THE HIGHEST INNS IN ENGLAND
As there are many inns claiming, each one of them, to be the “oldest,” so
there are many others disputing the point which is the highest situated. I
must confess the subject--for myself, at least--lacks charm. I know--how
can you help knowing it?--that to reach those eyries you must use
incredible efforts, scaling preposterous heights and faring over roads
that are, as a rule, infernally rough. And when you are come, in summer
hot, in winter searched through and through by the bitter blast
that--Shakespeare notwithstanding--is by a long chalk more unkind than
man’s ingratitude, to these unkindly altitudes, what, oh my brothers, do
you see? Without exception some plaguy ill-favoured shebeen, presiding
over starve-all fields at the best, but generally president over some
aching solitude that the hand of man--man being a reasoning animal--has
never sought to bring under cultivation. The best you can say of such
spots--and it is bad at the best--is that they usually command fine views
of better places, whence, you cannot help thinking, you were a fool to
come, and from which, you suspect, the innkeepers removed from
misanthropical motives, rather than from love of bracing air, or for the
mere idea of earning a livelihood.
The peculiar honour of being the highest-situated inn appears, after much
contention, to belong to the “King’s Pit,” usually called the “Tan Hill”
inn, in midst of a ghastly hill-top solitude in the North Riding of
Yorkshire, between Reeth and Barras. You get to it--I will not say most
easily and conveniently, for convenience and ease in this connection are
things unknown, but with less discomfort and fatigue--by way of Richmond,
and, when you have got there, will curse the curiosity that brought you to
so literally “howling” a wilderness. For there the winds do generally
blow, and, when they _do_, heaven send you have not to face them, for it
is a shelterless common where the “Tan Hill” inn stands in loneliness, and
not a tree or a hedge is there to break the stinging blast.
[Illustration: “TAN HILL” INN.]
Cheerfulness is not a characteristic of those who keep hill-top inns:
hence the suspicion that they are misanthropes who, hating sight or sound
of their kind, retire to such unfrequented spots, and, when the stray
traveller seeks refreshment, instead of weeping salt tears of joy, or
exhibiting any minor sign of emotion, grudgingly attend to his wants, and
vouchsafe as little information as they safely can.
The “Tan Hill” inn stands on the summit of Stainmoor, at a height of 1,727
feet above sea-level, and it is one of the most abject, uncompromisingly
ugly buildings that ever builder built. The ruins of a toll-house stand
near by, silently witnessing that it was once worth the while of somebody
to levy and collect tolls on what is now as unfrequented a place as it is
possible to conceive; but railways long since knocked the bottom out of
that, and for some years, until the autumn of 1903, the licence of the inn
itself was allowed to lapse, the house being first established for sake of
the likely custom from a coal-pit in a neighbouring valley, now abandoned.
The innkeeper lives rent free, with the half of his licence paid on
condition of his looking after that now deserted mine.
But there is one day in the whole year when the “Tan Hill” inn wakes to
life and business. That is the day of Brough Horse Fair, and the traffic
then is considerable: the only vestige of the former business of the road
now left to it by the Bowes and Barras Railway.
[Illustration: THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR BUXTON.]
Between Macclesfield and Buxton--five miles from Buxton and seven from
Macclesfield--just, by about 1,500 yards--in Cheshire, although commonly
said to be in Derbyshire, stands the next highest inn, the “Cat and
Fiddle,” at a height of 1,690 feet. It is only a little less
dreary-looking a house than that of “Tan Hill,” and wears a weather-beaten
air earned by the fierce storms and snow blizzards to which it is in
winter exposed. The wooden porch and the double doors within are necessary
outposts against the wind. In the winter the inhabitants are sometimes
weatherbound for days at a time, and generally take the precaution of
laying in a stock of provisions. One may no more visit Buxton without
going a pilgrimage to the “Cat and Fiddle” than it would be reasonable to
visit Egypt and not see the Pyramids; and consequently, however lonely the
place may be in winter, it is in summer visited by hundreds of trippers
brought in waggonettes and brakes named after advertising generals and
other puffed-up bull-frogs of the hour. The manner and the expressions of
those trippers form an interesting study. You see, plainly enough, that
they are bored and disillusioned, and that they wonder, as they gaze upon
the hideous house, or over the wild and forbidding moorland and
mountain-peaks, or down into the deep valleys, why the devil they came at
all; but they are all slaves of convention, and merely wait patiently
until the time for returning happily comes round.
There surely never was so demoniac-looking a cat as that sculptured here.
Of the derivation of the sign there are, of course, several versions, the
local one being that the sixth Duke of Devonshire was especially fond of
this road, and used often to travel it with his favourite cat and a
violin!
The “Traveller’s Rest,” at Flash Bar, in Staffordshire, on the Leek to
Buxton Road, occupies the third place, at an altitude of 1,535 feet, while
in the fourth comes a house called the “Isle of Skye,” at Wessenden Head,
in Yorkshire, near Holmfirth, 1,500 feet.
The fifth highest inn is the “Traveller’s Rest,” at the summit of the
Kirkstone Pass, in Westmoreland, 1,476 feet above the sea, a very
considerably lower elevation; but you may still see on the front of the
inn its repeatedly discredited claim to be, not merely the highest inn,
but the highest inhabited house, in England--which, as Euclid might say,
“is absurd.” But what the situation of the Kirkstone Pass lacks in height,
it has in gloomy grandeur. Probably more tourists, exploring the
mountainous country between Ambleside, Windermere, and Patterdale, visit
the Kirkstone Pass inn than any other of these loftily placed
hostelries--the “Cat and Fiddle” not excepted.
[Illustration: THE “TRAVELLER’S REST,” KIRKSTONE PASS.]
The “Newby Head” inn, Yorkshire, between bleak Hawes and lonely Ingleton,
stands at a height of 1,420 feet; and the Duchy Hotel at Princetown, on
Dartmoor, in far distant Devonshire, seems to be on the roof of the world,
with its 1,359 feet.