Kitabı oku: «The Cruise of the Land-Yacht «Wanderer»: or, Thirteen Hundred Miles in my Caravan», sayfa 5
Chapter Eight.
Leamington and Warwick – A Lovely Drive – A Bit of Black Country – Ashby-de-la-Zouch
”… Evening yields
The world to-night…
… A faint erroneous ray,
Glanced from th’ imperfect surfaces of things,
Flings half an image on the straining eye;
While wavering woods, and villages and streams,
And rocks and mountain-tops, that long retained
Th’ ascending gleam, are all one swimming scene,
Uncertain if beheld.”
Strange that for twelve long miles, ’twixt Warmington and the second milestone from Warwick, we never met a soul, unless rooks and rabbits have souls. We were in the woods in the wilds, among ferns and flowers.
When houses hove in sight at last, signs of civilisation began to appear. We met a man, then a swarm of boarding-school girls botanising, and we knew a city would soon be in sight. At Leamington, the livery stables to which we had been recommended proved too small as to yard accommodation, so we drove back and put up at the Regent Hotel. But there is too much civilisation for us here. Great towns were never meant for great caravans and gipsy-folk. We feel like a ship in harbour.
Rain, rain, rain! We all got wet to the skin, but are none the worse.
The old ostler at the Regent is a bit of a character, had been on the road driving four-in-hands for many a year. He was kindly-loquacious, yes, and kindly-musical as well, for he treated me to several performances on the coach-horn, which certainly did him great credit. He was full of information and anecdotes of the good old times, “when four-in-hands were four-in-hands, sir, and gentlemen were gentlemen.” He told us also about the road through Kenilworth to Coventry. It was the prettiest drive, he said, in all England.
Beautiful and all though Leamington be, we were not sorry to leave it and make once more for the cool green country.
The horses were fresh this morning, even as the morning itself was fresh and clear. We passed through bush-clad banks, where furze and yellow-tasselled broom were growing, and trees in abundance. Before we knew where we were we had trotted into Kenilworth. We stabled here and dined, and waited long enough to have a peep at the castle. This grand old pile is historical; no need, therefore, for me to say a word about it.
After rounding the corner in our exit from Kenilworth, and standing straight away for Coventry, the view from the glen at the bridge, with the castle on the left, a village and church on the rising ground, and villas and splendid trees on the right, made a good beginning to the “finest drive in all England.”
There is many a pretty peep ’twixt Kenilworth and Coventry.
The road is broad and good, and so tree-lined as often to merit the name of avenue. Especially is this the case at the third milestone, from near which the straight road can be seen for folly a mile and a half, shaded by the grandest of trees. This is a view not easily forgotten.
With all the beauty of this drive, however, it is too civilised to be romantic. The hedges are trimmed, and we actually noticed a man paring the grass on the edge of the footpath.
June 26th. – We are up very early this morning, for in Coventry the road-fiend rides rampant and in all his glory. They have steam-trams, which not only go puffing through the town, but for five miles out through the coal district itself. We must avoid them, get the start of them. So we are up and away long before seven.
We arrived here last night, and through the kindness of the editor of the Tricyclist got permission to draw in for the night into the large cricket and sports ground. The gates were closed at nine, and we had the keys. I was lord, therefore, of all I surveyed.
On the cinder-path last night a weary-looking but strong old man of over sixty was walking. He is doing or trying to do 1,000 miles in a shorter time than the pedestrian Weston. It is said that if he succeeds the brewers will pay him 1,000 pounds, and give him a free public-house, because he trains on beer instead of on tea, as did Weston!
The road leading northward from Coventry is terribly rough and rutty, and cut up with the trams from the mines, but being lined with trees, among which are many copper-beeches, it is not devoid of interest.
It is cold, bitterly cold and raw, with a strong north wind blowing, and we are obliged to wear top-coats on the coupé. Fancy top-coats at midsummer!
The country becomes unpleasant-looking even before the trams end. At Redworth, where I drew up for a short time to make purchases, swarms of rough, dark, and grimy men surrounded us, but all were polite and most civil.
On the hilltop we again draw up in front of an inn. The panting horses want water, and we ourselves have till now had no breakfast.
“Good beds for travellers round the corner.” This was a ticket in a window. I go round the corner. Here is a little show of some kind and a caravan. But the show business cannot be much of a success in this Black Country, for these caravanites look poverty-stricken. From a rude picture on a ragged screen I learn that this caravan is devoted to a horse-taming or Rarey show. The dramatis personae consist of a long, lean, unwholesome-looking lad with straggling yellow hair, a still longer and still leaner lad without any visible hair, and a short man with grey moustache. But this latter comes to the gate bearing in his arms a boy-child of ten years, worn to a skeleton, sickly, and probably dying. The boy shivers, the short man speaks soothingly to him, and bears him back into a dingy tent. I do not relish my breakfast after this sad sight.
We are not sorry when we are away from the immediate vicinity of the mines, and unlimbered by the roadside near the old Red Gate Inn. We have been following the ancient Roman road for many miles, and a good one it is, and very obliging it was of the Romans to make us such a road.
The inn is altogether so quiet and cosy that I determine to stable here for the night, and pass the day writing or strolling about.
So we cross the road and draw the Wanderer up beneath a lordly oak. In crossing we pass from Warwick into Leicestershire.
Pea-blossom is coughing occasionally. It is not a pleasant sound to have to listen to. She may be better to-morrow, for it will be Saturday, and a long and toilsome day is before us.
It is evening now; a walk of a mile has brought me to a hilltop, if hill it can be called. The view from here is by no means spirit-stirring, but quiet and calming to the mind. What a delightful difference between lying here and in that awful bustling inn yard at Leamington!
It is a country of irregular green fields, hedge-bounded, and plentifully sprinkled with oak and ash-trees and tall silver-green aspens; a country of rolling hills and flats, but no fens, with here and there a pretty old-fashioned farm peeping through the foliage.
There is not a cloud in the sky, the sun is sinking in a yellow haze, the robin and the linnet are singing beside me among the hawthorns, and down in the copse yonder a blackbird is fluting.
A pheasant is calling to its mate among the ferns; it is time apparently for pheasants to retire. Time for weasels too, for across the road runs a mother-weasel with a string of young ones all in a row. The procession had been feeding in that sweetly-scented beanfield, and is now bound for bed, and I myself take the hint and go slowly back to the Wanderer. But Hurricane Bob has found a mole, and brings that along. It is not dead, so I let it go. How glad it must feel!
At nine o’clock the sun had set, but left in the north-west a harbinger of a fine morning. What delicious tints! What delicate suffusion of yellows, greens, and blues! Just as the sun was sinking red towards the horizon uprose the moon in the east, round and full, and in appearance precisely like the setting sun. The trees on the horizon were mere black shapes, the birds had ceased to sing, and bats were flitting about. At eleven o’clock, it was a bright clear night with wavy dancing phosphorescent-like gleams of light in the north – the Aurora!
June 11th. – Started at eight o’clock en route by cross roads for Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Shortly afterwards passed a needle-shaped monument to George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends. It is a very humble one, and stands in a wooded corner almost surrounded by hawthorn. Went through the village of Fenny Drayton. Why called “Fenny,” I wonder? It is a little hamlet, very old, and with a pretty and very old church, but I had no time to get up to the steeple.
Road narrow but good. A glorious morning, with a blue sky and delicious breeze.
Greensward at each side of the road, with ragged hedges and stunted oaks and ashes; roses in the hedgerows, golden celandine on the sward, and tall crimson silenes everywhere. By-and-bye the country opens, and we come upon a splendid view; and here is a sight – a hedgerow of roses nearly a mile long! Here are as many of these wildly beautiful flowers as would drape Saint Paul’s Cathedral, dome and all.
We pass Sibson, with its very quaint old inn and little ivy-covered church surmounted by a stone cross; and Twycross, a most healthy and pretty rural village. There we unlimbered to dine, and in the afternoon went on towards our destination. Past Gopsal Park, with its quaint old lodge-gates and grand trees, on through dark waving woods of beech, of oak, and ash, on through lanes with hedgerows at each side, so tall that they almost meet at the top. We cross the railway now to avoid a steep bridge. Meesham is far away on the hill before us, and looks very romantic and pretty from the bridge. Its ancient church rears its steeple skyward, high over the houses that cluster round it, giving the place the appearance of a cathedral city in miniature. The romance vanishes, though, as soon as we enter the town. One long, steep street leads through it, its houses are of brick and most uninteresting, and the public-houses are so plentifully scattered about that thirst must be a common complaint here.
Ashby-de-la-Zouch lies above us and before as at last, and strangely picturesque it looks. Bows of queer-shaped trees are on each side of us; up yonder, in front, is a graveyard on a braeland; farther to the right a tall church spire, and flanking all, and peeping through the greenery of trees, is the ruined castle.
Market-day in Ashby, and we are mobbed whenever we stop to do some shopping.
The church here is well worthy of a visit; so too is the castle, but tourists ought to refresh their minds before spending a few days here by once more reading “Ivanhoe.”
It was hard, uphill work from Ashby; drag, drag, drag; horses tired, Pea-blossom limping, and all weary.
At the hilltop we came into quite a Highland country, and thence we could catch glimpses of lovely scenery and far-off blue hills.
The effects of the sunlight on the green oak woods and the yellow ashes were very charming.
Lount at last; a humble inn, quiet, kindly people, and a little meadow.
Chapter Nine.
A Quiet Sunday at Lount – A Visit to a Pottery – Beeston Hall – A Broiling Day
“How still the morning of this hallowed day!
Hushed is the voice of rural labour,
The ploughboy’s whistle and the milkmaid’s song.”
June 28th.
The country is indeed a Highlands in miniature. I might describe the scenery in this way: Take a sheet of paper and thereon draw irregular lines, across and across, up and down, in any conceivable direction. These lines, then, shall represent blackthorn hedges bounding fields of flowering grass and hay. Place trees in your picture anywhere, and, here and there, a wood of dwarfed oak, and dot the field-nooks with picturesque-looking cattle-huts. In the centre let there be a cluster of irregularly-built brick-tiled houses and the domes of a pottery works. This, then, is Lount and its surroundings, where we are now bivouacked. But to complete the sketch there must be footpaths meandering through the meadows, with gaps in the hedges for rustic stiles. Nor must the cattle be forgotten.
And all the country visible from this point is broken up into round hills, and each field is a collection of smaller hills, shaped like waves of a storm-tossed ocean.
How still and quiet it is! And above the green of fields and woods is a blue, blue sunny sky. Larks are singing up yonder, their songs mingling sweetly with the chiming of the church bells that comes floating over the hills, rising and falling as the breeze does, now high and clear, now soft and far-away like.
I had the caravan half-filled this morning with bright-eyed, wondering children. A parent brought me a red cotton handkerchief.
“T’missus,” he explained, “was makin’ oop a pie, and I thought upon thee loike.”
It was kindly, and I couldn’t refuse the gift, though gooseberry pies form no part of the Wanderer’s menu.
Ten o’clock pm. – The full moon has just risen over the dark oak woods; a strangely white dense fog has filled all the hollows – a fog you can almost stretch out your hands and touch. The knolls in the fields all appear over it, looking like little islands in the midst of an inland sea.
The corncrake is sounding his rattle in the hayfields – a veritable voice of the night is he – and not another sound is to be heard.
Passed a garden a few minutes ago while walking out. Such a sight! Glowworms in thousands; far more lovely than fireflies in an Indian jungle.
To bed.
June 29th. – We got under way by 8:30, after a brief visit to the Coleorton Pottery. This place has an ugly enough appearance outside, but is very interesting internally. The proprietor kindly showed my coachman and me over the works. We saw the great heaps of blue clay that had been dug from the hillside and left exposed for weeks to the weather, the tanks in which it is mixed with water, the machinery for washing and sifting it, the clay being finally boiled to the consistency of putty. An old man took dabs of this putty and cast them on a revolving table, smiling as he did so as he watched our wondering looks, for lo! cups and saucers and teapots seemed to grow up under his fingers, and a whole tea-set was produced more quickly than one could have brewed a cup of tea.
A somewhat misty morning, but roads good though hilly, and scenery romantic. But at Castle Donington, a long brick town, the scene changes. Away go hill and dale, away goes all romance, and we pass through a flat country, with nothing in it to enlist sympathy save the trees and rose-clad hedges.
But soon again comes another change, and we cross the broad and silvery Trent, stopping, however, on the bridge to admire the view.
We arrive at Long Eaton, and encamp by the roadside to cook dinner. Rows of ugly brick houses, a lazy canal with banks black with coal dust; the people here look as inactive as does their canal. Took the wrong turning and went miles out of our way.
We were stormed on our exit from Long Eaton by hordes of Board School children. They clustered round us like locusts, they swarmed like bees, and hung to the caravan in scores. No good my threatening them with the whip. I suppose they knew I did not mean much mischief, and one score was only frightened off to make room for another.
At Beeston, near Nottingham, I got talking to a tricyclist; a visit to a caravan followed, and then an introduction to a wealthy lace merchant. The latter would not hear of my going two miles farther to an inn. I must come into his grounds. So here in a cosy corner of the lawn of Beeston Hall lies the Wanderer, overshadowed by giant elms and glorious purple beeches, and the lace manufacturer and his wife are simply hospitality personified.
Such is the glorious uncertainty of a gentleman gipsy’s life – one night bivouacked by a lonely roadside in a black country, another in a paradise like this.
July 2nd. – A broiling hot day – almost too hot to write or think. At present we are encamped on the road, two miles from Worksop to the south. Tired though the horses were, we pushed on and on for miles, seeking shade but finding none; and now we have given up, and stand in the glaring sunshine. Roads are of whitest limestone, and, though there is little wind, every wheel of every vehicle raises a dust and a powder that seem to penetrate our very pores. We are all languid, drowsy, lethargic. Polly the parrot alone appears to enjoy the heat and the glare. The haymakers in yonder field are lazy-looking, silent, and solemn – a melting solemnity; the martins on that single telegraph-wire rest and pant open-mouthed, while the cattle in the meadow, with tails erect, go flying from end to end and back again in a vain attempt to escape from the heat and the flies.
But the flowers that grow by the wayside and trail over the hedges revel in the sunshine – the purple vetches, the red clover, the yellow wild-pea, and the starry Margueritas. Roses in sheets are spread over the hawthorn fences, and crimson poppies dot the cornfields. The white clover is alive with bees. This seems a bee country; everybody at present is either drumming bees or whitewashing cottages.
Got up to-day and had breakfast shortly after six. The kindly landlord of the Greyhound, Mr Scothern, and genial Mr Tebbet, one of his Grace the Duke of Portland’s head clerks, had promised to drive me through the forest grounds of Welbeck.
As the day is, so was the morning, though the sun’s warmth was then pleasant enough.
Our drive would occupy some two hours and a half, and in that time we would see many a “ferlie,” as the Scotch say. The bare impossibility of giving the reader anything like a correct account of this most enjoyable ride impresses me while I write, and I feel inclined to throw down my pen. I shall not do so, however, but must leave much unsaid. If any one wishes to see the country around here as I have seen it this morning, and wander in the forest and enjoy Nature in her home of homes, he must come to Welbeck in summer. Never mind distance; come, you will have something to dream pleasantly about for many a day.
A visit to the great irrigation canal, by which all the drainage from Mansfield is carried along, and utilised by being allowed to flood meadows, might not appear a very romantic way of beginning a summer morning’s outing. But it was interesting nevertheless. The meadows which are periodically flooded are wondrously green; three crops of hay are taken from each every season. They are on the slope, the canal running along above. The pure water that drains from these meadows finds its way into a river or trout stream that meanders along beneath them, and is overhung by rocks and woodland. Fish in abundance are caught here, and at present are being used to stock ponds and lochs on the duke’s estate.
We soon crossed this stream by a Gothic bridge, and plunged into what I may call a new forest. There are fine trees here in abundance, but it is a storm-tossed woodland, and much of the felled timber is so twisted in grain as to be useless for ordinary purposes.
We saw many trees that had been struck by lightning, their branches hurled in all directions. Up a steep hill after leaving this forest, and stopping at an old-fashioned inn, we regaled ourselves on ginger-ale. The landlord pointed with some pride to the sign that hung over the door.
“The duke himself – the old duke, sir, his Grace of the leathern breeches – brought that sign here himself – in his own hands and in his own carriage, and it isn’t many real gentlemen that would have done that, sir!”
The memory of the old duke is as much reverenced here, it appears to me, as that of Peter the Great is in Russia. The stories and anecdotes of his life you hear in the neighbourhood would fill a volume. People all admit he was eccentric, but his eccentricity filled many a hungry mouth, soothed the sorrows of the aged, and made many and many a home happy.
The tunnel towards Warsop is about two miles long, lighted by gas at night, and from windows above by day; there are a riding-school and wonderful stables underground, ballroom, etc, etc. I am writing these lines within a quarter of a mile of the open-air stables. The place looks like a small city.
Just one – only one – anecdote of the old duke’s eccentricity. It was told me last night, and proves his Grace to have been a man of kindly feeling. A certain architect had finished – on some part of the ground – a large archway and pillared colonnade, at great expense to the duke, no doubt. It did not please the latter, however, but he would not wound the architect’s feelings by telling him so. No, but one evening he got together some two hundred men, and every stone was taken away and the ground levelled before morning. The architect must have stared at the transformation when he came next day, but the matter was never even referred to by the duke, and of course the architect said nothing.
The country through which we went after passing the duke’s irrigation works was a rolling one, hill and dale, green fields, forest, loch, and stream. There are wild creatures in it in abundance. Yonder are two swans sailing peacefully along on a little lake; here, near the edge of the stream, a water-hen with a brood of little black young ones. She hurries them along through the hedge as our trap approaches, but the more hurry the less speed, and more than one poor little mite tumbles on its back, and has to be helped up by the mother. Yonder on the grass is a brace of parent partridges; they do not fly away; their heads are together; they are having a loving consultation on ways and means, and the young brood is only a little way off. Before us now, and adown the road, runs a great cock pheasant; he finally takes flight and floats away towards the woods. Look in the stream, how the glad fish leap, and the bubbles escaping from the mud in that deep dark pool tell where some fat eel is feeding. We pause for a moment to admire the trees, and the music of birds and melancholy croodling of the cushat fall upon our ears, while young rabbits scurry about in all directions, and a cuckoo with attendant linnet flies close over our horse’s head.
Not far from the little inn where we stopped we saw the ruins of King John’s palace. But little is left of it now, the stones having been put to other purposes, and it looks as like the ruins of an old barn as those of a palace.
We leave the road and pass into the forest proper – the old Sherwood Forest, sacred to the memory of Robin Hood and Little John and the merry monks of the olden time.
We enter Birkland. Saving those wondrous and ancient oaks that stand here and there, and look so weird and uncanny as almost to strike the beholder with awe, the forest is all new. Long straight broad avenues go in all directions through it. The ground on these is as level as a lawn, and just as soft and green. Here is the Shamble Oak. Its weirdlike arms are still green, though it is said to be 1,700 years old, and may be more. The trunk, round which twelve good strides will hardly take you, is sadly gutted by fire. Some boys set it alight in trying to smoke out a hornet’s hive. Here, in this oak, it is said, Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer, and, in more modern times, keepers and poachers used it as a larder.
A quaint and pretty log-hut à la Russe has recently been erected near the Shamble Oak. It is not yet furnished, but we found our way inside, the keeper in attendance here giving us great and impressive injunctions to wipe our feet and not step off the canvas. I wonder he did not bid us remove our shoes.
From the balcony of this log-hut one could have rabbit-shooting all day long, and pigeon-shooting in the evening. I hope no one ever will though.
We went home a different way, Mr Tebbet opening the double-padlocked gates for us. We passed the Parliament Tree, as it is called, where they tell us King John used to assemble his councillors. It is an oak still, a skeleton oak hung together by chains.
From the brow of a hill which we soon reached, we enjoyed a panorama, the like of which is not elsewhere to be seen in all broad England. From Howitt’s “Rural Life in England” I cull the following:
“Near Mansfield there remains a considerable wood, Harlowe Wood, and a fine scattering of old oaks near Berry Hill, in the same neighbourhood, but the greater part is now an open waste, stretching in a succession of low hills and long winding valleys, dark with heather. A few solitary and battered oaks standing here and there, the last melancholy remnants of these vast and ancient woods, the beautiful springs, swift and crystalline brooks, and broad sheets of water lying abroad amid the dark heath, and haunted by numbers of wild docks and the heron, still remain. But at the Clipstone extremity of the forest, a remnant of its ancient woodlands remains, unrifled, except of its deer – a specimen of what the whole once was, and a specimen of consummate beauty and interest. Birkland and Bilhaghe taken together form a tract of land extending from Ollerton along the side of Thoresby Park, the seat of Earl Manvers, to Clipstone Park, of about five miles in length, and one or two in width. Bilhaghe is a forest of oaks, and is clothed with the most impressive aspect of age that can perhaps be presented to the eye in these kingdoms… A thousand years, ten thousand tempests, lightnings, winds, and wintry violence have all flung their utmost force on these trees, and there they stand, trunk after trunk, scathed, hollow, grey, and gnarled, stretching out their bare sturdy arms on their mingled foliage and ruin – a life in death. All is grey and old. The ground is grey beneath – the trees are grey with clinging lichens – the very heather and fern that spring beneath them have a character of the past.
“But Bilhaghe is only half of the forest-remains here; in a continuous line with it lies Birkland – a tract which bears its character in its name – the land of birches. It is a forest perfectly unique. It is equally ancient with Bilhaghe, but it has a less dilapidated air. It is a region of grace and poetry. I have seen many a wood, and many a wood of birches, and some of them amazingly beautiful, too, in one quarter or another of this fair island, but in England nothing that can compare with this… On all sides, standing in their solemn steadfastness, you see huge, gnarled, strangely-coloured and mossed oaks, some riven and laid bare from summit to root with the thunderbolts of past tempests. An immense tree is called the Shamble Oak, being said to be the one in which Robin Hood hung his slaughtered deer, but which was more probably used by the keepers for that purpose. By whomsoever it was so used, however, there still remain the hooks within its vast hollow.”
But it is time to be up and off. We lay last night in Mr Tebbet’s private meadow. Had a long walk before I could secure a suitable place. But the place was eminently quiet and exceedingly private, near lawns and gardens and giant elms. The elm that grows near the pretty cemetery, in which haymakers were so busy this morning, is, with the exception of the oak at Newstead Abbey gates, the finest ever I have seen; and yet an old man died but recently in Mansfield workhouse who remembered the time he could bend it to the ground.
Warsop, which we reached over rough and stony roads and steepish hills, is a greystone village, the houses slated or tiled blue or red, a fine church on the hilltop among lordly trees, a graveyard on the brae beneath with a white pathway meandering up through it to the porch.
At the sixth milestone we reached a hilltop, from which we could see into several counties. Such a view as this is worth wandering leagues to look at. We watered the horses here, at the last of the Duke of Portland’s lodges.
Thou down hill again. How lovely the little village of Cuckney looks down there, its crimson houses shimmering through the trees! We bought eggs at the inn called the Greendale Oak. There is a story attached to this oak which my reader has doubtless heard or read.
This is the land of oaks, and a smiling land too, a land of wealth and beauty, a great garden-land.
