Wigan-Blackburn-Rochdale you will 
find it. But so well did the ignoble do their ignoble work, and 
spread report of it, that of the hundreds of Southerners who 

327 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

go through Lancashire to the Lakes few think of pausing to 
look at the other Lancashire. It is for them another Essex, 
another Cinderella. They have heard of Blackpool, but not 
of the quiet little coast resorts of Hest Bank and Kent's Bank 
and Grange-over-Sands. St Helens and Oldham they accept 
as sick-making towns, but they have possibly never heard of 
the valleys of the Kibble and the Hodder, and have forgotten, 
in shuddering at the mention of Lancashire, that Coniston 
and Ullswater and part of Windermere are in Lancashire. 
There is more to this County Palatine than factories and foot- 
ball, and music-hall comedians using a grotesque speech which 
has not been heard in Lancashire for fifty years. There are 
parts of Lancashire, believe it or not, where chimneys and pit- 
heads are not visible even through long-range glasses, and parts 
where lovers may walk in groves, not, perhaps, as fair as the 
groves of Somerset and Devon, but surprisingly fair when 
found in Lancashire. 

I, let me confess, am, or was until lately, one of those who 
shunned the county. In years past I had seen Wigan and 
Bolton and Rochdale, and the defiled country between them, 
and thought I had seen Lancashire. I had had two hours of 
Blackpool, and had never guessed what pastoral country lay 
behind it. I had travelled between Preston and Lancaster, never 
guessing of the country of the Wyre and the Kibble up to the 
Yorkshire border. More than once I had gone from Winder- 
mere to Coniston, and from Ambleside to that worn but still 
beautiful Hawkshead by Esthwaite Water, admiring the 
scenery of Westmorland and blandly unaware that I was 
admiring the scenery of Lancashire. My discovery of the rest 
of it was therefore all the more piquant. It was a reversal of 
the Yarrow surprise. 

The road is accompanied by the Lune all the way to 
Lancaster through a flat country in which the battlements of 
Lancaster may be seen long before you reach the town. It is a 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

town with scarcely one feature or appointment of beauty, yet, 
by its hillside position and its mauve-grey massiveness, it leaves 
you with the impression of beauty. The most interesting, I 
think, of the Lancashire towns. Even its industrialism, which 
is evident, is not so grimy as that of the towns farther south, 
nor is its noise the sour music of Bolton or Warrington. Its 
chief feature is its castle, now the county prison and sessions 
house, which stands at the top of the hill. It is mainly Norrnan, 
built on the site of a Roman fortress, part of which remains in 
what is called Hadrian's Tower, now used as a museum of 
Roman and other relics. The great entrance gateway was built 
by John of Gaunt when he was Duke of Lancaster, and a 
turret on one of its towers is known as John o' Gaunt's Chair. 
John o' Gaunt is almost the town's patron saint. In the middle 
of the road, at a central point of the town, is fixed a horseshoe 
which also is linked with John. His horse is said to have cast a 
shoe at this spot, where it was obsequiously allowed to remain 
until it was worn away, when it was replaced by another, and 
has so been replaced every seven years. Viewed from below, 
the casde seems well fitted for its present purpose; like most 
casdes, it has much more the air of a prison than a residence, 
and it may be that the bull-roaring choler of the old princes 
and earls arose from living in such places. In his book on the 
Manchester and Glasgow Road Mr Charles Harper tells the 
story of a seventeenth-century governor of the prison who 
seems to have anticipated the American method of dealing with 
his charges. They had the liberty of the town and a number of 
other liberties. They gave their parole and went out and about 
as they pleased, to sports and merry-makings and any other 
recreations they sought. The governor was their host, mixing 
freely with them and demanding of them no more than' a 
decent host does demand of his guests. Yet, in spite of his good- 
fellow methods, he seldom lost a charge, and he used these 
methods for the forty-six years of his governorship. 

3 2 9 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

From the castle you have a wide view of the valley of the 
Lune, and on a clear day a view across Morecambe Bay to the 
mountains of the Lakes. The passage across the sands of the 
bay, from Hest Bank to Kent's Bank, a short cut for those 
wishing to go from Lancaster to the Furness peninsula, is not 
now taken by the general public, but it was regularly used up 
to the coming of the railway. It was a hazardous crossing of 
some hours, and any miscalculation on the part of the guide, 
or any unexpected flood from the many rivers that run out to 
it from the mountains, meant disaster. There was not only the 
danger of unforeseen flood or of sudden storm sending the 
tide in before its regular time; there was the danger of the 
sands themselves, which, off the charted passage, were quick- 
sand. How many bodies those sands have covered during the 
centuries cannot be guessed, but the numbers of which records 
exist prove the dangers of the passage. As late as the nineteenth 
century, up to the forties, coaches and chaises were frequently 
engulfed when the sands, by a rush of water from the rivers, 
had become quick. These accidents did not always carry loss of 
life; in many cases passengers were able to struggle out and 
reach firm sand or remain on the coach during its slow sinking 
until horses could be brought to take them off. But the toll of 
life by drowning or sinking in the sand was none the less heavy, 
and one would think that in the face of this record, and now 
that the risk has been rendered unnecessary, nobody would 
tempt fortune by using the crossing. But fishermen and farm- 
hands, scorning railways and motor-buses, still use it. 

The Lancashire of the Furness peninsula is old and romantic 
country, overhung by the distant hills of Cumberland and by 
its own hills. Its coast is broken by many estuaries, and around 
these are little picturesque resorts as different from Blackpool 
and Southport as riverside cowslips from artificial sunflowers. 
There is Grange, already mentioned; quiet but sufficient, with 
happy scenery behind it and some pleasant villages near it. On 

330 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

the opposite side of the estuary is Silverdale, as charming as 
its name. There are Kent's Bank and little Cark, and not far 
from Cark is Cartmel, a grey village in a valley, with an old 
market cross and houses with Tudor windows, and its famous 
twelfth-century Priory. Farther inland are Greenodd and 
Haverthwaite and Newby Bridge and Satterthwaite, all 
villages of character, with jolly little inns; and to the west are 
Broughton and Askam and Dalton (where Romney was born) 
and the sandstone ruins of the Cistercian Furness Abbey. A 
tour of these spots makes a zigzag, in-and-out, up-and-down 
tour, with constant changes of view in which, however quiet, 
the romantic note is still perceptible. It is not, of course, so 
moving as the Cumberland country, but its woods and its little 
fells, its streams and its grey-and-green atmosphere, have their 
own appeal, which becomes positive power when you remember 
the other Lancashire. 

Nearer to this other and ugly Lancashire, indeed right on its 
edges, is an equally fair Lancashire in the portions east of 
Lancaster and north-east of Preston, where no railway runs. 
Here you may find many an oasis of quiet life and pasture and 
hill, and many an agreeable little town. A few miles from the 
modern Preston you may find the time-encrusted Roman town 
of Ribchester, sweetly set on the Ribble and dowered with old 
stone houses, among them an old almshouse of unusual 
structure. Near it are many villages frequented by anglers, and 
having therefore anglers' inns; and the angler's inn is usually 
a good go-as-you-please type of inn. (Which reminds me that at 
some point of this North-west run I stopped at a wayside inn 
whose name and situation I have forgotten and would like to 
recall, because of an interesting feature. It was not a picturesque 
house, and it made no display, but in its bar-parlour, among 
enamel advertisements of ale and biscuits, it had one thing out 
of harmony with the other appointments a remarkable wall- 
painting. On a broad panel over the fireplace was a spirited 

33* 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

painting, dark with time and smoke, of Tarn o' Shanter's flight 
across the bridge.) Clitheroe, lying under the hills, is another 
ancient town which with its neighbour, Whalley, was a centre 
of the doings of the Lancashire witches. Around these too are 
many villages whose names are mostly unknown in the South, 
though not unknown to artists. A reference to the wild flowers 
of Lancashire may raise a smile from those who know only its 
main roads, but in these parts and other parts untouched by 
factories the woods and lanes are a splendour of blossom. 
Among its flowers, I believe, are a number of unusual varieties, 
and it is one of the * grounds * of botanists; but for myself it 
is sufficient joy to know that such profusion can be found in 
the most wounded of all English counties. Nowhere has 
Victorian industrialism left such a trail of havoc as in Lanca- 
shire; but it could not cover the whole county, and side by side 
with roaring Lancashire there still lives serene Lancashire. 
Beauty and the Beast do not love one another; no love on 
Beauty's side could change this particular Beast into a Prince 
Charming; but the Beast is made a little less beastly by Beauty's 
neighbourhood. 

When we left this rural peace we had an encounter with the 
Beast. We turned towards home, with the idea of looking at 
Haworth, and then going through the Peak country and down 
by Wading Street; but to get to Haworth from Preston we 
had to travel what must be the ugliest road in all England 
the road Chorley-Bolton-Bury-Rochdale-Halifax. We have 
frequent newspaper correspondence on the topic of the Prettiest 
Village in England. Any correspondence on the ugliest thirty 
miles of English road would have to end, I think, with this 
road, though possibly some Durham road would be a runner- 
up. It was a road that set one's nerves screaming, and made 
one's heart sick t the ravishment of our England. We had 
seen the Lancashire that was. We now saw the Lancashire 
that money-lust has made. Thirty miles of chimneys and 

33 2 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

smoke. Thirty miles of sooted buildings and bald streets of 
box-like homes flush with the pavement. Thirty miles of slag 
and assaulted fields. Thirty miles of withered hedge and 
despondent trees, abandoned sheds and such an horizon as set 
the final terror in the soul of Childe Roland. Brown grass, 
sulky sky, ulcers of red brick breaking out on the hills, grey 
vegetation, and all life as raw and chill as the lines of the 
factories. The towns, graceless as they are, at least are things, 
but this deflowered countryside is nothing; an anomalous 
horror; the work of Caliban. It is like a curse choked in the 
throat. The villages that line it are villages such as even the 
darkest of the Dark Ages did not know. Nor could the Dark 
Ages have produced the towns, save as visions of the eventual 
doom-land of the wicked. Worse than a crime was this spolia- 
tion of the North-west It was a sin. Not only an offence 
against society, but a blasphemy. Mr Clough Williams-Ellis 
and his colleagues of the Preservation of Rural England move- 
ment are doing good and needed work, but their movement is 
some eighty years late. The fifties and sixties of last century 
were the times when it was most needed; when the ravaging 
of Lancashire began, and Ruskin was crying alone and nobody 
heeded him. 

Commerce, we know, is the blood of a nation's life, but if 
England can be supported only by treating her country as this 
part of Lancashire has been treated, then the sooner she fades 
into the glowing shadow and silence that enveloped old Spain, 
the better for the souls of her children. But she can be sup- 
ported without this defiling. She can, as modern business-men 
are realizing, be industrial and still be beautiful. There is no 
good reason why a pit-head should not be comely; no good 
reason why a chimney should not be a decoration; no good 
reason why a factory should not be as fit and fair as Broadcast- 
ing House or Grosvenor House. The reason why they are what 
they are lies in the horn-skinned sensibilities of nineteenth- 

333 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

century Business, which created a sore on the sweet face of 
England, and thought it atoned for the assault by endowing 
hospitals out of the suppurations. 

The escape from these scenes, when we turned off to 
Haworth between Halifax and Keighley, was like a benediction 
after profanity. It is a long climb to Haworth from the rqiain 
road. The old stone village stands high, and after the country 
we had just left and all that I had heard about Haworth I was 
surprised by it. Here was a quiet litde place, away from the 
filth and the drumming mills, set on a wide moorland in clean 
air and under unfbuled skies. From my reading I had expected 
it to be a detached portion of the wretchedness below, but the 
approach to it is, if not beautiful, impressive, and the place 
itself is neat and cheerful. After wandering about it I felt that 
too much sentiment had been poured upon the " three lonely 
girls " in the " bleak northern parsonage." The parsonage 
itself is a solid and comfortable little place, strong enough to 
keep out the utmost blasts of winter, and the views from its 
windows are anything but gloomy. I saw it possibly at its 
worst, under a November downpour, and I have seen many 
more dismal places. Their home life may not have been agree- 
able, but I cannot see the much advertised pathos in the situa- 
tion of their home. They might have had to live in Keighley 
or Burnley or Rochdale. 

Possibly a townsman might be moved to the megrims by the 
everlasting sight of the sweeping moor and the clouds and the 
hills which are the landscape of Haworth; but the Bronte girls 
were not town people. Charlotte got full enjoyment from her 
London visits, but she was essentially of the country. She 
would not have been happy in the thick, flowing life of a 
metropolis, and it is permissible to guess that she was as happy 
at Haworth as it was possible for one of her temperament to be 
anywhere. Branwell was a different case. His was the town 
temperament, and he was the ' mixer.* A large city was his 

334 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

natural environment, and if any of that family had just cause 
to be depressed by Ha worth it was the brother. It is he, the 
lover of company and streets, isolated with three girls in that 
small village, who deserves our pity. He would have been 
restless in any isolated village, even the loveliest, and one can 
appreciate how the solemn country of these moors and hills 
must have bored him with their * emptiness/ The girls had 
resources in their home duties, their literary work, and their 
interest in the country. He had none, and for the talk and 
company he craved he had only the sad substitute of commer- 
cial bagmen staying at the Black Bull. One cannot wonder that 
he spent so many hours at the Black Bull with or without 
company, and took eventually to drugs; but the fault did not 
lie with Haworth. It lay in the fact that an urban Bohemian, 
of weak nature, and dissatisfied with himself, was in his wrong 
setting a country-village setting, which is good for the con- 
templative, but bad for the introspective. 

Haworth itself is just a lonely village, no less agreeable than 
the homes of fifty other geniuses, and much more agreeable 
than any of the homes of Burns. It is, I think, the biographers, 
rather than the Bronte girls, who discovered its gloom. If you 
came straight to it from Wensleydale it might appear gloomy 
(so might Oxford) ; but corning to it from Keighley, it is, as 
I say, not unpleasing. The * bleak ' parsonage is now the Bronte 
Museum, and here Bronte enthusiasm is crystallized. Every 
procurable object having connexion with the family seems to 
be here. Anything they handled is religiously deposited under 
glass and religiously labelled, and even the bath and the last 
dress worn by Charlotte are on exhibition. Why these three 
shy young women should have drawn so much world attention 
upon themselves, and have been made the subjects of so wide 
a literature (there are two large bookcases filled with Bronteana 
in several languages), is a problem too deep for discussion 
here. But one may put the motion that, as with so many other 

335 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

figures, Johnson and Lamb and Lord Nelson for three, for- 
tuitous circumstance and legend had as much to do with it as 
the works they produced; for only one of the sisters, on a 
judicial examination, is en tided to the term ' genius.' Little 
attention is paid to Mrs Gaskell, whose work is at least equal 
to Charlotte's; but had she been one of a grievous family in 
a country parsonage, and written passionate letters to a 
Frenchman, and died young, her memory might have been 
subjected to a similar bulk of ana and pryings among her 
secrets. 

The Black Bull still stands in front of the church, little 
altered, I imagine, from what it was when Branwell night after 
night took the few steps to it from the parsonage to drink 
himself stupid in its rooms. (It was on one of these drinking 
nights, according to a not wholly reliable authority, that he 
claimed the authorship of Wuthering Heights.) It is not a 
picturesque house, but it has no need to be. It is the Black Bull 
of Haworth, and it can point to its place in literary history. 

The run from Huddersfield to Ashbourne, by the route we 
took, is a run through scenery changing from splendid to 
romantic, and from romantic to pastoral. The route was: 
Holmfirth-Holme-Woodhead-Glossop-Hayfield-Chapel-en- 
le-Frith-Buxton-Flash Bar-Leek; and the whole run, save for 
the first mile or so out of Huddersfield, presents England in all 
its variety. There were great hills and little hills, treeless slopes, 
plantations, corn country, gentle lanes, fierce descents, the wild- 
ness of the Peak, the languid charm of Dovedale, mountain 
torrents and meadow streams, massive crags and thunderous 
heights, and mossy farms in green fields. All in one leisurely 
run of about three hours. 

Just before we left Huddersfield we met an example of 
Yorkshire humour or, maybe, Yorkshire common sense. Away 
from one's own territory and people it is not easy to distinguish 

336 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

between the two, since humour, despite radio and the cinema, 
and inter-county travel and the wider life generally, is still 
localized to counties. The Suffolk joke is still distinct 
from the Devonshire joke, and the Cockney joke is incompre- 
hensible to Northumbrians, whose jokes, in turn, mean 
nothing in Dorset. The only joke that seems to enjoy complete 
comprehension throughout England rural and metropolitan 
is the Aberdeen joke. 

This was the Yorkshire joke, or what seemed to us a joke, 
though it may have been no more than the honest operation of 
a literal mind. One of our party wished to call at a certain 
shop in Huddersfield, and with the address in his hand he 
approached a man at a corner and used the loose phrase we 
would use in London when seeking direction namely, " Do 

you know Street? " The answer to such a question in 

London would be a quick direction to the street. The answer 

here was : " Do I know Street ? Ey, I should think I ought 

to. I should think I ought to know Street. I lived there 

twenty-two years. I wish I had as many sovereigns as times I 
walked through Street." 

" Yes yes, I expect so. Then you know how to get to it? " 

" Well, if I don't, I don't know who in Huddersfield would. 
Living there twenty-two years, I ought to. Ey, I could walk 

there blindfold. There isn't many can say they know 

Street better'n I do." 

" Yes, of course you could. No, I don't suppose many people 
have lived more than twenty-two years in it. So, with all that 
experience, you can probably tell us where it is." 

" Where it is? Ey, it's a good step from here. It's nowheres 
near here. I lived there twenty-two years just because it was 
near the works. And this part of the town isn't the works 
part. It's nowheres near here." 

" Well, where is it? As you can walk to it blindfold it ought 
to be possible for you to tell us the way to it from here.'* 

337 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

" The way to it from here? Why? Do you people want to 
go to Street? " 

"Well, dammit, what do you think we're asking for? 
Haven't We asked you three times to direct us? " 

To which came the infuriating but correct answer: " No. 
You asked me if I knew it, and I said I ought to, having lived 
in it twenty-two years. Then you asked if I knew how to get 
to it, and I said I did. Then you asked if I could tell you where 
it was, and I said I could. If you wanted me to tell you the way 
to it from here, why didn't you say so first time? " 

The road rises out of Huddersfield up and up and up, by a 
series of zigzag ascents, until, in about thirty minutes, we were 
on the wild and lonely hills, where a razor wind met us with 
open blade. In another ten minutes we were looking down on a 
small Lake District a string of tarns in a superb setting, which 
their burnished surfaces photographed in little. They lie in 
hollows of the hills, silver petals on a black floor, with all the 
appearance of being the product of thousands of years of 
Nature's processes. I had not known that there were lakes in 
these hills, and I wondered why I had not learned of them 
at school when I learned the points of the Pennine Chain. They 
cover the greater part of the country between Holmfirth and 
Woodhead, and are as graceful as the little lakes of Northum- 
berland. They were so unexpected, and so pleasing in their 
silver beauty, that until I could get from a suitcase an Ordnance 
map of the district I beguiled myself by imagining their names, 
which must, I felt, be five sweet symphonies. There was about 
them, in their unvisited solitude, an air of necromancy. Any 
one of them might have been that lake into which Sir Bedivere 
flung Excalibur to be caught by the arm clothed in white 
samite. Without them the solemnity of these dark hills might 
be oppressive, but their presence lifts the whole scene to a high 
key and gives it just the right touch of ease and fluency. So 

338 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

potent is their charm that even when I was able to dig out the 
Ordnance map and find their official name, nothing of their 
virtue faded. After one moment of shock they continued to 
satisfy the eyes and to yield their grace as freely as though they 
were indeed lakes of old legend and not the Manchester 
Waterworks. 

Here, within a few miles of unlovely Huddersfield and 
unlovelier Oldham, is proof that works of utility can be beauti- 
ful when they choose. Further proof may be found in that 
chain of lakes which is one of the * sights ' of Rhyader, in 
Radnorshire, and which continues to be a * sight ' when it is no 
longer a chain of lakes, but the Birmingham Corporation 
Reservoirs. If only gas-works and railway-sidings and all other 
kinds of c works ' could be made half as seemly as waterworks 
the English industrial town would need no apology. As it is, 
when talking to foreigners we hypocrites have to pretend that 
Huddersfield and Halifax and Ashton-in-Makerfield are only 
dots on the map. Like the working classes, or the townspeople 
of Oxford and Cambridge, they are not really part of the 
scheme. They are there, but we don't accept them: they don't 
* belong '; and any foreigner who associates them as part of 
England is quickly and tactfully tutored out of his ignorance; 
yet with their vitality, plus a little of the spirit that oversees our 
waterworks, they easily might belong. Indeed, we might even 
become proud of them, and, leaving Rye and Chester bathed 
in their religious light, conduct our French and American 
friends first to Halifax and Ashton-in-Makerfield. Only a litde 
vision and a period of stern destruction are needed to effect 
the change. It is true that the engineers of our waterworks are 
assisted by the feminine nobility of water, but a determined 
spirit could make even water ugly if it wished to, and could, 
on the other hand, make gas-works and railway-sidings things 
of aesthetic emotion, as meet and complementary to their 
landscape as a fifteenth-century tithe-barn. In another fifty 

339 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

years it may be done. Meantime, you could find no better spots 
for meditating upon the cure of modern civilization than the 
lonely and bonnie banks of the Manchester Waterworks. 

Between here and Buxton the country has none of the lyric 
quality that breathes in most English country, in northern 
Cumberland as in southern Somerset. It is of the dark and 
grand school: bare, colourless hills rolling and sweeping in 
mighty curves around each other; desolate plateaux, and lime- 
stone rocks with passes hewn through them. Trees are rare 
and bushes are few, and all fences are of piled stones. It is a 
country of suave outline but harsh spirit; and it seems much 
more the apt setting for the ruthless and bloodthirsty Border 
affrays than the richer country of Northumberland. But its 
history in that matter is much milder than its appearance. 

Yet it has known, and still knows, death. One's skin catches 
some draught of this in its presence, and one's skin carries true 
report. It has taken much toll of human life, but not in war. 
Many have died here, but they have not been soldiers; they 
have been peaceful citizens who have adventured into its lone 
recesses, and have lost their path and have died on its cliffs as 
miserably as any lost explorer in a Libyan desert. Although 
this is England compact, everyday England with no Vast 
Open Spaces nor any of the fantastic perils that attend an 
exploration of the Amazon or of the Poles, it yet has, in its 
little open spaces, its own perils. The Seven Wonders of the 
Peak its rocks and its great caves and its bottomless pits with 
the vulgar names have claimed the bones of more than a few 
adventurers. It is a common assumption that adventure and 
peril can only be had in outlandish countries, and that all 
hazardous travel, to justify itself, must be measured in miles 
distant from England. A trek to the South Pole is something 
to stir the imagination, and a journey up the Amazon sounds 
like real travel, against which a walk in the Derbyshire hills 
suggests a suburban season-ticket journey. Yet homely Derby- 

340 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

shire, as a glance at the records shows, can offer plenty of 
hazardous travel. No hazards of climate in the way of swamp 
fever or the tsetse fly, or fifteen degrees below zero (though it 
can be cold enough), and no hazard from animals; but hazards 
of its own which can end as these other things end. It needs 
only a fog or a blizzard, or a missed footing, or a sprained ankle 
on an outlying spur of the hills, and, unless you are very lucky, 
you are done. Men have been known to lie helpless and exposed 
on these hill wastes for ten days, with only their bodies to tell 
the tale of their unhappy end. Every year has a record of two 
or three deaths on Kinder Scout, where a mistaken path may 
be as fatal as a mistaken path in the jungle of Basutoland. 
Search-parties often have spent a week looking for a man, using 
bloodhounds to help them, and then have found no trace of 
him. He goes walking in the hills, and is no more heard of, 
until, perhaps a year later, another wanderer in some unfre- 
quented part comes across certain remains. 

At two points between Woodhead and Buxton we came to 
unexpected break-neck descents, like waterfall courses, which 
I felt were likely to add ourselves to the tale of disasters. It did 
not seem possible that our cripple of a car could achieve them 
and deliver us at the bottom whole and breathing. But it did. 
In about two minutes it carried us from what seemed the top 
of the world to the sea-level floor of the valley, and gave me 
in the process the only heart-leap thrills I have ever suffered in 
.English travel. Those descents were like hurtling down the 
face of a cliff, and as the car took its own way, and the brakes 
acted when they shouldn't, and didn't act when they should, I 
lost interest in the question of our safety and contented myself 
with the scene before me the piece-by-piece revelation of the 
valley of brown and amber which each turn of the descent 
opened out to us. It would have been as good a place as any in 
which to come to an end within sight of the Promised Land 
and when, after the second descent, we were at last running 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

on the flat I found myself sorry that it was all over. It had been 
almost as heart-leaping as the ride I took on a dark night from 
Cassis to Marseilles by taxi driven by a chauffeur who might 
have been escaping from justice. Double bends, headlong 
descents, curving precipice roads all were taken at speed. 
When, against our belief, we arrived safe at Marseilles, and I 
congratulated the driver on the time he had made, he said, 
yes, it was a new car, and he wanted to see what it could do. 
From Buxton to Leek the road is still high, but it runs 
through more civilized, if less impressive, country. All around 
here the hills are scarred by quarries, and in a dry summer, I 
am told, the white dust of these quarries is one of the nuisances 
of Derbyshire. It goes everywhere and settles everywhere, and 
the smaller lanes are thick with it. Like most of the roads in 
this district, the Buxton-Leek road is lonely, with little traffic 
and few habitations. Its chief points are isolated inns, so 
isolated that one wonders from what invisible spots their 
custom comes. One of these, the Traveller's Rest, stands on 
the crest of the road at Flash Bar, so high that it is second only 
to " the highest inn in England," the Cat and Fiddle, a few 
miles away on the Macclesfield Road. In the late eighteenth 
and early nineteenth century this Flash Bar inn had an 
unpleasant reputation. It was then a sort of Mumps' Ha,' or 
Jolly Beggars inn, except that its company was not composed of 
beggars. It was composed of perhaps even less desirable 
company pedlars and hawkers who bought cheap stock in the 
manufacturing towns about here and travelled it through the 
hill villages and markets and local fairs. By all accounts they 
were not the tame and respectable kind of hawker we know 
to-day, but fierce fellows, a sort of bastard gipsy. It was their 
custom to spend their week-ends in fraternal gatherings at 
lonely inns of this country, and indulge in a Saturday and 
Sunday * binge '; and the Traveller's Rest was one of their 
favourite haunts. So well known were their manners and 

343 




THE PEAK DISTRICT 

A view from the slopes of Mam Tor, looking north across the Vale of Edale 

towards the High Peak. 

Photo /. Dixan-Scott 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

habits that they had the inns to themselves; any casual caller 
was scared away. It is said that the term ' flash/ as a descrip- 
tion of cheap jewellery or any kind of faked article, and as a 
description of a certain kind of slang (flash patter), originated 
with the Flash men the pedlars who assembled at the Flash 
Bar inn. To-day it is a neat and sedate little place, which, 
though lonely during the week, is, I learned, just as well 
frequented on Saturdays and Sundays as it was a hundred years 
ago, but by the pleasanter company of walkers out of Buxton 
seeking lunch or tea. 

The run from it downward into Leek is a run which leaves 
the dark Peak country behind, and brings one back to green 
England where thick hedges replace the stone fences. Just 
beyond the second lonely inn on this road the Royal Cot I 
think the place is called you enter Staffordshire, and are close 
to the border of Cheshire. Cheshire is another of those corners 
of England which some malign interference constantly prevents 
my visiting. However near I may get to them, I never suc- 
ceed in seeing them. Even at this point, when I hoped we 
might turn aside for a day or so, circumstances compelled us 
to go on. So Cheshire must be left out, and I can tell you 
nothing about it but hearsay, which for me has a gilt edge to 
it, as all records of the unknown and unseen have. Never 
having seen the county unless you admit a three hours' change 
of train at Chester many years ago I feel, from all I have 
gathered about it, that it has charms and embellishments above 
all other counties; grapes superior to any I have been privileged 
to taste. Just because I am barred from it, I feel that it may 
hold an England I have only dreamed of; the ultimate, crystal- 
lized secret of England. I doubt if it does. I doubt if it can 
really hold anything fairer than the England I already know. 
But so long as it remains Cheshire Unvisited, it will remain for 
me the most pregnant of our counties, bringing forth the 
unlimited delights of the imagination. When I do visit it I 

343 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

am quite prepared to have these airy, insubstantial palaces 
tumble about me, but even so I shall have had the pleasure of 
my fancy, and there will still be left the facts of Cheshire, 
which, from all I have heard, are mighty agreeable. In beauty 
of scenery, I am told, it is not a serious rival to its neighbours. 
It is mainly a flat, farming country, a sort of larder to the 
industrial towns on its borders. But it is stocked with old halk 
and manor-houses, and half-timbered towns and villages, and 
ancient inns, and it has as rich a store of anecdote and legend 
as any of the counties which receive more attention from topo- 
graphers. Among its old towns I have heard much of Sand- 
bach, with its old houses and two Saxon crosses, so ancient that 
even antiquarians cannot give them an age; and of Brereton, 
Middlewich, Nantwich, and Prestbury. Then there are its 
villages, which, if not Arcadian, have a pensive charm and a 
dower of history. Tabley, Gawsworth, and Lymm, I believe, 
are notably attractive. And not only has it some of the finest 
private homes of England in its many halls, but three of the 
most picturesque inns of the older England. These are the 
Bear's Head, at Brereton, the Lion and Swan, at Congleton, 
and the Old Hall, at Sandbach three superb blackrand-white 
houses of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. And all 
about the county, I learn, are ancient preaching crosses, market 
crosses, bridges, and noble churches. I have just been looking at 
Mr T. A. Coward's book on Cheshire, the first celebration it 
has had for some years, I believe, and it has set in me a deter- 
mination to go out and see Cheshire, and not allow my friends 
to turn me aside. I will go out deliberately, and not stop until 
I am within its borders. 

Leek, into which you descend from Flash Bar, is so near the 
borders that it might pass, I fancy, for a Cheshire town. 
Actually it is in Staffordshire, and it is a factory town, but it has 
none of the blemishes of the other factory towns of Stafford- 
shire. It is clean and quiet; a factory town one could live in; 

344 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

pleasant Georgian houses and open country at one's garden- 
gate. I passed through it at dusk, and so many of its cottages 
had red blinds or red curtains to their lighted windows that it 
presented itself as a factory town whose factories might be 
devoted to the make-believe business of manufacturing Christ- 
mas cards, or perhaps inventing and printing new fairy-tales. 
Something odd or pantomimic, I thought, and though I was 
wrong, and its business is nothing so whimsy, it is still the sort 
of business that goes with red-litten windows and their sugges- 
tion of witches and princesses. Its business is silk. 

From Leek to Ashbourne the road goes up again, and then 
down, and then up, and again down, offering sometimes wide 
prospects and sometimes only hedgerows and glimpses of 
placid fields. At the hamlet of Waterhouses, about midway 
along the road, one may turn off for the two beauty-spots of 
Dovedale and the Manifold Valley; which, after the grandeur 
of the Peak country, make a note of the idyllic. Among their 
rocks and caves and gorges and limestone crags one is aware 
of nothing awesome. They are but features heightening the 
quiet meadows and streams, by whose presence they them- 
selves are tamed from the wild to the agreeably romantic. 
Dovedale, to my eye, is quite as beautiful and quite as varied 
in its scenes as the more widely known Cheddar Gorge; also, 
despite the parties who visit it in summer, it is less exploited. 
Even the Manifold Valley, a smaller Dovedale, offers unusual 
variety of prospect in its small compass. These are not only 
charming spots with charming names: they are linked with 
English literature by one little book which their people have 
not forgotten tp celebrate. Near the winning little village of 
Ham, which sits at the south of Dovedale, is the Izaak Walton 
inn, and near Hartington, by the Manifold Valley, is the 
Charles Cotton inn. You may remember, on being reminded, 
the tremors of the gentleman whom Charles Cotton was con- 
ducting from Ashbourne to his home, Beresford Hall (now 

345 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

demolished) ; the gentleman from Essex, who had apparently 
never seen a hill, and to whom the little crags and gorges and 
mild descents of Dovedale, and the Stone Bridge of Beresford 
Dale (which still stands), were a series of threats. 

Viator. Bless me, what mountains are here! Are we not in 
Wales? ... I hope our way does not lie over any of these, for 
I dread a precipice. 

Piscator. Believe me, it does, and down one, especially, that 
will appear a little terrible to a stranger, though the way is pass- 
able enough, and so passable, that we who are natives of these 
mountains and acquainted with them, disdain to alight. 

Viator. I hope, though, that a foreigner is privileged to use 
his own discretion, and that I may have the liberty to entrust 
my neck to the fidelity of my own feet,' rather than to those of 
my horse, for I have no more at home. 

Having entrusted his neck to his feet, and, with his host's 
help, slithered down the hill, Viator comes to the bridge : 

Viator. What's here the sign of a bridge? Do you use to 
travel with wheelbarrows in this country? 

Piscator. Not that I ever saw, sir. Why do you ask that ques- 
tion? 

Viator. Because this bridge certainly was made for nothing 
else; why, a mouse can hardly go over it: 'tis not two fingers 
broad. 

Piscator. You are pleasant, and I am glad to see you so: but 
I have rid over the bridge many a dark night. 

Viator. Why, according to the French proverb, and 'tis a 
good one among a great many of worse sense and sound that 
language abounds in, Ce quc Dieu garde, cst bien garde. They 
whom God takes care of are in safe protection; but let me tell 
you I would not ride over it for a thousand pounds, nor fall off 
it for two; and yet I think I dare venture on foot, though if 
you were not by to laugh at me I should do it on all fours. . . . 
Pray, what do you call this hill we came down? 
Piscator. We call it Hanson Toot. 
346 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

Viator. Why, farewell, Hanson Toot. I'll no more on thee: 
I'll go twenty miles about first. . . . What have we here, a 
church? As I'm an honest man a very pretty church. Have 
you churches in this country, sir? 

Piscator. You see we have: but had you seen none, why 
should you make that doubt, sir? 

Viator. Why, if you will not be angry, I'll tell you: I thought 
myself a stage or two beyond Christendom. 

It Is a sweet book, The Compleat Angler, a book with the 
smell of grass and hawthorn in it, and it was by happy fortune 
that it came out of this sweet country of North Staffordshire 
and Derbyshire. Though Walton's book deals with the 
streams of Hertfordshire, he was a Stafford man, and his 
earliest angling was done about these northern streams; and 
Cotton's continuation (on the Trout and Grayling) is entirely 
set in Dovedale. The whole course of the Dove is one of those 
poetic zones of England which hold at any time of year the 
feeling of a May morning. It is always fresh; it seems to be fed 
from some source of everlasting youth; and a few hours with 
it is as exhilarating as a few hours in the company of the 
gracelessly graceful young. It is a song of many verses with a 
constant refrain in the light key of May, and its little beauties 
pass across the mind in a procession of images of May. There 
are in England many titular Happy Valleys. Dovedale is one 
by virtue. The Manifold Valley, which in more commonplace 
country would be a jewel, is, even amid this loveliness, a fit 
companion to it. 

One would think that every inn of this district would have a 
copy of The Compleat Angler (an ideal inn companion) in 
its lounge, but of the six I visited I found it in two only; and 
in none of them was anybody singing Old Rose. But our inns 
seldom recognize books as one of the amenities of an inn. 
They seem to assume that every Englishman is a sporting man. 
They provide billiard-tables and cards and hard courts, and 

347 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

will readily fix arrangements for your golf and your fishing 
and your rough shooting; but for the man who cares to read 
they have only contempt. They express this in the rag-tag 
collection of volumes which is the ' library * of the average 
country hotel, and which is as far as they will go in recognition 
of the bookman. This * library ' almost comes in the category 
of sacred and futile English institutions; for it is to-day what it 
always was. It seems to be a tradition that the reading matter 
supplied to those guests who are dumb enough to want to read 
shall be in keeping with the imported collection of useless 
warming-pans, candle-snuffers, and chestnut-roasters only not 
so good. That is, it shall be not only superannuated, but the 
dross of the period to which it belongs. Dickens, writing in the 
sixties of last century, describes the books he found in a Cum- 
berland inn. They were of the sort you will find in the average 
inn to-day obscure rubbish of fifty or seventy years ago. 

Many a dreary time have I passed at country inns on wet 
week-ends when travelling without books. I am one of those 
constant readers who can read * almost anything/ but I do not 
know why I should have to read * almost anything * when, 
with a little thought on the part of the landlord, and a fiftieth 
of the cost of keeping up his billiard-room, I might be reading 
* something.' I once, at a Wiltshire inn, read right through 
Whita\ers Almanac^ of 1884, because there was nothing else 
to read. And at a Midland inn, of more than local fame, I had 
to pass the evenings of a wet week with a collection of volumes 
which you could hardly get together by a month of raking 
over the rubbish-heaps of Caledonian Market. They were: 
Guy Livingstone, Ministering Children, Houses on Sand > 
Little Fishers and their Nets, How to Manage Root Crops, 
Not li\e other Girls, four volumes of the Leisure Hour of the 
seventies, Bootless Baby, and Butterflies of Britain. Even when 
an inn does have something of the * standard ' sort it usually 
means calf-bound sets of those two standard authors who, by 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

me at least, are unreadable on the dullest dayThackeray and 
Scott. Most of them pay even less attention to their books than 
to the proper cooking of vegetables, if that is possible. In 
almost all the two hundred inns known to me the constant 
items of the bookshelves are The Stoc{ Exchange Year-boo^ 
and The Public Schools Year-boofa so that any American or 
European touring England might assume that these two books 
were the Englishman's favourite reading, the Bibles of the 
bourgeois. And perhaps he wouldn't be far wrong; perhaps 
our innkeepers know the Englishman better than I do. 

Still, there are a few of us to whom these particular books 
are not books, and I do think something might be done for us. 
Many people, I know, regard the superannuation of an inn's 
appointments as one of its ' charms,' and they settle down to 
read The Lamplighter by the light of an old-established lamp 
in an old-established chair of an old-established drawing-room, 
and find it ' romantic.' Myself, I read these things with exas- 
peration, and only because there is nothing else, and because I 
have exhausted the local paper, which, with its sidelights on 
the nooks and corners of human action and motive, is usually 
the best reading our inns afford. For the rest, their bookshelves 
have forced upon me a knowledge of the byways of nineteenth- 
century literature which I could well do without. Wet nights 
have made me acquainted with Queechy, The Wide, Wide 
World, A Prince of the House of David, Ben Hur, What 
Katy Did, Elsie Dinsmore, and the Life of Ira D. Sanfey. I 
did not find these books in humble wayside inns. I found them 
in hotels of thirty or more bedrooms. 

There may be quite a number of inns which have a library 
of books fitting to modern taste, from good thrillers to travel 
and philosophy, but my experience covers only five. Yet, when 
so many publishers issue half-crown and three-and-sixpenny 
series of reprints of sound work, a collection of sensible books 
could be made for a few pounds. We should then be spared 

349 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

that sight common to most country inns on wet days guests 
sitting about with unreadable volumes in their hands and in- 
creasing the stock of human blight already engendered by 
the rain and by the lounge's aspidistras and its spotty but 
appropriate engraving of The Stag at Bay. 

Soon after Waterhouses the road leaves the uplands, and you 
have a level run into Ashbourne, re-entering Derbyshire by the 
bridge over the Dove. On the Staffordshire side the village of 
May field sits prettily by the river; as prettily, I imagine, as it 
did when Thomas Moore knew it. It has the air of having 
suffered little change. Here, at Mayfield Cottage, he lived 
some two or three years, partly for the ^ sake of being near one 
of his revered lords and partly for the sake of the seclusion he 
needed while working on Lalla Roo\h. The cottage, I believe, 
is still there, but it draws no visitors. Like many men who 
were gods to their generation, Moore has nothing for us of 
this age. His work does not beat with the pulse of heart and 
soul, which is the one point common to all work, great or little, 
that survives its own day. From his generation we have picked 
for the laurel crown, not him or his equally famous fellows, 
but men whom his contemporaries passed over, just as 
future generations will doubtless reject our gods of to-day and 
elect two or three names which we regard, if at all, as second- 
rate. He had his talents and his qualities, but the talents were 
not stout enough for the main road of literature, and the 
qualities, though they impressed his contemporaries, were not 
of that pungently salted kind that outlives the man and draws 
pilgrims of a later age to any tracks he trod. Nobody, I think, 
is likely to go out of his way to look at Mayfield Cottage or at 
his other home, Sloperton Cottage, in Wiltshire, also on the 
estate of one of his lords. He was of his time, and in that 
time he was given all the success and fame which are mostly 
denied to better men until they are dead. Few men have it 

350 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

both ways, and I fancy Moore, being the amiable man he was, 
was well content to have it while his body was in being, and 
to be indifferent to the music of a distant drum. 

From Mayfield, over the Hanging Bridge (the significance of 
the name attaches to the 1745 Rebellion) , it is but a short step 
to Ashbourne and its long, dignified street of old residences. 

Ashbourne is one of the many trim little towns which seem 
to be made for active age to settle in. It is old, but it is not 
antiquated. Its years are no more than a bloom upon its 
current life. It might stand as a model for the * old-fashioned 
town ' of which so many concert ballads are written. Its little 
sloping market-square looks as though it had just been built for 
the curtain to rise on a gathering of village maidens and 
smocked gaffers singing a ' hearty welcome ' to the young 
squire. It has all the right appointments a cobbled and tiled 
centre, one or two inns of the riper sort, Georgian shops and 
a few Georgian houses, narrow passages one called the 
Channel leading out of it, and, behind all, the lofty spire of 
its church, whose bells inspired Moore, in the garden of his 
cottage, to those facile lines which so moved our grandfathers: 

Those evening bells, those evening bells, 
How many a tale their music tells. 

It is the market-square of early Georgian England in per- 
fection; small but complete; and, though much quieter to-day 
than it must have been in that noisy age, it is still a busy spot 
on its market days and is still adequate to market-square needs 
of these times. 

One of the features of the town is its old coaching inn, the 
Green Man. Its original date I do not know: like most of our 
old inns, it contains work of all periods. Its yard is the kind 
of yard that Herbert Railton delighted to draw; aged and 
weathered, and with many of its old features affectionately 
preserved. On the left, reached by a flight of steps, is a snug 

35 1 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 

little bar of blackened oak, against which the pewters almost 
chime, with old doors and small-paned window. On the right 
is the old kitchen and the main part of the hotel, filled with 
graceful staircases and Queen Anne rooms (a little, modern- 
ized, of course), and inspired by a general feeling that the 
whole story of the inn, before the eighteenth century and after, 
is resolved into the rhythm of the minuet. It is an inn that 
belongs to Ashbourne, and is a fit expression of Ashbourne's 
mellow dignity. It holds the very spirit of the town, and, by 
its atmosphere and style, it makes a poetically perfect base for 
a few days' tour of this part of Derbyshire. 

From Ashbourne you may reach by car not only Dovedale 
and the Manifold Valley, but the delightful course of the Der- 
went, and Matlock and Rowsley and Chatsworth and Bake- 
well and Haddon Hall and Casdeton (Peveril Castle) and 
Kedleston. A little farther afield you have the Peak Forest 
and the Peak country, through which we have just come. For 
walkers there are the hills and the near-by dales, whose ins- 
and-outs will fill many a day. Itself a captivating little town, 
it is set in a country dowered with fair scenes and with 
human and historic interest, past and present, in as large 
measure as the educated tourist could desire. For such a 
country a Green Man, not a Ritz Hotel, is your right setting. 

At Ashbourne, in a large house in the main street, lived 
Dr Johnson's old schoolfellow Dr Taylor, rector and squire. 
It was he who was the cause of Johnson's several visits to Ash- 
bourne, and in leaving this book at Ashbourne I remember 
that Bos well, on the" last Midland^ tour he made with John- 
son, left his master at Ashbourne. Business compelled him to 
return to Scotland, and he left Johnson with Dr Taylor, and 
repaired to the Green Man to hire chaise and horses. This 
litde incident has fixed the Green Man in literature. On his 
departure from the inn he received a mark of esteem which 
was so much to the liking of that simple-subde one, who 

352 



A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE 

treasured all marks of esteem, no matter what their source, 
that he recorded it. The mistress of the inn, " a mighty civil 
gentlewoman/' curtseyed very low to him, and presented him 
with an engraving of the sign of her house, bearing an inscrip- 
tion in her own hand. Boswell found the inscription so inter- 
esting that he preserved it, and in the Life quoted it " for the 
amusement of my readers ": 

M. Killingley's duty awaits upon Mr Boswell, is exceedingly 
obliged to him for this favour; whenever he comes this way 
hopes for a continuance of the same. Would Mr Boswell name 
the house to his extensive acquaintance, it would be a singular 
favour conferred on one who has it not in her power to make 
any other return but her most grateful thanks, and sincerest 
prayers for his happiness in time and in a blessed eternity. 

But I don't see any genuine reason for amusement. If it 
raises any smile it must be a wry smile born of the reflection 
that innkeepers, who by tide are our hosts, seldom think of 
making any kind of Vale to their guests, and never in such 
dutiful sentiments as these. By her businesslike graciousness 
M. Killingley has been made immortal, and she deserved im- 
mortality. If innkeepers of to-day could catch just a little of 
her manner they would benefit both themselves and their 
guests. Even on the sunniest morning the guest's outlook on 
life would be extra-sweetened by such a tribute, and if there 
was anything unsatisfactory about the inn that tribute would 
wipe it from his memory, and he would think and talk of it 
as a delightful place. 

But M. Killingley's godspeed to Mr Boswell is more than a 
fitting close to the brief acquaintance of hostess and guest. In 
its latter phrases it breathes such warmth of goodwill that it 
makes a fitting close to almost any human occasion. Or to 
any book. 



353 



INDEX 



ABBOT'S BROMLEY, 222 

Abbotsbury, 52 

Abel, John, 246 

Abinger, 266 

Acton Burnell, 238 

Acton Scott, 237 

Adam Bede, 217, 218 

Addison, Joseph, 223, 224 

Adventures of Johnny Newcome in 

the Navy, The, 190, 191 
Aisgill, 325 
Akcman Street, 27 
Albury Downs, 267 
Alconbury Hill, 160 
Aldborough, 321322 
Aldin, Cecil, 253 
Alfred, King, 90, 94, 126 
Alfred Jewel, the, 90 
Alfriston, 276 
Alkham, 273 
Allen, Ralph, 58, 108 
Allworthy, Mr (Tom Jones), 58, 108 
Alnmouth, 192193 
Alnwick, 193-194, 302, 303 
Alston, 308 
Amberley, 276 
American appreciation of England, 

^.-^ 24 . 

Ancient Mariner^ The, 87 
Andre, Major John, 223 
Apple-trees, wassailing of, on Twelfth 

Night, 98-99 
Appledore, 272 
Appletreewick, 318 
Aram, Eugene, 145, 322 
Arbury, 262 

Arden, Forest of, 206-207 
Ark wright, Sir Richard, 241 
Arm tree Fen, 168 
Arnold, Matthew, 226, 244 
Art of Sinking in Poetry, The, no 
Arthur, King, 82, 95, 101 
Arundel, 276 
Ashbournc, 351-353 
Ashbury, 125 



Ashby St Ledgers, 261 
Astley, 262 

Athelney, Isle of, 90, 94 
Aubrey, John, 44 
Austen, Jane, 39-40., 109 
Avalon, Isle of, 100, 101, 104 
Avcbury, 112-115 
Axminster, 63 
Aysgarth, 325 

BAINBRIDGE, 320 

Bakewell, 352 

Balch, H. E., 103 

Balcombe Forest, 274 

Ballard Down, 56 

Bamburgh, 188, 193 

Bamburgh Castle, 194-195, 203, 204 

Bardsey Island, 201 

Barham, 272, 273 

Barnby Moor, 174 

Barnes, William, 4^, 245 

Bath, 19, 26, 48, 108-110 

Battcrsea Park, 227 

Bawtry, 175-176 

Beadnell, 193 

Beaulieu, 43 

Beaumont, Francis, 205 

Bedford, 135-136 

Bedfordshire, 134135 

Beer, village, 62 

Belas Knap, 123 

Belford, 194 

Bellingham, 188, 305 

Belloc, Hilaire, 205, 206, 226, 276 

Bcnenden, 271 

Bennett, Arnold, 12 

Beresfbrd Dale, 346 

Beresford Hall, 345 

Berkshire, 123-128 

Berwick St John, 44 

Berwick-upon-Tweed, 149, 204 

Betty, William, 247 

Between the Heather and the Northern 

Sea, 185 
Beverley, 177 



355 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 



Bewdley, 247 

Bewick, Thomas, 188-189 

Biddendcn, 271 

Bignor, 276 

Bildeston, 289 

?ilhagh, 173 

Bilsdale, 180 

Bishop's Castle, 247 

Black Country, the, 227 

Black Mountains, the, 242 

Blackpool, 328 

Blackwater, river, 280 

Blake, Admiral Robert, 89, 91 

Bla\esmoor in H shire, 296 

Blakesware, 296 

Blandford, 43-44 

Blewbury, 127 

Bloomfield, Robert, 285 

Blubberhouses Moor, 318 

Blyth, 174-175 

Blyth, river, 190 

Blythburgh, 285 

Bodbury Ring, 237 

Bodiam Castle, 271 

Boleyn, Anne, 270 

Bolton Abbey, 176 

Bonington, R.P., 16 

Boo\ of Martyrs, The, 166 

Borrow, George, 34, 149, 150, 151, 169, 

226 

Boscastle, 84, 85 
Boscobel, 228 
Boston, 162, 163-168 
Boston Stump, 166-167, 194 
Boswell, James, 223, 224, 352-353 
Borvyle Hall, 238 
Boulge, 285, 289 
Boulge Hall, 290 

Bourton-on-the-Water, 116-117, 118 
Bower Chalk, 44 
Box Hill, 266 
Boxfbrd, 289 
Boxsted Hall, 286 
Bradford, 226 
Bradford -on-A von, 106-107 
Brad well, 281 
Braintree, 283, 284 
Bramble, Squire, 33, 132 
Branscombe, 62 
Bransdale, 180 
Brasted Chart, 269 



35 6 



Brenzett, 272 

Brewer, Dr, 113-114 

Brewersoak, 229 

Bridgnorth, 239240 

Bridgwater, 90-93 

Bridport, 59 

Brinsop, 242 

Britannia, 28 

Broad Chalk, 44 

Broads, the Norfolk, 146-147, 149 

Broadway, 64 

Brockenhurst, 43 

Brockhurst, 237 

Bronte, Branwell, 334-335, 336 

Bronte, Charlotte, 334, 335 

Brooke, Rajah, of Sarawak, 109, 151 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 151 

Browning, Robert, 161; a forbear of) 

46 

Brutus the Trojan, 70 
Buckden, 137 

Buckfast Abbey, 65, 67-68, 180 
Buckfastleigh, 67, 68 
Buckinghamshire, 265 
Buckle Street, 123 
Budle Point, 204 
Budleigh Salterton, 62 
Build was Abbey, 238 
Bulbarrow Hill, 49 
Bungay, 285 

Bunker's Hill (Lines), 168 
Bunyan, John, 134-135 
Burdett, Sir Francis, 125 
Burfbrd, 26, 119 
Burke, Edmund, 109 
Burke, Robert O'Hara, 70 
Burnct, Bishop, 157 
Burney, Dr, 144 
Burney, Fanny,, 58-59, 109, 144 
Burnham Thorpe, 166 
Burnham-on-Crouch, 281 
Burns, Robert, 161 
Burrowbridge, 90 
Bury St Edmunds, 285, 287, 288-289, 

290 

Buttertubs, 325 
Butterworth, George, 162 
Buxton, 247, 340-342 
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 109, 211 

CADBURY, 94-95 



INDEX 



Cadnam, 42 

Caedmon, 184 

Caer Caradoc, 237 

Caldy Island, 201 

Cambridgeshire, fens of, 139-143 

Camden, William, 28 

Camel, river, 81, 82 

Camelot, 94-95 

Campden, Lady, 119 

Cannock, 225 

Cannock Chase, 225-228 

Canterbury, 273 

Canterbury Cathedral, 222 

Canute, King, 51 

Caradoc Hills, 235, 237 

Cardington Casde, 238 

Carpenter, Edward, 37 

Carter, Frederick, 16 

Cartmel, 331 

Caruso, Enrico, 158, 319 

Castle Combe, in 

Castlcton, 352 

Catcott, 98 

Catesby, Robert, 261-262 

Catmose, Vale of, 162 

Cattistock, 52 

Cerne Abbas, 50-51 

Chaddesley Corbet, 253, 254 

Chagfbrd, 65 

Chalk, Vale of, 44 

Charles I, 209, 258, 259 

Charles II, 59-60, 228, 254, 258, 285 

Charlton Forest, 276 

Charmouth, 59-60 

Charringworth, 119 

Charsfield, 289 

Charterhouse Hinton, 104-105 

Chats worth, 352 

Chawton, 39-40 

Cheddar caves, the, 103 

Cheddar Gorge, 345 

Ched worth, 117 

Chelmsfbrd, 280 

Cheltenham, 247 

Cheshire, 343344 

Chesterfield^ Lord, 109 

Chesters, 306, 307 

Cheviot Hills, 194, 303 

Chichester Cathedral, 222 

Chiddingfold, 268 

Chiddingstone, 269-270 



Chillingham, 182 

Chilton, 98 

Chilvers Coton, 262 

Chippenharn, no 

Chipping Campden, 119-122 

Chollerford, 188, 305, 306 

Christabel, 87 

Church Stretton, 235-236, 237 

Clapham (Yorks), 312, 316 

Clare, John, 136, 161 

Clarendon, Earl of, 157 

Clark, Daniel, 322 

Clifton Grove, 214 

Clitheroe, 332 

Clive, Lord, 109 

Clungunford, 232 

Cobbett, William, 18, 34, 38-39, 125, 

137-138 

Coggeshall, 283-284 
Coke, Sir Edward, 151 
Colchester, 26, 280 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 87, 88, 219 
Collins, Wilkie, 34 
Complete Angler, The, 347 
Compton, 38, 64 
Compton Winyates, 256, 257 
Comus t 232 
Condover Hall, 238 
Coningsby, 168, 169, 170 
Constable, John, 94, 161, 283, 285, 

289, 292 

Cook, Captain James, 184-185 
Coombc Abbey, 261, 262 
Coquet, river, 191, 192 
Corder, William, 292-295 
Corfc, 54-55 
Corley, 262 
Cornwall, 74-85 
Cossington, 98 
Cotman, John Sell, 16, 151 
Cotswold Hills, 115-119 
Cottle, Joseph, no 
Cotton, Charles, 345-347 
Cotton, John, 165, 166 
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, 47 
Countryman., The, 116 
Coventry, 163, 205 
Cow Wold, 178 
Cowan Bridge, 312 
Cowden, 270 
Co well, Sam, 53-54 



357 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 



Cowper, William, 136, 242 

Cox, E. H. M. } 315 

Crabbe, George, 25, 285, 289 

Cranborne Chase, 44, 46 

Cranbrook, 271 

Crediton, 63, 64, 65 

Crome, John, 94, 151 

Cromwell, Oliver, 137, 171 

Cromwell, Ralph, 170 

Cromwell, Thomas, 171 

Cropton, 180, 181 

Crosland, T. W. H., 135 

Crouch, river, 280 

Crowcombe, 86 

Croxden Abbey, 222 

Cuckmere, valley of the, 276-277 

Cullercoats, 187, 193 

Curzon of Kedleston, Marquis, 170 

DARLING, GRACE, 196-199 

Darling, William, 197, 198, 199 

Dart, river, 67, 69-70 

Dartmeet, 67 

Dartmoor, 62, 63, 65-66 

Darwin, Charles, 268 

Darwin, Erasmus, 219 

Davies, Sir Walford, 247 

Davies, W. H., 161 

De la Mare, Walter, 269-270 

De Quincey, Thomas, 29, 302-303 

De Veres, Earls of Oxford, 280 

Dean Prior, 68, 69, 87 

Debenham, 289 

Dedham, 282, 283 

Defoe, Daniel, 17-18, 254 

Delius, Frederick, 162 

Deloney, Thomas, 125 

Derby, 216, 219 

Derbyshire, 216, 340-341 

Dereham, 226 

Derwent, river, 352 

Detective in Kent, A, 271 

Devonshire, 60-74 

Dickens, Charles, 34, 109, 348 

Dicker, river, 118 

Diddlebury, 238 

Din of a Smithy, The, 64 

Dingley, Thomas, 245-246 

Dittisham, 70 

Dobson, Austin, 189 

Dolmetsch, Arnold, 64 



358 



Don Quixote, 28 
Donhead St Mary, 44, 46 
Dorchester, 50, 57, 234 
Dore, valley of the, 242 
Dorset, 49 

Dove, river, 347, 350 
Dovedale, 336, 345, 347, 352 
Dover, 273 
Downe, 268 
Downham Market, 146 
Drebley, 318 

Drink water, John, 205, 206 
Dulverton, 84, 85 
Dunmow, 283, 284 
Dunsmoor Heath, 261, 262 
Dunstanburgh, 188 
Dunwich, 284, 285 
Durham, 186-187, 200 
Dutt, W. A., 285 

EARDISLAND, 242 

Easby Abbey, 176 

East Bergholt, 282, 283 

East Dereham, 146 

East Hendred, 127 

East Ling, 90 

East Retford, 172 

Eastbury, 125 

Eaton Socon, 136 

Ebbesbourne Wake, 44, 46 

Edgar, King, 54-55 

Edge Hill, battle of, 256, 258 

Edington, 98 

Edward the Martyr, King, 54, 55 

Egginton, 216 

Egloshayle, 81 

Egton Bridge, 182 

Elegy written in a Country Church- 
yard, 134 

Elfrida, 54-55 

Elgar, Sir Edward, 247 

Elham valley, 273 

Eliot, George, 206, 217, 262-263 

Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, 261-26; 

Elizabeth, Queen of England, 155, 157, 
158 

Ellaston, 217-218 

Elstow, 135 

Ely Cathedral, 140, 222 

Emma, 40, 315 

England's Gate, 242 



INDEX 



English Inn, The, 304 

English-Speaking Union, the, 151 

Erasmus, 147 

Ermin Street, 27 

Escombe, 106 

Esk, river, 182, ^83 

Essex, 277-284 

Ethelred the Unready, 55 

Evelina, 18 

Exeter Cathedral, 222 

Exmoor, 2, 85, 251-252 

Eye, 285 

FAK.ENHAM, 146 

Falmouth, 76-77 

Fnrndale, 180 

Fame Islands, 194, 196-199, 204 

Farnham, 3839 

Farquhar, George, 223 

Farrer, Reginald, 312-316 

Farrer's Last Journey, 315 

Fawkcs, Guy, 261 

Fea, Allan, 228 

Fenham Flats, 204 

Fens, the, 20, 139-143, 162-163, 168 

Feversham, Lord, 92, 105 

Fielding, Copley, 16 

Fielding, Henry, 58, 99, 249-250 

Fiennes, Celia, 34, 254 

Firth, J. B., 216 

Fitzgerald, Edward, 285, 290 

Flanders, Moll, 132 

Flatford Mill, 282 

Flodden, 187 

Fold country, 267-268 

Folkestone, 273 

Fonthill Abbey, 48 

Fonthill Bishop, 48 

Forest Lovers, The, 44 

Forfarshire, wreck of the, 197, 199 

Foss Way, 27, 256 

Foster, Birket, 16, 25, 188 

Fothergill, John, 71, 154 

Fountains Abbey, 176, 318, 325 

Fowcy, 76 

Foxe, John, 166 

Framlingham, 285, 289 

Franklin, Sir John, 166 

Freise-Greene, William, 109 

Fressingfield, 285 

Friday Street, 266 



Furness Abbey, 331 
Furness peninsula, 330 

GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS, 285, 292 

Gale, Norman, 245 

Galsworthy, John, 67 

Garden of Asia, The, 316 

Gardens, English, 242-244 

Garrick, David, 109, 223, 224, 247 

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 259, 336 

Gawsworth, 344 

Gedding Hall, 286 

George III, 58 

Gibbet Nook Corner, 169-170 

Gibbings, Robert, 64 

Gibbon, Edward, 43-44 

Giggles wick, 316 

Gil Bias, 28 

Girtin, Thomas, 16 

Glaisdale Moor, 180, 182 

Glastonbury, 94, 95, 100-102, 325 

Glastonbury Tor, 102, 104 

Godfrey, Richard, 91 

Godmanchester, 137 

Godolphin, Sidney, 65 

Golden Arrow, The, 239 

Golden Cockerel Press, 64 

Gonerby, 162 

Goring, 127, 128 

Gotham, the Wise Men of, 214, 216 

Grange-over-Sands, 328, 330 

Grantham, 162 

Grassington, 318 

Gray, Thomas, 134, 161 

Great Malvern, 247-249 

Great North Road, the, 45, 46, 131- 

204, 323 

Greene, Robert, 151 
Gr e ens toe kings , 40 
Greville, Sir Fulke, 262 
Griff, 262 

Grimston, Lady Ann, 133-134 
Grosmont, 180, 182 
Guildfbrd, 37, 38 
Guinevere, 95, 101 
Guiting Power, 118 
Gunpowder Plot, 261-262 
Gwynn, Nell, 247 

HADDON HALL, 352 
Hadleigh, 285 



359 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 



Hadrian's Wall, 302, 305-307 

Halstead, 283 

Hahwhistle, 307 

Ham Street, 272 

Hamilton, Sir William, 48 

Hamilton, Lady, 48 

Hampshire, 38, 41 

Hampton Court, near Leominster, 241 

Hamstall Ridware, 222 

Hanley, 217 

Hardraw Force, 325 

Hardy, Thomas, 43 

Harper, Charles G., 28, 131, 172, 

2 33 3 2 9 

Harris, Mary Dormer, 257 
Harrison, Julius, 247, 252 
Harrison, William, 119-121 
Harrogate, 247 
Haslemere, 64, 267 
Haven under the Hill, The, 185 
Hawkhurst, 271 
Haworth, 332, 334-336 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 14, 164-165, 

167, 224, 225 
Hazlitt, William, 40, 48 
Headcorn, 271 
Hciferlaw, 187 
Heiferlaw Tower, 194 
Hellingly, 275 
HelmsTey, 180 
Helston, 80 
Henley, W. E., 325 
Hereford, 247 

Herefordshire, 240, 241-246, 247 
Hereward the Wake, 140 
Herrick, Robert, 68-69, 88 
Hertfordshire, 295-301 
Hesperides, The, 68, 69 
Hest Bank, 32$, 330 
Hever Castle, 270 
Hewlett, Maurice, 44 
Hindhead, 37, 267 
Hindover Hill, 276 
Hissey, James, 122 
Hitchin, 134 
Hobbes, Thomas, in 
Hodder, valley of the, 328 
Hog's Back, the, 37 
Holbeach, 163 
Holland, in the Fens, 145 
Holmbury St Mary, 266 



360 



Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 14 

Holne, 67 

Hoist, Gustav, 247 

Holy Isle (Lindisfarnc), 188, 194, i 

204 

Honiton, 63 

Hood, Admiral Lord, 190 
Horncastle, 169 

House in Dormer Forest, The, 239 
Houscsteads, 306 
Housman, A. E., 230 
Howells, W. D., 14 
Howitt, William, 196, 197, 198-1 

218, 219, 220, 258-261 
Huddersfceld, 336 
Hudibras, 233 
Huggate Wold, 178 
Hume, David, 218, 221 
Humphreys, Arthur, 127 
Humphry Clinker, 18 
Huntingdon, 137-139, 159 
Hurt Wood, 267 
Hythe, 273 

ICKNIELD WAY, 27, 125, 126 

Idbury, 116 

Iden Green, 271 

Ina, King, 101 

Innkeeper's Diary, An, 154 

Innkeepers, 72-74, 353 

Inns and hotels, 24, 30, 43, 71-7, 
95-98, 109, 152, 159, 161, 275, 28' 
309-310, 33*-33 2 > 347-350 
Anchor, Ripley, 305 
Angel, Blyth, 175 
Angel, Bury St Edmunds, 287 
Angel, Hitchin, 134 
Angel, Lacock, 112 
Angel, Lavenham, 287 
Angel, Woodbridge, 287 
Australian Arms, Haverhill, 287 
Ball's Hut, Chichestcr, 40 
Bankes, Corfe, 55 
Bear, Wantage, 126 
Bear's Head, Brercton, 344 
Bell, Barnby Moor, 161, 174 
Bell, Clare, 286 
Bell, Kcxsey, 287 
Beverley Arms, Beyer ley, 177 
Black Boy, Nottingham, 210 
Black Bull, Haworth, 335, 336 



INDEX 



Inns and hotels continued 
Blackamoor's Head, Nottingham, 

211 

Blind Man's Gate, Barnby, 287 
Blue Boar, Maldon, 280 
Bottles, Occold, 287 
Bridge, Bedford, 136 
Bull, Long Melford, 287, 288 
Bull, Sudbury, 287 
Butt and Oyster, Chelmondiston, 

287 

Castle, Chiddingstone, 269-270 
Cat and Fiddle, near Buxton, 342 
Charles Cotton, near Harrington, 

345 

Coopers' Arms, Hitchin, 134 
Crown, Bawtry, 161 
Crown, Blandford, 53 
Dorset Arms, Hart-field, 275 
Dorset Arms, Withyam, 275 
Eight Bells, Nottingham, 210 
Feathers, Ledbury, 246 
Feathers, Ludlow, 233, 246 
Fell, Burnsall, 317 
Flying Horse, Nottingham, 210 
Fox and Goose, Fressingficld, 287 
George, Buckden, 137 
George, Chestcrs, 307 
George, Glastonbury, 101-102 
George, Huntingdon, 137 
George, Lacock, 112 
George, Norton St Philip, 104-105 
Globe, Sawtry, 161 
Gloucester Arms, Penrith, 308 
Golden Lion, Settle, 316 
Green Dragon, Malmesbury, in 
Green Man, Ashbourne, 351, 352, 

353 

Henry the Eighth, Hever, 269-270 
Horse and Chaise, Nottingham, 210 
Hunter *s Lodge, near Charmouth, 

60 

Izaak Walton, Dovedale, 282 
Izaak Walton, Ham, 345 
Jack o* Newbury, Newbury, 125 
Jolly Farmer, Farnham, 38 
King Alfred, Burrowbridgc, 90 
King Arthur's Castle, Tintagel, 82 
King's Arms, Malmesbury, in 
King's Arms, Ombcrsley, 254 
King's Head, Lancaster, 311 



Inns and hotels continued 
Lamb, Burfbrd, 119 
Lea Gate, Gibbet Nook Corner, 169 
Lion, Buckden, 137 
Lion, Dunchurch, 261 
Lion and Swan, Congleton, 344 
Loggerheads, Boston, 167 
Lygon Arms, Broadway, 64 
Magpie, Little Stoneham, 287 
Maid's Head, Norwich, 152-157, 159 
Mansion House, Bridgwater, 93 
New, Bourton-on-the- Water, 119 
No Hurry, or Five Miles from Any- 
where, Upware, 139 
at Norman Cross, 161 
Old Bakehouse, 119 
Old Hall, Sandbach, 344 
Otterburn Hall, Otterburn, 305 
Percy Arms, Otterburn, 304 
Punch Bowl, Nottingham, 210 
Queen's Arms, Charmouth, 32, 59 
Ram's Head, Disley, 311 
Red Lion, Debenham, 287 
Red Lion, Haltwhistle, 307 
Red Lion, Martlesham, 286-287 
Royal Cot, near Leek, 343 
Royal Huts, Hindhead, 40 
Rum Puncheon, Boston, 167 
Salutation, Nottingham, 210 
Seven Stars, Totnes, 70, 71 
Sir John Barleycorn, Cadnam, 42 
Stephen Langton, Friday Street, 266 
Sun, Hitchin, 134 
Sun, Kirkby Lonsdale, 309-310 
Sun, Saxilby, 171-172 
Sunrising, near Banbury, 258-259 
Swan, Bedford, 136 
Swan, Bradfbrd-on-Avon, 107 
Swan, Streatley, 128 
Talbot, Chaddesley Corbet, 254 
Three Crowns, Chagford, 65 
Three Crowns, Lichfield, 223 
Traveller's Rest, Flash Bar, 342-343 
Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham, 210 
Tumbledown Dick, Wortham, 287 
Two Golden Lions, Penrith, 308 
Unicorn, Ripon, 320-321 
Unicorn, Stow-on-the-Wold, 119 
Victoria, Swanage, 56 
West Meon Hut, or George, 40 
Wheatsheaf, Northleach, 119 



361 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 



Inns and hotels continued 
White Elm, Copdock, 287 
White Hart, East Retford, 172 
White Hart, Kendal, 311 
White Hart, Tetbury, 119 
White Horse, Eaton Socon, 136 
White Horse, Ipswich, 287 
White Horse, Romsey, 41 
White Horse, Tattingstone, 287 
White Horse, Woolstone, 126 
Whoop Hall, near Kirkby Lonsdale, 

312 
Woodyates, 44-45 

Ipswich, 285 

Irving, Washington, 13, 14 

Itinerary, 28 

Ixworth, 285 

JAMES I, 285 

James II, 258 

James, Henry, 14 

Jameson, Storm, 185 

Jane Eyre, 312 

Jeffreys, George, Judge, 89 

Jervaulx Abbey, 176 

Jevington, 276 

Jocelyn of Brakelond, 290 

John, King of England, 47, 144 

John of Gaunt, 329 

John 0' London's Weekly, 122 

Johnson, Samuel, 223, 224, 352 

Jones, Canon, 107 

Joseph of Arimathea, 04, TOO 

KEVTS, JOHN, 61-62 
Kedlcston, 352 
Kellaways, no 
Kemble, Charles, 247 
Kemble, Stephen, 247 
Kent, 268-273 
Kent's Bank, 328, 331 
Kentwel'l Hall, 286 
Kersey, 289 
Ket, Robert, 155 
Kettleburgh, 289 
Kiddier, William, 214 
Killinglcy, M., 353 
Kinder Scout, 341 
King Alfred's Camp, 125 
King's Lynn, 143-145, 166 
Kingsley, Charles, 67 



362 



Kingston Lisle, 124, 126 
Kington, 247 
Kipling, Rudyard, 94 
Kirkby Lonsdale, 309-311 
Kirke, Colonel, 89-90 
Kirknewton, 188 
Kirkwhelpington, 187 
Knaresborough, 322-323 
Knighton, 247 
Knockholt, 269 
Knowle, 98 
Konody, Pauline, 16 
Kubla Khan, 87 
Kynance Cove, 79 

LACOCK., 111-112 

Lakes, the, 309, 328 

Lalla Rooty , 350 

Lamb, Charles, 18, 87, 179, 296, 297, 

298, 300, 301 
Lambourn, 125 
Lancashire, 309, 311, 327-336 
Lancaster, 328-330 
Land, The, 22 

Landor, Walter Savage, 109, 205 
Langland, William, 205, 248 
Langton Wold, 178 
Lansdown Tower, Bath, 48 
Lastingham, 180, i8r 
Lavengro, 28 

Lavenham, 26, 285, 287, 288 
Lazy Tour, The, 34 
Le Vasseur, TheYese, 219, 220 
Ledbury, 246 
Leek, 342-345 
Leicestershire, 19 
Leighton, 239 
Lcith Hill, 267 
Leominster, 241 
Lewes, 226 
Lewis, Sinclair, 15 
Lichfield, 221-225 
Lincoln Cathedral, 222 
Lincolnshire Fens, 162-163, 168 
Lindisfarne (Holy Isle), 188, 194, 199 

204 

Lindisfarne Gospels, the, 201 
Linskill, Mary, 185-186 
Listeners, The, 269-270 
Little Malvern, 248 
Little Wenham Hall, 286 



INDEX 



Livingstone, David, 109 
Lizard, the, 79 
Lloyd, Charles, 87 
London, 37, 128, 131, 162 
Long Melford, 285, 287, 288 
Long Mynd, the, 235, 236-237 
Longs tone lighthouse, 197 
Lorna Doonc country, the, 85 
Lovely Ship, The, 185 
Lowood School, 312 
Lucas, E. V., 226 
Ludlow, 26, 232-235 
Lugg, river, 244 
Lundy Island, 201 
Lune, river, 328 
Lydd, 272 
Lydgate, John, 285 
Lymm, 344 
Lympne, 272 
Lyndhurst, 43 
Lynmouth, 62 
Lytton, Edward Bulvver, 109 

MACAULAY, LORD, 109 

Mackery End, 133 

McFee, William, 230-231 

Maldon, 280 

Malmesbury, in 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 205 

Malvern Hills, 247-248 

Malvern Link, 248 

Malvern Wells, 248 

Manaton, 67 

Manchester Waterworks, 339, 340 

Manifold Valley, 345, 352 

Mansfield Par\, 40 

Manvers, Earl, 173 

Marazion, 79 

Mark Ash, 43 

Marston Moor, battle of, 202 

Marten, Maria, 291, 292-294 

Martineau, Harriet, 151 

Marton-upon-Dove, 216 

Marvell, Andrew, 229, 245 

Mary, Queen of England, 285 

Masefield, John, 205, 246-247 

Matcham, Gervasc, 45-46 

Matlock, 247, 352 

Maud Heath's Causeway, no 

Maxwell, Donald, 271 

Mayfield, 350-351 



363 



Mead, 43 

Melbourne (Derbyshire), 216 

Melford Hall, 286 

Mendip Hills, 103, 104 

Meredith, George, 66, 136 

Meriden, 263 

Merry Tales of Gotham, 135 

Middleton-on-the-Wolds, 177 

Middlewich, 344 

Midhurst, 276 

Midlands, The, 206 

Mill Gill Foss, 325 

Miilhouse, , of Tattershall, 169 

Milton, John, 161, 179 

Milton Abbas, 49-50 

Minton, 237 

Mistletoe Bough, The, 41 

Mitford, 1 88, 190 

Mkford, John, 190-191 

Monmouth, Duke of, 44-45, 89, 91- 

92, 105 

Moor Park, 39 
Moore, Thomas, 350-351 
Morecambe Bay, 330 
Moritz, Carl Philipp, 34 
Morland, George, 20 
Morley, Christopher, 15 
Morpeth, 189, 190 
Mortehoe, 62 

Mortimer's Hole, 208, 209 
Most Pleasant and Delectable History 

of }ac\ of New bury, The, 125 
Mother Shipton, 322-323 
Mount's Bay, 79 
Mousehold Heath, 149 
Much Wenlock, 232, 239 
Muker, 325-326 

NASH, BEAU, 108 

Nashe, Thomas, 285 

Nasty, 134 

Nelson, Horatio, Viscount, 48, 151, 166 

Nether Stowey, 87-88, 219 

New Forest, the, 42-43 

New Malton, 177, 178 

New York (Lines), 168-169 

Newcastle, Duke of, 173 

Newgate Calendar, The, 119 

Newtondale, 180 

Nickleby, Nicholas, 132 

Nicks, Samuel, 131 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 



Nidderdale, 318-319 

Nigel, Lord, 132 

Night Thoughts, 133 

No Man's Friend (Lines), 169 

Noble Numbers, 69 

Norfolk, 140, 143-159, 163 

Norfolk Broads, the, 146-147, 149, 160 

North Dalton, 177-178 

North Downs, the, 266, 268 

North Malvern, 248 

North Walsham, 146 

Northumberland, 187-193, 302 

Northumberland, Duke of, 198 

Norton St Philip, 104-106 

Norwich, 149-159 

Nottingham, 161, 173, 207-214 

OFFA'S DYKE, 242 

Old Rose, 347 

Olney, 136 

Ombersley, 253, 254 

On the Eaves of the World, 312, 316 

Orchard Songs, 245 

Original Poems for Children, 290-291 

Otterburn, 1 88, 303, 304-305 

Ottery St Mary, 64 

Ouida, 290 

Ouse, river, 135, 136, 137, 138-139 

Ovingham, 188-189 

Oxford, 26, 226 

Oxney, Isle of, 271 

P ALDINGTON STATION, 128-130 
Parr, Catherine, 117 
Paston, family of, 151 
Paston Letters, 151, 155 
Peak, the, 336, 340, 352 
Peak Forest, 352 
Peasenhall, 285 
Pcmbridge, 242 
Penderel, Richard, 228-229 
Penkridge, 228 
Pcnnines, the, 177, 338 
Penrith, 302, 308-309 
Penshurst, 270 
Pentridgc, 46 
Penzance, 85 
Pepys, Samuel, 157 
Percy, Bishdp, 239 
Perry, John, 119-122 
Pershorc, 250-251, 252 



364 



Petworth, .226, 276 

Philips, John, 245 

Pickering, 178, 180 

Pickwickians, the, travels of, 18, 34 

Pilgrim Fathers, the, 61 

Pilgrim's Progress, The, 134, 135 

Piltdown, 275 

Pitch Hill, 267 

Pitchford Hall, 238 

Pitman, Sir Isaac, 109 

Pitt, William, 109 

Place Farm, Tisbury, 49 

Plymouth, 61 

Polstead, 289, 292-294 

Polyolbion, 17 

Poole, 45 

Poole Harbour, 56 

Pope, Alexander, 58 

Port Way, the, 125, 126 

Portisham, 52 

Portland, Duke of, 173 

Portsmouth Road, the, 37 

Potters' Art Guild, 38, 64 

Powys, T. F., 292 

Precious Bane, 239 

Prestbury, 344 

Pride and Prejudice, 40 

Priestley, J. B., 226 

Prioleau, Johri, 38 

Purbeck, Isle of, 54 

QUANTOCK HILLS, 86 
Queen's Bower, 43 
Queen's Quair, The, 44 
Quiller-Couch, Sir A., 76 

Rainbow Bridge, The, 312, 314, 315, 

316 

Ramsbury, 124-125 
Ramsey Island, 201 
Randolph, Thomas, 205 
Random, Roderick, 132 
Rat-catcher's Daughter, The, 53 
Reader's Handboo^, The, 101 
Red Barn Murder, 291, 292-295 
Red Horse, Vale o the, 256, 257-258 
Redesdale, Lord, 190, 191 
Redmirc Force, 325 
Reeth, 324, 325 
Reliques, The, 239 
Rhapsody, 162 



INDEX 



Kibble, river, 331 

Kibble, valley of the, 328 

Rochester, 331-332 

Richard III, 308 

Richard Yea-and-Nay, 44 

Richmond (Yorks), 324 

Rievaulx Abbey, 176, 178-179, 325 

Ringwood, 43 

Ripon, 200, 222, 319-321 

Ripon Cathedral, 222, 319 

Robin Hood, 173 

Robin Upright's Hill, 86 

Roderic^ Random, 18, 28 

Romney, George, 331 

Romney Marsh, 271-273 

Romsey, 26, 41-42 

Romsey Abbey, 41 

Ropley Village, 40 

Rosedale, 180 

Rosedale Abbey, 180, 181 

Ross, 247 

Rothbury, 303 

Rother, river, 271 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 217, 218-221 

Rowlandson, Thomas, 20, 287 

Rowsley, 352 

Royal Military Canal, near Romney, 

272 

Royal Oak, the, 228 
Rugeley, 225 
Rural Rides, 34 
Rushbrooke Hall, 286 
Ruskin, John, 333 
Russell, Gordon, 64 
Rutland, 161-162 
Rye, 26, 272 
Rye, Walter, 153 
Ryedale, 176, 178 

SAFFRON WALDEN, 283 

St Alban's or St Aldhclm's Head, 57 

St Breock, 81 

St Bridget, ' 100 

St Buryan, 79 

St Cross, hospital o 40-41 

St Cuthbert, 196, 199, 200, 201 

St Giles's churchyard, London, 

notable tombs in, 229 
St Hilary, 80 

St Hilda's Abbey, Whitby, 184 
St Ives (Cornwall), 80 



365 



St Ives (Huntingdonshire), 139 

St Just-in-Roseland, 78-79 

St Kew Highway, 82 

St Madron's Well, 80 

St Matthew's Fair, Bridgewater, 93 

St Mawes, 78, 85 

St Michael's Mount, 79 

St Michael's Tower, 102 

St Patrick, 100 

St Robert's Cave, Knaresborough, 322 

Salcombe, 62 

Salisbury Cathedral, 225 

Saltway, the, 119 

Sandbach, 344 

Sandgate, 273 

Sangreal, the, 94, 102 

Saver nake Forest, 123 

Savile, Lord, 173 

Saxilby, 171-172 

Scarborough, 178 

Scott, Sir Walter, 131 

Second Part of Henry the Fourth, The, 

192 

Sedgemoor, battle of, 44, 91-92, 105 
Sclborne, 39 
Sclby, 176 
Semerwater, 325 
Sennen, 79 

Sense and Sensibility, 40 
Sentimental Journey, The, 180 
Settle, 316, 317 
Seven for a Secret, 239 
Seward, Anna, 223, 224 
Seymour, Thomas, 117 
Shakespeare, William, 192, 206-207 
Shandy Hall, 180 
Shapwick, 98 
Sharpham, 70, 99-100 
Shere, 267 

Sheridan, R. B., 109 
Sherwood Forest, 42, 163, 173, 174 
Shropshire, 228-241 
Shropshire Lad, A, 206, 230 
Shuckburgh, Richard, 259-261 
Shushions, 229 
Siddons, Sarah, 247 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 47 
Silbury Hill, 112 
Silverdale, 331 
Simon of Sudbury, 285 
Simonburn, 188 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 



Six Weeds' Tour, 34 

Sixpenny Handley, 47 

Skegness, 166 

Skipton, 317 

Slapton, 62 

Slaughter, Upper and Lower, 118 

Sleights, 180, 182, 183 

Sloperton Cottage, 350 

Small Hythe, 271 

Smart, Rowley, 16 

Smith, Captain John, 166 

Smollett, Tobias, 254 

Snowshill, 118 

Soham, 140 

Somerset, 94-95, 98-99, 295 

Southminster, 281 

Southwell, 222 

Spalding, 163 

Speen, 64 

Spilsby, 1 66 

Squcers, Wackford, 132 

Staffordshire, 216-217, 221, 226, 343 

Stamford, 161, 162 

Stane Street, 27 

Stan ton, 118 

Stan way, 118 

Steer, Wilson, 16 

Stephenson, George, 188 

Sterne, Laurence, 180 

Stevenson, J. A. R., 64, 65 

Steventon, 40 

Stoke Ferry, 143 

Stokesay Castle, 237 

Stonehenge, 112 

Stour Valley, 161, 282-283 

Stowmarket, 289 

Stratford St Mary, 282, 289 

Stratford-on-Avon, 26, 205, 221 

Streatley, 127, 128 

Stretton Water, 236 

Studland, 56 

Stump Cross, 318 

Suckling, John, 285 

Sudbury (Derbyshire), 216 

Sudbury (Suffolk), 285 

Sudely Castle, 117 

Suffolk, 284-295 

Sunlight in New Granada, 230 

Surrey, 265-268 

Sussex, 265, 273-277 

Sutton Bridge, 144 



366 



Swaffham, 146 
Swaffham Prior, 140 
Swale, river, 324, 325 
Swaledale, 320 
Swanage, 54, 55-56 
Swell, Upper and. Lower, 118 
Swift, Jonathan, 39 
Swinburne, Algernon, 188 

TABLEY, 344 

Tas^ The, 136 

Tattershall, 169, 170 

Tattershall Castle, 170-171 

Taunton, 88-90 

Taylor, Ann, 285 

Taylor, Jane, 285 

Taylor, Captain Meadows, 190 

Taylor, Dr, 352 

Taylor, the waterman-poet, 34, 254 

Teffont Evias, 48 

Teffont Magna, 48 

Temple, Sir William, 39 

Temple Guiting, 118 

Tenbury, 247 

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 136 

Tentcrden, 271 

Terry, Dame Ellen, 271 

Tewin, 133 

Tewkesbury, 247 

Thames Valley, 163 

Thetford, 146 

Thixendale Wold, 178 

Thomas Hictythrift, 135 

Thomson, Hugh, 175 

Thorpe (Yorkshire), 318 

Thoughts in a Garden , 245 

Three Mile Cross, 226 

Through England on a Side Saddle, 

34 . 

Thyrsis, 244 
Tilgate Forest, 274 
Tillingham, 281 
Tintagel, 79, 82-84, IO1 
Tintern Abbey, 325 
Tisbury, 49 
Tollard Royal, 47 
Tollesburys, the, 280 
Tollcshunt villages, the, 280 
Tom Jones, 18, 28, 58, 249-250 
Torcross, 62 
Totnes, 69-71 



INDEX 



Towcdnack, 80 

Toys Hill, 269 

Trahernc, Thomas, 205 

Travels tn England , 34 

Trent, river, 214 

Trevenna, 82 

Treves, Sir Frederick, 46 

Tristram Shandy, 180 

Troller's Ghyll, cavern, 318 

Trollopc, Anthony, 41 

Troy Town, 76 

Truro Cathedral, 76 

Turbervilles, the, home of, 57 

Tunbridge Wells, 270 

Tutbury, 222 

Twain, Mark, 240 

Twelfth Night, wassailing apple-trees 

on, 98-99 
Tync, river, 305 

UFFINGHAM WHITE HORSE, 126 
Upton, 127 

Upton -on-Sevcrn, 249-250 
Upware, 139-140 
Uriconium, 238 

VALE OF EVESHAM, 163 
Vale of the Red Horse, 256,^ 257-258 
Vale of the White Horse, 123, 124 
Valentine Vox, 290 
Valley of Desolation, 318 
Vancouver, George, 166 
Villages, English, 22-27 
Villains and his Dinah, 53 

WADEBRIDGE, 80-81 
Walncy Island, 201 
Walsingham, 144, 146, 147-148 
Walsingham Way, the, 147 
Waltham St Lawrence, 64 
Walton, Izaak, 193, 345-347 
Wansbcck, river, 190 
Wantage, 126 
Warbeck, Perkin, 89 
Ward, Edgar, 229 
Ware Park, 296-301 
Wareham, 54 
Warkworth, 188, 191-192 
Warmwell, 57 
Warwickshire, 254-263 
Wash, the, 139, 144, 145 



367 



Wassailing of apple-trees, 98-99 

Waterhouses, 345, 350 

Wading Street, 27, 228, 257 

Wayland the Smith, Cromlech of, 126 

Wear, river, 186 

Webb, Mary, 185-186, 238-239 

Wellow, 173 

Wells and its cathedral, 102-103 

Welwyn, 133 

Wcnsleydale, 321 

Weobley, 242 

West Hagbourne, 127 

West Malvern, 248 

Westerham, 268 

Westermain, woods of, 217 

Weston Zoyland, 91, 92 

Weston-under-Lizard, 228^229 

Wey valley, 37 

Wcymouth, 57-58 

Whallcy, 332 

Wharram-le-Street, 178 

Wheathampstead, 133 

Whispering Knights, the, 123 

Whistler, James Abbot McNeill, 161 

Whitby, 177, 180, 183-186 

Whitby Abbey, 184 

White, Gilbert, 39 

White, Kirke, 161, 214 

White Horse Hill, 126 

Whiteladies, 228 

Whitfield Gill, 325 

Whiting, last Abbot of Giastonburyj 

99, 101 
Wichnor, 222 
Wicken Fen, 20, 140 
Widecombc-in-thc-Moor, 67 
Willersley Hill, 121, 122 
Willersley, 242 

William of Malmesbury, loo-ior, i] 
Williams, Vaughan, 162 
Williams-Ellis, Clough, 333 
Wills, John, 70 
Wilmington, the Long Man of, 52 

27 6 

Wilton, 47 
Wilton House, 47 
Wiltshire, 47, 111-112 
Wimborne, 43 
Winchcombe, 118-119 
Winchcombe, John, 125 
Winchester, 26, 37, 40-41 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND 



Winfrith, 57 

Winter, William, 14-15 

Winterslow Hut, 40 

Wisbcch, 146 

Witharn, river, 170 

Withyam, 275 

Wolds, the, 176, 177, 178 

Wolfe, General James, 109, 268 

Wolsey, Cardinal, 285 

Womenswold, 272, 273 

Wood, John, Junior, 109 

Woodbridge, 285, 289, 290 

Woodcutts, 47 

Woodyates, 44-46 

Wookcy Hole, 103-104 

Wool, home of the Turbervilles, 57 

Woolavington, 98 

Woolstone, 126 

Worcester, battle of, 59, 254 

Worcester Cathedral, 222 



Worcestershire, 244, 245, 247, 248, 2< 

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 87 

Wordsworth, William, 87, 109, 136 

Worth Forest, 274 

Wotton (Surrey), 266 

Wotton, Sir Henry, 262 

Wotton Hall (Staffs), 217, 218-221 

Wrekin, the, 228, 229 

Wuthcring Heights, 336 

Wye, river, 245 

Wye Valley, 19 

Wylam, 188 

Wylye, river, 47 

Wymondham, 146 

YORK, 160, 178 

Yorkshire, 176, 311, 317-319, 325-32 

Young, Arthur, 34, 285 

Young, Edward, 133 

Yoxall, 222 




124067