Part 4

Leaving Coventry the next day about noon in a steady rain, we sought the most direct route to Manchester, thereby missing Nuneaton, the birthplace and for many years the home of George Eliot and the center of some of the most delightful country in Warwickshire. Had we been more familiar with the roads of this country, we could have passed through Nuneaton without loss of time. The distance was only a little greater and over main roads, whereas we traveled for a good portion of the day through narrow byways, and the difficulty of keeping the right road in the continual rain considerably delayed our progress. We were agreeably surprised to find that the car did not skid on the wet macadam road and that despite the rain we could run very comfortably and quite as fast as in fair weather. I had put up our cape top and curtains, but later we learned that it was pleasanter, protected by water-proof wraps, to dash through the rain in the open car. English spring showers are usually light, and it was rather exhilarating to be able to bid defiance to weather conditions that in most parts of the United States would have put a speedy end to our tour.

A few miles farther brought us to Tamworth with its castle, lying on the border between Warwickshire and Staffordshire, the "tower and town" of Scott's "Marmion." The castle of the feudal baron chosen by Scott as the hero of his poem still stands in ruins, and was recently acquired by the town. It occupies a commanding position on a knoll and is surrounded by a group of fine trees.

A dozen miles more over a splendid road brought in view the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral, one of the smallest though most beautiful of these great English churches. Built of red sandstone, rich with sculptures and of graceful and harmonious architecture, there are few cathedrals more pleasing. The town of Lichfield is a comparatively small place, but it has many literary and historical associations, being the birthplace of Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose house is still standing, and for many years the home of Maria Edgeworth. Here, too, once lived Major Andre, whose melancholy death in connection with the American Revolution will be recalled. The cathedral was fortified during the civil war and was sadly battered in sieges by Cromwell's Roundheads; but so completely has it been rebuilt and restored that it presents rather a new appearance as compared with many others. It occurred to us that the hour for luncheon was well past, and we stopped at the rambling old Swan Hotel, which was to all appearances deserted, for we wandered through narrow halls and around the office without finding anyone. I finally ascended two flights of stairs and found a chambermaid, who reluctantly undertook to locate someone in authority, which she at last did. We were shown into a clean, comfortable coffee room, where tea, served in front of a glowing fire place, was grateful indeed after our long ride through the cold rain.

[Illustration: THE THREE SPIRES OF LICHFIELD.

From Photograph.]

It became apparent that owing to our many delays, we could not easily reach Manchester, and we stopped at Newcastle-under-Lyme for the night. This town has about 20,000 people and lies on the outer edge of the potteries district, where Josiah Wedgewood founded this great industry over one hundred years ago. The whole region comprising Burslem, Hanley, Newcastle, Stoke-on-Trent and many smaller places may be described as a huge, scattered city of about 300,000 inhabitants, nearly all directly or indirectly connected with the manufacture of various grades of china and earthenware. The Castle Hotel, where we stopped, was a very old inn, yet it proved unexpectedly homelike and comfortable. Our little party was given a small private dining room with massive antique furniture, and we were served with an excellent dinner by an obsequious waiter in full-dress suit and with immaculate linen. He cleared the table and left us for the evening with the apartment as a sitting room, and a mahogany desk by the fireside, well supplied with stationery, afforded amends for neglected letters. In the morning, our breakfast was served in the same room, and the bill for entertainment seemed astonishingly low. Mine host will no doubt be wiser in this particular as motorists more and more invade the country.

An hour's drive brought us to Manchester. The road by which we entered the city took us direct to the Midland Hotel, which is reputed to be the finest in the Kingdom. Manchester is a city of nearly a million inhabitants, but its streets seemed almost like those of a country town as compared with the crowded thoroughfares of London. It is a great center for motoring and I found many of the garages so full that they could not take another car. I eventually came to one of the largest, where by considerable shifting they managed to accommodate my car. But with all this rush of business, it seemed to me that the owners were in no danger of becoming plutocrats, for the charge for a day's garage, cleaning the car, polishing the brass and making a slight repair, was five shillings.

For half the way from Manchester to Leeds, the drive was about as trying as anything I found in England. The road is winding, exceedingly steep in places, and built up on both sides with houses--largely homes of miners and mill operatives. The pavement is of rough cobble-stones, and swarms of dogs and children crowded the way everywhere. Under such conditions, the numerous steep hills, narrow places and sharp turns in the road made progress slow indeed. It was evident that the British motorists generally avoid this country, for we met no cars and our own attracted attention that showed it was not a common spectacle. However, the trip was none the less an interesting one as showing a bit of the country and a phase of English life not usually seen by tourists.

There is little to detain one within the city of Leeds itself, but there are many places of interest in its immediate vicinity. There are few more picturesque spots in Yorkshire than Wharfdale, with its riotous little river and ruins of Bolton Abbey and Barden Tower. This lies about fifteen miles to the northwest, and while for special reasons we went to Ilkley Station by train, the trip is a fine motor drive over good roads. The park which contains the abbey and castle is the property of the Duke of Devonshire, who keeps it at all times open to the public. The River Wharfe, rippling over shingly rocks, leaping in waterfalls and compressed into the remarkable rapids called the Strid, only five or six feet wide but very deep and terribly swift, is the most striking feature of the park. The forest-clad cliffs on either side rise almost precipitously from the edges of the narrow dale, and from their summit, if the climb does not deter one, a splendid view presents itself. The dale gradually opens into a beautiful valley and here the old abbey is charmingly situated on the banks of the river. The ruins are not extensive, but the crumbling walls, bright with ivy and wall flowers, and with the soft green lawn beneath, made a delightful picture in the mottled sunshine and shadows of the English May day.

On our return to Leeds, our friend who accompanied us suggested that we spend the next day, Sunday, at Harrogate, fifteen miles to the north, one of the most famous of English watering places. It had been drizzling fitfully all day, but as we started on the trip, it began to rain in earnest. After picking our way carefully until free from the slippery streets in Leeds, we found the fine macadam road little affected by the deluge. We were decidedly ahead of the season at Harrogate, and there were but few people at the splendid hotel where we stopped.

The following Sunday was as raw and nasty as English weather can be when it wants to, regardless of the time of year, and I did not take the car out of the hotel garage. In the afternoon my friend and I walked to Knaresborough, one of the old Yorkshire towns about three miles distant. I had never even heard of the place before, and it was a thorough surprise to me to find it one of the most ancient and interesting towns in the Kingdom. Not a trace of modern improvement interfered with its old-world quaintness--it looked as if it had been clinging undisturbed to the sharply rising hillside for centuries. Just before entering the town, we followed up the valley of the River Nidd to the so-called "dripping well," whose waters, heavily charged with limestone, drip from the cliffs above and "petrify" various objects in course of time by covering them with a stonelike surface. Then we painfully ascended the hill--not less than a forty-five per cent grade in motor parlance--and wandered through the streets--if such an assortment of narrow foot-paths, twisting around the corners, may be given the courtesy of the name--until we came to the site of the castle. The guide-book gives the usual epitaph for ruined castles, "Dismantled by orders of Cromwell's Parliament," and so well was this done that only one of the original eleven great watch-towers remains, and a small portion of the Norman keep, beneath which are the elaborate vaulted apartments where Becket's murderers once hid. No doubt the great difficulty the Cromwellians had in taking the castle seemed a good reason to them for effectually destroying it. At one time it was in the possession of the notorious Piers Gaveston, and it was for a while the prison-house of King Henry II. There are many other points of interest in Knaresborough, not forgetting the cave from which Mother Shipton issued her famous prophecies, in which she missed it only by bringing the world to an end ahead of schedule time. But they deny in Knaresborough she ever made such a prediction, and prefer to rest her claims to infallibility on her prophecy illustrated on a post card by a highly colored motor car with the legend,

"Carriages without horses shall go, And accidents fill the world with woe."

Altogether, Knaresborough is a town little frequented by Americans, but none the less worthy of a visit. Harrogate is an excellent center for this and many other places, if one is insistent on the very best and most stylish hotel accommodations that the island affords. Ripon, with its cathedral and Fountains Abbey, perhaps the finest ruin in Great Britain, is only a dozen miles away; but we visited these on our return to London from the north.

On Monday the clouds cleared away and the whole country was gloriously bright and fresh after the heavy showers. We returned to Leeds over the road by which we came to Harrogate and which passes Haredale Hall, one of the finest country places in the Kingdom. A large portion of the way the road is bordered by fine forests, which form a great park around the mansion. We passed through Leeds to the southward, having no desire to return to Manchester over the road by which we came, or, in fact, to pass through the city at all. Our objective point for the evening was Chester, and this could be reached quite as easily by passing to the south of Manchester. Wakefield, with its magnificent church, recently dignified as a cathedral, was the first town of consequence on our way, and about twenty-five miles south of Leeds we came to Barnsley, lying on the edge of the great moorlands in central England. There is hardly a town in the whole Kingdom that does not have its peculiar tradition, and an English friend told us that the fame of Barnsley rests on the claim that no hotel in England can equal the mutton chops of the King's Head--a truly unique distinction in a land where the mutton chop is standard and the best in the world.

An English moor is a revelation to an American who has never crossed one and who may have a hazy notion of it from Tennyson's verse or "Lorna Doone." Imagine, lying in the midst of fertile fields and populous cities, a large tract of brown, desolate and broken land, almost devoid of vegetation except gorse and heather, more comparable to the Arizona sagebrush country than anything else, and you have a fair idea of the "dreary, dreary moorland" of the poet. For twenty miles from Barnsley our road ran through this great moor, and, except for two or three wretched-looking public houses--one of them painfully misnamed "The Angel"--there was not a single town or habitation along the road. The moorland road began at Penistone, a desolate-looking little mining town straggling along a single street that dropped down a very sharp grade on leaving the town. Despite the lonely desolation of the moor, the road was excellent, and followed the hills with gentle curves, generally avoiding steep grades. So far as I can recall, we did not meet a single vehicle of any kind in the twenty miles of moorland road--surely a paradise for the scorcher. Coming out of the moor, we found ourselves within half a dozen miles of Manchester--practically in its suburbs, for Stalybridge, Stockport, Altrincham and other large manufacturing towns are almost contiguous with the main city. The streets of these towns were crowded with traffic and streetcar lines are numerous. There is nothing of the slightest interest to the tourist, and after a belated luncheon at a really modern hotel in Stockport, we set out on the last forty miles of our journey. After getting clear of Manchester and the surrounding towns, we came to the Chester road, one of the numberless "Watling Streets," which one finds all over England--a broad, finely kept high way, leading through a delightful country. Northwich, famous for its salt mines, was the only town of any consequence until we reached Chester. We had travelled a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles--our longest day's journey, with one exception--not very swift motoring, but we found that an average of one hundred miles per day was quite enough to thoroughly satisfy us, and even with such an apparently low average as this, a day's rest now and then did not come amiss.

[Illustration: SUNSET ON THE MOOR.

From Painting by Termohlen.]

It would be better yet if one's time permitted a still lower daily mileage. Not the least delightful feature of the tour was the marvelous beauty of the English landscapes, and one would have a poor appreciation of these to dash along at forty or even twenty-five miles per hour. There were many places at which we did not stop at all, and which were accorded scant space in the guide-books, that would undoubtedly have given us ideas of English life and closer contact with the real spirit of the people than one could possibly get in the tourist-thronged towns and villages.

V

THE BORDER TOWNS, SHREWSBURY AND LUDLOW

I shall say but little of Chester, as of every other place on the line of our journey so well known as to be on the itinerary of nearly everybody who makes any pretensions at touring Britain. The volumes which have been written on the town and the many pages accorded it in the guide-books will be quite sufficient for all seekers after information. Frankly, I was somewhat disappointed with Chester. I had imagined its quaintness that of a genuine old country town and was not prepared for the modern city that surrounds its show-places. In the words of an observant English writer: "It seems a trifle self-conscious--its famous old rows carry a suspicion of being swept and garnished for the dollar-distributing visitor from over the Atlantic, and of being less genuine than they really are. However that may be, the moment you are out of these show-streets of Chester, there is a singular lack of charm in the environment. The taint of commerce and the smoke of the north hangs visibly on the horizon. Its immediate surroundings are modern and garish to a degree that by no means assists in the fiction that Chester is the unadulterated old-country town one would like to think it." Such a feeling I could not entirely rid myself of, and even in following the old wall, I could not help noting its carefully maintained disrepair. I would not wish to be understood as intimating that Chester is not well worth a visit, and a visit of several days if one can spare the time; only that its charm was, to me, inferior to that of its more unpretentious neighbors, Shrewsbury and Ludlow. Our stay was only a short one, since our route was to bring us to the town again; still, we spent half a day in a most delightful manner, making a tour of the "rows" and the odd corners with quaint buildings. The tourist, fortified with his red-backed Baedecker, is a common sight to Chester people, and his "dollar-distributing" propensity, as described by the English writer I have quoted, is not unknown even to the smallest fry of the town. Few things during our trip amused me more than the antics of a brown, bare-foot, dirt-begrimed little mite not more than two or three years old, who seized my wife's skirts and hung on for dear life, pouring out earnestly and volubly her unintelligible jargon. We were at first at a loss to understand what our new associate desired, and so grimly did she hang on that it seemed as if another accession to our party was assured--but a light dawned suddenly on us, and, as the brown little hand clasped a broad English copper, our self-appointed companion vanished like a flash into a neighboring shop.

Even when touring in your "wind-shod" car, as an up-to-date English poet puts it, and though your motor waits you not a stone's throw from your hotel, you may not entirely dispense with your antiquated equine friend as a means of locomotion. So we learned when we proposed to visit Eaton Hall, the country place of the Duke of Westminster, which lies closely adjoining Chester, situated deep in the recesses of its eight-thousand-acre park. A conspicuous sign, "Motors strictly forbidden," posted near the great gateway, forced us to have recourse to the hackman, whose moderate charge of eight shillings for a party of three was almost repaid by his services as a guide. He was voluble in his information concerning the Duke and especially dwelt on his distinction as the richest man in the world--an honor which as good and loyal Americans we could not willingly see wrested from our own John D. of oleaginous fame. Eaton Hall is one of the greatest English show-places, but it is modern and might well be matched by the castles of several of our American aristocracy. Tame indeed seemed its swept and garnished newness, its trim and perfect repair, after our visits to so many time-worn places, with their long succession of hoary traditions. The great library, with its thousands of volumes in the richest bindings and its collections of rare editions, might well be the despair of a bibliophile and the pictures and furnishings of rare interest to the connoisseur--but these things one may find in the museums.

Over a main road, almost level and as nearly straight as any English road merits such a description, we covered the forty miles from Chester to Shrewsbury without incident. The most trying grade given in the road-book is one in twenty-five, and all conditions are favorable for record time--in absence of police traps. Four miles out of Chester we passed Rowton Station, lying adjacent to Rowton Moor, where King Charles, standing on the tower of Chester Wall which bears his name, saw his army defeated by the Parliamentarians. We made a late start from Chester, but reached Shrewsbury in time to visit many parts of the town after dinner. We found it indeed a delightful old place, rich in historic traditions, and the center of a country full of interesting places. The town is built on a lofty peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the River Severn, and the main streets lead up exceedingly steep hills. In fact, many of the steepest and most dangerous hills which we found in our travels were in the towns themselves, where grades had been fixed by buildings long ago. The clean macadam in Shrewsbury made it possible to drive our car without chains, though it rained incessantly, but so steep and winding are some of the streets that the greatest caution was necessary.

Shrewsbury is described by an English writer as a "sweet-aired, genuine, dignified and proud old market town, the resort of squires, parsons and farmers, and mainly inhabited by those who minister to their wants. It never dreams of itself as a show-place." He also adds another strong point in its claim to distinction: "Some years ago a book was published by a zealous antiquarian, enumerating with much detail all the families of England of a certain consequence who still occupied either the same estate or estates contiguous to those upon which they were living in the Fifteenth Century. The shire of which Shrewsbury is the capital very easily headed the list in this honorable competition and thereby justified the title of 'proud Salopians,' which the more consequential of its people submit to with much complacency, even though it be not always applied in a wholly serious way."

It is a genuine old border town, so far unspoiled by commercialism. Modern improvements have not invaded its quaint streets to any great extent, and many of these still retain their old names--Dog-pole, Wylecop and Shoplatch--and are bordered by some of the finest half-timbered houses in Britain. Nor is Shrewsbury wanting in famous sons. In front of the old grammar school building is a bronze statue of Charles Darwin, the man who changed the scientific thought of a world, who was born here in 1809. This same grammar school was built in 1630 and is now converted into a museum of Roman relics, which have been found in the immediate vicinity. In its earlier days, many distinguished men received their education here, among them Sir Philip Sidney and Judge Jeffreys. The Elizabethan market-house and the council-house which was visited by both Charles I and James II on different occasions are two of the most fascinating buildings to be seen in the town. There are scant remains, principally of the keep of the castle, built by the Norman baron to whom William the Conqueror generously presented the town. St. Mary is the oldest and most important church, and in some

## particulars it surpasses the cathedral at Chester. It is architecturally

more pleasing and its windows are among the finest examples of antique stained glass in the Kingdom.