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THE RIVERS AND STREAMS
OF ENGLAND
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
ST. MARTIN'S HOUSE, 70 BOND STREET, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE DERWENT, HIGH TOR, MATLOCK, DERBYSHIRE]
THE
RIVERS & STREAMS
OF ENGLAND
PAINTED BY
SUTTON PALMER
DESCRIBED BY
A. G. BRADLEY
[Illustration: colophon]
PUBLISHED BY 4 SOHO SQUARE
ADAM AND CHARLES LONDON, W
BLACK MCMIX
PREFACE
Though this is not a book on angling, a life-long attachment to the
fly-rod on the part of the author, and to the delightful scenes into
which such predilections notoriously lead one, makes it at once more
difficult and more easy to write than if one were approaching the
subject as a stranger to the atmosphere, and merely to "write round" the
pictures Mr. Palmer has so admirably painted. But in my case it is by no
means only this. A predilection for British landscape in general, and
all that thereby hangs, has stimulated a far wider acquaintance with it
than any mere angling rambles could achieve, and resulted in the
publication of several books concerned with such things, and covering
more or less about twenty counties. I feel this explanation is
desirable, lest the note of intimacy with many far-sundered streams, in
allusion and otherwise, that must occur in these pages may be suspect.
The more so, as from the fascination of the Cook's ticket or what not,
comparatively few of my countrymen have any considerable knowledge of
their own land. The Rhine is certainly better known than the Wye, and
the Danube probably than the Severn.
But these very experiences made the first proposal to write a book,
other than a mere encyclopædia, within a brief space on such a big
subject, seem almost hopeless. Rivers and streams from every direction,
by scores, came surging out upon the memory at the very thought of it,
in quite distracting fashion. It was finally agreed, however, that the
literary part of the book should take shape in a series of essays or
chapters dealing with the rivers mainly in separate groups or
water-sheds, leaving the proportions to my discretion. Capricious in a
measure this was bound to be. Selection was inevitable. It is not of
supreme importance. _Caeteris paribus_, and without diverging more than
necessary from the skilful illustrator, I have dealt more freely with
the rivers I know best, and also with those I hold to be more worthy of
notice. There are, of course, omissions, this book being neither a guide
nor an encyclopædia, but rather a collection of descriptive essays and
of water-colour sketches covering, though necessarily in brief, most of
the groups. In this particular subject there is happily no need for
author and illustrator to keep close company in detail. What inspires
the pen, and in actual survey stirs the blood, is often unpaintable.
What makes a delightful picture, on the other hand, tells sometimes but
a dull tale in print. I have had to leave to the artist's capable brush,
owing to the necessary limitations of the letterpress, several subjects;
a matter, however, which seems to me as quite immaterial to the general
purport of the book, as it is unavoidable. But otherwise I think we run
reasonably together. At first sight the omission of the Thames in
description may seem outrageous. A moment's reflection, however, will, I
am sure, conduce to a saner view. Illustration is wholly another matter;
but to attempt ten or fifteen pages on that great and familiar river,
dealt with, too, in bulk and brief by innumerable pens, that could serve
any purpose or gratify any reader, seems to me a fatuous undertaking.
The Severn, on the other hand, as great, almost as important as the
Thames, and still more beautiful, is by comparison an absolutely unknown
river, and we have given it the first place.
A. G. B.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE SEVERN 1
CHAPTER II
THE WYE 39
CHAPTER III
THE CHALK STREAMS 64
CHAPTER IV
THE BORDER RIVERS 101
CHAPTER V
TWO AVONS 149
CHAPTER VI
THE RIVERS OF DEVON 161
CHAPTER VII
THE RIVERS OF THE SOUTH-EAST 209
CHAPTER VIII
THE YORKSHIRE DALES 227
CHAPTER IX
AN EAST ANGLIAN RIVER 269
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Derwent, High Tor, Matlock _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. The Severn, near Arley, Shropshire 6
3. The Severn, Bridgenorth, Shropshire 18
4. The Severn, near Cam, Gloucestershire 30
5. Chepstow with Wye and Severn 34
6. The Wye, Haddon Hall, Derbyshire 38
7. The Wye, Hay, Breconshire 40
8. The Wye, Ross, Herefordshire 46
9. The Monnow, Old Bridge, Monmouth 52
10. The Wye, Symond's Yat, Herefordshire 60
11. The Wye, Tintern, Monmouthshire 62
12. The Thames, looking towards Henley 64
13. The Avon, near Salisbury 66
14. The Thames, the Bells of Ouseley, Old Windsor 70
15. Stapleford on the Wiley 82
16. The Itchen, St. Cross, Winchester 88
17. The Itchen, and St. Giles' Hill, Winchester 94
18. The Dove, Dovedale, Derbyshire 100
19. The Tyne, Hexham, Northumberland 102
20. The Coquet, and Warkworth Castle, Northumberland 124
21. The Eden, Samson's Chamber, near Carlisle 136
22. The Eden, near Lazonby, Cumberland 140
23. The Derwent, Grange, Borrowdale 142
24. Skelwith Force, near Ambleside, Westmoreland 144
25. The Derwent, Borrowdale, Cumberland 146
26. The Brathay, Langdale, Westmoreland 150
27. The Thames, Backwater by the Islands, Henley 152
28. The Avon at Clifton 154
29. The Avon, Stratford, Warwickshire 158
30. A Glimpse of the Thames, Kew 160
31. The Hamoaze, Devonport, from Mount Edgcumbe 162
32. The Dart, Dittisham, Devon 166
33. The Erme, Ivy Bridge, Devon 172
34. The Tamar, Cotehele, Cornwall 178
35. The Tamar, near Calstock, Cornwall 182
36. The Tavy, Tavistock, Devon 186
37. The Okement, Oakhampton, Devon 192
38. On the West Lynn, Lynmouth, Devon 198
39. The Exe, Countess Weir, Devon 200
40. The Exe, Topsham, Devon 202
41. The Axe, Axmouth, Devon 204
42. The Thames, Eton 208
43. The Thames, Richmond 208
44. The Arun, Arundel Castle, Sussex 208
45. The Arun, Amberley, Sussex 210
46. The Ouse, near Barcombe Mills, Sussex 212
47. The Ouse, near Lewes, Sussex 214
48. A Stream, near Leith Hill, Surrey 216
49. The Rother, Fittleworth, Sussex 216
50. The Wey, Surrey 218
51. The Medway, Aylesford, Kent 220
52. The Wey, Elstead, Surrey 222
53. The Medway, Maidstone, Kent 224
54. The Medway, Rochester 226
55. The Trent, Nottingham 228
56. The Wharfe, Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire 230
57. The Wharfe, the Strid, Yorkshire 234
58. The Wharfe, Barden Tower, Yorkshire 238
59. The Nidd, Knaresborough, Yorkshire 242
60. The Ure, near Ripon, Yorkshire 246
61. The Ure, Aysgarth Force, Yorkshire 250
62. The Swale, Richmond, Yorkshire 252
63. The Swale, Richmond, Yorkshire 254
64. The Swale, Richmond, Yorkshire 256
65. The Swale, Easby Abbey, Yorkshire 258
66. High Force, Tees, Yorkshire 260
67. The Tees, Cotherstone, Yorkshire 264
68. The Tees, Barnard Castle, Durham 266
69. The Stour, Bergholt, Suffolk 268
70. The Ouse, near St. Ives, Huntingdonshire 268
71. The Ouse, Huntingdonshire 270
72. The Ouse, Houghton Mill, Huntingdonshire 272
73. The Ouse, Hemingford Abbots, Huntingdonshire 274
74. The Ouse, near Holywell, Huntingdonshire 276
75. The Stour, near Dedham, Essex 278
_Sketch Map at end of Volume._
RIVERS AND STREAMS OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
THE SEVERN
There is surely some peculiar fascination in the birthplace of a famous
river when this lies in the heart of moors and mountains. For myself, I
admit at once to but scant interest in the infant springs of even such
slow running rivers as I have some personal affection for. There is
neither mystery, nor solitude, nor privacy about their birth. They come
into the world amid much the same surroundings as those in which they
spend the greater part of their mature existence--amid ploughed fields,
cattle pastures, and villages, farmyards, game covers, and ozier beds.
When full they are inevitably muddy, and when empty are very empty
indeed; lifeless, and mute at the best, at the worst actually dry. The
river of low-country birth acquires, in short, neither character nor
quality worthy of consideration till as a full-grown stream it can trace
a shining coil in the valley, or reflect the shadow of spire, bridge or
mill, of willow or poplar.
How different is the source of a mountain-born river, above all when it
boasts some name famous in story, and is to become the feeder of
historic cities and bearer of great navies. Its hoarse voice plashing
amid the silence of the eternal hills strikes the chord responsive to
such scenes as these with singular force, and a little louder perhaps
than its comparatively nameless neighbour, which leaves their common
watershed for some other sea. As the lowland landscape of England is
unique, so the mountain and moorland solitudes of these two islands are
quite different from anything else in the whole universe. The mountain
regions of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, exhibit, to be sure,
some slight variety of detail, due partly to human and partly to natural
agencies. But such differences are positively trifling compared to the
contrast they each and all present to any other of the waste places of
the earth, unless perhaps some wilder portion of Brittany may be a
qualified exception. This delightful singularity, to my thinking a
wholly favourable one, is not sufficiently understood or appreciated.
There are tremendous masses of snow and crag and evergreen timber, as
well as marvellous formations of naked rock, in four continents
appealing to practically another sense. There are lower ranges, too, on
the scale of our own mountains, in many parts of the world draped in
timber from base to summit, which again are of another family, and those
who have lived or been much among them know how unsatisfactory by
comparison are their limitations, how obstructive both of free movement
and of outlook.
But there is nothing anywhere resembling our open hills where heather
and bog grasses of many hues, where emerald turf, spreading bracken and
golden gorse, broken with cliff and crag and scaur, invite the wanderer
to a delightful and easy intimacy with their innermost haunts. Here you
may ramble practically at will, with the unobstructed glories of earth
and air always before your eyes, the fresh tempered breezes of our
gulf-stream-washed island in your lungs, your feet pressing upon plants
and grasses all instinct of a soil that knows nothing of fierce heats
and binding frosts as those terms are understood in most other lands.
And then, again, how futile to parade the altitude of our British
mountains as evidence of insignificance. They laugh to scorn all such
arithmetic, and many times in a single day will wrap themselves in some
magic veil, and lift their peaks and shoulders round you, till scale and
altitude as expressed in figures become practically a thing of naught.
The obvious of the past garish and sunny hour, when their modest
measurement proclaimed itself to any reasonably experienced eye, has
vanished, and you find yourself confronted by heights that lack
absolutely nothing in stature and dignity, and are in effect mountains
of 10,000 feet. Everything that shapely form and atmosphere can achieve
in the way of effect these little mountains of ours are capable of. Our
much maligned climate not merely clothes them in a chequered mantle of
green and russet, of grey, purple, or saffron, only less in winter than
in summer, but gives them those ever-changing moods and aspects that few
people who know both would as a permanency exchange for all the sun
glare of the earth. And how solitary are the hollows of these hills
where rivers rise: nay, often more than that, and little short of
awesome. Here again, perhaps, comes in the quite undisturbing reflection
that there is a railway within five miles and a town possibly within
ten! What does it matter, when nobody ever comes here, and there is not
a trace visible anywhere of man's handiwork but possibly the dark line
of some stone dyke built two centuries ago? The very consciousness that
this is in populous Britain makes the wild wilder, the silence stiller,
the solitude more solitary.
For myself, I know of a score of such valley heads in the North and
Wales, whence streams and rivers have their birth, that provoke a
feeling of positive and pleasurable creepiness, such as the wildest
woods and the remotest prairies never touched me with. Whether opening
and shutting in a driving winter mist, or with their high rocky
shoulders turned gloomily from the sun on a fine autumn morning, these
inner sanctuaries and water-sheds where so many of our English rivers
rise seem as if they gathered the silence of unlimited wastes and
distilled its very essence. The very sounds that break their solitude,
intensify it: the plashing of the tiny stream when it has struggled out
of the meshes of the high bog that gives it birth, and is taking its
first leap for liberty and independence down the rocky ledges of the
precipice towards the world below, the mournful call of the curlew, the
fitful, plaintive bleat of the mountain sheep, or the faint rattle of
stones misplaced by its nimble feet. Poets have written of the "startled
air," and some of them perhaps have used the phrase but tritely, and
themselves but half suspecting the true felicity of the metaphor. In
these sombre chambers of the hills, walled in upon every side, the
stillness seems literally to grasp at every slight sound and cling to it
with strange vibrations and lingering echoes, which remind one how
utterly alien to these places are the common sounds of the everyday
world that pass unnoticed--a world so ridiculously near and yet so
infinitely remote.
Among the outstanding geographical facts which used to be hammered into
the heads of schoolboys was that of Plinlimmon being the parent of both
the Severn and the Wye. Many poems both in Welsh and English have been
inspired by this picture of two infant streams springing from the bosom
of the same mountain, and after following widely sundered courses
through various counties, meeting again as great rivers, just in time to
mingle their waters before merging them in the brine. It would be a
pretty conceit even if it were not in the case of these two rivers an
actual fact. Whether
[Illustration: THE SEVERN, NEAR ARLEY, SHROPSHIRE]
[Illustration]
it is on this account, or because of the huge bulk and prominent
situation of Plinlimmon, many "eminent geographers" of not very remote
days wrote it down for the benefit of generations of misguided students
as the third loftiest mountain in Wales. But it is not even in the first
rank, being less than 2500 feet. There are several mountains in South
Wales alone of greater altitude and more graceful shape. But Plinlimmon,
all the same, is a fine upstanding mass of wild bog, linked upon both
sides to far-spreading solitudes, and worthy to be the mother of the
greatest and of the most beautiful river respectively in England or
Wales.
That the former deserves the epithet is a mere geographical fact. That
the Wye contains a greater mileage of the highest types of British
scenery than any other river, will surely be conceded by any one
sufficiently equipped with a knowledge of British rivers to pronounce an
opinion worth having and not disqualified by too intimate personal
association with some other possible claimant. For it is the only river
in the country that rises to the highest scale of physical beauty and
distinction as we know them in Britain, both in its earlier and its
later stages. A few large rivers, notably the Cheshire Dee, the Usk,
the Tynes, the Tees, and of course many smaller ones in the north and
west, compare with the Wye, though few surpass it in their higher
reaches, being all distinguished by the same type of rugged and
mountainous scenery. But none of them, after they have left such
associations behind and become by comparison low-country rivers on their
progress to the sea, break out again like the Wye for such a long period
of their later course in scenes that vie with those of its youth and are
among the recognised gems of British scenery.
The fountain springs of the Severn and the Wye are less than a mile
apart on the long slope of Plinlimmon. The one flowing north-east, the
other south-east, there is little to choose between them as they fume
and fret in their sombre mountain cradles or sparkle among the narrow
stone-walled meadows, the little white-washed sycamore-shaded homesteads
of the upland farms. The Wye has greater things in store for her than
even the wild foothills of Plinlimmon as she dashes off into the
mountain gorges of Radnorshire and Brecon. But the Severn, though
flowing always from source to mouth through a landscape consistently
fair and often striking, seldom rises to the level maintained by her
younger sister for more than half of her journey to the sea. The Severn,
called hereabouts the Hafryn by the Welsh, may be said to emerge into
civilization near the little Montgomeryshire town of Llanidloes, noted
for its sheep fairs and its fish poachers. Here it meets, to follow
northwards the only railroad which even now links North and South Wales.
This will have brought with it over the wild heathery moorland watershed
between Wye and Severn, where dark brooding hills enclose the region of
Pant-y-dwr (Hollow of the waters), the brown streams of the Tylerch. The
Clywedog meeting the other two just below their junction, the Severn now
becomes a lusty little river, brawling incessantly upon a wide stony
bed.
Of the thousands of tourists who every season travel on the Cambrian
railway to the Welsh watering-places, few probably realise that the
little trout stream which prattles in and out of the line in the high
country around Moat Lane Junction bears the name of the greatest, though
truly the second in fame, of English rivers. From first to last the
Severn is faithful to Montgomeryshire as the Welsh county of its birth.
From Blaen Hafryn, its source on Plinlimmon, just within the county
bounds, for some 50 miles straight measure along its valley--all the
way, indeed, from Llanidloes to the Breiddon Hills--it waters the
richest pastures and the fattest corn lands of the ancient kingdom of
Powys Fadog. But if the Severn drains the richest portion of this most
delectable and highland country, it must not be supposed that its
environment is tame or its streams lazy. Everywhere to the right and to
the left lofty hills, though for the most part somewhat back-lying,
bound the limits of the vale, while now and again a glimpse of some
distant mountain serves to remind one that Montgomeryshire is in the
main a mountain county. For the Severn valley is so intercepted with
small hills, so richly wooded, so ornate in places with the park lands
and foliage of country seats, so sprinkled with pleasant villages, one
is apt to forget that the little streams hurrying down to the river from
the north come from a really wild Wales beyond, while lying back to the
south the regions of Kerry and Clun speak in their very names to the
initiated of the spirit of solitude.
But the human or certainly the historic interest of Montgomeryshire and
much of its visible wealth clusters along this broad and broken vale of
the Severn. Newtown and its flannel industries and the name of
Pryce-Jones will strike a responsive note in the ear of every British
housewife. But the stern fragments of Montgomery Castle, perched on the
summit of a rock 350 feet above the river, is perhaps more in harmony
with the mood in which we should follow an historic artery through this
Border country. The little town, absolutely the smallest and most
somnolent county capital in the two countries, lies behind the rocky
castle height. The Norman, Roger of Montgomery, was granted this country
by his friend and chief William the Conqueror, who appears to have
assumed it was in Shropshire, because Offa's Dyke crosses the river near
by. This misconception soon became apparent, and though the well-nigh
impregnable castle, called always Tre-Faldwin by the Welsh after Roger's
constable, Baldwin, was retained in Anglo-Norman hands, it is not too
much to say that it was a centre of strife between the Welsh and English
for 200 years, till Edward the First completed the conquest of Wales and
created the North Welsh counties, this one being fortunate in acquiring
the sonorous name which had clung to the castle and lordship. The actual
building, whose scant fragments are now so conspicuous and suggestive,
was erected by Henry the Third, who in his troubles with his barons was
compelled to promise Llewelyn the Second or "the Great" that this should
be the uttermost western limit of his pretensions to dominion.
But a more accessible celebrity than either Henry the Third or Llewelyn,
seeing that he has left us one of the raciest autobiographies in the
language, owned and lived in Montgomery Castle, to wit, Lord Herbert of
Chirbury. His period was the first half of the seventeenth century, but
his exploits were not confined to Montgomeryshire, as his reputation for
courage, brains, and eccentricity was a national one and something more.
His literary remains, which are numerous, are matter, perhaps, for the
specialist, but his autobiography, which in a reprint can be bought for
a shilling or two, is the most delightful picture in brief of country
and domestic life, of Courts and Camps abroad and at home, of social
London, and, above all, of the point of view of a shrewd, original,
experienced and travelled man of the world, warrior, courtier, scholar,
and theologian. Chirbury is the adjoining parish, and this
sombre-looking fortress above the Severn may in a sense be regarded as
the cradle of the great race of Herbert, which with its many noble
branches and varied achievements is perhaps the most illustrious in
England. One branch, in the persons of the Earls of Powis, is still very
much represented here on the Severn. For as the river tumbles along in
occasional pools where the salmon ought to rise to the fly, but for some
inscrutable reason refuse to do so, and in long gliding deeps to
Welshpool, Powis Castle, the "Castell Goch," the "Red Castle" of old
Border days, rises out of its wooded park lands on the left bank. Known
locally as "Pool," Welshpool was a Border town like Berwick-on-Tweed and
Hay-on-Wye. Two nations dwelt there in separate quarters in a sort of
armed neutrality in days when nationality at intermittent periods meant
life or death, and still dwell there in long-mingled unity.
Shropshire runs close up to the Severn at Montgomery Castle upon the
south bank, and English only is spoken by the Welsh population all down
the valley from Moat Lane, though with the spring of the hills to the
northward the native tongue still everywhere asserts itself. Around
Welshpool, too, the Jones's, Hughes's, and Williams's begin to display
the Shropshire type of man as opposed to the Welshman, whether
English-speaking or otherwise. But the Severn turns away and clings to
its native county for yet another 10 miles. Receiving the first of its
three important affluents, the Vyrnwy from the north, it finally takes
leave of Wales beneath the shadow of those imposing twins the Breiddons,
which like a pair of huge sentinels stand guarding the gateway from the
plains of north Shropshire into the hills of Wales. Indeed, the exit of
the Severn, by this time a considerable river, from Welsh territory is
finely marked, for when it has run a pleasant, uneventful course,
touching by the way no place of note, to Shrewsbury, the westward view
from the latter is significant and striking. To the last mile of
Montgomeryshire, Wales stands finely out above the rich undulations of
this once frontier and much harassed county, with singular distinction.
The properly constituted Salopian as he stands upon the western
outskirts of his town, where his famous school has in recent times
perched itself above the high banks of Severn, sees his past laid out
before him, like a page of history; the fat Saxon lowland spreading
westward for a dozen miles, and the sharp rampart of Wales from north to
south as far as the eye can see, height after height, range after range,
almost precisely delimiting the outworks behind which for centuries lay
a vigilant, unforgetting, and alien people, ready to strike at the
first sign of over-confident negligence. This to the indifferent eye may
seem ancient history, but it was real enough even as late as the days of
Henry the Fourth, when for ten years Glyndwr kept the Border counties in
a continual state of apprehension. Part of the walls are still standing,
while the Severn, bending in horse-shoe shape round the town, still runs
under both the _English_ and the _Welsh_ bridge, and the castle rises
above the river-bank whence Henry the Fourth and his army marched out on
that July morning 500 years ago to meet the Percies on the bloody field
of Haytely.
Shrewsbury is a fine old town, and the encircling Severn adds no little
to its pride of pose. It sprang into being on the ashes of the
neighbouring Brito-Roman city of Uriconium a few miles down the river,
so ruthlessly destroyed by the Saxon pagans. First as Pengwern, then as
Schrobbesberie, the principal city of the middle March, it gave in time
its name to a county, and kept chief watch and ward against the Welsh of
Powys land and of North Wales. It has a great story and stout traditions
like all Border towns, and looks it. Of late years it has begun to share
the attentions of over-sea visitors with Chester, a fact in no way
surprising. For though its antiquities are not so definite and obviously
on show, Shrewsbury, unlike the other, is far removed from the
disfiguring industrial atmosphere of the North. It is nothing, to be
sure, but the historic market-town of a great district; but the latter
is so large, so important and interesting, including as it does both
English and Welsh territory, that Shrewsbury has at once the peaceful
air of a country borough with the size and dignity of something very
much more. It is rich in ancient half-timbered houses, often standing in
their original narrow wynds or rows. Its sixteenth-century market-hall
is one of the best in England. There are some beautiful old mansions
too, that were the town-houses of great Salopian families in the days
when counties or groups of counties were a social unit unto themselves,
and London a far-away rendezvous for great nobles or pronounced
courtiers only. Shrewsbury is justly proud of its old churches. The
Abbey is a fine Norman building with later additions and much recent
successful restoration, and will be the Cathedral when Shropshire--only
a matter of time--becomes a diocese. St. Mary's, however, is the more
interesting, being of large dimensions and exhibiting almost every
style of architecture from Norman onwards, and lifting a lofty and
beautiful spire heavenwards. In its windows is a wealth of old
stained-glass, brought at various times from various places both in the
locality and on the Continent. Battlefield Church, beyond the town, was
raised over the burial pits of the many thousand dead who fell at that
great encounter, to say masses for ever for their souls and for those of
Henry the Fourth and the pious founders. With its fine tower planted
amid the quiet fields upon the site of the very shock of battle it seems
to tell a strange story, and to have long outlived the prodigiously
important function it was destined for, if numbers counted for
responsibility in the repetition of masses.
It was here, of course, that our old friend Falstaff was almost at his
very best in the scene of the fight between Hotspur and Prince Henry. To
return to fact, however, it was in Shrewsbury market-place that
Hotspur's naked body, after being three days buried, was set up between
two mill-stones to show the world that the lion of the north, the terror
of his enemies, was in truth dead. It was on Severn's banks at Berwick,
close to Shrewsbury, that this paragon of his day and type, whose very
defects of speech the golden youth of England affected, spent the last
night of his life; and in the morning, when he was told the name of the
place, turned pale and said that "he had ploughed his last furrow," for
a wizard in Northumberland had told him he should die at Berwick,
meaning, as he supposed, that more famous one in the north, where every
generation of Percy in those days fought and bled. He traced the outline
of his hand with a dagger on an oak panel of the house, and it became a
tradition of the Bettons, the owners, that if the panel was lost Berwick
would go with it, and sure enough the double disaster occurred within
quite recent times. Near a century later, Mytton, the Governor of
Shrewsbury, refused to open the gates to Henry the Seventh as he was
marching to fight for that title on Bosworth Field, swearing he should
only enter the town "over his belly." Matters having arranged themselves
pleasantly, however, the too protesting Governor, to save his oath, lay
on his back in the gate while Henry stepped over him.
The Severn is in sober mood for much of its progress round Shrewsbury,
providing both the school and the townsfolk with an admirable boating
course, after which it breaks out again into
[Illustration: THE SEVERN, BRIDGENORTH, SHROPSHIRE]
[Illustration]
those interludes of shallow rapids that mark its normal course. Soon
after leaving Shrewsbury, having run under the high ridge of Haughmond
Hill and the ruinous Abbey of that name, the river swerves southward,
and for the rest of its long course holds more or less to that point of
the compass. In spite of increasing volume from various small
affluents--the Meole at Shrewsbury, the Condover brook and the little
river Tern which joins it just below--the Severn still retains, in
subdued fashion, the qualities of a big hill-born stream running from
long pike-haunted deeps into shallow rapids, where persevering anglers
still catch occasional trout, and up which the salmon run in high water
as they head for their breeding-grounds among the Montgomery Hills. It
is a sore point among Severn anglers that for some occult reason no
Severn salmon can be persuaded to take a fly--one of those mysteries
with which the king of fishes continues to bewilder and exasperate
generations of experts. Here all the way up through Shropshire and
Montgomery are the fish, the water, and the conditions that make the
salmon a fly-taker more or less in every other river of this pattern in
Great Britain. Nay, its very tributaries, the Wye and the Usk, though
you would expect, to be sure, greater things of them than of the
Severn, are conspicuous in this particular. Salmon are taken
occasionally on a minnow above Welshpool, but so rarely on a fly as not
to be worth noting.
Running under the picturesque church and bridge of Atcham the river soon
passes Uriconium or Wroxeter, the partly excavated Roman British city
some six miles below Shrewsbury. The wall of the Basilica (as supposed)
at Uriconium is, I think, the only ruin south of the Roman wall country
that has weathered the storms of centuries and the hand of man above
ground--the only one, at any rate, like this one springing out of a
lonely rural landscape,--and thus sitting against the skyline with a
turnip-field as a foreground, it seems to move one even beyond a Norman
or a Saxon church--and no wonder. How the "White city" was utterly
destroyed by the west Saxons after the battle of Deorham in 577 is told
us vaguely in the wail of Llywarch Hen, whose sons perished in the
carnage. Still winding through a pleasant undulating region, passing the
high red cliff and the deep dingle near Hamage and the wooded slopes
about Shadwell, the Severn runs within a mile or two of the Wrekin,
which rises some 1300 feet high to the eastward. Away to the west
Wenlock Edge, Caradoc, and the Longmynd, approaching 2000 feet in
altitude, show their shapely forms. At Buildwas the beautiful ruins of
its Norman Cistercian Abbey overlook the river, while those of Much
Wenlock Priory, once the greatest and most powerful in Shropshire, cover
twenty acres not far from its banks. Just above Buildwas the Severn
begins to accelerate its pace in the deep trough it has cut in the
limestone hills, and enters the mining district of Coalbrook dale, where
for a few miles what must once have been a beautiful gorge has been for
ages smirched with many disfiguring industries; for here in the
seventeenth century iron is said to have been first smelted with coal.
The phase, however, is a very short one, for with Coalport the smoke and
turmoil are left behind, and through peaceful and delightful scenes the
river forges on to Bridgenorth.
Here, perched on a high promontory between the river and a tributary
ravine, with the leaning wall of its ancient castle upon the summit and
its houses clinging to the steeps, the historic little Shropshire town
makes a brave show. And from this point, by Hampton Wood and Highley, to
Arley and Bewdley the Severn runs in a narrow valley with woody hills
pressing upon the right and left, and oftentimes rolling glades of
birch and bracken about its banks, and the entire distance beautifully
varied with foliage and meadow. Below Arley, a place of renown for its
scenery, the Severn may be said to abandon definitely all semblance of a
mountain river, to cease from intermittent fretting on rocky channels,
and to sober down for good--a procedure due in part no doubt to certain
weirs below--into a fairly fast but smooth, deep, and navigable stream.
Bewdley, though but a small town now of some 2000 souls, is a place of
peculiar interest in Severn annals; for in times remote, those of the
Saxon and the Roman at any rate, it was certainly the head of the swampy
lagoon through which the river wandered from here to the Bristol
Channel, and the head consequently of navigation. But much more
interesting than this, Bewdley was, till the period of canals, a great
shipping port for Birmingham and other Midland centres. Long barges
travelled down to Bristol, and it can be readily understood what this
meant in days when roads were practically useless for transportation.
Bewdley, moreover, at one time manufactured as a monopoly the famous
"Monmouth caps" worn by soldiers, sailors, and others when sumptuary
laws ordained in what manner each rank of life should array itself. But
canals which struck the Severn lower down, followed in due course by
railroads, destroyed Bewdley. It is now, however, a singularly
interesting illustration of a Queen Anne and Georgian town left
commercially derelict in the full career of its prosperity. A long row
of substantial buildings once full of merchandize spreads along the
river-bank, while a wide street runs inland up the hill slope bordered
with houses, which speak eloquently, to any one who can read such
messages, of the prosperous provincial merchant of the Jacobean and
Georgian period, put to such humble modern uses as an insignificant
agricultural market-town can find for them. With its sombre Queen Anne
church, its placid old-world air, and leafy hills mounting high in
pleasant confusion above it, and its fine stone bridge spanning the
river, Bewdley is a place to remember among the Severn towns. Always
celebrated for its beauty of situation, old Leland, brief and curt to
the verge of humour, broke out in its presence into verse:
Deliciis rerum Bellus locus undique floret
Fronde coronatus Viriarae, tempora sylvae.
Here, too, as an occasional alternative to Ludlow, was held the Court of
Wales and the Marches. Of Bewdley Forest nothing is left but some great
oaks scattered over meadow and park land, but that of Wyre, near by,
still rolls back from the Severn, ridge upon ridge of scrub oak
woodland, covering about twenty square miles with dense foliage scarcely
anywhere broken but by the trail of the little streams that prattle down
its narrow glens. There is nothing quite approximating to Wyre Forest
remaining in England--this dense mantle of scrub oak, laid over a large
tract of uninhabited hilly country. In autumn this uniform sea of
russet, splashed about with the dark green of stray yew trees, rolling
over hill and dale for many miles, presents a sight common enough in
some other countries, but quite unfamiliar in English landscape.
Stourport, a little outpost of murky industry, soon follows, with the
tributary of the Stour from the Birmingham country, together with the
canal that in pre-railroad days virtually killed Bewdley. But from here
to Worcester the Severn steals serenely on, through pastoral scenes of
quiet but engaging charm. Hills of moderate height, and muffled betimes
in foliage, trend upon the narrow vale, which is always one long carpet
of meadow, while a weir or two at long intervals now checks any natural
tendency the wide river might have had to retain the livelier habits of
its youth, being now everywhere navigable for boats, barges, or small
steamers. But the Severn, unlike its famous twin the Thames, remains for
all that a lonely river. At certain spots of course, such as Bewdley,
Holt, Fleet, and Worcester, Midland holiday-makers paddle about within
limits, but, fine boating river in a practical sense though it must
everywhere be, in its long solitary journey from point to point the
pleasure-boat is conspicuously absent. Probably the high, bare, grassy
banks which are almost continuous, and must shut out the surrounding
country from any one down on the surface of the stream, has something to
do with this.
Once a day, perhaps, in summer a small steamer from Worcester or
Tewkesbury carries a load of holiday-makers between those places or up
to Bewdley, while occasionally a long line of tarpaulin-covered barges,
drawn by a tug, lashes the brown sombre river into great commotion. Save
for these rare interruptions, however, Sabrina in her pilgrimage through
Worcestershire is a lonely stream; at close quarters even a thought
sombre and moody, swishing noiselessly between those high grass
embankments and half-submerged willows, over the top of which she gets
up so readily when the fountains of the Welsh hills are loosed. Seats
of old renown lie here and there upon the ridges to the right and left.
Hartlebury Palace is near by, where the Bishops of Worcester are still
seated in the Jacobean halls of their gorgeous predecessors, behind
moats and ramparts that sheltered much earlier prelates even than these;
past the many-hundred-acred wood of Shrawley and past Astley, where are
the remains of hermitages cut in the cliff, used in quite recent years
for profane purposes, but of old by pious recluses who exchanged
benedictions with the Severn boatmen for small coin. Thence to
Ombersley, the seat and village of the Sandys, who were foremost among
Worcestershire loyalists in the Civil War; and Holt Castle, where the
Elizabethan Chancellor, the first of the Bromleys, set up house and
founded the present family. Close by, too, are the ancient oaks of
Whitley, almost brushing the costly fountains and terraced gardens of
the Earls of Dudley, till the uplifted glades of Hallow Park, where
Queen Elizabeth stayed with a little retinue of 1500 horses, and shot a
buck, makes a fitting approach to Worcester, whose Cathedral stands out
conspicuously above the town, which lies sloping upwards from the
river-bank.
Plain though stately in exterior and nobly poised, Worcester Cathedral
holds the visitor rather by the richness of its interior and the many
successive styles of architecture it displays, including the original
crypt--almost the best in England--of Bishop Wulfstan, the
eleventh-century founder of the present fabric. Little of the latter
indeed but this Norman crypt is left, for the church of the great
Monastery of Worcester suffered sorely from fire and mischance in the
Middle Ages, while during the civil wars, the city being nearly the
whole time "in action," as it were, was more fleeced and knocked about
than almost any other in England. The first small battle of the war,
fought by Rupert, which struck a long and serious misgiving into the
minds of the raw mounted troopers of the Commonwealth, took place at
Powick Bridge over the Teme, near the city. The last battle of the
second brief war, as every one knows--a fierce and bloody one--was also
fought at Worcester. Otherwise it was occupied for a brief time by
Essex's raw army, who worked havoc among the monuments, windows, and
ornamentation of the Cathedral. Thenceforward the "ever faithful city"
was held for the King, though at the cost of much hardship and constant
exactions for his cause, till near the end of the struggle, when it was
captured.
Modern Worcester is singularly fortunate in the wide range of its
industries, gloves and porcelain still claiming pre-eminence. It still
retains, however, among much of that reconstruction inevitable to a busy
town, quite a large number of sixteenth and seventeenth century
half-timbered houses. That occupied by Charles the Second, at the great
battle of Worcester, and from which he escaped by only a hair's breadth
to pursue the adventurous course of a hunted fugitive, is still
standing, as also is the yet finer old house which was the headquarters
of the Scottish commanders, and in which the Duke of Hamilton died of
his wounds. It would be out of place, even if space permitted, to dwell
here on the peculiar position which Worcester, and the county of which
the Severn valley is so important a part, occupied from the Norman
Conquest to the Reformation. It was of all English counties the one
where the Church had most property and most power, and the influence of
great lay magnates was least. While here too, and above all while
treating of the Severn, the fact must be emphasized what an influence
the river had on the drift of race and political balance in England. In
British, Roman, and probably for most of the Saxon period, the Severn
was by no means the well-behaved river, a hundred or so yards broad,
flowing between well-defined banks, that we see to-day, but the whole
valley through which it now flows was a marshy lagoon. Beyond the valley
was a strip of forest wilderness, and beyond the wilderness was Wales
and its dubious Borderland. Worcester first came into being as the chief
passage of the Severn, since Roman, British, and Saxon roads, and the
route of travel for long afterwards, all converged here. As a historical
boundary no river in England has played such a part. Even in that more
or less authentic compact known as the Tripartite convention,
caricatured by Shakespeare, between Owen Glyndwr and the Percies in the
early fifteenth century to divide England and Wales into three kingdoms,
the Severn was the natural frontier of the western dominion. Its west
bank even to-day has a faint Celtic flavour, while nothing to the
eastward of the river could possibly suggest anything but the Saxon.
Leaving Worcester for its twenty-mile run to Tewkesbury, the Severn
almost immediately receives the Teme, that famous trout and grayling
river which from here to its source in the Radnor moors has scarcely a
dull mile. Whether brawling in the woody limestone gorges of Downton,
gliding under the storied walls of Ludlow, slipping from pool to rapid
through the pleasant meads of Herefordshire, or running its
Worcestershire course through the deep romantic vale between Tenbury and
Powick, the Teme is always beautiful. With this final contribution from
the Welsh mountains, the Severn pursues its sombre, smooth, fast-gliding
course between the same high banks of red sandstone soil, held together
by tufted grass for the better resistance of winter floods, and the low
willows which trail and dip in the stream. Occasionally some slope of
woodland makes a brief change in its character. But no villas nor
country-houses to speak of venture on the river edge, nor vary its
somewhat monotonous character of foreground detail with their ornate
accessories, such as display themselves in one shape or another on most
of our famous rivers. Neither punts nor skiffs nor house-boats, nor
flannelled youths nor gay parasols, ever brighten its broad silent
stream. But as a natural feature in a typical English landscape of more
than common beauty, rolling majestically along between
[Illustration: THE SEVERN, NEAR CAM, GLOUCESTERSHIRE]
[Illustration]
wide ox-pastures and meadows that in June are busy with haymakers and
instinct with pastoral life, it leaves little to be desired. One
feature, however, here adds abiding lustre to the Severn valley; for the
Malvern Hills, by far the finest range for their modest altitude in all
England, rise within easy distance of its western bank, and following in
the same direction make a mountain background to a scene that even
without them would be fair enough.
While noting contrasts, too, though in this case not anywise concerned
with the physical attributes of Thames or Severn, what a curiously
different tale is told in the ownership of their respective banks. Along
the former, for instance, with its gayer surface, its more ornate and
gregarious shores and splendid mansions, how few occupants of these last
have any hereditary association with the soil, how utterly broken are
most ties with the past! Along the Worcestershire Severn, on the other
hand, the ancient stocks hold their ground with singular tenacity. Above
Worcester something of this has been indicated; and again, as one
follows the river downwards and recalls the names of Lygon (Earl
Beauchamp), Hornyold, Berington, Lechmere, Coventry, Temple, or
Martin--all but the last two, who are about a century later,
representatives by descent of Tudor ancestors--it seems to cover almost
every seat of note within hail of the river, and probably the greater
portion of the land abutting on its banks to the county's limit: and
this for modern England anywhere is extremely creditable and rare
enough.
Upton, a little town of some importance in the more primitive times of
Severn navigation, has now scarcely anything but a bridge and small
market to live upon. In the churchyard and predecessor of the present
abandoned and conspicuous Georgian church was fought a desperate
skirmish between the Scots and Fleetwood's vanguard, just before the
last battle of Worcester. Approaching Tewkesbury the river runs out into
a wide expanse of meadow land, and through this, under the walls of the
beautiful old town with its superb Abbey church rising conspicuously
above its banks, Shakespeare's Avon, having now run its course by
Warwick, Stratford, Evesham, and Pershore, rolls its classic waters to
their confluence.
Tewkesbury has some claim to be the most picturesque of the Severn
towns, though lying absolutely upon the flat. It is small, unsmirched
by any industry, and undoubtedly contains in its two long streets a
greater proportion for its size of really good sixteenth and seventeenth
century houses than any of its neighbours on either Severn or Avon, rich
beyond measure in this respect as both these valleys are. Then the Abbey
church alone would make a town famous. To dwell upon this imposing pile,
practically a Cathedral, is here out of the question. Its massive Norman
tower with its wealth of rich external arcading is one of the finest in
England. Its long nave with vaulted roof resting upon massive
cylindrical Norman pillars is of scarcely less renown. Its aisles and
transepts, choir and chapels, its pointed windows with their old
stained-glass, its many monuments, and above all its superb west front,
make a subject almost foolish to touch upon in half a page. One may
state, however, that its lay founder was that celebrated Robert
Fitzhamon, Earl of Gloucester, who in the time of Rufus added to his
earldom by a romantic adventurous exploit, well remembered in Wales, the
province of Glamorgan. His body lies, too, where it should lie, in his
own abbey, beneath an elegant chantry raised nearly three centuries
later to his memory by a pious abbot.
It would be ill omitting, however space may press, all mention of the
battle of Tewkesbury, when on May 4, 1471, the Yorkist forces under
Edward the Fourth encountered the Lancastrians under Queen Margaret
outside the town in the final battle of the long Wars of the Roses. The
latter were defeated with prodigious slaughter; a place near Severn's
bank being still known as the _Bloody Meadow_. But the slaughter was not
confined to the battle: the Lancastrian fugitives, when all was long
over, were hunted and hounded to death, and with their chief, who had
sought sanctuary in the Abbey, were dragged in great numbers to the
scaffold. After this a solemn thanksgiving was held in the Abbey by the
bloodthirsty victor, whose notions of a benignant deity, like most of
his kind in those pitiless days, was merely the God whom he fancied had
interfered in his favour.
Swishing silently onward between its high, monotonous banks of red earth
and green tufty turf and unaspiring willows; stirred perhaps once a day
by a trail of steam-dragged barges, but otherwise noiseless always,
unless for the occasional plunge of a fish on its reddish-brown surface,
the Severn rolls towards Gloucester through a fat and
[Illustration: CHEPSTOW WITH WYE AND SEVERN]
[Illustration]
teeming country. Peaceful hay meadows of ample acreage, astir but for a
week of June, save when some winter flood rolling over them makes for
their yet greater silence. Towering elms and yet older oaks, following
some flood ditch or hedgerow along the river's edge or across the flat
valley, which give a certain sense of dignity and opulence to this part
of the Severn's course, and not least when a summer wind is ruffling
their thousand leaves and curling over these great seas of mowing grass.
Farms and cottages shrink backward a couple of fields' length from the
river-bank on to the edge of the upland for obvious and sufficient
reason. And so by Deerhurst with its part Saxon church and wholly Saxon
chapel, by Apperley Court and Ashelworth ferry to the outskirts of
Gloucester. Here the navigation of the river, helped by a canal cut
across to Sharpness Point 18 miles below, assumes an ocean-going
character and considerable importance for small ships. The well-known
"bore" or tidal wave rushes up the Severn periodically, often achieving
the height of 9 feet and a speed of 14 miles an hour, and special
embankments have been made below Gloucester to preserve the land from
its attacks. When the Severn begins to open out into wide watery flats,
and below Gloucester to take on the muddy qualities of a tidal river,
there is little occasion to follow it. The general outlook, however,
during the last forty-mile stretch of the Severn, is worthy of its fame,
for on both sides the uplands spread back in deep lofty ridges. The
Cotswolds upon the one hand, with Mayhill and the Forest of Dean upon
the other, give character and interest even to the shining flats of salt
marsh, sand, and mud, through which the Severn, from any height, can be
seen coiling like a serpent to meet the Wye, and with the later advent
of the Avon to merge into the Bristol Channel.
But Gloucester is the real port of the Severn, a clean and pleasant
city, and like Worcester has two long main streets meeting where an
ancient cross stood, and still in name stands; for the heart of the
city, unlike the other, is a mile from the Severn as well as lower
lying, and its navigation is effected by canals. As an historic town in
the Middle Ages Gloucester counted for much, its earldom carrying for
many reasons extraordinary power, and its situation on the edge of the
Welsh Marches, and on the lowest bridge of the Severn, having alone a
significance that can scarcely be realised without some understanding of
the military and political importance of this corner of England and
Wales before the Wars of the Roses. Centres of influence shift, and when
the archer and the man-at-arms under the Clares and Mortimers ceased to
be a potent factor in English political life, the country between and
about the Severn and the Wye, the original home of English archery, lost
its peculiar significance and took rank by mere geographical and
commercial considerations. In the Civil War, however, Gloucester came
again to the front. Its stubborn retention by the Parliamentary party in
a Royalist country, and its defence by Massey, entitles it to rank with
Royalist Worcester as among the most conspicuous centres of strife in
that distressing conflict. But strangers nowadays only visit Gloucester
to see the Cathedral--an expedition well worth the making. Belonging to
the middle group of cathedrals in size, this one is chiefly celebrated
for its beautiful tower and cloisters, both of the Perpendicular period.
Most of the nave, however, retains the original Norman character in
piers and arches with exceptional grandeur of elevation; elsewhere it is
much obscured by Perpendicular casing. Gloucester boasts also one of the
four eleventh-century crypts and the largest east window in England,
still containing a good deal of the old painted glass. Originally a
Benedictine monastery, the burial within its walls of Edward the Second,
murdered at Berkeley Castle near by, and afterwards held as a martyr,
brought pilgrims, money, and additions to the church, which became the
Cathedral of the new See of Gloucester, cut off from Worcester by Henry
the Eighth. A fragment too of Llanthony Abbey, the twin sister, though
in fact the unfilial daughter, of that stately ruin, that other
Llanthony in the Welsh vale of Honddu, still stands amid the modern
litter of the docks.
[Illustration: THE WYE, HADDON HALL, DERBYSHIRE]
[Illustration]