Part 9

Between Kendal and Penrith, a distance of twenty-six miles, is situated the bleakest and most trying stretch of country in all the distance from London and Glasgow. It is the district of that high-perched table-land, 1,400 feet above sea-level, dreaded by the old coachmen, and the passengers too, as “Shap Fell.” All the weather of Westmoreland is brewed amid the inhospitable altitudes of Stainmoor and Shap Fell, which are, in addition, afflicted with the local phenomenon known as the “Helm Wind.” This, perhaps fortunately for travellers, is not a winter’s gale, but a playful blast that characterises the days of May and June. When the tourist reads that it is strong enough to overturn horses and carriages, and that the noise of it may be heard twenty miles off, like thunder, or the roar of a cataract, he entertains serious thoughts of accomplishing this stage of his journey by rail. The Helm Wind derives its name from the “helm,” or cap, of light clouds that rests immovably for hours in the sky at the time of its blowing. It blows across the fells of Westmoreland and Cumberland, rushing down their steep sides and lashing the waters of the Lakes into furious waves and driven spray.

The ascent to this not very promising region begins by a gentle rise at Mint Bridge, one mile from Kendal. It continues, with increasingly steep gradients, but with two short intervals of down gradient, for nine and a half miles, when the summit is reached. Although Shap Fell has so ugly a name, the rise at no point exceeds 1 in 10. It is rather the long-continued character of the ascent to the exposed summit that makes the road remarkable.

[Sidenote: _COACHING INCIDENTS_]

The coaching accidents on this stage were remarkably few. The principal happening of this kind was when a country mail was upset at Kirbythore Bridge, on Hucks Brow, owing to the horses shying at a quite inoffensive water-wheel. The coach fell eight feet, and a horse was killed, but there the damage ended. A stalwart Yorkshire wool-stapler, who was riding outside, was flung off and made to perform a complete somersault, but he alighted safely on his feet, and just in time to catch, at “mid-off,” a parcel which shot with wondrous velocity out of a woman’s arms, and proved on inspection to be a baby. He said, dryly, when they congratulated him on his fielding, that “a stray baby isn’t generally a good catch for a man.”

It was only right and proper that on such a road as this amateur coachmen were few. It would, indeed, have sounded a higher note of propriety had there been none at all. With regard to the mails, the Post Office regulations, not only on this road, but on roads in general, strictly forbade coachmen allowing amateurs to drive, and expected the guards to interpose, to prevent anything of the kind. On one occasion, when young Teather, of Teather & Son, the mail-contractors, had taken the coachman’s place, and was about to drive his own horses, a half-indignant and half-terrified passenger seized the reins because the guard would not veto the arrangement. What would have happened to that guard for not fulfilling his instructions to the letter we do not know, for there happened to be a change of Government at the time, and when the guard somewhat impudently desired to know which of the two Postmasters-General—the in-coming or retiring—he was to address in his defence, the matter was allowed to drop.

One of the few privileged amateurs was Mr. James Parkin, who generally worked on Teather’s ground out of Penrith, towards Carlisle. He was one of those who would drive only the best of teams, and so gave up when the railways encroached and the horses on the shorter journeys became inferior. He was wont to say he did not care to be a “screw-driver.” He was a very steady but slow-going whip: too slow for the Mail, and lacked energy to make his horses slip along over the galloping ground, where really scientific coachmen always made up for lost time. The guard, in fact, was perpetually holding up his watch, admonishing him to “send ’em along.”

Ramsay of Barnton was a good enough whip when the cattle were good, but he liked to choose his ground. Nightingale, the great coursing judge of that day, was the one to “take a coach through the country.” He took the horses as they came,—kickers or jibbers—and, thanks to his fine nerves and delicate handling of the ribbons, kept his time to a second.

[Sidenote: _COACHMEN_]

Parson Bird was also said to be “well up to his work,” and was so good-hearted a fellow that when the regular coachman from Keswick to Kendal broke his leg, he took his place for six weeks, and collected the fees for him. A story is told of a lady giving the parson-coachman half-a-crown at the end of the journey one afternoon, and being introduced to him at a ball the same evening at Kendal. He at once asked for a dance, but she was highly indignant that a coachman should so presume. However, the matter was explained, and to such satisfaction that not only did she dance, but eventually became Mrs. Bird.

Among the regular coachmen, John Reed took a very high place. He was a stout and a very silent man: all for his horses and nothing to his passengers. He drove the Glasgow Mail from Carlisle to Abington, never tasted ale or wine, and never had an accident. This was the more remarkable as Mr. Johnstone of Hallheaths, owner of Charles XII., horsed the Mail along one stage with nothing but thoroughbreds; and, had they “taken off,” not even Reed, strong-wristed though he was, could have held them in.

John Bryden was the very reverse of John Reed, and full of jollity and good stories on the box. The two Drydens were even more dashing in their style: one had the art of teaching his horses to trot when most men would have had them on the gallop; the other was a wonderful singer. Whenever the Mail reached a long ascent and he had to slacken speed, he would beguile the way with “She Wore a Wreath of Roses,” or “I Know a Flower within my Garden Growing,” in a rich tenor that would have secured him a good concert-room engagement in these times.

Another notable coachman was “Little Isaac Johnson.” He kept on the box for thirty-five years, and never had an accident. He was supreme with a kicking horse, and always took care to make him his near-side leader. When such an one was put there, he could punish him more severely, and liked to hit restive animals inside the thigh. He could “fairly wale them up,” if they continued to rebel.

The Telfers were coachmen of the same severe school, and well known over Shap way. Jem Barnes, on the other hand, was fat and lumbersome and lacked fire; so that people _did_ say he had his sleeping-ground as well as his galloping-ground. But, one night, at least, when he was driving north over Shap Fell, there was little chance of sleeping. He had on that occasion not only to gallop at all the snow-drifts, but to put a postboy and a pair on in front. The pole-hook broke in midst of the blinding, snow-wreathed journey, and the hand of his almost namesake, Jem Byrns, the guard, was nearly frozen to the screw-wrench when he brought out a spare pole-hook and fastened it on. The snow was falling in flakes as large as crown-pieces all the while, and the only comic relief was the voice of a “heavy swell” issuing from the box seat, beneath a perfect tortoise-shell covering of capes and furs, “_What are you fellows keeping me here in the cold for, and warming your own hands at the lamp?_”

[Sidenote: _PEDIGREE_]

George Eade, another of this distinguished company, was very deaf, but with hearing enough to be cognisant of a great many objurgations from Mr. Richardson, of the “Greyhound” at Shap, for taking it out of his horses. One day Richardson came out and was particularly bland—nothing to complain of at all—but George, unable to distinguish anything, and concluding he was on the old subject, had his back up in an instant. “_Hang you!_” said he, “_I’m not before my time; I’ll bet you_ £5 _of it; look at my watch!_”

Jack Pooley was a great character. When he retired from the box, he joined the Yeomanry and entered his horse for a cavalry plate at a race-meeting. Two of the conditions of entry were that it must never have won £50, and also must be half-bred. Some objections being raised, it became necessary to examine him before the committee. To the first question, whether his horse had ever won £50, he replied, “No, indeed! but he’s helped to lose many a fifty—he ran three years in an opposition coach.” The next question was, “What is he by, Mr. Pooley?” “By?” said Jack. “I should say he was by a shorthorn bull, he’s such a devil of a roarer.” The answers, we are told, were considered eminently satisfactory.

The mail-coachmen on the Shap and Penrith stage were for some time afflicted with a mare that stopped with every one of them in turn at the end of two miles. At last they all wearied of her, and orders were issued that if she refused again, she was not to be brought back alive. On this fateful journey she started, and, according to her use and wont, suddenly sulked and sat down on her haunches in the middle of the road, like a dog, with her fore-legs straight out in front. The coachman, armed by the contractor with power of life or death, did not proceed to tragical extremities. He got down, took a rail out of the hedge, and struck her nine times below the knees with the flat side of it. This treatment proved effectual, not only for that journey, but for all time, and she was docile and willing ever after.

How bravely and doggedly the mails and stages battled on winter nights against the howling blasts of Shap and Stainmoor, sometimes contending with snowstorms and drifts in which not only the coachman and guard, but the passengers also, bore a hand at the snow-shovels and dug and delved until hands and feet, previously numbed with cold, glowed again! How anxiously, when that digging and delving seemed almost ineffectual and the drifts impassable, did they strain their vision to catch a glimpse through the murky night, filled with driving snowflakes for the cheerful lights of that roadside inn, the “Welcome into Cumberland,” telling travellers accustomed to this road not only of comfort available at hand, but of a farewell to the terrors of Westmoreland and approach to the sheltered little town of Penrith.

XX

At four miles and three-quarters from Kendal, at Watchgate, the finest view opens, along Sleddale. Beyond it comes the “Plough” inn, with pictorial sign and the couplet—

He that by the Plough would thrive, Himself must either hold or drive.

a statement to which farmers do not unanimously subscribe.

[Sidenote: _HUCKS BROW_]

Beyond this again comes Hucks Brow, the end of the first stage out of Kendal, and Forest Hall, which, with the Abbey Farm at Shap, forms one of the two largest sheep-farms in Westmoreland. Another rise of a mile and a half, and a steep descent leads to Boroughbridge, a hamlet where an ancient bridge spans a mountain stream and is neighboured by a few cottages and the “Bay Horse” inn. From this point the final and most trying ascent is made. An old road goes winding away in the valley below, past Hausefoot Farm, but it has long ceased to be of any but strictly local use.

The road across Shap summit is built upon peat bogs, and needs constant repair. The boggy nature of the foundation is not apparent to the casual wayfarer, but may readily be discovered by standing beside it at the passing of a motor-car, when it very perceptibly shakes.

At the descent from the summit towards Shap village, the old road crosses to the right hand, and away to the right, half a mile across the moors, the hotel of Shap Wells is seen, rising from its wooded hollow.

Dr. Granville, who wrote a work on English spas in 1845, came in due course to Shap Wells, and remarks justly upon the wild and remote situation of the wells and the hotel, but he does not lay any stress upon the truly awful ancient-egg flavour of the medicinal waters, which, if their medicinal virtues be in proportion to their taste, must needs be very remarkably curative. He talks rather of the colour scheme of the water, than of _bouquet_, and waxes eloquent on its bluish, opalescent hue. He was here in the height of summer, and found at the hotel a “lady sitting at a roasting fire (of which by-the-by I was glad to partake also) on the 6th of August.” But notwithstanding the curious taste and flavour of the waters, the hotel is greatly frequented. It is not the waters, but the bracing air, that now forms the attraction.

[Sidenote: _SHAP_]

The village of Shap, although itself of no mean altitude, seems quite sheltered after the four miles’ run down from the summit. Still stands the old “Greyhound” inn of coaching days, as you enter the village. And not only of coaching days, but of times earlier, as the tablet over the door, dated 1703, proclaims. This was the inn, doubtless, at which Prince Charlie called, on his way, and found the landlady a “sad imposing wife.” The weird greyhound sculptured on the tablet somewhat resembles the Saxon idea of a horse, as carved on White Horse Hill, in Berkshire.

Shap is a large village, with cattle-market, and an odd squat building styled a “market cross,” now used as a parish room, but it is chiefly famous among tourists for its Abbey, which exists only in scanty ruin, a mile away, in a lonely situation: lonely, that is to say, except for its great Abbey Farm. You approach it over a sheep track down and across a narrow bridge built by the old monks so well that it stands soundly to this day and does not let my Lord Lonsdale through when he drives visitors across in his big motor-car, to see the ruined tower, practically all that remains of the Abbey. Shelter was more to the point when I came here, chased by rain-storms and thunder-storms that spouted and rumbled among the hills, and I know more of the kindly hospitality of the farm than of the antiquities of the Abbey, which, after all, are few beyond broken columns and the stone coffins of departed and forgotten abbots and brethren. The Abbey was resigned in 1541 by Richard Evenwode, the last Abbot. Its revenue was then £154 per annum, a good deal in those days. To-day black-faced, horned Scotch mountain-sheep roam the Abbey lands.

Hackthorpe village, with an old hall, now a farmhouse, beside the road, brings us to the neighbourhood of Lowther Castle and its beautiful park, seat of the Earl of Lonsdale. The mansion itself, built by Smirke in 1808, is magnificent, in the sense that it is huge and was costly to build and is princely in its appointments, but it is not a castle nor is it Gothic architecture, although the architect who designed it, and the second Lord Lonsdale, for whom it was designed, fondly imagined it to be so.

[Sidenote: _THE “BAD LORD LONSDALE”_]

The wicked Lowther, the “bad Lord Lonsdale,” _i.e._ the first Earl (1736-1802), once haunted this superstitious countryside, after he had run his earthly course with sinful _éclat_, and was a dreaded “boggle”—which is Westmoreland and Cumberland for “ghost.” This once notorious character, “this brutal fellow,” as Boswell styled him, was eccentric to a degree, and actually acknowledged himself to be “truly a madman, though too rich to be confined.” One of his eccentricities was the keeping of wild horses, instead of deer, in his park at Lowther. Too rich and powerful to care a rap what was thought of him, he drove about in gloomy, out-of-date majesty in an ancient mildewed carriage drawn by shaggy, unclipped horses. The entry of this equipage into Penrith, where he owned most of the property and, politically speaking, all the inhabitants, was regarded with awful expectation of what he would do next, and was feared almost as much as the coming of some mediæval judge armed with a commission to try rebels.

In life representative of the worst and coarsest feudal barons of the Middle Ages, he was held in still greater terror in his death. The awe-stricken rustics long continued to tell how he was with difficulty buried, and how, while the clergyman was praying over him, his mischievous disembodied spirit very nearly knocked the astonished cleric from his desk. Disturbances at the Hall and noises in the stables followed, and men and horses had no rest. The Hall became almost uninhabitable, and out of doors there was constant danger of meeting the noble but malignant spook, either driving in his ghostly “coach and six,” or walking along the dark roads. In a desperate case of this kind, a Catholic priest was thought to be essential as a spirit-layer. The Established Church would not serve, and as for Dissenters—bah! The priest came and prayed, but Jemmy was obstinate and stood a long siege, and when conjured by all that was holy, was only willing to be banished to the Red Sea—to which troublesome spirits are rusticated, as a sort of spiritual Botany Bay—for a year and a day. This was not considered good enough. The district had experienced too much of him in life, and ardently wished to be shot of his ghost for good and all, and so the priest was urged to pray for all he was worth, which he did, finally overpowering the tyrant. Instead of transporting him to the Red Sea, he was laid under the great rock of Walla Crag, Haweswater, for ever!

[Sidenote: _PEEL TOWERS_]

It is at Clifton, just south of Penrith, that the real Borderland begins. We are still thirty-five miles short of the actual border-line, but we have come now within the “sphere of influence” (as international politicians might now phrase it) of the old mosstrooping, cattle-lifting, and plundering and burning rascals from the Scottish side, who ever and again came across the Solway in well-mounted bands that numbered perhaps twenty, or perhaps five hundred, and often swept the countryside clean of stock; returning as swiftly as they had come, and leaving burning homesteads behind them. Those times have left plentiful traces, still plain to see, in the old domestic architecture of mansion and farmstead. Castles we have here, as elsewhere, but this borderland is the country of the peel-tower. In ages when the south of England lived in security, and men no longer built homes that were half fortresses, these oft-raided northern counties still lived in constant and well-founded apprehensions, and every one who had anything to lose had his own stronghold, in the little peel-tower that was, according to circumstances, his entire home, or a considerable part of it. Many of the peel-towers remain, as uninhabited ruins: others form the central portion of houses and mansions since enlarged. At Clifton stands such a one.

It is a fair type of the defences once absolutely necessary. You see the care taken to build strongly, with thick walls that no swiftly moving band of raiders could have leisure to demolish; and you see, too, that it was equally impossible to burn. The ground floor was not only exceptionally solid, but it had no entrance from without, and was reached only by a trap-door in the floor above.

So soon as the farmer or the squireen of those days had taken alarm, he drove his stock into the barmkin, or enclosure, attached to his tower of refuge, and, summoning all his family and securing his valuables, ascended with them by a ladder to the first floor, and, withdrawing the ladder after him, awaited events. For defence he had a store of heavy stones on the leads above the second floor; or from the narrow-slitted windows could shift to shoot arrows, or fling hot water, boiling tar, or domestic sewage upon enemies who came near enough.

But the cattle were still in danger, and the men of the house were usually concerned to garrison the tower with the women and children, and to give fight, if the odds were not overwhelming, outside; and many a Westmoreland and Cumberland farmer has died in protecting his stock.

Clifton should be marked on maps with the conventional crossed swords indicating the site of a battle, for it was here, on the evening of December 18th, 1745, that the Battle of Clifton Moor, the last ever fought on English ground, was decided. It is true that, judged by the standard of killed and wounded, it was no great affair, but it probably gave a final turn to the fortunes of the Young Pretender. It was fought midway in the panic-stricken retreat from Derby, and was a rearguard action, covering the retirement of the main body upon Penrith and Carlisle. Some two thousand Highlanders made a stand here, in the muddy road and fields, in advance of the village, as the sun went down, and the Duke of Cumberland’s force, consisting chiefly of Kerr’s, Bland’s, Montagu’s, Kingston’s, and Cobham’s dragoons, attacked them in the growing darkness.

[Sidenote: _THE BATTLE OF CLIFTON_]

The rebel cavalry were off at once. According to the account of Lord George Murray, on the Scottish side, “our horsemen, on seeing the enemy, went to Penrith”: an innocent phrase, which rather obscures the prudent, if inglorious, fact that they “bunked,” as a schoolboy would say, or “did a guy,” as the slangy would remark: leaving the Highland infantry to do the best they could. It was a haphazard hurly-burly that ensued. No one could see any one. The Highlanders were quite invisible, and the English dragoons only to be seen by the gleam of their buff belts in the darkness. Mr. Thomas Savage, a Quaker, whose house was in the thick of the encounter, was anxious for himself, and for his cattle, which interposed between the combatants, but he had really little cause for alarm; for both sides fired so high and so wide that not even a cow was killed, and after all the shooting and the hacking was done, and the rebels had fled, leaving the more or less stricken field in the possession of the enemy, it was found that but twelve (or according to one account, five) Highlanders had been killed and some forty to seventy made prisoners. On the English side, eleven dragoons were killed, and twenty-nine wounded. Many a railway accident has wrought more havoc.

The registers of Clifton church bear witness to this event, in the following entries:

“The 19th of December, 1745, Ten Dragoons, to wit, six of Bland’s, three of Cobham’s, and one of Mark Kerr’s Regiment, buried, who was killed y^e evening before by y^e Rebels in y^e skirmish between y^e Duke of Cumberland’s army and them at y^e end of Clifton Moor next y^e town.”

“Robert Atkins, a private Dragoon of General Bland’s Regiment, buried y^e 8th Day of January, 1746.”

This last was obviously one of the wounded.

The Duke of Cumberland wanted a lodging for the night, and stayed accordingly in the house of Mr. Savage, who, during the progress of the affair, had locked himself in, while his daughter-in-law hid in the kitchen cupboard. The Quaker’s account of the Duke was, “pleasant agreeable company he was—a man of parts, very friendly, and no pride in him.”

[Sidenote: _A CHARMED LIFE_]

None came so well out of that fight as Colonel Honeywood of Howgill, who seems to have been a host in himself, and would have done even better had it not been for an accident by which even the bravest of the brave might be brought ingloriously to earth. His prowess was vouched for by a Highlander, who, asked how his people got on, quaintly replied: “We gat on vary weel, till the lang man in the muckle boots cam ower the dyke, but his fut slipped on a turd, and we gat him down.” The Highlanders nearly did for the “lang man,” for they gave him three sword cuts on the head, and then left. He seems to have lived a charmed life, for he was at that time invalided home from Continental warfare, in which, at the Battle of Dettingen, he had received no fewer than twenty-three broadsword cuts and two musket balls.