It became apparent that owing to our many delays, we could not easily
reach Manchester, and we stopped at Newcastle-under-Lyme for the night.
This town has about 20,000 people and lies on the outer edge of the
potteries district, where Josiah Wedgewood founded this great industry
over one hundred years ago. The whole region comprising Burslem, Hanley,
Newcastle, Stoke-on-Trent and many smaller places may be described as a
huge, scattered city of about 300,000 inhabitants, nearly all directly
or indirectly connected with the manufacture of various grades of china
and earthenware. The Castle Hotel, where we stopped, was a very old inn,
yet it proved unexpectedly homelike and comfortable. Our little party
was given a small private dining room with massive antique furniture,
and we were served with an excellent dinner by an obsequious waiter in
full-dress suit and with immaculate linen. He cleared the table and left
us for the evening with the apartment as a sitting room, and a mahogany
desk by the fireside, well supplied with stationery, afforded amends for
neglected letters. In the morning, our breakfast was served in the same
room, and the bill for entertainment seemed astonishingly low. Mine host
will no doubt be wiser in this particular as motorists more and more
invade the country.
An hour's drive brought us to Manchester. The road by which we entered
the city took us direct to the Midland Hotel, which is reputed to be the
finest in the Kingdom. Manchester is a city of nearly a million
inhabitants, but its streets seemed almost like those of a country town
as compared with the crowded thoroughfares of London. It is a great
center for motoring and I found many of the garages so full that they
could not take another car. I eventually came to one of the largest,
where by considerable shifting they managed to accommodate my car. But
with all this rush of business, it seemed to me that the owners were in
no danger of becoming plutocrats, for the charge for a day's garage,
cleaning the car, polishing the brass and making a slight repair, was
five shillings.
For half the way from Manchester to Leeds, the drive was about as trying
as anything I found in England. The road is winding, exceedingly steep
in places, and built up on both sides with houses--largely homes of
miners and mill operatives. The pavement is of rough cobble-stones, and
swarms of dogs and children crowded the way everywhere. Under such
conditions, the numerous steep hills, narrow places and sharp turns in
the road made progress slow indeed. It was evident that the British
motorists generally avoid this country, for we met no cars and our own
attracted attention that showed it was not a common spectacle. However,
the trip was none the less an interesting one as showing a bit of the
country and a phase of English life not usually seen by tourists.
There is little to detain one within the city of Leeds itself, but there
are many places of interest in its immediate vicinity. There are few
more picturesque spots in Yorkshire than Wharfdale, with its riotous
little river and ruins of Bolton Abbey and Barden Tower. This lies about
fifteen miles to the northwest, and while for special reasons we went to
Ilkley Station by train, the trip is a fine motor drive over good roads.
The park which contains the abbey and castle is the property of the Duke
of Devonshire, who keeps it at all times open to the public. The River
Wharfe, rippling over shingly rocks, leaping in waterfalls and
compressed into the remarkable rapids called the Strid, only five or six
feet wide but very deep and terribly swift, is the most striking feature
of the park. The forest-clad cliffs on either side rise almost
precipitously from the edges of the narrow dale, and from their summit,
if the climb does not deter one, a splendid view presents itself. The
dale gradually opens into a beautiful valley and here the old abbey is
charmingly situated on the banks of the river. The ruins are not
extensive, but the crumbling walls, bright with ivy and wall flowers,
and with the soft green lawn beneath, made a delightful picture in the
mottled sunshine and shadows of the English May day.
On our return to Leeds, our friend who accompanied us suggested that we
spend the next day, Sunday, at Harrogate, fifteen miles to the north,
one of the most famous of English watering places. It had been drizzling
fitfully all day, but as we started on the trip, it began to rain in
earnest. After picking our way carefully until free from the slippery
streets in Leeds, we found the fine macadam road little affected by the
deluge. We were decidedly ahead of the season at Harrogate, and there
were but few people at the splendid hotel where we stopped.
The following Sunday was as raw and nasty as English weather can be when
it wants to, regardless of the time of year, and I did not take the car
out of the hotel garage. In the afternoon my friend and I walked to
Knaresborough, one of the old Yorkshire towns about three miles distant.
I had never even heard of the place before, and it was a thorough
surprise to me to find it one of the most ancient and interesting towns
in the Kingdom. Not a trace of modern improvement interfered with its
old-world quaintness--it looked as if it had been clinging undisturbed
to the sharply rising hillside for centuries. Just before entering the
town, we followed up the valley of the River Nidd to the so-called
"dripping well," whose waters, heavily charged with limestone, drip from
the cliffs above and "petrify" various objects in course of time by
covering them with a stonelike surface. Then we painfully ascended the
hill--not less than a forty-five per cent grade in motor parlance--and
wandered through the streets--if such an assortment of narrow
foot-paths, twisting around the corners, may be given the courtesy of
the name--until we came to the site of the castle. The guide-book gives
the usual epitaph for ruined castles, "Dismantled by orders of
Cromwell's Parliament," and so well was this done that only one of the
original eleven great watch-towers remains, and a small portion of the
Norman keep, beneath which are the elaborate vaulted apartments where
Becket's murderers once hid. No doubt the great difficulty the
Cromwellians had in taking the castle seemed a good reason to them for
effectually destroying it. At one time it was in the possession of the
notorious Piers Gaveston, and it was for a while the prison-house of
King Henry II. There are many other points of interest in Knaresborough,
not forgetting the cave from which Mother Shipton issued her famous
prophecies, in which she missed it only by bringing the world to an end
ahead of schedule time. But they deny in Knaresborough she ever made
such a prediction, and prefer to rest her claims to infallibility on her
prophecy illustrated on a post card by a highly colored motor car with
the legend,
"Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe."
Altogether, Knaresborough is a town little frequented by Americans, but
none the less worthy of a visit. Harrogate is an excellent center for
this and many other places, if one is insistent on the very best and
most stylish hotel accommodations that the island affords. Ripon, with
its cathedral and Fountains Abbey, perhaps the finest ruin in Great
Britain, is only a dozen miles away; but we visited these on our return
to London from the north.
On Monday the clouds cleared away and the whole country was gloriously
bright and fresh after the heavy showers. We returned to Leeds over the
road by which we came to Harrogate and which passes Haredale Hall, one
of the finest country places in the Kingdom. A large portion of the way
the road is bordered by fine forests, which form a great park around the
mansion. We passed through Leeds to the southward, having no desire to
return to Manchester over the road by which we came, or, in fact, to
pass through the city at all. Our objective point for the evening was
Chester, and this could be reached quite as easily by passing to the
south of Manchester. Wakefield, with its magnificent church, recently
dignified as a cathedral, was the first town of consequence on our way,
and about twenty-five miles south of Leeds we came to Barnsley, lying on
the edge of the great moorlands in central England. There is hardly a
town in the whole Kingdom that does not have its peculiar tradition, and
an English friend told us that the fame of Barnsley rests on the claim
that no hotel in England can equal the mutton chops of the King's
Head--a truly unique distinction in a land where the mutton chop is
standard and the best in the world.
An English moor is a revelation to an American who has never crossed one
and who may have a hazy notion of it from Tennyson's verse or "Lorna
Doone." Imagine, lying in the midst of fertile fields and populous
cities, a large tract of brown, desolate and broken land, almost devoid
of vegetation except gorse and heather, more comparable to the Arizona
sagebrush country than anything else, and you have a fair idea of the
"dreary, dreary moorland" of the poet. For twenty miles from Barnsley
our road ran through this great moor, and, except for two or three
wretched-looking public houses--one of them painfully misnamed "The
Angel"--there was not a single town or habitation along the road. The
moorland road began at Penistone, a desolate-looking little mining town
straggling along a single street that dropped down a very sharp grade
on leaving the town. Despite the lonely desolation of the moor, the road
was excellent, and followed the hills with gentle curves, generally
avoiding steep grades. So far as I can recall, we did not meet a single
vehicle of any kind in the twenty miles of moorland road--surely a
paradise for the scorcher. Coming out of the moor, we found ourselves
within half a dozen miles of Manchester--practically in its suburbs, for
Stalybridge, Stockport, Altrincham and other large manufacturing towns
are almost contiguous with the main city. The streets of these towns
were crowded with traffic and streetcar lines are numerous. There is
nothing of the slightest interest to the tourist, and after a belated
luncheon at a really modern hotel in Stockport, we set out on the last
forty miles of our journey. After getting clear of Manchester and the
surrounding towns, we came to the Chester road, one of the numberless
"Watling Streets," which one finds all over England--a broad, finely
kept high way, leading through a delightful country. Northwich, famous
for its salt mines, was the only town of any consequence until we
reached Chester. We had travelled a distance of about one hundred and
twenty miles--our longest day's journey, with one exception--not very
swift motoring, but we found that an average of one hundred miles per
day was quite enough to thoroughly satisfy us, and even with such an
apparently low average as this, a day's rest now and then did not
come amiss.
[Illustration: SUNSET ON THE MOOR.