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.
[Illustration: BOROUGHBRIDGE, SHAP FELL.]
[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.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “GREYHOUND,” SHAP.]
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.
[Illustration: SHAP ABBEY.]
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.
[Illustration: CLIFTON.]
[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.
His hurts do not seem to have permanently harmed him, for he lived
forty years longer.
XXI
In the lowlands beneath Clifton stands Brougham Hall, and near it
Brougham Castle, both beside the Eamont river. A good deal of the Hall
is ancient, but most of the exterior, recased in a baronial way, looks
like (what it is) an academic attempt at recovering the architectural
style of the fourteenth century. When it is said that the work was
done in the early part of the nineteenth century, it will be supposed,
with a good deal of truth, that the result is dull and lifeless.
Anciently the seat of the Broughams, it came at length to the Bird
family, from whom the property was purchased in 1727 by the grandfather
of the Lord Brougham who was Lord Chancellor and a great political
figure in the days of George the Fourth, William the Fourth, and Queen
Victoria. Dr. Granville, travelling hereabouts in the middle of the
nineteenth century, sampling medicinal spas, looked upon the Hall with
awe, as the residence of that statesman.
The Doctor cherished a remarkable veneration for that able, but
eccentric personage, and was perhaps the only person to do so. Says
he, “Like the Château de Vernet, Brougham Hall, when the grave shall
have swept away prejudices and political animosities, will be visited
by thousands, eager to behold the _château_ of the English Voltaire;
he who, to the encyclopædic knowledge and pungent wit of the French
philosopher, joined the impassioned and fiery eloquence of Mirabeau.”
Thus the enthusiastic Granville.
[Sidenote: _LORD BROUGHAM_]
Eloquence? Brougham could tear a passion to tatters with any one, but
he ranted. It is true that the post-boys used to drive the chaises of
travellers in these regions somewhat out of the direct road, in order
to glimpse the residence of Lord Brougham; but those travellers viewed
the place, and Brougham himself, with curiosity, just as one might an
Icelandic geyser, to which, indeed, he is not inaptly to be compared.
His spoutings were as plentiful and as hot.
Not every one looked upon Brougham with awe, as the caricatures of his
grotesque physiognomy prove. Jemmy Anderson, a well-known post-boy in
this district, was not abashed by him; but then post-boys venerated no
one. It was in the days when the future Lord Chancellor was still Mr.
Henry Brougham, Q.C., that Jemmy Anderson drove him, post, from Shap
to Penrith, and “took him down” an unwonted peg. Jemmy jogged quietly
along at about seven miles an hour, mounted upon an almost broken-down
wheeler, until the fiery spirit within the post-chaise could stand it
no longer. Letting down the front window the future Lord Chancellor
vociferated: “Post-boy, I shan’t give you a farthing, for you have
driven me like a snail.” “Indeed,” replied the shrewd Cumbrian,
“thee wunna gie me a farden, wunna thee? Then ah’ve coomed far enow
for nowt!” With that he slowly dismounted and began to detach his
horses from the chaise, until an appealing voice from within led to a
compromise, by which the angry lawyer, who had been specially retained
to appear in a _cause célèbre_ at Penrith, capitulated, and upon paying
his money down—upon which the offended post-boy insisted—Jemmy Anderson
was persuaded to finish the stage.
The Brougham family, still owning the Hall, trace their descent from
Saxon times, and one of their ancestors, referred to as “Brum,”
fortified his residence here so long ago as 1284.
[Illustration: SEPULCHRAL SLAB OF UDARD DE BROHAM.]
An early ancestor was Udard De Broham, a crusader, who died in 1185.
“His soul is with the saints, we trust”; but his skull, ravished from
his grave in Brougham Church, grins from its glass case in the Hall,
and his trusty sword, that had been buried with him, is near by. It was
in 1846, when repairs were in progress at the church, that the skeleton
of Udard was discovered, beneath the inscribed slab pictured here, a
mere two feet deep. He had been laid here cross-legged and spurred on
one heel. With him had been buried a fragment of glass of Phœnician
manufacture, blue inside, but externally patterned in black and white
stripes not unlike the striped peppermint sweets still dear to rural
youth. This was considered a talisman, or luck-compelling object, in
the superstitious age in which Udard flourished, and was doubtless
brought by him from Palestine and buried with him as his most prized
possession.
Nine ancient De Brohams in all were discovered at this time, including
the remains of Gilbert, son of Udard, a man of gigantic size, who died
in 1230. A curious enamelled metal circlet, of beautiful workmanship,
and in perfect preservation, lay beside him; and his grave was duly
rifled of it.
[Illustration: BROUGHAM CASTLE.]
[Sidenote: _ANN CLIFFORD_]
But Brougham Castle is finer than the Hall, or than memories of De
Brohams. Brougham derives its name, down the long alleys of time, from
_Brovacum_, a Roman station in these outposts of the Roman dominion,
thickly studded with such. And a military post of the first importance
it continued to be until the time of Henry the Fourth. Normans built
the keep of the old castle, and the families of Vipont and De Clifford
added to it, and held the marchlands against the Scots, or warred for
or against their sovereigns, with more or less success, until their
line ended in a woman: the famous Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset,
Pembroke, and Montgomery, who was as good a man as any. She was born
in 1590, and enjoyed length of days and strength of mind during the
whole of them, dying at last in 1676. Marrying twice, and unhappily on
both occasions, she was twice widowed, and left with an only daughter.
Upon her second widowhood she retired to these scenes of her youth,
and busied herself in rebuilding her ancient and ruined castles of
Brougham, Appleby, Skipton, Bardon Tower, Pendragon, and Brough;
together with the restoration of numerous churches, and the erection of
monuments to various people, including herself. She was as ceaseless
and busy a builder as old Bess of Hardwick herself, and an imperious
and masterful old lady who even withstood Cromwell. He declared he
would ding down her castles as soon as she built them up, but she
merely replied that they would be rebuilt every time, and Cromwell was
obliged to give in. “Let her build an she will, for me” he said, and
build she accordingly did. She is described as having been a “perfect
mistress of forecast and aftercast,” who “knew well how to converse of
all things, from predestination to slea-silk;” and she certainly was
tenacious of her rights, or what she conceived to be her rights; being
as remarkable a litigant as she was a builder. By all accounts, she was
nothing less than an unmitigated terror, and the plain man, who reads
of her autocratic ways, is apt to think that the unhappiness of her
marriages was felt by her husbands a good deal more than by herself.
[Sidenote: _THE CASTLE-BUILDER_]
We know a great deal about this extraordinary woman, for among her
activities was the writing, at tremendous length, about herself and her
ancestors; and in those pages she dwells with an amusing complacency
upon the early beauties of her face, her form, and mind.
[Illustration: COUNTESS PILLAR.]
It was in 1652 that she so thoroughly repaired Brougham Castle, making
it afterwards her principal residence; but the day of castles was done,
and, as she really must have foreseen, her works were left, after her
death, to decay. Her only daughter had married the Earl of Thanet, who
in 1728 caused the most part of Brougham Castle to be demolished, and
the materials sold. And here it stands to-day, a roofless shell.