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[Illustration: _To all the Friends with whom I have spent happy hours on
the Avon the drawings in this book are dedicated A.P._]
[Illustration: THE WARWICKSHIRE AVON]
Our journey opens in Northamptonshire, and in that season when the year
grows ancient,
“Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter.”
In the stubble the crack! crack! of a stray gun speaks, now and again,
of partridge-time. Over the pastures, undulating with ridge and furrow,
where the black oxen feed, patches of gloom and gleam are scurrying as
the wind--westerly, with a touch of north--chases the light showers
under a vivid sun. Along the drab road darts a bullfinch, his family
after him; pauses a moment among the dogrose berries; is off again, and
lost in the dazzle ahead.
A high grassy ridge stands up from the plain; and upon it, white and
salient against a dark cloud, the spire of a village church. From its
belfry, says the sexton, you may spy forty parishes: but more important
are the few cottages immediately below. They seem conspicuously
inglorious: yet their name is written large in the histories. It speaks
of a bright June day when along this ridge--then unenclosed and
scattered with broom and heath flowers--the rattle of musketry and
outcries of battle rolled from morning to late afternoon, by which time
was lost a king with his kingdom. For the village is Naseby. Here, by
the market green, the Parliamentarians ranged their baggage. Yonder, on
Mill Hill and Broad Moor, with just a hollow between, the two armies
faced each other; the royalists with bean-stalks in their hats, their
enemies with badges of white linen. To the left, Sulby hedges were lined
with Ireton’s dragoons. And the rest is an old story: Rupert, tardily
returning from a headlong charge, finds no “cause” left to befriend, no
foe to fight. While his men were pillaging, Cromwell has snatched the
day. His Majesty is flying through Market-Harborough towards Leicester,
and thither along the dusty roads his beaten regiments trail after him,
with the Ironsides at their heels, hewing hip and thigh.
[Illustration: NASEBY MONUMENT]
An obelisk, set about with thorn-bushes and shaded by oak and birch,
marks the battle-field. It rests on a base of rough moss-grown stones,
and holds out “a useful lesson to British kings never to exceed the
bounds of their just prerogative, and to British subjects never to
swerve from the allegiance due to their legitimate monarch.” And the
advice is well meant, no doubt; but, as the Watch asked of Dogberry,
“How if they will not?”
[Illustration: _The Avon from Noseby field to Wolston_]
Naseby, however, has another boast. Here, beside the monument, we are
standing on the water-shed of England. In the fields below rise many
little springs, whereof those to the south and east unite to form the
Ise brook, which runs into the Nen, and so find their goal in the North
Sea; those to the west form the Avon, and seek the British Channel. And
it is westward that we turn our faces--we, whom you shall briefly know
as P. and Q.; for the business that brings us to Naseby is to find here
the source of Shakespeare’s Avon, and so follow its windings downward to
the Severn.
[Illustration: SULBY ABBEY]
The source is modest enough, being but a well amid the “good cabbage” of
the inn garden. To-day, a basin of mere brick encloses it; but in 1823,
the date of the obelisk, some person of refinement would adorn also Avon
Well; and procured from Mr. Groggan of London a Swan of Avon in plaster;
and Mr. Groggan contrived that the water should gush elegantly from her
bill, but not for long. For the small boy came with stones, after his
kind; and now, sans wing, sans head, sans everything, she crouches among
the cabbages, “a rare bird upon earth.”
From Avon Well the spring flows to the northwest, and we follow it
through “wide-skirted meads” dotted with rubbing-posts and divided by
stiff ox fences (the bullfinches of the fox-hunter--for we are in the
famous Pytchley country), past a broad reservoir fringed with reed and
poplars, and so through more pastures to Sulby Abbey. And always, as we
look back, Naseby spire marks our starting-point. About three miles
down, the runnel has grown to a respectable brook, quite large enough to
have kept supplied the abbey fish-ponds.
[Illustration: WELFORD CANAL HOUSE]
On the site of this abbey--founded circa 1155 by William de Wydeville in
honor of the Blessed Virgin--now stands a red-brick farm-house, passably
old, and coated with ivy. Of the vanished building it conserves but two
relics--a stone coffin and the floriated cover of another. The course of
the stream beside it, and for some way below, is traced by the
thorn-bushes under which it winds (in springtime how pleasantly!) until
Welford is reached--a small brick village. Here, after rioting awhile in
a maze of spendthrift channels, it recombines its waters to run under
its first bridge, and begin a sober life by supplying a branch of the
Grand Junction Canal. A round-house at the canal’s head forms, with the
bridge, what Mr. Samuel Ireland, in his Beauties of the Warwickshire
Avon (1795), calls “an agreeable landscape, giving that sort of view
which, being simple in itself, seldom fails to constitute elegance.”
Rather, to our thinking, the landscape’s beauty lies in its suggestion,
in that here we touch the true heart of the country life; of quiet
nights dividing slow, familiar days, during which man and man’s work
grow steeped in the soil’s complexion, secure of all but
[Illustration: SWING-BRIDGE NEAR WELFORD]
“the penalty of Adam,
The season’s difference.”
It is enough that we are grateful for it as we pass on down the valley
where the canal and stream run side by side--the canal demurely between
straight banks, the stream below trying always how many curves it can
make in each field, until quieted for a while by the dam of a little
red-brick mill, set down all alone in the brilliant green. The
thorn-bushes are giving place to willows--not such as fringe the Thames,
but gray trees of a smaller leaf, and, by your leave, more beautiful.
Our walk as we follow the towpath of the canal, having the river on our
left, is full of peaceful incidents and subtle revelations of color--a
lock, a quaint swing-bridge, a swallow taking the sunlight on his breast
as he skims between us and the inky clouds, a white horse emphasizing
the meadow’s verdure. The next field holds a group of sable--a flock of
rooks, a pair of black horses, a dozen velvet-black oxen, beside whom
the thirteenth ox seems consciously indecorous in a half-mourning suit
of iron-gray. Next, from a hawthorn “total gules” with autumn berries,
we start six magpies; and so, like Christian, “give three skips and go
on singing” beneath the spires and towers of this and that small village
(Welford and North and South Kilworth) that look down from the edging
hills.
[Illustration: STANFORD HALL]
Below South Kilworth, where a windmill crowns the upland, the valley
turns southward, and we leave the canal to track the Avon again, that
here is choked with rushes. For a mile or two we pursue it, now jumping,
now crossing by a timely pole or hurdle, from Northamptonshire into
Leicestershire and back (for the stream divides these counties), until
it enters the grounds of Stanford Hall, and under the yellowing
chestnuts of the park grows suddenly a dignified sheet of water, with
real swans.
Stanford Hall (the seat of Lord Bray) is, according to Ireland,
“spacious, but wants those pictorial decorations that would render it an
object of attention to the traveller of taste.” But to us, who saw it in
the waning daylight, the comfortable square house seemed full of quiet
charm, as did the squat perpendicular church, untouched by the restorer,
and backed by a grassy mound that rises to the eastern window, and the
two bridges (the older one disused) under which the Avon leaves the
park. A twisted wych-elm divides them, its roots set among broad burdock
leaves.
[Illustration: ROMAN CAMP, LILBURNE]
Below Stanford the stream contracts again, and again meanders among
black cattle and green fields to Lilburne. Here it winds past a
congeries of grassy mounds, dotted now with black-faced sheep, that was
once a Roman encampment, the Tripontium mentioned by the emperor
Antoninus in his journey from London to Lincoln. Climbing to the
eminence of the prætorium and gazing westward, we see on the high ground
two beech-crowned tumuli side by side, clearly an outpost or speculum
overlooking Watling Street, the Roman road that passes just beyond the
ridge “from Dover into Chestre.” This same high ground is the eastern
hem of Dunsmore Heath, once so dismally ravaged by the Dun Cow of
legend, till Guy of Warwick rode out and slew her in single combat. The
heath, a long ridge of lias bordering our river to the south for many
miles to come, is now enclosed and tilled; but its straggling cottages,
duck ponds, and furze clumps still suggest the time when all was common
land.
At our feet, close under the encampment, an antique bridge crosses Avon.
Beside it is hollowed a sheep-washing pool, and across the road stands a
little church. Tempted by its elaborate window mouldings, we poke our
heads in at the door, but at once withdraw them to cough and sneeze. The
place is given over to dense smoke and a small decent man, who says that
a service will be held in ten minutes, and what to do with the stove he
doesn’t know. So we leave him, and pass on, trudging towards Catthorpe,
a mile below.
A wooden paling, once green, but subdued by years to all delicate tints,
fronts the village street. Behind, in a garden of cypress and lilacs,
lies the old vicarage, with deep bow-windows sunk level with the turf, a
noteworthy house. For John Dyer, author of “Grongar Hill”--“Bard of the
Fleece,” as Wordsworth hails him--held Catthorpe living for a few years
in the last century; and here, while his friends
“in the town, in the busy, gay town,
Forgot such a man as John Dyer,”
looked out on this gray garden wall, over which the fig-tree clambers,
and “relished versing.” The church stands close by, a ragged cedar
beside it, an elm drooping before its plain tower. We take a long look
before descending again to the river, like Dyer
“resolved, this charming day,
Into the open fields to stray,
And have no roof above our head
But that whereon the gods do tread.”