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
Tower of Chipping Campden Church 188
The Rollright Stones 192
The Tower, Magdalen College 210
The Severn below the Quarry, Shrewsbury 232
Wigmore Abbey--Gate House and Barn 262
Tewkesbury Abbey 282
St. Peter's Church, Clevedon 320
A Devon Cottage 334
The Fal 340
Church of St. Columb Minor 360
Arthur's Castle, Tintagel 364
Boscastle 368
The Lizard Light, Cornwall 372
Land's End 376
_From Gretna Green to Land's End_
THE BORDER
The dominant interest of the northwestern counties is, of course, the
Lake District, with its far-famed poetic associations; yet for the
student of English history and the lover of Border minstrelsy the
upper strip of Cumberland has a strong attraction of its own.
An afternoon run on the Midland brought us from Liverpool to Carlisle.
Such are the eccentricities of the English railway system that the
"through carriage" into which guard and porter dumped us at Liverpool,
a third-class carriage already crowded with one sleeping and one
eating family, turned out not to be a through carriage at all; and a
new guard, at Hellifield, tore us and our belongings forth and thrust
us into an empty first-class, lingering in the doorway until we had
produced the inevitable shilling. But the freedom of an empty carriage
would have been well worth the honest price of first-class tickets,
for as the train sped on from the Ribble into the Eden Valley, with
the blue heights of the Pennine range and the long reaches of the
Yorkshire moors on our right, and on our left the cloud-caressed
summits of Lakeland, we needed all the space there was for our
exultant _ohs_ and _ahs_, not to mention our continual rushing from
window to window for the swiftly vanishing views of grey castle and
ruined abbey, peel tower and stone sheep-fold, grange and hamlet, and
the exquisite, ever-changing panorama of the mist.
Carlisle, "the Border City," a clean, self-respecting, serious town,
without beggars, with no superfluous street courtesies, but with
effectual aid in need, is the heart of one of the most storied regions
of England. The River Drift man and the Cave man seem to have fought
the mammoth and the elk and gone their shadowy way untraced in this
locality, but the museum in Tullie House contains hammers and axes,
found in Cumberland soil, of the Stone Age, and spear-heads and
arrow-heads, urns for human ashes, incense cups, food vessels and
drinking vessels of the Bronze Age,--mute memorials of life that once
was lived so eagerly beneath these same soft, brooding skies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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