AtNorthallerton we reach the junction of the alternative route, which, branching from the Selby and York itinerary, goes over difficult, but much more beautiful, country by way of Wetherby and Boroughbridge. The ways diverge at the northern extremity of Doncaster, and as both can equally claim to be an integral part of the Great North Road, it is necessary to go back these sixty-three miles to that town and explore the route. Beginning at a left-hand fork by the flat meadows that border the river Don, it comes in a mile to York Bar, a name recalling the existence of a turnpike-gate, whose disappearance so recently as 1879 seems to bring us strangely near old coaching days. The toll-house still stands, and with the little inn beyond, backed and surrounded by tall trees, forms a pleasant peep down the longflat road. “Red House,” nearly three miles onward, is plainly indicated by its flaring red-painted walls. Now a farmhouse, it was once a small coaching-inn principally concerned with the traffic along the Wakefield road, which branches off here to the left.
York Bar
Passing this, we come in two miles to Robin Hood’s Well, a group of houses by Skelbrooke Park, where at the “New Inn” and the “Robin Hood” many coaches changed horses daily, the passengers taking the opportunity of drinking from Robin Hood’s Well, a spring connected with that probably mythical outlaw, who is said to have met the Bishop of Hereford travelling along the road at this spot, and to have not only held him to heavy ransom, but to have compelled him to dance an undignified jig round an oak in Skelbrooke Park, on a spot still called (now the tree itself has disappeared) “Bishop’s Tree Root.” Among famoustravellers who have sipped of the crystal spring of Robin Hood’s Well is Evelyn, who journeyed this way in 1654. “Near it,” he says, “is a stone chaire; and an iron ladle to drink out of, chained to the seat.”
Robin Hood’s Well
Some fifty years later, the very ugly building that now covers the spring was erected by Vanbrugh for the Earl of Carlisle. It cannot be said to add much to the romantic associations of the place, but the efforts of the wayfarers, who in two centuries have carved every available inch of its surface with their names, render it a curious sight.
Here the road begins a long climb up to the spot where five ways meet, the broad left-hand road conducting into Leeds. This is, or was, Barnsdale Bar, where some of the local Leeds coaches branched from the Great North Road, the chief ones between London and Leeds continuing along this route as far as Peckfield Turnpike, five miles to the other side of Ferrybridge. Barnsdale Bar is, like all the other toll-bars, a thing of the past, but the old toll-housestill hides among the trees by the roadside. Beyond it the way lies along an exposed road high up on the hill-tops; a lonely stretch of country where it is a peculiarly ill mischance to be caught in a storm. Thence it plunges suddenly into the deep gorge of Went Bridge, where the little river Went goes with infantile fury among rocks and mossy boulders along a winding course thickly overhung with trees. The wooded sides of this narrow valley are picturesque in the highest degree, but were probably not highly appreciated by timid coach-passengers who, having been driven down the precipitous road at one side at the peril of their lives, were turned out by the guard to ease the toiling horses by walking up the corresponding ascent at the other. This is the prettiest spot in all “merry Barnsdale,” and anciently one of those most affected by Robin Hood. His very degenerate successors, the poachers and cut-throats of James the First’s time, found it a welcome harbourage and foregathered at the predecessor of the Old Blue Bell Inn, which was accordingly deprived of its license for some time. The old sign, bearing the date of 1633, when business was probably resumed, is still kept within the house, as the rhymed inscription on the modern one outside informs the passer-by:—
The Blae Bell on Wentbridge Hill,The old sign is existing stillInside the house.
The Blae Bell on Wentbridge Hill,The old sign is existing stillInside the house.
An old posting-inn, the “Bay Horse,” has long since reverted to the condition of a private house.
The road rising out of Went Bridge runs between the jagged rocks of a cutting made in the last years of the coaching age to lighten the pull up, but still it is a formidable climb. This is followed by a hollow where a few outlying houses of Darrington village are seen, and then the bleak high tableland is reached that has to be traversed before the road drops down into the valley of the Aire at Ferrybridge, that now dull and grimy town which bears no appearance ofhaving had an historic past. Yet Ferrybridge was the scene of the skirmish that heralded the battle of Towton, and stands in the midst of that mediæval cockpit of England, wherein for centuries so many rival factions contended together. Near by is Pontefract, in whose castle Richard the Second met a mysterious death, and not far off lies Wakefield. Towton Field itself lies along the Tadcaster route to York. In every direction blood has been shed, for White Rose or Red, for King or Parliament; but Ferrybridge is anything but romantic to the eye, however greatly its associations may appeal to the well-stored mind. Coal-mining and quarrying industries overlie these things. The place-name explains the situation of the townlet sufficiently well, and refers to the first building of a bridge over the old-time ferry by which wayfarers crossed the Aire to Brotherton, on the opposite bank. It is quite unknown when the first bridge was built, but one existed here in 1461, the year when Towton fight was fought. This was succeeded by a wooden structure, itself replaced by the present substantial stone bridge, built at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This was always a troublesome part of the road to keep in repair, as we may judge from old records. A forty days’ indulgence was granted by the Bishop of Durham early in the fourteenth century to the faithful who would contribute to the repair of the road between Ferrybridge and Brotherton, in these words:—“Persuaded that the minds of the faithful are more ready to attach themselves to pious works when they have received the salutary encouragement of fuller indulgences, trusting in the mercy of God Almighty and the merits and prayers of the glorious Virgin his Mother, of St. Peter, St. Paul, and of the most holy confessor Cuthbert, our patron, and of all saints, we remit forty days of the penances imposed on all our parishioners and others, sincerely contrite and confessed of their sins, who shall help by their charitable gifts, or by their bodily labour, in the building or in the maintenance of the causewaybetween Brotherton and Ferrybridge, where a great many people pass by.”
Let us hope that the pious, thus incited to the commission of good works, responded. It was a more serious matter, however, in later ages, when a great many more people passed by, and when road-surveyors, unable to dispense these ghostly favours, repaired the roads only at the pecuniary expense of the ratepayers. These Yorkshire streams, the Aire, the Wharfe, and many others, descending from the high moorlands, develop an extraordinary force in times of flood, and have often destroyed half the communications of these districts. Such was the havoc wrought in 1795 that many of the bridges were washed away and great holes made in the roads. Three bridges on this road between Doncaster and Ferrybridge disappeared. With such perils threatened, travellers deserved to be comfortably housed when they lay by for the night. And comfort was the especial feature of these inns.
The most luxurious inn and posting-house in the north of England was held to be the “Swan” at Ferrybridge; “in 1737 and since the best inn upon the great northern road,” according to Scott. However that may have been, certainly the “Angel” at Ferry-bridge was the largest. Both, however, have long since been given up. The many scattered buildings of the “Angel” have become private houses, and the “Swan,” empty for many years past, is falling into a roofless ruin by the riverside. Innkeeping was no mean trade in those times, especially when allied with the proprietorship of horses and coaches. Thus, in the flower of the coaching age, the “Angel” was in the hands of a medical man, a certain Dr. Alderson, the son of a local clergyman, who actually found time to attend properly to his practice and to conduct the business of a licensed victualler and coach-proprietor. He thought it not derogatory to his social position to be “mine host,” and he certainly made many friends by his enterprise. Ferrybridge, as the branching-offplace of yet another Great North Road route—the Tadcaster route to York—was a very busy coaching centre, and besides the two inns mentioned there were the “Greyhound” and the “Golden Lion.” The last-named was especially the drovers’ house. Drovers were a great feature of the road in these old days, and their flocks and herds an unmitigated nuisance to all other travellers. Uncouth creatures from Scotland, they footed it all the way to London with their beasts, making their twenty miles a day; their sheep and cattle often numerous enough to occupy a whole mile of road, and raising dust-clouds dense enough to choke a whole district. It was, at the pace they went, a three weeks’ journey from the far north to London and the fat cattle that started on the four hundred miles walk must, with these efforts, have become the leanest of kine on arrival at Smithfield.
The “Old Fox” inn, which still stands on the other side of the river at Brotherton, was also a drovers’ place of call. It stands at the actual fork of the roads, eleven miles from Tadcaster, and twenty from York. The Edinburgh mail originally ran this way, finally changing to the Selby route, while the “Highflyer” and “Wellington,” London and Edinburgh and London and Newcastle, coaches kept on it until the end in 1840; but it was chiefly crowded with the cross-country coach traffic, which was a very heavy one.
The places are few and uninteresting on these twenty miles into York; Sherburn and Tadcaster—that town of ales—the chief of them; while the tiny godless village of Towton, without a church, on the way, is disappointing to the pilgrim, eager to see it for the sake of its association with the great battle. The road skirts the eastern side of that tragic field, after passing the hamlet of Barkston Ash.
Thebattle of Towton, March 29, 1461, was the bloodiest ever fought on English ground, the slain on both sides in that desperate fight and in the skirmishes at Ferrybridge and Dintingdale amounting to more than 30,000 men. The events that had preceded it were alternately cheering and depressing to the hopes of the Yorkists, who had been defeated with great slaughter at Wakefield on the last day but one of the previous December, had gained the important victory of Mortimer’s Cross on the 2nd of February, and had been defeated again at the second battle of St. Albans on the 17th of the same month; and although on March 4th the young Duke of York had entered London and assumed the crown as Edward the Fourth, the Lancastrians still held the Midlands and, lying at York, interposed a bold front against an advance. It was a singular position. The Lancastrians had their headquarters at the city from which their opponents took their title, and two kings of England, equally matched in power, animated their respective adherents with the utmost loyalty.
After their victory at St. Albans the Lancastrians, exhausted, had retired to York, the south being as dangerous to a Lancastrian army as the north, loyal to the Red Rose, was to the Yorkists. The Yorkists, on their part, eager to enter London, did not pursue their rivals. Both sides required breathing time, for events had marched too rapidly in the past two months for the pace to be maintained. Still, the Yorkists were in force, three weeks later, at Pontefract, and threatening to cross the Aire at Ferrybridge, a strategic point on their contemplated line of advance to the city of York. It was here, early in the morning of the 28th, that the bloody prelude to the battle opened, in a sudden Lancastrian attack on the Yorkist outpost. Lord Fitzwalter, the Yorkist commander, lay asleep in bed atthe time. Seizing a pole-axe at his sudden awakening, he was slain almost instantly, but his force, succeeding in driving the enemy across the river, took up a position at Brotherton, the Lancastrians falling back in disorder to Dintingdale, near Barkston Ash, where, later in the day, the Lancastrian, Lord Clifford, was slain by an arrow.
Map of Battlefield of Towton and Surrounding Country
The advance-guard of the Lancastrian army now fell back upon the main body, which took up a well-chosen position between the villages of Saxton and Towton, lying across a rising road which led out of the former place, and having on its right the steeply falling meadows leading down into the deep depression ofTowton Dale, where the Cock Beck still wanders in far-flung loops in the flat lands below. On their left the ground stretched away for some distance and then fell gently towards the flats of Church Fenton.
Saxton
At their rear the road descended steeply again into Towton, while Tadcaster lay three miles and York eleven miles beyond. It was a position of great strength and one that could only possibly be turned from the left. The fatal defect of it lay in the chance, in the case of defeat, of the beaten army being disorganised by a retreat down so steep a road, leading as it did to the crossing of a stream swollen with winter rains.
In visiting this spot, we must bear in mind that the broad road from Ferrybridge to Tadcaster and York was not then in existence. The way lay across the elevated land which, rising from Barkston Ash towards Saxton, reaches to a considerable height between that village and Towton. From this commanding spot the valleys of the Wharfe and Ouse lie plainly unfolded,and the towers of York itself may be seen on the skyline, on the verge of this wide expanse of meadows and woodlands.
The hedgerows on the way to the battle-field are remarkable for the profusion of briar roses that grow here in place of the more usual blackberry brambles and thorns, and Bloody Meadow, the spot where the thickest of the fight took place, was until quite recently thickly overgrown with the red and white roses with which Nature had from time immemorial planted this scene of strife. Latterly they have all been grubbed up by farmers, keener on the purity of their grasslands than on historic associations.
Towton Dale
The main body of the Yorkists, advancing to Saxton, opened the attack on the Lancastrians early in the morning of Palm Sunday, the 29th. The centre of the fight was in the meadow on the left hand of the road leading towards Towton, a short distance beyond Towton Dale quarry. The Lancastrians numbered 60,000 men, the Yorkists 48,600. For ten hours the furious encounter raged, “sore fought, for hope of lifewas set aside on every part.” Six years’ warfare, from 1455, when the first battle of St. Albans had been fought, had rendered the enemies implacable. Almost every combatant had already lost kinsfolk, and intense hatred caused the order on both sides that no quarter was to be given and no prisoners taken. The day was bitterly cold, and snowstorms swept the upland, driving in the faces of the Lancastrians with such blinding fury that their arrows, shot in reply to the Yorkist volleys, could not be properly aimed, and so missed their mark. A hand-to-hand encounter with swords and battle-axes then followed, obstinately fought, but resulting practically in the butchery of the Lancastrians, for nearly the half of their whole force were slain or met their death either in Towton Dale or at the crossing of the stream down the road past Towton Hall. The rest fled to Tadcaster and on to York, where Henry the Sixth, the Queen, and the young Prince of Wales were waiting the result of the fight. They left immediately, and the victorious Duke of York entered the ancient city.
Many proud nobles fell that day with the men-at-arms; among others, Lord Dacre, fighting for the Red Rose, shot by a boy concealed in what the country people call a “bur-tree,” that is to say, an elder. He lies buried in the churchyard of Saxton, on the north side of the church, under a much-mutilated altar-tomb, whose inscription refers to him as “verus miles”—a true knight. Tradition yet tells of his death, in the local rhyme:—
The Lord of DacresWas slain in the North Acres,
The Lord of DacresWas slain in the North Acres,
fields still known by that name. Many grave mounds remain in Bloody Meadow, where a rude cross leans, half hidden under a tangled hedge; and in 1848, during some excavations in Saxton churchyard, a stratum of bones, four feet in thickness, was exposed, the poor relics of those who fell in the great fight. Others still are said to have been buried in the littlechapel of Lead, a mile away, by the banks of the Cock, whose stream ran red that day. A few stones at the back of Towton Hall mark the place where a votive chapel was erected, where prayers might be said for the souls of the dead, whose numbers on both sides are said by one authority to have reached 36,776.
Lead Chapel
Relics have been found on the battle-field. Many years ago a wandering antiquary found a farmer’s wife breaking sugar with a battle-axe discovered in the river. She did not know what it was, but he did, and secured it. It is now at Alnwick Castle. In 1785 was found a gold ring which had belonged to the Earl of Northumberland, who was carried mortally wounded from the field. It weighs an ounce, and bears the Percy Lion, with inscription, “Now ys thus.” Another interesting and pathetic find was a spur, engraved with “En loial amour, tout mon coer,” the relic of some unknown knight.
Itis a wild, weird kind of country upon which we enter, on the way from Brotherton to Aberford and the North. Away to the left suddenly opens a widevalley, in an almost sheer drop from the road, looking out upon illimitable perspectives. Then comes Fairburn, followed by what used to be Peckfield Turnpike, where the “Boot and Shoe” inn stands at the fork of the roads, and where the Leeds and London “Royal Mail,” “Rockingham,” and “Union Post” coaches turned off. Micklefield, two miles beyond, approached by a fine avenue of elms, is an abject coal-mining village, and hauling-gear, smoke, and the inky blackness of the roads emphasise the fact, even if the marshalled coal-wagons on the railway did not give it insistence. Coming up the craggy rise out of Micklefield and its coal, on to Hook Moor, one of the finest stretches of the road,quâroad, brings the traveller past the lodge-gates of Parlington Park and the oddly ecclesiastical-looking almshouses beyond, down into the stony old village of Aberford, which lies in a depression on the Cock Beck. Beyond the village, on journeying towards it, one sees the long straight white road ascending the bastioned heights of windy Bramham Moor; and the sight clinches any half-formed inclination to rest awhile at Aberford before climbing to that airy eminence.
Aberford still seems to be missing its old posting and coaching traffic, and to be awaiting the return of the days when the Carlisle and Glasgow mail changed at the “Swan,” a fine old inn, now much shrunken from its original state. Stone-quarrying and the neighbouring coal-mines keep the village from absolutely decaying; but it still lives in the past. The picturesque old settles and yawning fireplaces of the “Swan,” and of that oddly-named inn, the “Arabian Horse,” eloquent of the habits of generations ago, survive to show us what was the accommodation those old inns provided. If more primitive, it was heartier, and a great deal more comfortable than that of modern hotels.
By the churchyard wall stands part of the old Market Cross, discovered by the roadside and set up here in 1911; with the “Plague Stone” in whose water-filled hollow purchasers placed their money, so that the sellers might not risk infection.
A ruined windmill of strange design, perched on the hillside road behind the village, is the best point whence to gain an idea of the country in midst of which Aberford is set. It is boldly undulating country, hiding in the folds of its hills many old-world villages. Chief among them, two miles off the road, is Barwick-in-Elmete—i.e.in the elm country—with its prehistoric mounds and the modern successor of an ancient maypole, set up in the village street by the cross, presented in May 1898 by Major-General Gascoigne, of Parlington Park.
Ruined Mill, Overlooking Aberford
The road two miles out of Aberford reaches that home of howling winds, that most uncomfortable and undesirable place, Bramham Moor. Here, where the Bramham Moor inn stands at the crossing of the Leeds and York road, a considerable traffic enlivened the way until eighty years ago. Since that time the broad roadways in either direction have been empty, except when the hounds meet here in the hunting season, when, for a brief hour, old times seem come again. It was along this cross-road that “Nimrod,”that classic coaching authority, travelled in 1827, his eagle eye engaged in criticism of the Yorkshire provincial coaches.
Barwick-in-Elmete
The rustical driver of the Leeds to York stage, happily, did not know who his passenger was. Let us hope he never saw the criticism of himself, his coach and horses, and everything that was his, which appeared shortly afterwards in theSporting Magazine. Everything, says “Nimrod,” was inferior. The man who drove (he scorns, you see, to call him a coachman) wasmore like a Welsh drover than anything else. The day was cold, but he had neither gloves, boots, nor gaiters. However, he conducted the coach only a ten miles’ stage, and made up with copious libations of gin for the lack of warm clothing. On the way he fell to bragging with his box-seat passenger of the hair’s-breadth escapes he had experienced when driving one of the Leeds to London opposition coaches; and “Nimrod,” complimenting him on the skill he must have shown on those occasions, he proceeded to give a taste of his quality, which resulted in his getting the reins clubbed and a narrow escape from being overturned. “Nimrod” soon had enough of it, and at the first opportunity pretended to be ill and went inside, as being the least dangerous place. Arriving at Tadcaster, ten miles from York, the door was opened, and “Please to remember the coachman” tingled in the ears of the passengers. “What now,” asked “Nimrod,” “are you going no farther?” “No, sir, but ah’s goes back at night,” was the Yorkshireman’s answer. “Then you follow some trade here, of course?” continued the great coaching expert. “No, sir,” said a bystander, “he has got his horses to clean.” Fancy a coachman, even if only of that inferior kind, who could not be called anything better than “the man who drove,”—fancy a coachman seeing to his own horses. “Nimrod” was properly shocked at this, and with memories of coaching nearer London, with stables and yards full of ostlers and helpers, and the coachmen, their drinking done, flirting with the Hebes of the bar, could only say, with a gasp, “Oh! that’s the way your Yorkshire coaching is done, is it?”
He then saw his fellow-passengers pull out sixpence each and give it to the driver, who was not only satisfied, but thankful. This also was a novelty. Coachmen were, in his experience, tipped with florins and half-crowns, nor even then did they exhibit symptoms of thankfulness, but took the coin as of right. “What am I to do?” “Nimrod” asked himself; “I never gave a coachman sixpence yet, andI shall not begin that game to-day.” So he “chucked” him a “bob,” which brought the fellow’s hat down to the box of the fore-wheel in gratitude.
With a fresh team and another driver the journey was continued to York. About half-way, the coach stopped at a public-house, in the old style; the driver got down, the gin bottle was produced, and, looking out of the window, “Nimrod” was surprised to see the man whom he had thought was left behind at Tadcaster. “What, are you here?” he asked. “Why, yes,” answered the man; “’tis market-day at York, and ah’s wants to buy a goose or two.” “Ah,” observed “Nimrod,” “I thought you were a little in the huckstering line.”
Bramham Moorleads down into Bramham village, past the Park, where a ruined manor-house, destroyed by fire, stands amid formal gardens and looks tragical. The place wears the aspect of romance, and seems an ideal home for the ideal Wicked Squire of Early Victorian novels. Lord Bingley, who built it and laid out the grounds in the time of Queen Anne, was not more wicked than the generality of his contemporaries, but here are all the “properties” with which those novelists surrounded the cynical deceivers of innocence, who stalked in inky cloaks, curly hats, and tasselled riding-boots through their gory pages. Here is Lord Bingley’s Walk, an avenue of gigantic beeches where he did not meet the trustful village maiden, as he ought to have done, by all the rules; here also is the obelisk at the suggestively named Blackfen, whence twelve avenues diverge—where no tattered witch ever cursed him, so far as can be ascertained. Lord Bingley evidently did not live up to the possibilities of the place, or of his station, nor did those who came after him, for no horrid legend is narrated with bated breath in Bramham village, which lies huddled together in thehollow below the park, the world forgetting, and by the world forgot, ever since that leap year, 1408, when on the 29th of February the Earl of Northumberland, rebelling against Henry the Fourth, was defeated and slain by Sir Thomas Rokeby at the battle of Bramham Moor.
Moor End
Rising steeply out of Bramham and coming to the crest at Moor End, where the road descends long and continuously to Wetherby and the river Wharfe, we come to what used to be regarded as the half-way town between London and Edinburgh. The exact spot, where a milestone told the same tale on either face, is, in fact, one mile north, where the “Old Fox” inn stands. This was, of course, the most noted landmark on the long road, and the drovers who journeyed past it never failed to look in at the “Old Fox” and “wet their whistles,” to celebrate the completion of half their task. At Wetherby itself the “Angel” arrogated the title of “half-way house,” and was the principal coaching inn. It still stands, like its rival, the “Swanand Talbot,” smaller than of yore, the larger portion of its stables now converted into cottages. At the “Angel” the down London and Glasgow mail dined, with an hour to spare; the up coach hurrying through to its change at Aberford. Wetherby was a change for the stage-coaches, which ran the whole seventeen miles to Ferrybridge with the same teams; a cruelly long and arduous stretch for the horses.
Nineveh
This is a hard-featured, stony town; still, as of old, chiefly concerned with cattle-raising and cattle-dealing, and crowded on market-days with farmers and drovers driving bargains or swearing at the terrified efforts of beasts and sheep to find their way into the shops and inns. Down on the southern side of the town runs the romantic Wharfe, between rocky banks, hurrying in swirling eddies towards its confluence with the Ouse, below Tadcaster; and on to the north goes the road, through the main street, on past the conspicuous spire of Kirk Deighton church, coming in three miles to Walshford, where a bridge crosses the rocky, tree-embowered Nidd, and that old posting-house, the comfortable-looking “Walshford Bridge Inn,” stands slightly back from the road, looking like a private mansion gone diffidently into business.
Beyond Walshford Bridge the road turns suddenly to the left, and, crossing the railway at lonely Allerton station, passes a substantial red-brick farmhouse which looks as if it has seen very different days. And indeed it has, for this was once the “New Inn,” a changing-place for the mails. Now on the right comes the long wall of Allerton Park, and presently there rises ahead that strange mound known by the equally strange name of Nineveh, a tree-crowned hill, partly artificial, girdled with prehistoric earthworks, and honeycombed with the graves of the forgotten tribes, to whom it was probably at once a castle, a temple, and a cemetery. The road onward to Boroughbridge is, indeed, carried over a Roman way, which itself probably superseded the tracks of those vanished people, and led to what is now the village of Aldborough near Boroughbridge,once that great Roman city of Isurium which rivalled York itself, and now yields inexhaustible building-stones for modern cottages, and relics that bring the life of those ancients in very close touch with that of our own time: oyster-shells and oyster knives, pomatum-pots, pins, and the hundred little articles in daily use now and fifteen hundred years ago.
Boroughbridge was originally the settlement founded by the Saxons near the ruined and deserted city of Isurium. Afraid of the bogies and evil spirits with which their dark superstitions peopled the ruins, they dared not live there, but built their abiding-place by the river Ure, where the mediæval, but now modernised, village of Boroughbridge stood, and where the bridge built by Metcalf, the blind road- and bridge-maker, over a century ago spans the weedy stream in useful but highly unornamental manner. The battle of Boroughbridge, fought in 1322, is almost forgotten, and coaching times have left their impress upon the town instead. The two chief coaching inns, the “Crown” and the “Greyhounds,” still face one another in the dull street; the “Greyhounds” a mere ghost of its former self, the “Crown” larger, but its stables, where a hundred horses found a shelter, now echoing in their emptiness to the occasional footfall. Oddly enough a medical practitioner, a Dr. Hugh Stott, was landlord of the “Crown” for more than fifty years. Probably he and the landlord of the “Angel” at Ferrybridge were the only two inn-keeping doctors in the kingdom. The “Crown” was anciently the home of the Tancreds, a county family owning property in the neighbourhood: the “Greyhounds” obtains its curious plural from the heraldic shield of the Mauleverers, which displays three greyhounds, “courant.” Hotel accommodation was greatly in request at Boroughbridge in the old days; for from this point branched many roads. Here the Glasgow coaches turned off, and a number of coaches for Knaresborough, Ripon, Harrogate, and the many towns of south-west Yorkshire. The “Edinburgh Express,” which went by way of Glasgow, also passedthrough. Boroughbridge was a busy coaching town, so that ruin, stark, staring, and complete fell upon it when railways came.
The remaining nineteen miles to Northallerton scarce call for detailed description. Kirkby Hill, a mile out of Boroughbridge, lies to the left, its church-tower just within sight. This is followed by the unutterably dull, lifeless, and ugly village of Dishforth, leading to the hamlet of Asenby, where the road descends to the picturesque crossing of the Swale and the Cod Beck, with the village of Topcliffe crowning the ridge on the other side: a village better looking, but as lifeless as the others. Thence flat or gently undulating roads conduct in twelve miles to Northallerton, past Busby Stoop Inn, the villages of Sand Hutton, Newsham, and North and South Otterington.
South Otterington lives with a black mark in the memory of antiquaries as that benighted place where the parishioners thought so little of their church registers some years ago that they allowed the parish clerk to treat all the old ones, dating from before the eighteenth century, as so much waste-paper; some of them making an excellent bonfire to singe a goose with. They were not singular in this respect, for churchwardens of different places have been known to do the most extraordinary things with these valuable documents. Thoresby, the antiquary, writing of a particular register, remarks that “it has not been a plaything for young pointers. It has not occupied a bacon-cratch or a bread-and-cheese cupboard. It has not been scribbled on, within and without,” from which we infer that that was the common fate, and that others had been so treated.
The junction of the two main routes of the Great North Road at Northallerton takes place ignominiously outside the goods station at a level-crossing.
The Edinburgh Express, 1837. After Jason Pollard
Thealternative route now described and Northallerton regained by it, we may resume the long journey to Edinburgh. It is the completest kind of change from the wild ups and downs of the Boroughbridge and Wetherby route to the long featureless stretches that now lie before us. We will not linger in the town, but press onward to where the battle of the Standard, as the battle of Northallerton is often known, was fought, on the right-hand side of the road, near the still unenclosed fragments of Cowton Moor. It was not a great struggle, for the Scots fled after a short resistance, and the great numbers of their slain met their fate rather at the hands of the peasantry, while fleeing through a hostile country, than in combat with the English army.
Standing amid the heathy tussocks of Standard Hill, looking over the Moor, the wide-spreading hill and dale of the Yorkshire landscape fades into a blue or misty distance, and must in its solitude look much the same as it did in those far distant days. Nothing save the name of the hillock and that of the farm called Scot Pits, traditionally said to have been the place where the Scottish dead were buried, remains to tell of the struggle. “Baggamoor,” as old chroniclers call the battle-field, from the baggage thrown away by the Scots in their flight, is traversed by the road, which proceeds by way of Oak Tree and Lovesome Hills to Great Smeaton, where the mails changed horses on the short seven miles’ stage between it and Northallerton, or the nine miles to Darlington. The “Blacksmith’s Arms” was in those times the coaching inn here, but it has long since been converted into cottages. William Tweedie, the last of a succession of three Tweedies who kept the “Blacksmith’s Arms” and owed their prosperity to the mails changing at their house, was also the village postmaster. A God-fearing man and an absent-minded, it is recorded of him that during asermon at the parish church he was surprised in the midst of one of his mental absences by hearing the preacher enlarge upon the text of “Render unto Cæsar.” “Ay,” he said, in a loud voice, when the duty of paying the king’s taxes and just demands was brought home to the congregation, “that puts me in mind o’t: there’s old Granny Metcalf’s bin owin’ the matter o’ eightpence on a letter these two months past.”
Now Widow Metcalfhadpaid that eightpence. She was in church, too. The suddenness of the unjust accusation made her forget time and place, and she retorted with, “William Tweedie, y’re a liar!”
One has a distinct suspicion that by “Lowsey Hill, a small Village contiguous on the Left” (but a place so-named would more properly have been “contagious”) mentioned here by Ogilby, he must have meant what is now Lovesome Hill.
The old coach passengers, driving through, or changing at, Great Smeaton must have often wondered, seeing the smallness of the place, what size the neighbouring Little Smeaton, away off to the left, could have been. Their inquiries on that head were usually answered by the coachmen, who were wags of sorts, that Little Smeaton consisted of one dog-kennel and two hen-coops. It is a lonely road between Northallerton and Darlington, and quips of this kind probably tasted better when administered on the spot than they do to the armchair traveller. Particularly lonely is High Entercommon, where a turnpike-gate stood in the days that are done, together with an inn, the “Golden Lion,” where a few coaches which made a longer stage from Northallerton changed. Were it not that William Thompson, landlord at the best period in the history of coaching, was a highly reputable person, and had been coachman to Sir Bellingham Graham before he set up as innkeeper, we might point to the house and say how suitable a locality for the secret roadside crimes of old, of which novelists delight to tell! Roads, and travelling before railways, used to set the romancists busily engaged in spinning the mostblood-curdling stories of villainous innkeepers who, like Bob Acres, kept “churchyards of their own,” and murderous trap-doors in their guest-rooms giving upon Golgothas filled with the bones of their many victims. If one might credit these astounding stories, the inns that were not murder-shops were few and far between; but happily those writers, anxious only to make your blood creep, were as a rule only exercising their particularly gory imaginations.
A story of this order is that of a lady who set out in her carriage to visit some friends in Yorkshire. She had come to within thirty miles of her destination, when a thunderstorm which had been threatening broke violently overhead. Struggling against the elements, the coachman was glad to espy an old-fashioned roadside inn presently visible ahead, and, his mistress expressing a wish to alight and rest until the storm should abate, he drove up to the door. It was a wild and solitary spot (they always are in these stories, and it is astonishing how solitary and wild they are, and how many such places appeared to exist). The rusty sign creaked dismally overhead, and the window-shutters flapped violently in the wind on their broken hinges; altogether it was not an inviting spot. But any port in a storm, and so the lady alighted. She was shown into a large old-fashioned apartment, and the horses and carriage were stabled until such time as it might be possible to resume the journey. But, instead of passing off, the storm grew momentarily worse. Calling her servant she asked him if it were possible to continue that night, and on his replying in the negative, reluctantly resigned herself to staying under a strange roof. She had her dinner in solitary state, and then found all the evening before her, with nothing to occupy the time. She went to the window and looked out upon the howling storm, and, tired of that uninviting prospect, gazed listlessly about the room. It was a large room, ill-furnished, and somewhat out of repair, for the inn had seen its best days. Evidences of a more prosperous time were left in the shape ofsome scattered articles of furniture of a superior kind and in the presence of a curious piece of ancient tapestry facing her on the opposite wall, bearing a design of a life-sized Roman warrior wielding a truncheon.
But one cannot spend all the evening in contemplating the old chairs and moth-eaten tapestry of a half-furnished room, and the storm-bound traveller soon wearied of those objects. With nothing else to do, she took out her purse and began to count her money and to calculate her travelling expenses. Having counted the guineas over several times and vainly tried to make the total balance properly with her expenditure and the amount she had set out with, she chanced involuntarily to glance across the room. Her gaze fell upon the stern visage of the helmeted Roman, and to her horror the lack-lustre tapestry eyes were now replaced by living ones, intently regarding her and her money. Ninety-nine of every hundred women would have screamed or fainted, or have done both; but our traveller was evidently the hundredth. She calmly allowed her gaze to wander absent-mindedly away to the ceiling, as if still speculating as to the disposition of the missing odd guineas; and then, exclaiming, “Ah! I have it,” made for the door, to call her servant, leaving her purse, apparently disregarded, on the table. In the passage outside she met the landlord, who desired to know what it might be she wanted. “To see my man, with orders for the morning,” said she. The landlord shuffled away, and her servant presently appeared. She told him what she had observed, and mounting upon the furniture, he examined the tapestry, with the result that he found the wall behind it sound enough in all places, with the exception of the eyes. On pressing the fabric at those points it gave way, disclosing a hole bored through the wall and communicating with some other room. This discovery of course aroused the worst suspicions; but the storm still raged, it was now late, and to countermand the accommodation already secured for the nightwould be to apprise the landlord of something having been discovered. There was nothing for it but to stay the night. To sleep was impossible, and so the lady, retiring to her bedroom, securely bolting the door, and assuring herself that no secret panel or trap-door existed, sat wakefully in a chair all night. Doubtless the servant did the same, although the story does not condescend to details where he is concerned. At length morning came, without anything happening, and, equally without incident, they set out after breakfast from this place of dread, the lady having previously ascertained that the room on the other side of the wall behind the tapestry was the landlord’s private apartment.
These adventures being afterwards recounted, it was called to mind that an undue proportion of highway robberies had for some time past been occurring in the immediate neighbourhood of the inn, and a queer story was remembered of a traveller who had stayed there overnight being robbed soon after leaving by a highwayman, who, without any preliminary parley, desired him to instantly take off his right boot—the boot in which, as a matter of fact, he had stowed away his money. The highwayman, who evidently had been informed of this secret hiding-place, extracted the coin, and, returning the boot, went on his way. It afterwards appeared that the traveller had stowed his money in his boot while under the impression that he was alone in the tapestry-room. He had reckoned without the Centurion.
The inn of course fell into evil repute, and the landlord was soon afterwards compelled to give up business. But the provoking part of it all, from the point of view of the historian, is that the story does not descend to topographical particulars, and that the description of the place as being in Yorkshire is necessarily of the vaguest, considering the vastness of the shire.
Dalton-upon-Tees, three miles onward from High and Low Entercommon, shows little to the passer-by on the Great North Road, who, a mile beyond its scattered cottages, looking as though they had lost themselves, comes to Croft, to the river Tees, and to the end of Yorkshire. It behoves one to speak respectfully of Croft and its Spa, for its waters are as nasty as those of Harrogate, with that flavour of rotten eggs so highly approved by the medical profession, and only the vagaries of fashion can be held accountable for the comparative neglect of the one and the favouring of the other. Sulphur renders both equally nauseous and healthful, but Croft finds few votaries compared with its great and successful rival, and a gentle melancholy marks the spot, where, on the Yorkshire bank, the mouldy-looking Croft Spa Hotel fronts the road, its closed assembly rooms, where once the merry crowds foregathered, given over to damp and mildew.
Croft is in the Hurworth Hunt, and it is claimed by local folk that the Hurworth Country was indicated by “Handley Cross,” where Jorrocks and his cronies chased the fox and enjoyed themselves so vigorously. The Spa Hotel was then a place of extremely high jinks. Every night there would be a dinner-party, with much competition as to who could drink the most port or champagne. The test of the sturdiest fellow was to see who could manage to place on his head a champagne or port bottle and lie down and stand up with it still in place. Few reputations, or bottles, survived that ordeal.
But Croft is a pretty place, straggling on both the Yorkshire and Durham banks of the Tees; with a fine old church commanding the approach from the south. It is worth seeing, alike for its architecture; for a huge and preposterous monument of one of the Milbankes of Halnaby; and especially for theextravagantly-arrogant manorial pew of that family, erected in the chancel, and elevated in the likeness of two canopied thrones approached by an elaborate staircase and over a crimson carpet. This pompous structure dates from about 1760. The thing would not be credible, did not we know to what extent the pride and presumption of the old squirearchy sometimes went.
Croft Bridge
A sturdy old Gothic bridge here carries the road across the stream into the ancient Palatinate of Durham. It were here that each successive Prince-Bishop of that see was met and presented with the falchion that slew the Sockburn Worm, one of the three mythical monsters that are said to have infested Durham and Northumberland. Like the Lambton Worm, and the Laidly—that is to say, the Loathly—Worm of Spindleston Heugh, the Sockburn terror, according to mediæval chroniclers, was a “monstrous and poysonous vermine or wyverne, aske or werme which overthrew and devoured many people in fight, for ytye sent of yepoyson was so strong ytnoe p’son might abyde it.” The gallant knight who at some undetermined period slew this legendary pest was Sir John Conyers, descended from Roger de Conyers, Constable of Durham Castle in the time of William the Conqueror. The family held the manor ofSockburn by the curious tenure of presenting the newly appointed Bishop Palatine of Durham on his first entry into his diocese with the falchion that slew the Worm. The presentation was made on Croft Bridge, with the words:—“My Lord Bishop, I here present you with the falchion wherewith the champion Conyers slew the worm, dragon, or fiery flying serpent which destroyed man, woman and child; in memory of which the king then reigning gave him the manor of Sockburn, to hold by this tenure, that upon the first entrance of every bishop into the county the falchion should be presented.” Taking the falchion into his hand, the bishop immediately returned it, wishing the owner of Sockburn health, long life, and prosperity, and the ceremony was concluded. Sockburn, seven miles below Croft, on the Durham shore of the Tees, is no longer owned by that old heroic family, for the proud stock which in its time had mated with the noblest in England decayed, and the last Conyers, Sir Thomas, died a pauper in Chester-le-Street workhouse in 1810. The manor-house of Sockburn has long since been swept away, and the old church is a roofless ruin, the estate itself having long since passed to the Blackett family, in whose possession the wondrous falchion now remains. The bishops of Durham, no longer temporal princes, do not now receive it, the last presentation having been made to Bishop Van Mildert by the steward of Sir Edward Blackett in 1826.
Sockburn FalchionCroft Bridge, a massive and venerable-looking stone structure of seven arches, built in 1676, is itself the successor of a much older building, referred to in a Royal Brief of 1531 as being “the moste directe and sure waye and passage for the King o’er SoveraigneLorde’s armie and ordyn’ce to resort and pass over into the north p’tes and marches of this his reaulme, for the surtie and defence of the same againste the invasion of the Scotts and others his enemyes, over which such armys and ordyn’ces hathe hertofor always bene accostomyed to goo and passe.”
Here we are in Durham, and three miles from Darlington. Looking backwards on crossing the bridge, the few scattered houses of the hither shore are seen beside the way; one of them, the “Cornet” hotel, with a weather-beaten picture-sign of the famous pedigree bull of that name, and the inscription, “‘Comet,’ sold in 1810 for one thousand guineas.” The Tees goes on its rippling way through the pointed arches of the historic bridge, with broad shingly beaches over against the rich meadows, the road pursuing its course to cross that rival stream, the Skerne, at Oxneyfield Bridge, a quarter of a mile ahead. Close by, in a grass meadow to the right of the road, are the four pools called by the terrific name of “Hell’s Kettles,” which testify by the sulphureous taste of their water to the quality of Croft Spa. Of course, they have their wonderful legends; Ogilby in 1676 noted that. “At Oxenhall,” he says, “are three Pits call’d Hell-kettles, whereof the vulgar tell you many fabulous stories.” They have long been current, then; the first telling how on Christmas Day 1179 the ground rose to the height of the highest hills, “higher than the spires and towers of the churches, and so remained at that height from nine of the morning until sunset. At the setting of the sun the earth fell in with so horrid a crash that all who saw that strange mound and heard its fall were so amazed that for very fear many died, for the earth swallowed up that mound, and where it stood was a deep pool.” This circumstantial story was told by an abbot of Jervaulx, but is not sufficiently marvellous for the peasantry, who account for the pool by a tale of supernatural intervention. According to this precious legend, the farmer owning the field being about to carry his hay on June 11, St. Barnabas’Day, it was pointed out that he had much better attend to his religious duties than work on the anniversary of the blessed saint, whereupon he replied:—
Barnaby yea, Barnaby nay,I’ll hae my hay, whether God will or nay:
Barnaby yea, Barnaby nay,I’ll hae my hay, whether God will or nay:
and, the ground opening, he and his carts and horses were instantly swallowed up. The tale goes on to say that, given a fine day and clear water, the impious farmer and his carts and horses may yet be seen floating deep down in these supposedly fathomless pools! De Foe, however, travelling this way in 1724, is properly impatient of these tales. “’Tis evident,” says he, “they are nothing but old coal-pits, filled with water by the river Tees.”
Darlington, to which we now come, is a very busy, very prosperous, very much rebuilt town, nursing a sub-Metropolitan swagger of architectural pretension in its chief streets infinitely unlike anything expected by the untravelled in these latitudes. There is a distinctly Holloway Road—plus Whitechapel Road—and Kennington Lane air about Darlington which does but add to the piquancy of those streets. Tumbledown houses of no great age and no conceivable interest are shouldered by flaunting shops; or rather, to speak by the card, by “stores” and “emporia”; these alternating with glittering public-houses and restaurants. The effect can be paralleled only by imagining a typical general servant dressed in a skirt and train for a Queen’s Drawing Room, with ploughboy’s boots, a cloth jacket, and ostrich-feathered hat to complete the costume. It is a town only now beginning to realise that prosperity must make some outward show of the fact, and it is accordingly going in for show in whole-hearted fashion, and emerging from the grime in which James the First found it in 1617. “Darneton!”he said when told its name; “I think it’s Darneton th’ Dirt.” Dirty indeed it must have been for James, fresh from his own capital, where they flung their sewage from the windows into the streets, to have found it remarkable. De Foe, fifty years later, said, “Darlington, a post-town, has nothing remarkable in it but dirt, and a high bridge over little or no water.” An odd contemporary commentary upon this seems to lurk in the fact that cloth was then brought to Darlington from all parts—even from Scotland—to be bleached!
More akin to those times than these are the names of the streets, which, like those of York, are chiefly “gates”:—High Northgate, Skinnergate, Bondgate, Blackwellgate, and Priestgate.
In vain will the pilgrim seek the “Black Bear,” the inn at Darlington to which Frank Osbaldistone, in the pages ofRob Roy, came. Scott describes the wayfarers whom the young squire met on his way from London to York and the North as “characters of a uniform and uninteresting description,” but they are interesting to us, belonging as they do to a time long past. “Country parsons, jogging homewards after a visitation; farmers, or graziers, returning from a distant market; clerks of traders, travelling to collect what was due to their masters in provincial towns; with now and then an officer going down into the country upon recruiting service.” These persons kept the tapsters and the turnpikes busy, and at night time, when they foregathered at the roadside inns, sandwiched their talk of cattle and the solvency of traders with terrifying tales of robbers. “At such tales, like children, closing their circle round the fire when the ghost-story draws to its climax, they drew near to each other, looked before and behind them, examined the priming of their pistols, and vowed to stand by each other in case of danger; an engagement which, like other offensive and defensive alliances, sometimes glided out of remembrance when there was an appearance of actual peril.”
This was about 1715. In those days, as Scott says,“journeys of any length being made on horseback, and, of course, by brief stages, it was usual always to make a halt on the Sunday in some town where the traveller might attend divine service, and his horse have the benefit of the day of rest. A counterpart to this decent practice, and a remnant of old English hospitality, was, that the landlord of a principal inn laid aside his character of publican on the seventh day and invited the guests who chanced to be within his walls to take a part of the family beef and pudding.”
“Locomotion”
The “Black Bear” at Darlington, as pictured by Scott, was such a place and the landlord as typical a host, and here Frank Osbaldistone met the first Scot he had ever seen, “a decentish hallion—as canny a North Briton as e’er crossed Berwick Bridge”—which was high praise from mine host, for innkeepers loved not Scottish folk and their thrifty ways. But, as already remarked, the “Black Bear” at Darlington does not exist, and coaching relics are rare in this town, whose modern prosperity derives from railways. It is, therefore, with singular appropriateness that Stephenson’s “Locomotion,” the first engine for that first of railways, the Stockton and Darlington, longsince withdrawn from service, has been mounted on a pedestal at Darlington Station. In heathen lands this ancestor of the modern express locomotive would be worshipped as a fetich, and truly it is an ugly and uncanny-looking object.
“The Experiment”
The Stockton and Darlington Railway Act dates from 1821; the line to be worked by “men and horses, or otherwise,” steam not being contemplated. The construction was begun in May, 1822, and meanwhile the Rainhill experiments had proved the possibility of locomotive engines. The Act was therefore amended, to authorise the use of them and to permit the conveyance of passengers; a kind of traffic which, odd though it may seem now, was not contemplated by the projectors, whose original idea was a railway for the conveyance of coal. It was on September 27th, 1825, that the line was opened, a train of thirty-eight wagons travelling, as a contemporary newspaper breathlessly announced, “with such velocity that in some parts the speed was frequently twelve miles an hour.” Curiously enough, however, the first passengers, after the opening ceremony, were conveyed, not by steam, but by a rough coach, like a gipsy caravan, running on the rails and drawn by a horse. This odd contrivance was called the “Experiment,”and did the twelve miles in two hours. It was followed by other vehicles, consisting of old stage-coach bodies mounted on railway wheels, and it was not until some months had passed that passengers were intrusted to the locomotive. The first passenger train ran a spirited race with the coach over the twelve miles’ course, steam winning by a hundred and twenty yards, amid the cheers of excited crowds. After thirty-eight years of independent existence, the Stockton and Darlington line was, with its branches, finally absorbed into the North-Eastern system, in 1863.
Darlington is thus a place entirely inimical to coaching interests and memories. Here, on its pedestal, stands the first of the iron monsters that killed the coaches, and the town itself largely lives by manufacturing railway wagons and iron and steel bridges. But coaching had had its day, and did not die untimely. A few years longer and the great highroads, already inconveniently crowded, must have been widened to accommodate the increased traffic. Railways have been beneficent in many directions, and they have enabled many hundreds of thousands to live in the country who would otherwise have been pent in stuffy streets. Imagination fails in the task of endeavouring to picture what the roads would have been like to-day if road-travel had remained the only means of communication. Locomotion would have been immensely restricted, of course; but the mere increase of population must have brought huge crowds of additional passengers. Figures are commonly said to be dry, but they can occasionally be eloquent enough. For instance, when we compare the population of the United Kingdom in 1837, when the Queen came to the throne, and now, and consider the bearing of those figures on this question, they are more than eloquent, and are even startling. There were twenty-five and a half millions of persons in these islands in the first year of Victoria’s reign. There are now forty-nine millions. Over twenty-three millions of persons most of whom would have used the roads, addedin eighty years! Of course, the opportunities for cheap and quick travel have made frequent travellers of those who otherwise would never or rarely have stirred from their homes; but railways have wrought greater changes than that. What, let us think, would have been the present-day position of the city of London without railways? It must needs have remained largely what it was when the “short stages” conveyed such citizens as did not live in the city to and from their residences in the suburbs, which then extended no further than Highgate, Chiswick, Norwood, and Stockwell. A stage-coach commonly held sixteen persons, twelve outside and four in; and allowing for those who might manage to walk into the city, how many of such coaches should we require nowadays, supposing railways suddenly abolished, to convey the city’s myriad day population? So many thousands that the task would be impossible. The impossibility of it gives us at once the measure of the railways’ might, and raises them from the mere carriers we generally think them to the height of all-powerful social forces whose effects may be sought in every detail of our lives. To them the wide-spreading suburbs directly owe their existence, equally as the deserted main roads of yester-year owed their loneliness to the same cause; and social scientists have it that they have performed what may at first sight seem a miracle: that, in fact, they have increased the population. If railways had not come to ease the growing pressure that began to be felt upon the roads in the early “twenties,” something else must have appeared to do the work of speedy conveyance, and that something would have been the Motor Car. Railway competition and the restrictive legislation that forbade locomotive carriages on highways served to keep motor cars under until recently; but away back to 1787, when the first steam-carriage was made, the problem of mechanical traction on roads was being grappled with, and many very good steam-cars made their appearance between 1820 and 1830. The caricaturists of the period werekept busily engaged making more or less pertinent fun of them; in itself a testimony to the interest they were exciting even then. Here is a typical skit of the period which takes a renewed interest now that we are on the threshold of an era of horseless traction.
“Fellow, Give my Buggy A Charge of Coke, Your Charcoal is Too D—d Dear.” From an old print
Few things are more remarkable than the speed with which railways were constructed through the length and breadth of the country, but it was long before through communication between London and Edinburgh was established. It was a coach-guard on this road who, just before the last coach was run off it by the locomotive, sadly remarked that “railways were making a gridiron of England.” They were; but it was not until 1846 and 1848, twenty-one and twenty-three years after the initial success of the Stockton and Darlington line, that by the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway, and the building of the railway bridge across the Tweed, the last links of the railway journey between the two capitals were completed. Even now, it requires the united efforts of three entirely distinct and independent railway companies to convey the through traffic of under four hundred miles between the two capitals. The Great Northern territory ends at Shaftholme, near Doncaster, whence the North-Eastern’s system conducts to the Border at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the remaining fifty miles belonging to the North British Railway.
De Quincey, in his rhapsody on the “English Mail Coach,” says: “The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York, four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed noevidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind, insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostrils, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.”
The Iron Road to the North
But, in truth, railways and coaches have each their especial variety of the romance of speed. De Quincey missed the quickening rush and contact of the air quite as much as any other of the sights, sounds, and sensations he speaks of when travelling by railway; a method of progression which does not admit of outside passengers. Nothing in its special way can be more exhilarating than travelling by coach as an “outside”; few things so unsatisfactory as the position of an “inside”; and if a well-groomed coach is a thing of beauty, there is also a beautiful majesty in a locomotive engine that has been equally well looked after. One of the deep-chested Great Northern expresses puffing its irresistible way past the green eyes of the droppedsemaphores of some busy junction at night-time, or coming as with the rush and certainty of Fate along the level stretches of line that characterise the route of the iron road to the North, is a sight calculated to rouse enthusiasm quite as much as a coach. Nor are railways always hideous objects. It is true that in and around the great centres of population where railway lines converge and run in filthy tunnels and along smoke-begrimed viaducts they sound the last note of squalor, but in the country it is a different matter. The embankments are in spring often covered with a myriad wild flowers; the viaducts give a human interest to coombe and gully. Lovers of the country can certainly point to places which, once remote and solitary, have been populated and spoiled by the readiness of railway access; but the locomotive has rendered more holidays possible, and has kept the roads in a decent solitude for the cyclist. Imagine, if you please, the Great North Road nowadays without the railway. A hundred coaches, more or less, raced along it in the last years of the coaching age, at all hours of the day and night. How many would suffice for the needs of the travelling public to-day? and what chance would be left to the tourist, afoot or awheel?