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24 chapters
IN UNFAMILIAR ENGLAND
IN UNFAMILIAR ENGLAND
SULGRAVE MANOR, THE CRADLE OF THE WASHINGTONS. Painted especially for the author by Daniel Sherrin. Copyright, 1910 By L. C. Page & Company (INCORPORATED) All rights reserved First Impression, January, 1910 TO MY WIFE THE CONSTANT COMPANION OF MY WANDERINGS...
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PREFACE
PREFACE
It may seem that there is little excuse for a new book on English travel, since works covering the beaten path in the British Isles fairly teem from the press. But as a record of pilgrimages to the unfamiliar shrines and to the odd corners all over the United Kingdom this book may have its value. My reference to the tourist-frequented spots has been only incidental, and I think I can claim to have found much of interest not elsewhere described. And this I put forth as my chief excuse for adding
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MAPS
MAPS
WARWICK CASTLE FROM THE AVON. Original Painting by Daniel Sherrin....
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In Unfamiliar England I SOME NOOKS ABOUT LONDON
In Unfamiliar England I SOME NOOKS ABOUT LONDON
When Washington Irving made his first journey to England, he declared the three or four weeks on the ocean to be the best possible preparation for a visit to the mother country. The voyage, said he, was as a blank page in one’s existence, and the mind, by its utter severance from the busy world, was best fitted to receive impressions of a new and strange environment. And it was no doubt so in the slow ocean voyages of olden time; but today it is more as if one stayed within his palatial hotel fo
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II WANDERINGS IN EAST ANGLIA
II WANDERINGS IN EAST ANGLIA
Despite the fascination that London always has and the fact that one could scarcely exhaust her attractions in years, it was with impatience that we endured the delay imposed by business matters and preparations for a period of two months or more on the road. We were impatient, surely, or we should hardly have left our hotel at six o’clock in the evening, in the face of a driving rain. Ordinarily, two or three hours would have brought us to Cambridge, only fifty miles away; but we could not depe
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III SOME MIDLAND NOOKS AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY
III SOME MIDLAND NOOKS AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY
It was not easy to get rooms at the University Arms, even though we had applied the week before. It was the close of the university year, for which event, the manageress assured us, many people had engaged rooms a full year in advance. We were late applicants, to be sure. However, we had the advantage of a previous acquaintance—a thing that counts for much in the English hotel—and, since nowhere else would do, we were soon comfortably established at the University Arms. A stop of a day or two gi
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IV MEANDERINGS FROM COVENTRY TO EXETER
IV MEANDERINGS FROM COVENTRY TO EXETER
Despite our numerous visits to Coventry, each one had some new delight in store; some bit of curious antiquity that had previously escaped us was sure to turn up, and once in the heart of the old-world town, one easily forgets the modern manufacturing city that has grown up around it. In the immediate vicinity of the famous three spires there clusters much to detain one and which may well make Coventry the shrine of a far greater number of pilgrims than it now is. If we enter the grand old churc
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V RAMBLES IN THE WEST COUNTRY
V RAMBLES IN THE WEST COUNTRY
“Through the heart of Dartmoor forest” may bring up many fascinating, even weird associations, but on our map we regarded the thin red line of our road rather dubiously. It runs almost straight from Exeter to Prince Town—the prison town of the moor—and on either side for many miles lies a waste country, apparently quite devoid of villages and even of roads. The road as shown on the map is thickly studded with arrow heads, denoting dangerous hills, and the description in the road-book is far from
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VI ODD CORNERS OF THE WELSH BORDER
VI ODD CORNERS OF THE WELSH BORDER
There are few English castles where the spirit of medievalism lingers as at Berkeley and few that have darker deeds recorded in their long annals of crime. It has had a strange fascination for me ever since I read its story in my boyhood days, and the verse of the poet Gray had given the castle a weird association in my mind: It was therefore a keen disappointment to learn on arriving in the quiet Gloucestershire town that it was not a day when the castle was open to visitors. However, we do not
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VII A WEEK IN SOUTH WALES
VII A WEEK IN SOUTH WALES
We leave Shrewsbury by the Welsh bridge for a week among the rugged hills and valleys of Southern Wales, a country rich in relics of antiquity and romantic associations. We sweep along the fine highway to Welshpool and from thence, a little farther, to Montgomery, a decayed, out-of-the-way town in the hills. A fragment of its castle is perched high on the precipitous hill commanding the town and looking far over the vale of the serpentine Severn. The Severn, like the Wye, is the most sinuous of
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VIII SOME NOOKS AND CORNERS
VIII SOME NOOKS AND CORNERS
Early next day we were in Hereford, for it is but forty miles from Brecon by the Wye Valley road. It had been just one week since we had passed through the town preparatory to our tour of South Wales—a rather wearisome journey of well upon a thousand miles over some of the worst of Welsh roads. It was not strange, then, that we gladly seized the opportunity for a short rest in Hereford. There is something fascinating about the fine old cathedral town. It appeals to one as a place of repose and q
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IX THE BYRON COUNTRY
IX THE BYRON COUNTRY
The exterior of the Swan Inn, its weather-beaten gables crowded between rather shabby-looking buildings on either side, is not wholly prepossessing. We hesitate to enter the courtyard, though it is quite late, until a policeman assures us there is nothing better in the town—or in the country about, for that matter. Had we needed further assurance, we might have glanced at our trusty Baedeker to find the Swan honored with special mention as “an excellent, long-established house with winding oak s
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X FROM YORKSHIRE COAST TO BARNARD CASTLE
X FROM YORKSHIRE COAST TO BARNARD CASTLE
The Minster of St. John of Beverley is easily the finest single example of Perpendicular architecture in England; in beauty and majesty of design, in proportion and in general effect—from almost any viewpoint—there is no more pleasing church in the Kingdom. We come in sight of its graceful twin towers while yet afar from the town, after a thirty-mile run from York through some of the most prosperous farming country in the shire. As we come nearer, the mass of red tiles, from which rises the nobl
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XI LAKELAND AND THE YORKSHIRE DALES
XI LAKELAND AND THE YORKSHIRE DALES
During a tour such as ours one becomes impressed that a large proportion of Britain is in barren moorlands or broken hills suitable only for sheep grazing—an impression made all the stronger by the diminutive size of the country. We in America can better afford our vast tracts of waste land; we have fertile river valleys from which dozens of Englands might be carved; but it seems almost melancholy that at least a third of the Kingdom, no greater in size than an average American state, should be
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XII SOME NORTH COUNTRY SHRINES
XII SOME NORTH COUNTRY SHRINES
We have spacious quarters at the Station Hotel, our lattice windows opening upon a stone balcony beyond which we can see the fountain, flowers and shrubbery of the gardens, and farther away, against the purple sky, the massive yet graceful towers of the minster. How different the Station Hotel is from the average railway hotel in America can be appreciated only by one who has enjoyed the hospitality of the one and endured the necessity of staying at the other. We feel as nearly at home as one po
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XIII ACROSS THE TWEED
XIII ACROSS THE TWEED
Gretna Green is a disappointingly modern-looking hamlet, and has little to accord with the romantic associations that its name always brings up. In olden days it gained fame as a place where marriages were accomplished with an ease and celerity that is rivalled in our time only by the dissolution of the tie in some of our own courts. Hither the eloping couples hastened from England, to be united with scarcely other ceremony than mutual promises—witnesses were not required—and a worthy blacksmith
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XIV MORE YORKSHIRE WANDERINGS
XIV MORE YORKSHIRE WANDERINGS
Flodden Field lies adjacent to the road which we pursued southward from the Tweed, but there is little now to indicate the location of the historic battlefield. Song and story have done much to immortalize a conflict whose results were not especially important or far-reaching—the world knows of it chiefly through the vivid lines of “Marmion.” It is not worth while to follow our hasty flight to the south; we are again bound for the Yorkshire moors and the distance we must cover ere night will not
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XV ROUND ABOUT WILTSHIRE
XV ROUND ABOUT WILTSHIRE
Our run from Nottingham to Oxford was uneventful, for we roved rather at random for the day through the delightful Midland country. At Nottingham one will find the Victoria is quite up to the standard of station-hotel excellence in England and the rates refreshingly low. The city itself will not detain one long, for the great wave of modern progress that has inundated it has swept away most of its ancient landmarks. The old castle, once the key to the Northlands, has been superseded by a palatia
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XVI DORSET AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT
XVI DORSET AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT
Of the hundreds of hotels whose hospitality we enjoyed—or endured—in Britain, no other was so barbarously gorgeous as the Royal Bath at Bournemouth. The furnishings were rich, though verging to some extent on the gaudy, and the whole place had an air of oriental splendor about it made the more realistic by “fairy grottoes” and gilded pagodas on the grounds. It is a rather low building of great extent, with wide, thickly carpeted halls in which bronze and plaster statuettes and suits of old plate
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XVII SOUTH ENGLAND NOOKS
XVII SOUTH ENGLAND NOOKS
One will find Lyndhurst in New Forest a pleasant place for a day’s rest after returning from the Isle of Wight to the mainland. Especially is this so if it be early in the summer before the more crowded season comes on. The town will be fairly quiet then and the Crown Inn has an air of solid comfort that almost takes it out of the class of resort hotels. Its spacious gardens to the rear afford a sylvan retreat that is an agreeable variation from an almost continual life on the open road. Lyndhur
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XVIII FROM DUBLIN TO CORK
XVIII FROM DUBLIN TO CORK
We are off for the Emerald Isle. There was much of interest in the three days between London and Dublin, but I will not follow our journey here; in a later chapter I will endeavor to gather some of the scattered threads. We reach Ludlow the first night, one hundred and forty-eight miles in six hours—very speedy going for us—but a day from Ludlow to Barmouth and another to Holyhead is more in keeping with our usual leisurely progress. One can never truly feel the plaintive sweetness of Lady Duffe
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XIX THROUGH SOUTHERN IRELAND
XIX THROUGH SOUTHERN IRELAND
Cork is the gateway by which a large number of visitors enter Ireland, and is pretty sure to be on the route of anyone making a tour of the Island. It manifestly has no place in this record, nor has Blarney Castle, the most famous ruin in the world—among Americans, at least. And yet, who could write of an Irish tour and make no reference to Blarney. We may be pardoned for a hasty glance at our visit to the castle on the day after our arrival at Cork. The head porter at the Imperial, clad in his
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XX SOME ODDS AND ENDS
XX SOME ODDS AND ENDS
Holyhead is an inconsequential town whose chief end is to serve as a port of departure for Ireland. Were it not for this useful purpose, few tourists would ever see it—or the Isle of Anglesea, for that matter. Aside from some fine coast scenery and the castle, now very ruinous, built by Edward I. at Beaumaris, Anglesea offers little in the way of attractions. The island is rather barren, with here and there a mean-looking village with a long, unpronounceable Welsh name. The main road from the gr
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XXI LUDLOW TOWN
XXI LUDLOW TOWN
I am going to write a chapter, though it be a short one, on Ludlow Town, which, among the hundreds of places rich in historic association and redolent of romance that we visited in our wanderings, still continues pre-eminent in our memories. We took occasion to pause here four or five times for the night, and each succeeding sojourn only served to heighten our appreciation of the delightful old town and its traditions. One will not tire of the Feathers Inn—surely one of the most charming of the
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