as much interested as those who witnessed the play. 'I was fairly
shamed of myself,' I heard one saying, 'to meet with ye when I came
off the last time, for the tears on my face, but if you had given me
a five pound note I could not have helped it.' Ah, thought I, that
was the secret of {85} your acting so well. Now and again an actor
in undress would pass down the room to have a look at the others as
they performed their parts, and to report. They would come back with
much encouragement to their fellow-players with such words as these:
'Eh, but it's a grand company now, and walls is beginning to stream
now'; and in truth the heat of the room and the consequent vapour
bath was a thing not to be easily forgotten. But if it had been
twice as hot, and the hall had been twice as crammed, and the play
had been twice as long, one could still have sat with real pleasure
to see such perfect acting done with such simplicity and reality to
the life. One wished that Will Shakspere could have come along; how
he would have blessed these village folk for their truth and their
simplicity. And how good a thing, thought I, it is, that there
should be a dull time at the English Lakes, so that, without any
temptations to extravagance in scenery or setting of the plays--that
would inevitably come with a wider public,--these natural dale-folk
can delight their fellow-villagers, by dramatic talent as real as it
is remarkable.
{86}
JAMES CROPPER OF ELLERGREEN.
The pattern life of a public-spirited country gentleman closed, when
James Cropper of Ellergreen, with eye undimmed and natural force
unabated, entered rest.
Come of an old Viking stock,--for his name is found in the _Landnama
Bok of Iceland_,--he had inherited the best traditions of true
philanthropy from his grandfather, who, with Zachary Macaulay, had
worked for the emancipation of the slave. In him, too, ran something
of the spirit of good old Quaker blood. Whole-hearted Churchman as
he was, he loved as the Friends love, simplicity in form and
directness in religious expression. In earliest days he had cared
for social and industrial problems, and the sorrows of the labouring
poor entered into his heart. It was his good fortune to be able, by
becoming an employer of labour, in his paper mills at {87} Burneside,
to face these problems and to become, as he always wished to become,
the father rather than the master of his workmen.
He lived to see Burneside become, under his fostering care, a model
village. He lived to see some of his endeavours, notably his idea of
Co-operative Stores for the people, find acceptance far and wide.
The guardianship of the poor was a sacred trust to him. As Chairman
of the Board of Guardians at Kendal for twenty-five years, and as
Vice-President of the Northern Poor Law Congress, he both learned and
taught wisdom. Almost the last thing he talked with me about was a
scheme for caring for that most helpless class of our poorer friends,
the pauper imbeciles of Cumberland and Westmoreland.
He was in early days a keen politician, and represented his
neighbouring town of Kendal for five years in Parliament. Latterly
he had felt that he could not be a partisan, or rather that
partisanship dulled sympathies, and though it was a grief to him at
the time to leave the House at the redistribution of seats, he found
so much more of home politics to hand for him to do, that he ceased
to regret it.
When the County Council in Westmoreland {88} met for its first time
in 1888, they unanimously elected James Cropper to be their chairman,
and to the day of his death his heart was in the work.
The Queen Anne's Bounty Board gave him the chance of helping the
church of his love. The late Bishop of Carlisle, Harvey Goodwin, had
no truer friend; and the present Bishop Bardsley testified to the
constant help to church work in the diocese that this most earnest
layman was always willing to bestow.
But it was the cause of education--elementary, secondary, public
school, or university--that was nearest to his heart. As one of the
Governors of Sedbergh, and Heversham and Kendal Grammar Schools, his
counsel was constantly sought. As a believer in women's education,
he founded a scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a bursary
at the Edinburgh Medical School for the training of native Indian
women as doctors.
[Illustration: JAMES CROPPER OF ELLERGREEN.]
He was Chairman of a Kendal Education Society which anticipated much
of the present endeavour of the Code to secure better instruction for
elementary teachers. He was never so happy as when he could gather
the teachers on the lawn at Ellergreen, and hold counsel with them as
to their future aims and their present {89} progress. The idea of a
pupil-teachers' centre at Kendal was his, and as Chairman of the
County Council he was able to lend it substantial aid. When the
Voluntary School Association came into being, he took up the idea
warmly, and personally visited every school within his area, and made
its wants and its difficulties his own.
There was not a day that this public benefactor did not do something
to help his time. And if one asked oneself why it was he had the
power to be a pillar of good in his generation, a kind of beacon and
standard for higher and happier life in all classes of society round
about him, the answer seemed to be that he had a heart which was for
ever young, in a body that seemed as if age could not touch it--that
his sympathies were not with the past, but with the present and the
future; that his enthusiasm for the better time coming never failed
him; that he believed that all things work together for good to them
that fear God and keep His commandments.
The grace of this abundant hopefulness flowed out in all he did and
said. 'Age could not stale his infinite variety,' because he never
grew old. To see him with young men or little children was to see
him at his best. To {90} know him in his home life was a privilege
for which to be thankful.
But deeper than all his spring of hope and sympathy with the young
and the new lay the fountain of poetry at his heart. He did not, I
think, write poetry, but the love of it was a continual presence. He
had the poet's heart, and entered into the poet's mind. For him, the
practical public county magistrate and councillor, the spirit of the
innermost was the joy of the imagination. This was the secret of his
swift sympathy with nature and with man.
We met by appointment in the Tapestry Room of the Spanish Palace at
the Paris Exhibition on October 12th, 1900. He was as cheery as ever.
'I have had a delightful week,' he said, 'I wish all my friends could
have seen this wonderful exhibition. Yesterday I was at Chartres
Cathedral. I never knew what stained glass was before; pray visit
Chartres. It is a revelation to one.' Then he turned to the Spanish
tapestries and went with deepest pleasure through the historic scenes
that the needles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have left
on deathless record. He seemed as young-hearted as a boy, and as
fresh in his enthusiasm as if this Paris {91} Exhibition was the
first he had ever seen, but he was seventy-seven and had seen more
than falls to most of us to see, of all this world can show. I did
not know as I shook hands and parted that Death already had shaken
him by the hand.
That night the sharp pain of pneumonia was upon him. I saw him once
again, at the bedside celebration of his last Holy Communion, and
then I saw him dead. His beautiful lace without a wrinkle in it with
all the look of youthfulness come back--but, alas, without the bloom,
beneath that ample crown of snow-white hair which for years past had
added such dignity to his refined and kindly presence. As I gazed,
the one thought that came to me was this, did ever man pass so little
weary, so full of keen interest and unabated enthusiasm after so long
a pilgrimage, right up to the doors of that other world where, as we
trust, all his fullest powers shall find full play, or enter these
gates of life with so little pain?
He died in France and his body was borne across the sea and laid to
rest in the valley he held most dear. It seemed as if all
Westmoreland and Cumberland had come to Burneside to do him honour at
the homegoing.
{92}
The coffin, covered with wreaths, was laid upon a simple wheeled bier
in front of the doors of Ellergreen, and so taken by hand from the
house to the church. It was his wish that no hearse should be used,
and that this simpler method of carrying the body to its rest should
be employed. Before the procession moved, many of those present came
up to the coffin to see the beautiful photograph taken after death;
and side by side of it the picture of his bride taken on her
honeymoon. Beneath these two pictures were written the words from
Christina Rossetti's poem:
'Think of our joy in Paradise
When we're together there,'
and beneath this a little note stating that these were the words
which he had begged might be inscribed upon his tombstone.
Those who knew how ideal had been their wedded life, knew also how
through all the long years of widowerhood and the grief of separation
that lent its pathos to his fine face, there had been one sweet music
to which he moved--the music of the hope of a sure reunion, that had
surely come with joy at last.
The sunlight faded from the near fells, and {93} sorrow filled the
air. A single robin sang a note or two and was silent, and the
leaves fell audibly to the ground. But all who gazed out east saw
the blue Howgills and the further Pennine range shine out like
burnished silver and gold, and thought of the glory of that far land
to which our friend had gone.
The procession went up the drive and into the lane, and so down into
the village, where every head seemed bowed and every home a house of
mourning. The service, simple throughout, included his favourite
hymn:
'Lord, it belongs not to my care
Whether I live or die,'
and at the grave side a third hymn was sung which had been chosen by
his daughter as expressive of the continuity of happy life in the
world beyond. The bishop pronounced the benediction, the mourners
placed their wreaths at the grave side; silently the vast crowd
melted away, and left to its long rest the body of one of the most
public-spirited servants of the common good that Westmoreland has
known. He will be as sorely missed as he will be surely mourned.
{94}
A DAY WITH ROMAN AND NORSE.
It was burning June. The sun shone on lake and fell. Skiddaw was
cloudless and lifted into the clear heaven its purple lilac shade
powdered with the fresh fern and the emerald green of the bilberry.
The corn-crake cried in the valley, the throstle whistled from the
larch plantation; in and out of the elder-blossom the tireless bees
went humming, and the haymakers could hardly get on with their work
for gazing at the exquisite beauty of the wild roses on the hedge.
In Cumberland, as Southey said, we miss the violet, but we make up
for our loss in April and May by the blush roses of the June. They
embroider the lanes, they dance upon the hedgerows, they flash
against the grey blue waters of the lake, they flutter against the
green fellside. Such roses! not faint in {95} colour and scent as we
see in the South, but red of heart and filled with fragrance,
wonderful wild roses of Cumberland.
What a day of life and loveliness it is! On the old Millbeck Hall
door stone up yonder are the words, 'Vivere mori, mori vivere,' but
we feel that the living, the living are the hearts that praise, and
death is, even by suggestion, out of place here.
To-day as we dash along under Skiddaw to see where Roman and Norseman
once had home, we feel that the same beauty was beheld by earlier
races, and the wild rose that gladdens our sight was very dear to
eyes of far-off generations, and has been a perpetual garden of life
and loveliness for all the passing years.
We are going to see the camps of the warriors of old, and we do well
to gather and put in hat and buttonhole the emblem of England's
warrior saint, the good St. George. As one thinks of the flower,
one's mind does not only go back to Pisanello and his picture of St.
George away there in the church of St. Anastasia in Verona, but to
the hundred shrines wherein are seen that fair Madonna, the Rose of
God, whose painters honoured the wilding rose for her {96} sake, and
gave it immortality on their canvases. To Roman Catholic and to
Protestant alike, how significant and full of tender association is
the wild dog-rose of Cumberland! How close it brings the church days
of an older time back to the present dwellers in this country, seeing
that both on Carlisle's city arms and Carlisle's bishop's coat of
arms, the wild rose shines, memorial of the monastery that honoured
the Rose of Heaven.
But to-day we are going back to times that antedate those mediaeval
church days. We are on visit bent to Roman and Viking who dwelt in
sight of Skiddaw--the cleft one, in the days,
'When never a wild-rose men would braid
To honour St. George and the Virgin Maid.'
We dash on by Dancing Gate, a farm beyond Scalebeck, with its quaint
holly trees, whose sons have never forgotten the art of dancing, on
by Mirehouse with its memories of James Spedding and Thomas Carlyle
and Alfred Tennyson, on under Ullock slope, and by Ravenstone till we
reach an old farmhouse, quaint with its Jacobaean door-pilasters.
'For Orthwaite Hall and Overwater,' said the coachman, 'we should
turn off here to {97} the right and go up the Rake,' as he slackened
his paces.
There was an old Norse ring about that word 'rake,' for the
Icelanders still talk of their sheep '_rachan_' just as our
Cumberland shepherds do; when the sheep follow one after another
along the mountain side, they are hereabouts said to be 'raking,' but
though we were bent on a Norse chieftain's home we refused to ascend
the Rake. It was very hot and sultry, and we preferred the shady
woodland of Bassenthwaite 'parks,' and so drove forward. We passed
the Vicarage house and the Bassenthwaite Church, crossed a small
stream, and, turning sharply by a deserted chapel towards the
village, drove by the village green, thence entering a kind of meadow
road, were soon in shadow, and for more than a mile went, beneath
bowery oak, and fragrant larch, and gleaming hazel, along this
copse-lane sweet with wild woodruff and gay with lychnis, towards the
hillside opposite the Dash, where stands Orthwaite or Overthwaite
Hall. It is worth while turning for a backward gaze as we ascend the
hill; Bassenthwaite and the fells that close round far Derwentwater
look nowhere more beautiful than from here.
{98}
That little tarn on our left is not Overwater, but it has its
history; one hundred sheep went on the ice one wintry day, broke
through, and all were drowned. The current superstition is that the
pike in that tarn are as large as donkeys; whether before or after
the feast of plenty accorded by the mountain sheep is not told.
Here is Orthwaite or Allerthwaite Hall grim and grey, its little
Elizabethan window mouldings, its diamond squares of glass, its
quaint low-ceilinged dining room. There is a look of drear sadness
and of pale sorrow about the quiet half-hall, half-farmstead, and
there may well be, for its owner William George Browne, the
traveller, went forth therefrom to explore Tartary and Bokhara in the
year 1812, and being suspected by the Persian government of sinister
design, was, under instruction from headquarters, taken captive
beyond the Kizzil Ozan river, blindfolded and barbarously murdered.
Poor Browne! he had better have stayed in sight of harmless Skiddaw,
but his was the gipsy's mind, and though none knew quite why he
journeyed, and his journeys in Africa, Egypt, and Syria show that he
travelled more from love of wild roaming than for aught else, home
for William George Browne had {99} no attraction in its sound. His
was the restless wanderer's heart.
Now we leave the carriage, and while it goes round to pick us up at
Whitefield Cottage on the Uldale and Ireby road, we descend into the
meadows and find ourselves gazing on a large square entrenchment, at
the angles of which were once raised mounds, lying to the south-west
of Overwater. No Roman camp this, for Romans did not place their
camps in the bottoms, unless they had a secure look-out above them,
or a fortified camp on a height near by; and Romans did not when they
dug an entrenchment round their camp, throw the earth out to right
and left and make an embankment either side their fosse, as it is
plain was the case here; besides there is but one entrance to the
camp, and that was not the Roman way. No, the camp we are looking
upon was probably the kraal or stockaded farmstead of a Norse
chieftain, any time between 874 and 950 A.D.
Its owner probably came up the Derwent with Ketel, son of Orme, with
Sweyn and Honig or Hundhr, what time they harried Cumberland under
Ingolf or Thorolf the Dane. For aught we know, he may have been
tempted hither by some sudden surprise-peep he got {100} of the
Overwater tarn and neighbouring meadowland, from the heights of
Skiddaw, the first time he clomb that double-fronted hill.
It is true that a Roman tripod kettle is said to have been discovered
near, but the Romans were not the only nation on the earth that
worked in bronze, and knew the advantage of putting legs to their
kettles; and both in the museum of Copenhagen and Christiania such
tripod kettles may be seen to-day that came from the hands of the
Norsemen of old time.
As we gaze across the quiet meadow land to the north-east, we see the
high raised hill, where it is more than probable that the Viking
chieftains, who here had their steading, 'died into the ground,' as
they expressed it, when the death hour came. At any rate that hill
is called Latrigg, which may well mean the 'Hlad Rigg' or 'Ridge of
the Dead,' and as at Keswick so here, the Vikings may have carried up
their dead chieftains for their last long rest to yonder height. It
is by some thought possible that the word Latrigg may come from Norse
words that signify the 'Lair Ridge,' the ridge of the lair of wild
beasts, and doubtless in those early days the farmer who built his
stockade had cause to dread other wild beasts than such as now
trouble the hen roosts {101} beneath Skiddaw. Now on still nights
the shepherd of Underskiddaw may hear the fox of Skiddaw calling
across the waters of Bassenthwaite to the red-coated vixen at Barf,
and hear her shrill bark answer to his cry, but then the wolf howled
and the wild boar prowled, and there was need of stockade not only
against man but against the creatures of the wild woodland.
We leave the meadow with its Viking memories, walk on to join our
carriage at Whitefield Cottage, thence, driving along towards Uldale
and Ireby, see, far off, the common of Ulph the Norseman that was
often waked by John Peel's 'horn in the morning,' and, instead of
descending into the valley that separates us from that long moor that
stretches to Caldbeck, we turn sharply to the left, pass a lonely
house of some pretension, and drive by a narrow lane through hedges
covered with wild-rose; away to the west, upon surmounting the ridge,
we suddenly come in sight of the littoral plain--all peacock green
and blue, the Solway flashing in the distance--and the grey hills of
bonnie Scotland beyond. We descend the hill and pull up at a lodge
gate. "Snittle Garth," says the driver. The very name has a
Scandinavian ring about it; we enter the {102} Park and pull up at a
pleasant-looking country house.
By courtesy of the owner we pass in front of the garden, gay with its
flowers, and full of the sense and sweetness of an English country
house. We can hardly gaze at the camp we have come to see, so fair
and beautiful is the vision outstretched before us of Bassenthwaite
laid in gleaming whiteness beneath the dark hills of Wythop and the
purple vastness of Skiddaw, so exquisite the shadowy foldings of the
blue hills that take the eye far up beyond the gates of Borrodale to
Gimmer Crag, to Great-End and far Sea-fell. But when we look at the
camp we have come to see we find ourselves standing on a high
plateau, sheltered on north and east and west by rising ground. The
site of the camp is rectangular, eighty-three feet by thirty-one;
isolated by a trench with regular scarp and counter-scarp. This
trench is twelve feet broad at the bottom, twenty feet at the top;
the scarp and counter-scarp are each nine feet, and the depth is five
feet. The work, to all appearance, is freshly done, and but for the
fact that no pottery has been revealed, might well be work of Roman
engineers. As we wonder at the quaint oblong island of green carved
in {103} the hill side, surrounded by its dry moat, we listen to what
the sages say and archaeologists guess about its origin and intent.
'The remains of a mediaeval pleasaunce,' says one antiquarian.
'Not a bit of it,' says another, 'this was no sheet of water for
ornament, with an island in its midst, this was a Roman sanitary
camp. Hither sick and sorry came the poor fellows, whom the frosts
of Cumberland had pinched, or the dews of Cumberland had rheumatised,
or the malaria of the Derwent Vale had febrified, or the swords and
clubs of the stubborn British had wounded, and here girt round by
friendly fence of water, sheltered from the wind, uplifted in this
quiet pastoral scene, they built their rough wattle hospital, and
prayed to the goddess of health.'
'No, no,' says a third antiquarian, no authority he, and therefore
likeliest to be right. 'This was a battle holme. Here in the olden
time men met for holm-gauge or wager of battle; on that oval sward
was decided, in the sight of the assembled multitude, the feud of
families or the strife of tribes.'
We can, as we gaze, conjure up the whole scene, and hear the crash of
battle hammer, and see the flame of the circling brand; but the {104}
peace of the present subdues the passion of the past, and the sound
of the quiet grass-cropping hard by of the unfearful sheep, the song
of the thrush from the neighbour sycamore recalls us to such pastoral
tranquillity as ill assorts with the stormy drama
'Of old far-off unhappy things
And battles long ago.'
Now rejoining our carriage let us drive west, up hill, to the
neighbouring Caermote. We shall feel all the time that the
tribesmen, gathered at their battle holme, can follow us with their
eyes, and wonder what on earth can possess us to leave them with
their fierce axe play just going to begin, for the old deserted
look-out camp on the slope a mile away. We leave the carriage to
descend the hill to the south and await our arrival at the large
square double camp of the Romans on the lower slope, and not without
many pauses to wonder at fair scene of the seaward plain, we make our
way up to the northern peak of Caermote Hill.
This, with its circular rampart, was probably the 'mons
exploratorius' of the large double camp on the lower south-eastern
slope, and a glorious look-out the Roman legionaries must have had,
if on such a day of June they came {105} with their wild roses in
their hands to see the sun come with its wild rose over Helvellyn, or
move slowly to its setting and turn the whole grey Solway into gold.
Down now we go southward across the pleasant green sward, negotiate
one or two rather awkward fences, and bearing a little to the left,
towards the main road that runs to Bewaldeth, we soon find ourselves
in the midst of ramparts of the quaint double Roman camp. It is a
camp within a camp, the larger of the two being about 180 yards by
160 yards square. There is evidence that the cohort that first
encamped here must have felt that it was a place of much strategic
importance, for they made the road from 'old Carlisle' to Keswick run
right through the middle of it. The continuation of this road,
though it remains untraced, probably ran along the east side of
Bassenthwaite up to the tiny Roman watch camp at the 'Gale,' and so
by Guardhouse towards Penrith, and to Causeway Foot, on the road to
Ambleside.
They appear also to have felt that they were in a dangerous country
when first they rested beneath Caermote, for they circled themselves
with a triple rampart and a double fosse.
{106}
But not for ever was there to be war at the gates, even in Roman
times. The cohort gave way to a 'century,' and the centurion, who
remained to keep the way from 'old Carlisle' to Keswick open, was
content to trust his safety from attack to the guardianship of a
single ditch and rampart; and yet the fierceness of fire and sword
must in after times have been felt again at this place. Not many
years ago the ruins of some buildings near the north gate of the
large camp were discovered, that had once been roofed with lead, but
the buildings had been set on fire, and the lead had poured itself
away into the ground. There was nothing to suggest that these
buildings had been of Roman workmanship, and though it is possible
that this was a kind of half-way store-house for the lead miners of
Caldbeck, who were sending their mineral booty to the sea, it is
quite as probable that at some time or other a farmer had here his
'strength' or 'strong house,' and that 'rievers' from over the Border
had made short work of him, and given his farm-stead to the flames.