a distance of about six miles. The morning was cool, with breezy clouds,
intermingled with sunshine, and, on the whole, as good as are nine tenths
of English mornings. J----- sat beside the driver, and S----- and I in
the carriage, all closed but one window. As we drove through Skipton,
the little town had a livelier aspect than yesterday when it wore its
Good Friday's solemnity; but now its market-place was thronged,
principally with butchers, displaying their meat under little movable
pent-houses, and their customers. The English people really like to
think and talk of butcher's meat, and gaze at it with delight; and they
crowd through the avenues of the market-houses and stand enraptured round
a dead ox.
We passed along by the castle wall, and noticed the escutcheon of the
Cliffords or the Thanets carved in stone over the portal, with the motto
Desormais, the application of which I do not well see; these ancestral
devices usually referring more to the past, than to the future. There is
a large old church, just at the extremity of the village, and just below
the castle, on the slope of the hill. The gray wall of the castle
extends along the road a considerable distance, in good repair, with here
and there a buttress, and the semicircular bulge of a tower.
The scenery along the road was not particularly striking,--long slopes,
descending from ridges; a generally hard outline of country, with not
many trees, and those, as yet, destitute of foliage. It needs to be
softened with a good deal of wood. There were stone farm-houses, looking
ancient, and able to last till twice as old. Instead of the hedges, so
universal in other parts of England, there were stone fences of good
height and painful construction, made of small stones, which I suppose
have been picked up out of the fields through hundreds of years. They
reminded me of old Massachusetts, though very unlike our rude stone
walls, which, nevertheless, last longer than anything else we build.
Another New England feature was the little brooks, which here and there
flowed across our road, rippling over the pebbles, clear and bright. I
fancied, too, an intelligence and keenness in some of the Yorkshire
physiognomies, akin to those characteristics in my countrymen's faces.
We passed an ancient, many-gabled inn, large, low, and comfortable,
bearing the name of the Devonshire House, as does our own hotel, for the
Duke of Devonshire is a great proprietor in these parts. A mile or so
beyond, we came to a gateway, broken through what, I believe, was an old
wall of the Priory grounds; and here we alighted, leaving our driver to
take the carriage to the inn. Passing through this hole in the wall, we
saw the ruins of the Priory at the bottom of the beautiful valley about a
quarter of a mile off; and, well as the monks knew how to choose the
sites of their establishments, I think they never chose a better site
than this,--in the green lap of protecting hills, beside a stream, and
with peace and fertility looking down upon it on every side. The view
down the valley is very fine, and, for my part, I am glad that some
peaceable and comfort-loving people possessed these precincts for many
hundred years, when nobody else knew how to appreciate peace and comfort.
The old gateway tower, beneath which was formerly the arched entrance
into the domain of the Priory, is now the central part of a hunting-seat
of the Duke of Devonshire, and the edifice is completed by a wing of
recent date on each side. A few hundred yards from this hunting-box are
the remains of the Priory, consisting of the nave of the old church,
which is still in good repair, and used as the worshipping-place of the
neighborhood (being a perpetual curacy of the parish of Skipton), and the
old ruined choir, roofless, with broken arches, ivy-grown, but not so
rich and rare a ruin as either Melrose, Netley, or Furness. Its
situation makes its charm. It stands near the river Wharfe,--a broad and
rapid stream, which hurries along between high banks, with a sound which
the monks must have found congenial to their slumberous moods. It is a
good river for trout, too; and I saw two or three anglers, with their
rods and baskets, passing through the ruins towards its shore. It was in
this river Wharfe that the boy of Egremont was drowned, at the Strid, a
mile or two higher up the stream.
In the first place, we rambled round the exterior of the ruins; but, as I
have said, they are rather bare and meagre in comparison with other
abbeys, and I am not sure that the especial care and neatness with which
they are preserved does not lessen their effect on the beholder.
Neglect, wildness, crumbling walls, the climbing and conquering ivy;
masses of stone lying where they fell; trees of old date, growing where
the pillars of the aisles used to stand,--these are the best points of
ruined abbeys. But, everything here is kept with such trimness that it
gives you the idea of a petrifaction. Decay is no longer triumphant; the
Duke of Devonshire has got the better of it. The grounds around the
church and the ruins are still used for burial, and there are several
flat tombstones and altar tombs, with crosiers engraved or carved upon
them, which at first I took to be the memorials of bishops or abbots, and
wondered that the sculpture should still be so distinct. On one,
however, I read the date 1850 and the name of a layman; for the
tombstones were all modern, the humid English atmosphere giving them
their mossy look of antiquity, and the crosier had been assumed only as a
pretty device.
Close beside the ruins there is a large, old stone farm-house, which must
have been built on the site of a part of the Priory,--the cells,
dormitories, refectory, and other portions pertaining to the monks' daily
life, I suppose, and built, no doubt, with the sacred stones. I should
imagine it would be a haunted house, swarming with cowled spectres. We
wished to see the interior of the church, and procured a guide from this
farm-house,--the sexton, probably,--a gray-haired, ruddy, cheery, and
intelligent man, of familiar though respectful address. The entrance of
the church was undergoing improvement, under the last of the abbots, when
the Reformation occurred; and it has ever remained in an unfinished
state, till now it is mossy with age, and has a beautiful tuft of
wall-flowers growing on a ledge over the Gothic arch of the doorway. The
body of the church is of much anterior date, though the oaken roof is
supposed to have been renewed in Henry VIII's time. This, as I said
before, was the nave of the old Abbey church, and has a one-sided and
unbalanced aspect, there being only a single aisle, with its row of
sturdy pillars. The pavement is covered with pews of old oak, very
homely and unornamental; on the side opposite the aisle there are two or
three windows of modern stained glass, somewhat gaudy and impertinent;
there are likewise some hatchments and escutcheons over the altar and
elsewhere. On the whole, it is not an impressive interior; but, at any
rate, it had the true musty odor which I never conceived of till I came
to England,--the odor of dead men's decay, garnered up and shut in, and
kept from generation to generation; not disgusting nor sickening, because
it is so old, and of the past.
On one side of the altar there was a small square chapel,--or what had
once been a chapel, separated from the chancel by a partition about a
man's height, if I remember aright. Our guide led us into it, and
observed that some years ago the pavement had been taken up in this spot,
for burial purposes; but it was found that it had already been used in
that way, and that the corpses had been buried upright. Inquiring
further, I found that it was the Clapham family, and another that was
called Morley, that were so buried; and then it occurred to me that this
was the vault Wordsworth refers to in one of his poems,--the burial-place
of the Claphams and Mauleverers, whose skeletons, for aught I know, were
even then standing upright under our feet. It is but a narrow place,
perhaps a square of ten feet. We saw little or nothing else that was
memorable, unless it were the signature of Queen Adelaide in a visitors'
book.
On our way back to Skipton it rained and hailed, but the sun again shone
out before we arrived. We took the train for Leeds at half past ten, and
arrived there in the afternoon, passing the ruined Abbey of Kirkstall on
our way. The ruins looked more interesting than those of Bolton, though
not so delightfully situated, and now in the close vicinity of
manufactories, and only two or three miles from Leeds. We took a dish of
soup, and spent a miserable hour in and about the railway station of
Leeds; whence we departed at four, and reached