The Old Man; or, Ravings and Ramblings round ConistoneGibson, Alexander Craig
History
The Old Man; or, Ravings and Ramblings round Conistone
Gibson, Alexander Craig
Coniston (Cumbria, England) -- Description and travel; Lake District (England) -- Description and travel
Miss Martineau says that Mr Tyson will tell the traveller “of the
alteration in the times, and how the Wesleyans have opened a chapel
in Ulpha, which draws away some of the flock; and that others have
ceased to come to church since the attempts to get copper from
the neighbouring hills,—the miners drawing away the people to
diversion on Sundays.” I cannot help thinking that Miss Martineau has
misunderstood the worthy pastor as to this latter cause of diminution
in his congregation. The miners are certainly no more given to Sunday
diversion than the rest of the community, and they have the less excuse
for indulging in amusement on Sunday, inasmuch as they have more time
for week-day recreation than their agricultural compeers. I cannot
observe any difference between the manners and conduct of the miners
and of the other inhabitants of Seathwaite, nor can I understand how
any such difference can be supposed to exist, because all the people
employed in the Seathwaite mines are natives of this or the adjoining
vales—are, in fact, for the most part, sons or brothers of the
small yeomen and farmers, and have taken to mining because it is an
occupation that affords them better earnings for less work, than does
agricultural or pastoral labour, their only other resources.
Bidding adieu to Seathwaite chapel, and to its venerable and obliging
minister, you must return to Newfield for your pony, and set out on
your way back to Conistone. You ride up the dale by the road you
descended for about half a mile or more, and just before you reach the
guide-post, where the road you came by turns off to cross Nettleslack
Bridge, you had better leave the road, passing through a gate on your
right, and following a track through a field for about forty yards, to
take a look at the humble homestead of Undercrag, where Robert Walker
was born. Though the buildings are of the humblest, the situation is
very beautiful, nestling, as its name signifies, at the foot of a high
wall of grey rock nearly perpendicular, but delightfully chequered with
little slopes and irregular shelves of bright green turf. Undercrag
has little about it to attract notice before many of its neighbours;
its only claim to our attention is its being the birth-place of one,
whose homely name has become known wider and farther than has that of
any other native of the lake country, always excepting the name of his
great biographer.
[Sidenote: “A PEACEFUL RETIREMENT.”]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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