England -- Description and travel; Wales -- Description and travel
Writing of old houses, here is an account of a curious discovery made
in one that I transcribe verbatim from my morning paper of July 10,
1912: "Whilst repairing the fireplace and chimney at the Feerm Farm,
near Mold, workmen have discovered a revolving stone, which on being
moved revealed a secret chamber. The house was built in the early
part of the sixteenth century and was once a manor-house. In the
chamber was antique oak furniture, including a table on which lay old
firearms, household utensils, and the remains, reduced to dust, of a
repast. It is surmised that the room was used as a hiding-place by
Royalist fugitives during the Civil War in the reign of Charles I.,
and that since then it had remained undisturbed." Still a stranger
discovery, and a most tragic one, relating to an old house in England
is recorded by Mrs. Hugh Fraser in _A Diplomatist's Wife in Many
Lands_, and this is her account of it: "The owners of a certain old
house, having inherited it from another branch of the family, decided
to clear away a crowded shrubbery that almost covered one side." Upon
the shrubbery being cut down, we learn, "it became evident that a part
of the building ran out farther into them than any one had noticed.
Measurements were taken and proved that a room existed to which there
was no entrance from within; this was finally effected by breaking
down a bricked-up window, and then the long-excluded daylight showed
a bedroom, of the eighteenth century, in wild confusion, garments
thrown on the floor, and chairs overturned as if in a struggle. On the
mouldering bed lay the skeleton of a woman, still tricked out in satin
and lace, with a dagger sticking between the ribs. Under the bed was
another skeleton, that of a man, who seemed from the twisted limbs and
unnatural position to have died hard. No clue had been obtained to the
story."
After this who shall say that old houses have not their romances,
recorded or unrecorded? Mrs. Fraser's account of a hidden chamber and
of skeletons found therein is not the only one of the grim kind that
has come to my notice. A book indeed would be needful to tell all the
strange and, I believe, truthful tales about old houses in remote spots
that I have gathered during many years of road wandering. Boscobel,
like many another house of its kind, might never have become famed or
known to the outer world but for the chance sojourn there of the hunted
king.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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