The Cathedral Towns and Intervening Places of England, Ireland and Scotland:: A Description of Cities, Cathedrals, Lakes, Mountains, Ruins, and Watering-places.Silloway, Thomas W. (Thomas William)
History
The Cathedral Towns and Intervening Places of England, Ireland and Scotland:: A Description of Cities, Cathedrals, Lakes, Mountains, Ruins, and Watering-places.
Silloway, Thomas W. (Thomas William)
Great Britain -- Description and travel
where we arrived after an hour's ride, and remained over night, much
enjoying our accommodation at the Avenue Hotel. Next morning, after
breakfast, took a stroll out over the town. It is a noted place of
aristocratic resort for pleasure, and for its springs--a sort of cross
between English Bath and American Saratoga. Everywhere were facilities
for the enjoyment of pleasure or health-seeking tourists. It would seem
as though one could hardly be sick here. It was in this place that Sir
Walter Scott wrote "Kenilworth," and as one breathes the exhilarating
air, he is inclined to reduce the honors usually accorded to the
great writer, and imagine that it is nothing strange that, with such
surroundings, he wrote as he did. A visit to Leamington, and one is
in the secret of Sir Walter's power when he wrote that smoothest of
romances.
Perhaps we ought to make a more economical use of adjectives in
describing the neatness of streets and the beauty of public and private
grounds, for this is the universal and not exceptional condition.
The pink hawthorn is in bloom, and such pansies as we never saw at
home. Remember, this is May 28. We have not anywhere in our travels
seen Indian corn growing, and think it is not raised. We have seen no
fields of potatoes, only small patches for family use; and these are
six inches out of the ground. Carrots and early cabbages are fully
grown and exposed for sale. We visited one grapery, where the Black
Hamburg vines were forty years old and in good bearing, the grapes
being about the size of peas. The vines were set in the borders of
the greenhouse, which were two and a half feet wide, and the vines
were three and a half feet apart,--the stocks, or trunks, being not
more than an inch and a half in diameter. On the outside of a small
conservatory was a fine heliotrope, one and a half inches in diameter,
nine years old, which had often been well pruned and was in profuse
bloom.
The town has a population of 22,730, and is very pleasantly situated on
the River Leam, a tributary of the Avon, and is one of the handsomest
towns in England, and more American in appearance than any other place
we saw on our journey. The spring waters are saline, sulphurous, and
chalybeate. They came into use in 1797, and are visited constantly by
the _élite_ of the land.
KENILWORTH.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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