Part 11

In the days of yore, when this district resembled a great lake studded with numerous islands fringed with willow groves, it was the seat of numerous ecclesiastical establishments of great wealth and influence--Peterborough, Crowland, Ely, Thorney, Spalding, Ramsey and others. The insulated sites were favourable to the seclusion of the cloister, the patches of land were exceedingly fertile, and the water abounded with fish and wild fowl. On one of these Fen islands rose the great Abbey of Crowland, the ruins of which come into view some miles before we reach it. Its foundation goes back to Saxon times, and it was repeatedly sacked by the Danes. Turketul, grandson of King Alfred, who through four successive reigns had rendered important services to the nation by his valour in the field and his wisdom in counsel, returning from a journey to the North, found the abbey a ruin. Of the once flourishing community only three monks remained to tell the story of the massacre of their brethren and the destruction of their abbey by the invaders. They accommodated their illustrious visitor to the best of their ability amongst the fire-scathed walls of the church, and entreated his intercession with the king for assistance. The interview made a deep impression on his mind, and, reaching home, he astonished his royal master by avowing his intention to become a monk. Accordingly he caused proclamation to be made by public crier that he was anxious to discharge his debts, and if he had wronged any man would restore fourfold. Resigning all his offices, Turketul repaired to the Fens, devoted himself to the rebuilding of the abbey and the restoration of its fallen fortunes, became abbot, and there spent the remainder of his days.

A curious structure, known as Crowland Bridge, which stands in the centre of the town, has greatly perplexed archaeologists, and given rise to various legends. It consists of three semi-arches whose bases stand equi-dis-tant from each other in the circumference of a circle and unite in the centre. At the foot of one of the arches is a mutilated statue, apparently holding an orb in the right hand. Local tradition declares that three rivers ran through the three arches into an immense pit dug to receive them, and that the statue represents Oliver Cromwell with a penny roll in his hand! The most probable explanation of the remarkable structure is that it was a high cross built to form a trysting-place for the fens-men, who, when the Fens were flooded, might bring hither their produce for sale in boats, and that the figure is St. Guthlac, the founder and patron of the abbey.

If East Anglia possesses little natural beauty, it is rich in historical associations. Reference has already been made to the many noble ruins of ancient ecclesiastical buildings throughout the Fen country. Their traditional reputation has been handed down in an old rhyming legend:

"Ramsey, the rich of gold and of fee, Thorney, the flower of many a fair tree, Crowland, the courteous of their meat and drink, Spalding, the gluttons, as all men do think, Peterborough the proud, as all men do say, Sawtrey, by the way, that old abbey, Gave more alms in one day than all they."

It maybe doubted whether in any part of the world four such cathedrals can be found in the same compass as Lincoln, Peterborough, Ely, and Norwich. And it is certain that with the single and doubtful exception of Oxford, no such magnificent collection of collegiate edifices exists as those of Cambridge. "That long street which, beginning from the Trumpington Road, skirts the magnificent Fitzwilliam Museum and the Pitt Press; which passes by ancient Peterhouse and quaint St. Catherine on one side; which is there known as King's Road and fronts the glories of King's College, the Senate House, the Library, and Caius College; which then in a darkening and narrow street, almost a very gorge, skirts the old historic gateways of Trinity and St. John's, and afterwards emerges past the chapel which is the latest architectural glory of Cambridge, opposite the venerable round church and near the new buildings of the Union--certainly in its long broken wavering line, this street may enter into formidable competition with the High Street of Oxford or any of the streets of the world.

There are, moreover, several distinct features in which Cambridge is unsurpassable. The wide silent old court of Trinity, with its babbling fountain; the glorious structure of King's College; above all, that exquisite scenery, a composition made up of many varying beauties known as the "backs of the colleges are separate features to which Oxford can hardly offer a parallel. As an Oxford poet has said:--

"Ah me! were ever river banks so fair, Gardens so fit for nightingales as these? Were ever haunts so meet for summer breeze, Or pensive walk in evening's golden air? Was ever town so rich in court and tower To woo and win stray moonlight every hour?" *

* From Oxford and Cambridge, their Memories and Associations. Religious Tract Society.

Among the cities of East Anglia, Norwich claims special mention. Though a local couplet declares that--

"Caistor was a city when Norwich was none. And Norwich was builded with Caistor stone."

Yet the _parvenu_ upstart goes back to the time of the Roman occupation of the island. It was the capital of the Saxon kingdom of East Anglia, and for many centuries afterwards it held a prominent place in our history. So early as the reign of Edward III. it was one of the great centres of our manufacturing industry; the Flemish settlers having here introduced or developed the woollen trade. In pre-reformation days it was a stronghold of the Wyckliffites or Lollards, many of whom here sealed their testimony with their blood. In 1531, Thomas Bilney was added to the list of worthies who make up the Norwich Martyrology. Probably no other provincial town in England has given so many eminent names to the literature, science, and art of our country, from Sir Thomas Browne, author of the _Religio Medici_, down to Harriet Martineau. Even apart from these interesting associations, Norwich itself deserves and will well repay a visit.

Surrounded by wooded slopes and pleasant meadows and winding streams, its streets full of quaint picturesque architecture, and dominated by its noble castle and cathedral, few or none of our English cities offer a more pleasing combination of urban and rural beauty.

The tourist in search of the picturesque in East Anglia will do well to include Yarmouth among his wanderings.

Its surroundings indeed are as flat and uninteresting as possible. The readers of David Copperfield will remember his description: "As we drew a little nearer and saw the whole adjacent prospect lying in a straight line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might have improved it; and also that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea, and that the town and the tide had not been quite so mixed up like toast and water, it would have been nicer. But Peggotty said with greater emphasis than usual, that we must take things as we found them; and that for her part she was proud to call herself a Yarmouth Bloater."

But the town is a curious combination of English bustle and Dutch quaintness. Its quay reminds the traveller of the Boomptjies of Rotterdam; its "rows," only a few feet wide, with a narrow riband of sky overhead, recall the narrow streets of Genoa; its vast fleet of herring-boats discharging their silvery "harvest of the sea" at the wharves, offer a spectacle almost unique in the world. Unlike Norwich and many other neighbouring towns, Yarmouth has been the scene of no important event in our history, nor has it contributed any illustrious name to our list of worthies. A stained glass window in the parish church, however, perpetuates the earthly memory of one whom Scripture declares shall be "had in everlasting remembrance"--Sarah Martin, the prison visitor. She was a poor dressmaker, without wealth or social position, earning with difficulty a scanty subsistence by her needle, yet doing a work comparable to that of John Howard or of Elizabeth Fry. The great lesson of her life has been admirably inculcated by an eloquent American preacher:

"Here, on a lowly bed, in an English village by the sea,--fades out the earthly life of one of God's humblest but noblest servants. Worn with the patient care of deserted prisoners and malefactors in the town gaol for twenty-four years of unthanked service, earning her bread with her hands, and putting songs of worship on the lips of these penitent criminals,--Bible and Prayer-book in his feeble hand, saying, at the end, 'I have been the happiest of men, yet I feel that death will be gain to me, through Christ who died for me.'

"Blessed be God for the manifold features of triumphant faith!--that He suffers His children to walk toward Him through ways so various in their outward look--Sarah Martin; from her cottage bed, Earl Spencer from his gorgeous couch, little children in their innocence, unpretending women in the quiet ministrations of faithful love, strong and useful and honoured men, whom suffering households and institutions and churches mourn. All bending their faces towards the Everlasting Light, in one faith, one cheering hope, called by one Lord, who has overcome the world, and dieth no more! The sun sets; the autumn fades; life hastens with us all. But we stand yet in our Master's vineyard. All the days of our appointed time let us labour righteously, and pray and wait, till our change come, that we may change only from virtue to virtue, from faith to faith, and thus from glory to glory!"

ROUND ABOUT SOME INDUSTRIAL, CENTRES.

|IT is not to the manufacturing districts of England that the traveller in search of the picturesque would most naturally repair. To him they are often a region of tall chimneys and squalid-looking habitations, with a canopy of smoke above and black refuse of coal and iron on the banks of polluted rivers below. Something of this impression is due to the economy of railway companies, which, for the most part, have chosen to enter great towns by their least attractive suburbs, where land is cheapest. Hence, it is not from the carriage-windows of the train that Leeds or Sheffield, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, or Manchester should be judged. The traveller who will alight and explore may find a wealth of natural beauty which would astonish him.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the contrast--due chiefly, no doubt, to geological structure--more apparent than on the edge of the "Black Country" in Staffordshire. From Dudley Castle the views are more curiously contrasted than in almost any other part of England. By night the whole country is lighted up on one side by the flames from the furnaces, which cover the country for many miles. By day the din of hammers and the clank of wheels, the roar of traffic and the shriek of the steam-whistles surge up, through the pall of smoke, upon the ear. Descend, and between the ironworks and coalpits the ground is unsightly with refuse heaps, while its frequent inequalities, and the bending, tottering buildings, show it to be honeycombed with mines. Vegetation is rare; what there is, is blackened and stunted; black also are the outsides of churches, chapels, schools. For inhabitants of such a district to gain any sense of natural beauty, they must be able at frequent intervals to escape; and, happily, to do this is within the reach of most. Railway communication with every part of England is constant and easy; and to know the difference that a few miles' journey will make in the scene, one has only to reascend to Dudley Castle, where it lies in the midst of its fair wooded domain.. Look from it to the north, east, or south, and all is smoke and flame; but turn to the west, and though the traces of unresting labour are still discernible, they soon give way to a country of richly diversified charm: glimpses are obtained of the beautiful valley of the Severn, the Wrekin towers grandly not many miles away, and the Malvern hills are dim and blue in the distance.

In other manufacturing centres, if the contrast is not so marked, yet there is a similar accessibility to many a sequestered and lovely scene. The nearness of the wildest and grandest Derbyshire scenery to busy, unromantic Manchester has been pointed out in a previous chapter; and the neighbourhood of the great Yorkshire centres of industry is full of picturesque beauty. A little way out of Leeds, for instance, where the Liverpool Canal passes over an embankment near to the river Aire, may be found the scene of one of Turner's most charming sketches; and though the locality bears evident marks of the great industrial invasion, much of the beauty still remains. In the same valley, not far off, are the stately ruins of Kirkstall Abbey, while the broad reach of river that encloses it, and the green meadows on the bank, with the low wooded heights on either side of the valley, suggest the memories of a day when the surroundings of the old ecclesiastical building were such as the monks most dearly loved; while Esholt Hall, some few miles higher up the river, at the extremity of a noble avenue of elm trees, was, in its time, a nunnery on low-lying ground, circled by an amphitheatre of hills, in a vale even now rich and beautiful, and which once must have seemed the very abode of tranquillity and peace.

It is, indeed, no small boon to the artizans of Leeds, Bradford, and many other crowded hives of industry in this part of England, that they are within so easy a distance of scenes which, in natural beauty, may vie with almost any in the land. Ivirkstall, as we have said, is close by the former town; and its grounds are thronged on every holiday by busy workers, who, whether intent or not on learning the appropriate lesson from the mouldering walls and tower, are at least fully alive to the advantages of fresh air, and of wide scope and range for healthful amusement. The like may be said of other places, lying only a little further off. There is Roundhay Park, for instance, one of the most splendid domains in England, now, through the wise liberality of the Leeds Corporation, the property of the people; while the public parks of many other towns, as Bradford, Halifax, Barnsley, with Manchester, Liverpool, Blackburn, gratify not only the instinct for recreation, but the desire for beauty.

Or again, our traveller, in his pause at Leeds, may take the opportunity of visiting Ilkley, with its fine open moorland, where the brain-wearied worker may range at will. Then, a little way beyond Ilkley, lie the fair woods and noble heights encircling Bolton Abbey, where the Wharfe comes down, as yet unpolluted, from the moorland beyond; while the form of the White Doe of Rylstone, or the memory of the ill-fated heir of Egremont, seems yet to haunt the scene.

A little further again, our astonished friend comes upon a _Clapham Junction_, but it is amid the silence of the hills! Ingleborough, with its marvellous caves, too little known, with its companion heights, Pen-y-gant and Whernside, rise from the valley: and every path is full of beauty, especially that which leads into the heart of Craven, where bold limestone scars, deep glens, and upland moors, with one deep, lonely tarn, dear alike to dreamers and to anglers, yield a succession of pictures, of which, among their many charms, not the least is their easy accessibility from the neighbourhood of clanking mills and inky streams. For Ilkley, Bolton, Harrogate, Craven, Clapham may all be reached by the busy worker of Leeds or Bradford, and much of their beauty enjoyed, in the leisure of a summer Saturday afternoon, or on a "Bank holiday." He who would be free from excursionists, with their loud talk, their demonstrative ways, their baskets and their bottles, must go another time; but even in those holiday-hours there is much to interest. The "trippers" may be an interruption to the dreamer, an annoyance to the sensitive; but it is good that people whose lives are usually so hard-pressed and monotonous should have the means of ennobling enjoyment within easy reach; and though occasionally there may be an element of roughness or even intemperance in the recreation, we should be unjust were we not to record our impression, from what we have often seen, that there is a decided improvement in these respects, and that the free access to hill and moor, to fine scenery and pure air, has its part in checking those vices which spring up like evil weeds in the unwholesome dwellings of a crowded population.

The "Excursion Season," no doubt, has its drawbacks in Lancashire, Yorkshire, London, and everywhere else. There are holidays that depress rather than invigorate: the spirit of self-indulgence may adopt the pretext of needed recreation, and the Lord's day is too often heedlessly or wilfully disregarded; but on the whole it is good that God's fair world should be thrown open to all who can enjoy its beauties; and that, as we have seen, some of its richest beauties should lie at the very threshold of the hardest workers in the most unromantic scenes.

The topic is almost inexhaustible; and the selection of places to be visited in reasonable time, from these "centres of industry," would be invidious to make. A little way beyond Leeds, as every one knows, lies Harrogate, the high table-land where medicinal waters have for long generations given to the place the fame of a true "city of Hygeia," while we ourselves would still give the chief credit to the invigorating, stimulating air, and to the almost inexhaustible interest of the neighbourhood, occupying the mind of the visitor with a round of healthful delights. The visit to Studley Park and Fountains Abbey will probably rank among the chief of these. Again, as in the cases of Kirkstall and Bolton, reverting to the past, we admire the taste and wisdom shown by the cowled brotherhoods in mediæval times, in their choice of dwelling-places. Something, indeed, of the beauty which we now see may have been the result of their assiduous culture. It was part of their work to "make the wilderness to smile;" but they had a rare faculty for lighting upon scenes which, if not already beautiful, possessed an evident capability for becoming so. At Fountains both nature and art seem to vie with each other; and in the modern arrangement of the domain, the art may occasionally be the more apparent. The artistic yields to the artificial; the ruins have been maintained at the due stage of picturesqueness by careful oversight and repair; and the carefully prepared "surprise," which awaits the visitor at one stage of his progress through the grounds, is too theatrical to permit even one of the fairest of pictures to have its full effect. But, perhaps, all this is hypercritical, and, with every deduction, this old Cistercian abbey is one of the most beautiful, as it is one of the most complete mediæval monastic buildings in England. The tower, unlike that of its sister abbey at Kirkstall, is little impaired by the ravages of time, the plan of the edifice is easy to be traced; and the light pillars and lofty arches of the Ladye Chapel give to the whole a finishing touch of stateliness and grace. Then how pleasant to wander through the noble avenues of Studley, to gaze upwards to the gigantic spruce firs, or to climb the mound where linger the decaying forms of the rugged yew trees--remnants, it is said, of the "seven sisters" that spread their shade over the founders of the abbey, more than six hundred years ago!

Still pursuing our way northwards, we reach the country of the Yorkshire Dales, where the Swale, passing by Richmond, the Tees, on the edge of Durham, and many smaller streams, descend from the eastern slope of the Westmoreland moors. Both abound in wild and charming scenery: the upper Tees-dale especially is singularly impressive. The river runs in its deep rocky bed through alpine-looking green meadows, with clean whitewashed cottages scattered here and there. Trees there are few or none, except a small kind of fir; and in place of hedges, low stone walls mark the boundaries of the fields. About five or six miles below its source, there forms the striking waterfall "High Force," tumbling over a black basaltic precipice, fifty feet high; while yet higher up the stream, where it issues from a gloomy tarn on the edge of the Westmoreland moors, descending for some two hundred feet over a steep, irregular staircase, so to speak, of basalt, the weird wildness of the scene, in the midst of its hilly amphitheatre, approaches sublimity. Caldron Snout is the quaint name of this unique rapid, and the curious in geology, as well as the lover of the picturesque, will be well repaid by a visit.

But by this time we have wandered some distance from our manufacturing centres. If, however, we have left the Yorkshire district behind, we are approaching the yet more black and busy coal districts.

Teesdale itself has two sets of associations, and the same stream, whose rocks and dales are so romantic in its earlier course, becomes, by the time it reaches Stockton, a broad and inky flood, and so passes by Middlesborough--that wonderfully progressive seat of the iron manufacture--to the sea. We now pass on from town to town along the coast, each busier, blacker than the last, but with glimpses of rich beauty between, while the city of Durham, as seen from the rail, is one of the noblest views of rock and river, cathedral, castle, and town, on which the traveller's eye has ever rested. This river is the Weir; then the Tyne is reached, and Newcastle, the "capital of the north," is entered over its splendid High-Level Bridge.

We can imagine no better route for a pedestrian excursion than the way from Denton Hall to Thirlwall Castle--about thirty-four miles; or, if the tourist wishes to see the whole, let him put Dr. Bruce's Condensed Guide and an Ordnance map into his knapsack, devote a week to the exploration, and proceed by leisurely stages from Wallsend, on the Tyne, to Bowness, on the Solway, a distance of seventy-three miles and a half.

But our chief object in visiting these great centres of industry is to explore their neighbourhoods. Few towns in England are better worth a prolonged visit than Newcastle-upon-Tyne; but its attraction to us now is, that we can, at so short a distance from its busy streets, place ourselves amid rural scenes of surpassing interest, as well on their own account as for their historical associations.

First and foremost, of course, there is the Roman Wall, with its long line of remains, still magnificent, and so varied from place to place, while the scenery that surrounds them is so striking, that sea to sea classic ground.