The original Constant Spring works stood to the east of the new main
road to Stony Hill, about seven miles from Kingston, just below the
aqueduct. They were later removed to the other side of the road lower
down the hill, near the end of the car line, where they still stand in
ruins; and traces of the stone guttering connecting the old works with
the new may still be seen on the east side of the main road. The late
Dr. Cargill stated (in an article on “The Captain’s Story” which
appeared in the “Journal of the Institute of Jamaica” in 1896) that the
great house stood a little below the aqueduct. Mr. Soutar, however, says
that the house at Spring Garden was the original great house. The
remains of a substantial though short flight of stone steps (marking,
Mr. Soutar says, the old still-house) exist to-day just above the
reservoirs, commanding one of the finest views to be obtained on the
higher slopes of the plain of Liguanea. These old aqueducts, which
enhance the beauty of many a Jamaica landscape, besides telling of the
day when sugar was king, afford the best examples of architecture to be
found in the island.
It was at Constant Spring hotel in 1894 that “Alice Spinner” wrote a
“Study in Colour,” one of the best pictures of negro character sketched
by an English pen; and the hotel figures in the story as Summerlands
Hotel, where “no ill-cooked stew or muddy coffee could rob the glorious
mountains of their jewelled peak.”
=Olivier Road=, near Constant Spring, helps to record the fact that Sir
Sydney Olivier, when colonial secretary, lived near by. It is the only
publicly-given name after a colonial secretary.
Although of late, writers, misled by Anthony Trollope’s doubting
reference to the story, and by a misreading of Froude’s words, have
attempted to prove that “Tom Cringle’s Log,” a work which brought
literary fame to Michael Scott at a bound, was probably written in
Glasgow in the intervals of business, and although it is possible he may
have rewritten in that city the chapters to suit the pages of
“Blackwood,” there seems very good evidence still obtainable that the
original studies of Jamaica life and character, which have delighted
three or four generations of readers, were actually written in Jamaica.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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