From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England. — John Shaqi
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.Bates, Katharine Lee
General
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.
Bates, Katharine Lee
England -- Description and travel
We drove eastward ten miles farther, under sun and shower, now by
broad meadows where sleek kine, secure at last from cattle-lifters,
were tranquilly grazing, now by solemn ranks of Scotch firs and
far-reaching parks of smooth-barked, muscular beeches, now through
stone-paved hamlets above whose shop-doors we would read the familiar
ballad names, Scott, Graham (Graeme), Armstrong, Musgrave, Johnston,
Kerr, and wonder how the wild blood of the Border had been tamed to
the selling of picture postal cards.
Our goal was Naworth, one of the most romantic of English castles. Its
two great towers, as we approached, called imagination back to the
days
"When, from beneath the greenwood tree,
Rode forth Lord Howard's chivalry,
* * * * *
And minstrels, as they marched in order,
Played, 'Noble Lord Dacre, he dwells on the Border.'"
Naworth is the heart of a luxuriant valley. The position owes its
defensive strength to the gorges cut by the Irthing and two
tributaries. These three streams, when supplemented by the old moat,
made Naworth an island fortress. The seat of the Earls of Carlisle, it
was built by Ranulph Dacre in the fourteenth century. Even the present
Lady Carlisle, a pronounced Liberal and a vigorous worker in the
causes of Temperance and Woman Suffrage, though claiming to be a more
thoroughgoing Republican than any of us in the United States, points
out with something akin to pride "the stone man" on the Dacre Tower
who has upheld the family escutcheon there for a little matter of five
hundred years. In the sixteenth century the Dacre lands passed by
marriage to the Howards, and "Belted Will," as Sir Walter Scott
dubbed Lord William Howard, proved, under Elizabeth and James, an
efficient agent of law and order. Two suits of his plate armour still
bear witness to the warrior, whom the people called "Bauld Willie,"
with the same homely directness that named his wife, in recognition of
the ample dower she brought him, "Bessie with the braid apron," but
his tastes were scholarly and his disposition devout. Lord William's
Tower, with its rugged stone walls, its loopholes and battlements, its
steep and narrow winding-stair guarded by a massive iron door, its
secret passage to the dungeons, is feudal enough in suggestion, yet
here may be seen his library with the oak-panelled roof and the great
case of tempting old folios, and here his oratory, with its fine
wood-carvings, its Flemish altar-piece, and its deep-windowed recess
outlooking on a fair expanse of green earth and silver sky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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