Gonerby Hill was reputed the steepest bit between London and Edinburgh. It was, at the time when Scott wrote, a great deal steeper than nowadays, now that the road has been cut deeply through it, instead of climbing painfully over the crest. Then also, as he remarks, the open ground at its foot was unenclosed and covered with copses and swampy pools. Also, as Jeanie discovered, there was “bad company” where the “bonny hill lifted its brow to the moon.” But surely never did such odd company as Sir Walter has invented lurk in these recesses. The _Heart of Midlothian_, indeed, is a fantastic novel quite unworthy of the Wizard of the North, and its wildly improbable characters and marvellous rencounters are on a par with Harrison Ainsworth at his worst. Syston, two miles away to the right, is, they say, the original of the Willingham village in the novel, and Barkston, close by, is doubtless the “Barkston town-end” where Mother Murdockson was put in the stocks; but the references to them are of the haziest. It was not inadvisedly that Ainsworth was just mentioned, for Gonerby Hill is named in Turpin’s Ride. Ainsworth always resorted to the gibbet when he wanted to make a point in the gruesome. Accordingly, when Turpin mounts the rise, what does he find but “two scarecrow objects covered with rags and rusty links of chain,” depending from “the tree.” “Will this be my lot, I wonder?” asks the hero with a shudder. We need only to be slightly acquainted with Ainsworth’s methods to know that a melodramatic answer was immediately forthcoming. Springing from the briars and tussocks of rank grass between the foot of the gallows and the road, a gaunt figure exclaimed, “Ay, marry will it!” These “gaunt figures” never failed the novelist; but the plain man wants to know what they were doing on these inclement spots, and by what unfailing instinct they were always there at the precise moment demanded in the interests of fiction. The descent of Gonerby Hill accomplished, and the level reached, a singularly featureless and flat twelve miles leads into Newark, past Marston cross-roads, where a turnpike gate used to trouble travellers, past Foston, a forlorn village on a knoll, Long Bennington, a larger and still more forlorn village on the flat, and thence, with the graceful spire of Claypole far on the right, over the Shire Dyke, into Nottinghamshire, and through Balderton. XXIX