Part 9

_Pastimes and Recreations._--The pastimes and recreations of the Lancashire people fall, as elsewhere, under two distinct heads; those which arise upon the poetic sentiment, the love of purity, order, and beauty, and those which come of simple desire to be entertained. Where poesy has a stronghold, we have never long to wait for the "touches of sweet harmony"; hence a characteristic of working Lancashire, immemorial as to date, is devotedness to music. In all Europe it would be difficult to find a province where the first and finest of the fine arts is better understood, or more reverently practised. High-class sacred music--German music in particular--fills many a retired cottage in leisure hours with solace and joy; and very generally in villages, as well as in the large towns, there are clubs and societies instituted purely for its promotion. "On the wild hills, where whin and heather grow, it is not uncommon to meet working-men with their musical instruments on their way to take part in some village oratorio many miles distant.... Up in the forest of Rossendale, between Derply Moor and the wild hill called Swinshaw, there is a little lone valley, a green cup in the mountains, called Dean. The inhabitants of this valley are so notable for their love of music that they are known all through the neighbouring country as 'Th' Deign layrocks.'"[30] In many of the large country manufacturing establishments--the printworks, for instance--the operatives have regularly organised "bands,"--the employers giving encouragement,--the value of which, in regard to moral culture, is shown in the members being usually the trusted men.

[30] _i.e._ the larks, or singing birds, of Dean. Edwin Waugh, _Sketches_, p. 199.

The same primitive inclination towards the poetic would seem to underlie the boundless Lancashire love of flowers and gardens. Not that the passion is universal. The chief seat, as of the intrinsically best of the dialect, is the south-eastern part of the county: the portion abutting on Yorkshire is unfavourably cold, and though in the north occur fine examples of individual enthusiasm, there is little illustration of confederated work. Societies strong and skilful enough to hold beautiful exhibitions are dotted all over the congenial parts of the cotton district. They attend as diligently to the economic as to the decorative; one never knows whether most to admire the onions, the beans, and the celery, or the splendid asters, dahlias, and phloxes--in many parts there is ancient renown also for gooseberries. After the manner of the wise in other matters, the operative Lancashire gardeners, if they cannot grow the things they might prefer, give their whole hearts to liking those they have at command. The rivalry and ambition in regard to gooseberries is unique. While the fruit is ripening upon the bushes it is sacrilege for a stranger to approach within a distance of many yards. On cold and hurtful nights the owner sits up to watch it, like a nurse with an invalid, supplying or removing defence according to the conditions, and on the show day the excitement compares in its innocent measure with that of Epsom. The exhibitors gather round a table: the chairman sits with scales and weights before him, calling in turn for the heaviest red, the heaviest yellow, and so on, every eye watching the balance; the end of all being a bright new kettle for the wife at home.

Many of the operative gardeners are assiduous cultivators of "alpines," the vegetable _bijouterie_ of the mountains; others are enamoured of ferns, and these last are usually possessed of good botanical knowledge. The beginning would seem to date from the time of Elizabeth, thus from the time of Shakspere, when other immigrations of the Flemish weavers took place. Things of home too dear to leave behind them, they brought with them their favourite flowers, the tulip and the polyanthus. These early growers would doubtless for a time be shyly looked upon as aliens. Nothing is known definitely of the work of the ensuing century, but there is certain proof that by 1725 Lancashire had already become distinguished for its "florists' flowers," the cultivation lying almost entirely in the hands of the artisans, who have never for an instant slackened, though to-day the activity is often expressed in new directions.

It is owing, without doubt, to the example of the operative Lancashire gardeners of the last century and a half that floriculture at the present moment holds equal place with classical music among the enjoyments also of the wealthy; especially those whose early family ties were favourable to observation of the early methods. More greenhouses, hothouses, and conservatories; more collections of valuable orchids and other plants of special beauty and lustre exist in South Lancashire, and especially in the immediate neighbourhood of Manchester, than in any other district away from the metropolis. Orchid culture was practised here, as in Macclesfield and Birmingham, long before what orchids are was even a question in many parts. The name of one of the noblest species yet discovered, the _Cattleya Mossiæ_, commemorates an old Liverpool merchant, Mr. John Moss, one of the first to grow these matchless flowers; while in that of the _Anguloa Clowesii_ we are reminded of the beautiful collection formed at Higher Broughton by the Rev. John Clowes, which, after the decease of the possessor, went to Kew. A very remarkable and encouraging fact is that orchids, the queenliest and most fragrant of indoor flowers, can, like auriculas, with skilful management be brought to the highest possible state of perfection in an atmosphere in which many plants can barely exist--the smoky and soot-laden one of Manchester. The proof was supplied by the late Dr. R. F. Ainsworth of Cliff Point, to whom flower-show honours were as familiar as to Benjamin Simonite of Sheffield, that astonishing old florist whose auriculas are grown where the idea of a garden seems absurd.

These very practical proofs of the life and soundness of the poetic sentiment in working Lancashire prepare us for a county feature in its way quite as interesting and remarkable--the wide-spread and very deep-seated local taste for myth, legend, and superstition, which, in truth, is no other than the poetic sentiment uncultured and gone astray. Faith in "folklore" is by no means to be confounded with inane credulity. The folk-lore of a civilised nation is the _débris_ of the grand old spirit-worship--vague, but exquisitely picturesque, and figuratively significant, which, in the popular religion of the pre-Christian world, filled every sweet and romantic scene with invisible beings--Dryads, who loved the woodland; Naïads, that sported in the stream and waterfall; Oreads, who sat and sang where now we gather their own fragrant _Oreopteris_,[31] and which assigned maidens even to the sea--the Nereids, never yet lost. "Nothing," it has been well said, "that has at any time had a meaning for mankind ever absolutely dies." How much of the primeval faith shall survive with any particular race or people--to what extent it shall be transformed--depends upon their own culture, spiritual insight, and ideas of the omnipresence of the Almighty, of which the fancies as to the nymphs, etc., declared a dim recognition: it is affected also very materially by the physical character and complexion of their country. This has been illustrated in the completest manner as regards the eastern borders of Lancashire by the accomplished author of _Scarsdale_[32] already named: the influence of the daily spectacle of the wild moor, the evening walk homewards through the shadowy and silent ravine, the sweet mysteries of the green and ferny clough, with its rushing stream, all telling powerfully, he shows us with perennial grace, upon the imagination of a simple-hearted race, constitutionally predisposed towards the marvellous, and to whom it was nourishment. Nobody is really happy without illusions of some kind, and none can be more harmless than belief in the mildly supernatural. The local fairy tales having now been pretty well collected and classified,[33] it remains only to recognise their immense ethnographical value, since there is probably not a single legend or superstition afloat in Lancashire that, like an ancient coin, does not refer the curious student to distant lands and long past ages. Lancashire, we must remember, has been successively inhabited, or occupied, more or less, by a Celtic people,--by Romans, Danes, and Anglo-Saxons,--all of whom have left their footprints. No one can reside a year in Lancashire without hearing of its "boggarts"--familiar in another form in the Devonshire pixies, and in the "merry wanderer of the night," Titania's "sweet Puck." Absurd to the logician, the tales and the terrors connected with the boggarts carry with them, like all other fables, a profound interior truth--the truth for which, as Carlyle says, "reason will always inquire, while half-reason stands indifferent and mocking." The nucleus of the boggart idea is, that the power of the human mind, exercised with firmness and consistency, triumphs over all obstacles, and reduces even spirits to its will; while, contrariwise, the weak and undetermined are plagued and domineered over by the very same imps whom the resolute can direct and control. So with the superstitions as to omens. When in spring the anglers start for a day's enjoyment, they look anxiously for "pynots," or magpies, _one_ being unlucky, while _two_ portend good fortune. The simple fact, so the ornithologists tell us, is that in cold and ungenial weather prejudicial to sport with the rod, one of every pair of birds always stays in the nest, whereas in fine weather, good for angling, both birds come out. Illustrations of this nature might be multiplied a hundred-fold, and to unabating advantage. Time is never ill-spent upon interpretation of the mythic. The effort, at all events, is a kindly one that seeks--

To unbind the charms that round slight fables lie, And show that truth is truest poësy.

[31] _Lastrea Oreopteris_, "sweet mountain-fern," abundant in South-East Lancashire.

[32] The late Sir James Philips Kay-Shuttleworth, Bart.

[33] _Lancashire Folk-lore._ By John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson. 1867.

The dialect itself is full of metaphor, images of great beauty not infrequently turning up. Some of them seem inherited from the primevals. That light and sound are reciprocally representative needs, for instance, no saying. From the earliest ages the idea of music has always accompanied that of sunrise. Though to-day the heavens declare the glory of God silently, in the beginning "the morning stars sang together":--old Homer's "rosy-fingered morn" is in Lancashire the "skryke" or cry "of day."

Though much that is deplorably brutal occurs among the lowest Lancashire classes, the character of the popular pastimes is in general free from stain; and the amusements themselves are often eminently interesting, since in honest and _bona fide_ rustic sports there is always archæology. The tales they tell of the past now constitute in truth the chief attraction of the older ones. The social influences of the railway system have told no less upon the village-green than on the streets of cities; any picture that may now be drawn must needs owe its best colours to the retrospective. Contemplating what remains of them, it is pleasant, however, to note the intense vitality of customs and ceremonials having their root in feelings of _reverence_; such, for example, as the annual "rush-bearing" still current in many parts, and not unknown even in the streets of modern Manchester. That in the olden time, prior to the introduction of carpets, the practice was to strew floors and indoor pavements with green rushes every one knows. Among the charges brought against Cardinal Wolsey was his extravagance in the too frequent and ostentatious spreading of clean ones. Employed also in churches and cathedrals on the anniversary of the feast of the saint to whom the building was dedicated, when renewed it was with special solemnity. In an age when processions full of pomp and splendour were greatly delighted in, no wonder that the renewal became an excuse for a showy pageant; and thus, although to-day we have only the rush-cart, the morris-dancers, the drums and trumpets, and the flags--the past, in association, lives over again. Small events and great ones are seldom far asunder. In the magnificent "rush-bearing" got up for the delectation of James I. when at Hoghton Tower, Sunday, 17th August 1617, lay one of the secret causes of the Stuart downfall. Sports on the Sabbath day had been forbidden by his predecessor. James, admitting as argument that the cause of the reformed religion had suffered by the prohibition, gave his "good people of Lancashire" leave to resume them. The Puritans took offence; the wound was deepened by Charles; and when the time of trial came it was remembered.

"Pace-egging" (a corruption of Pasche or Pasque-egging) is another immemorial Lancashire custom, observed, as the term indicates, at Easter, the egg taking its place as an emblem of the Resurrection. Perverted and degraded, though in the beginning decorous, if not pious, the original house-to-house visitation has long had engrafted upon it a kind of rude drama supposed to represent the combat of St. George and the Dragon--the victory of good over evil, of life over death. So with "Simnel-Sunday," a term derived from the Anglo-Saxon _symblian_, to banquet, or _symbel_, a feast, a "simnel" being literally "banquet-bread."[34] This corresponds with the Midlent-Sunday of other counties, and, particularly in Bury, is a time of special festivity. The annual village "wakes" observed everywhere in Lancashire, and equivalent to the local rush-bearings, partake, it is to be feared, of the general destiny of such things. Happily the railway system has brought with it an inestimable choice of pleasure for the rational. The emphatically staple enjoyment of the working Lancashire population to-day consists in the Whitsun-week trip to some distant place of wonder or wholesome gratification, the seaside always securing the preference. In Lancashire it is not nearly or so much Whitsun-Monday or Whitsun-Tuesday as the whole of the four following days. In the south-eastern part of the county, Manchester particularly, business almost disappears; and very delightful is it then to observe how many little parties of the toiling thrifty are away to North Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and even to France. The factory system always implies _masses_. The people work in masses, and suffer in masses, and rejoice in masses. In Whitsun-week, fifty miles, a hundred miles away, we find in a score of places five hundred, perhaps a thousand. There are salutary home-pleasures ready besides. Manchester does wisely in holding its principal flower-show during this great annual holiday, drawing, in fair weather, some 50,000 visitors. The example is a good one, since with the growing disposition of the English people to enjoy their holidays, it behoves all those who have the management of places of healthy recreation to supply the most humanising that may be possible, and thus mitigate the influence of the hurtful ones. The staple game of muscular Lancashire was formerly that of bowls. A history of Manchester would be incomplete without plenty of lively chat about it; and in regard to the more modern pastime, the cricket match, it is no vaunt to add that while the chief cricketing in England lies in the hands of only nine out of its forty counties, the premiership has once at all events, say in 1879, been claimed as fairly by Lancashire as by its great rival on the banks of the Trent. Nottinghamshire, moreover, had held its position without half the difficulties in the way that Lancashire had to contend with.

[34] In the Anglo-Saxon version of the Old Testament there are many examples of derivative words. In Exodus xxiii. 15, 16, feasting-time is _symbel-tid_; xxii. 5, a feast-day is _symbel-dæg_. In Psalm lxxxi. 3, we have _symelnys_, a feast-day.

VII

THE INLAND SCENERY SOUTH OF LANCASTER

Scenery more diversified than that of Lancashire, taking the Duddon as its northern boundary, does not exist in any English county. For the present we shall keep to the portion south of the Lune, deferring the Lake District to the next chapter, to which may also be left the little that has to be said concerning the shore south of that river. The eastern parts have attractions quite as decided as those of the north, though of a character totally different. Every acknowledged element of the picturesque may be discovered there, sometimes in abundance. The only portion of the county entirely devoid of landscape beauty is that which is traversed by the Liverpool and Southport Railway, not unjustly regarded as the dullest in the kingdom. The best that can be said of this dreary district is, that at intervals it is relieved by the cheerful hues of cultivation.

From Liverpool northwards to the banks of the Ribble, excepting at some distance from the sea, and eastwards to Manchester, the ground is nearly level. Nothing must be expected where it borders upon the Mersey above the estuary. To quote the precise terms employed by Pennant, "The Mersey is by no means a pleasing water." The country bordering upon it, he might have added, appeals very slenderly to the imagination; and most assuredly, since the old topographer passed along, Nature has made no change for the better as regards the river, while man has done his best to efface any pretty features it may once have owned. But we have not to go far from the modern Tyre in order to find hills and the picturesque. Newborough and the vicinity present a remarkable contrast to the plains beneath. Here the country begins to grow really beautiful, and thenceforward it constantly improves. Some of the slopes are treeless, and smooth as a lawn; others are broken by deep and wooded glades, with streamlets bound for the Douglas (an affluent of the Ribble), one of the loveliest dells of the kind in South Lancashire occurring near Gathurst. On the summits, at Ashurst particularly, a sweet and pleasant air never fails to "invite our gentle senses." Here too we get our first lesson in what may be truly said, once for all, of Lancashire--that wherever the ground is sufficiently bold and elevated we are sure not only of fine air and an extensive prospect, but a glorious one. At Ashurst, while Liverpool is not too far for the clear discerning of its towers and spires, in the south are plainly distinguished the innumerable Delamere pines, rising in dark masses like islands out of the sea; and far away, beyond the Dee, the soft swell of the hills of North Wales, Moel Vamma never wanting. This celebrated eminence, almost as well known in South Lancashire as in Denbighshire, may be descried even at Eccles, four or five miles from the Manchester Exchange.

Eastwards of the great arterial line of railway which, running from Manchester to Lancaster through Bolton and Preston, almost exactly bisects the county, the scenery is rich in the eloquent features which come of wild and interminable surges of broad and massive hill, often rocky, with heights of fantastic form, the irregularities giving token, in their turn, of deep chasms and clefts, that subdivide into pretty lateral glens and moist hollows crowded with ferns. The larger glens constitute the "cloughs" so famous in local legend, and the names of which recur so frequently in Lancashire literature. As Yorkshire is approached, the long succession of uplands increases in volume, rising at last in parts to a maximum altitude of nearly 1900 feet. Were a survey possible from overhead, the scene would be that of a tempest-ruffled ocean, the waves suddenly made solid.

Very much of this vast hill-surface consists of desolate, heathery, unsheltered moorland. The amount of unreclaimed land still existing in Lancashire, and which must needs remain for ever as it is, constitutes in truth one of the striking characteristics of the county. Not merely in the portion now specially under notice are there cold and savage wastes such as laugh the plough to scorn. The "fells" of the more northern districts present enormous breadths of similar character, incapable of supporting more than the poorest aboriginal vegetation, affording only the scantiest pasturage for a few scattered mountain-sheep, thus leaving the farmer without a chance. In itself the fact of course is in no degree remarkable, since there are plenty of hopeless acres elsewhere. The singular circumstance is the association of so much barrenness with the stupendous industries of the busiest people in the world. It is but in keeping after all with the general idea of old England,--

"This precious gem, set in the silver sea,"--

the pride of which consists in the constant blending of the most diverse elements. If we have grim and hungry solitudes, rugged and gloomy wildernesses, not very far off, be sure there is counterpoise in placid and fruitful vale and mead. Lancashire may not supply the cornfield: the soil and climate, though good for potatoes, are unfriendly to the cerealia; there is no need either to be too exacting; if the sickle has no work, there is plenty for the scythe and the spade.

A few miles beyond Bolton the hills begin to rise with dignity. Here we find far-famed and far-seen Rivington Pike, conspicuous, like Ashurst, through ascending almost immediately out of the plain. "Pike" is in Lancashire, and in parts of the country closely adjacent, the equivalent of "peak," the highest point of a hilly neighbourhood, though by no means implying an exactly conical or pyramidal figure, and very generally no more than considerable elevation, as in the case of the "Peak of Derbyshire." Rivington well deserves its name, presenting from many points of view one of those beautiful, evenly swelling, and gently rounded eminences which the ancient Greeks were accustomed to call [Greek: titthoi] and [Greek: mastoi], as in the case of the classic mound at Samos which Callimachus connects so elegantly with the name of the lady Parthenia. There are spots, however, where the mamelon disappears. From all parts of the summit the prospect is delightful. Under our feet, unrolled like a carpet, is a verdant flat which stretches unbrokenly to the sea-margin, twenty miles distant, declared, nevertheless, by a soft, sweet gleam of silver or molten gold, according to the position of the sun in the heavens. The estuary of the Ribble, if the tide be in, renews that lovely shining; and beyond, in the remote distance, if the atmosphere be fairly clear, say fifty or sixty miles away, may be discerned the grand mountains that cast their shadows into Coniston. Working Lancashire, though it has lakes of its own, has made others! From the summit of Rivington we now look down upon half a dozen immense reservoirs, so located that to believe them the work of man is scarcely possible. Fed by the inflow of several little streams, and no pains taken to enforce straight margins, except when necessary, these ample waters exemplify in the best manner how art and science are able at times to recompense Nature--

"Leaving that beautiful which always was, And making that which was not."

After heavy and continuous rain, the overflow gives rise to musical waterfalls. Up in the glen called Deanwood there is also a natural and nearly permanent cascade.[35]