The “Red Lion” may, for purposes of comparison, be divided into three parts. There is the old gabled original portion of the inn, probably of late seventeenth-century date, now used as a medical dispensary, forming two sides of a courtyard, recessed from the road, and screened from it by an old wrought-iron railing; and added to it, perhaps eighty years later, an imposing range of eighteenth-century red-brick buildings, partly in use as offices for the local Urban District Council and in part a “Literary Institute,” and a world too large for both. This great building is even more imposing within; its immense cellarage, large ball-, or assembly-room, noble staircases, and finely panelled walls, the now neglected witnesses of a bygone prosperity. Traditions still survive of how George the Fourth used to entertain his Windsor huntsmen here. In the rear was stabling for some two hundred horses. Most of it has been cleared away, but the old postboys’ cottages still remain in the spacious yard. The remaining part of the “Red Lion,” still carried on as an inn, presents a white-stuccoed, Early Victorian front to the high road. [Illustration: THE “BELL,” BARNBY MOOR: MEET OF LORD GALWAY’S HOUNDS.] Not many inns are built upon crypts. Examples have already been referred to in these volumes, but another may be mentioned, in the case of the “Lamb” inn at Eastbourne; while the “Angel” at Guildford is a well-known instance. No one, looking at the modern-fronted “Angel,” one of the foremost hotels of Guildford, would be likely to accuse it of owning an Early English crypt, but it has, in fact, an exceptionally fine one of three bays, supported by two stone pillars. The ancient history of this undercroft is unknown, and merely a matter for conjecture. At the “Angel” itself antiquity and modernity meet, for while fully equipped for twentieth century convenience, it has good oak panelling of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the fine hall and elsewhere. CHAPTER II THE OLD INNS OF CHESHIRE Cheshire, that great fertile plain devoted almost exclusively to dairy-farming, is without doubt the county richest in old inns: inns for the most part built in the traditional Cheshire style--of timber and plaster: the style variously called “half-timbered,” “magpie,” or “black and white.” Of these the “Old Hall” at Sandbach is the finest and most important, having been built originally as the manor-house, about the time of Queen Elizabeth, the inscription, “16 T.B. 56” on a portion of the long frontage, probably marking repairs, or an extension of the building, at that period.