Charles G. Harper

“ It is not given to the casual wayfarer to perceive this romance, envisaged as it is in the grim and grimy outskirts, or in the everyday crowding and turmoiling of the central traffic; but it is there, nevertheless, and I, for one, refuse to treat of Manchester in particular, or of the road in general, in mere terms of topography; for the road, and the places to which it conducts, take in their compass the entire interests and sympathies of mankind: the blood and tears, the joys and sorrows of the ages. ”

“ Manchester, as an industrial centre, has, in common with other great cities similarly placed, always keenly felt the vicissitudes of national prosperity, and, with the surrounding towns and districts of Lancashire, has ever ridden on the crest of the waves of commercial expansion, or wallowed in the depths of its depression. There is perhaps no other great city, nor any other county than Lancashire, in England which so surely feels the warming glow of good times, or the chilling nip of bad ”

“ The Evan Water was in flood this black and boisterous night, and, raving in its stony bed, tore furiously at the newly rebuilt bridge that spanned the torrent. Down through the wild obscurity from the heights above Douglas Mill came the mail from Glasgow for Carlisle, and no sooner did the horses place foot upon the bridge than it collapsed, as suddenly and completely as any stage property. ”

“ To argue from this old love of colour in dress a corresponding delight in flowers would be a mistake, for rural Scotland has few indeed of the English type of cottage, with clustered roses and jessamine and a very wealth of colour in its old-fashioned garden. All through Dumfriesshire and Lanarkshire, eighty-five miles along the road to Glasgow, the country cottages are merely un-ornamental living-boxes, and flower-gardens are vanities not indulged in. ”

“ And the great ocean-going steamers come surging slowly up to Manchester, bellowing for the swing bridges to swing open, and crowds of interested idlers, and the impatient traffic, held up at the flung-up bridges, look upon the sight with never-satiated gaze. It is a perennial wonder, a sensation that never stales.
In some ways even more wonderful are the changes that have overtaken Trafford Park, at the head of the Canal. ”

“ To find in Manchester, whose every byway seethes with life, a corner not already occupied, a spot where you can hear the ticking of a clock, is too delightful to be forgone. There is, indeed, only one other spot in Manchester where something the same conditions prevail, and that is the great palatial building of Ryland’s Library, where inestimably rare books, manuscripts, and bindings are to be found. ”

“ Prominent above all other monuments on that stricken hill is the tall column crowned by an effigy of John Knox. The Cathedral Yard itself is a dismal place. There, forming a close paving, are the memorials of many of Glasgow’s departed citizens: the stones broken and mangy: merchants jostling cock-lairds and dunghill squires with their heraldic achievements weathered in most cases almost beyond recognition; and one of those ferocious denunciatory Covenanters’314 monuments with which every visitor to Scotland soon becomes familiar. ”

“ THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD I London Road Railway Station nowadays marks the beginning of central Manchester. Hitherto the long, long approach, although busy and crowded, has been, if not a thought suburban, at least busy chiefly on the retail scale. Here, however, where the railway brings travellers in from London, you see Manchester as the great city of immense warehouses: the place that no longer manufactures but deals in bulk and by wholesale with the goods produced in a dependent circle of towns. ”

“ The Cathedral Square abuts upon one of the most squalid neighbourhoods in Glasgow, but it is here that the oldest domestic building in the city stands. The stranger’s attention is first attracted to it by the legend, “Provand’s Lordship,” painted across the weathered stone frontage over the hairdresser’s shop that occupies part of the ground floor. Then, glancing at the high-pitched roof and the corbie-stepped gables, characteristic of old Scottish architecture, he will perceive that he is indeed contemplating a very reverend building. ”

“ Having come now to the Sark, and across it into the long street of Springfield, and by the same token into Scotland, it is necessary to tell at length the story of “Gretna Green” marriages. It could scarce be told in more forbidding surroundings, for Springfield is one long street of gaunt, unrelieved commonplace, and neither the once notorious “Queen’s Head” inn on the right, nor the “Maxwell Arms” on the left, helps to relieve it in the least degree. But the devil’s in it if love can’t throw a rosy tinge over even such a scene, and doubtless Springfield looked entrancing to some. ”

“ Competition was evidently most extraordinarily keen for it to have gone the length of inducing a Border marriage-monger to build an hotel on the English side of the Sark, and for his agents and others to have wrangled and disputed for business on a railway platform, like so many cab-touts. The romance of Gretna obviously departed, leaving only the sordid dregs, when the Glasgow and South-Western Railway was made, 1848-50, and linked up with Carlisle and the whole of England. ”

“ Tolcross and its lengthy continuation, Gallowgate, are one long-drawn slum, and so conduct shamelessly to the very heart of things: the junction of Trongate, Saltmarket, and High Street, where stands the old centre of the city in coaching days, Glasgow Cross.
Here Glasgow is at its busiest, and the hurrying crowds look as though they had little time for sentiment. Yet the Glasgow people have, of course, an interest in Sir Walter Scott, and some there are who can point out to the stranger the house, once an inn, in King Street, turning out of Trongate, which Scott once frequented. ”

“ You deceptively descend to it, to Denighton Bridge, crossing a little stream that comes down the valley from Crawfordjohn, but then rise to an exposed lonely plateau, bleaker than Shap and without its interest. Down at Denighton Bridge, where the view ranges along the gloomy valley wherein the Covenanters skulked and the troopers of Montrose hunted them, the sheep graze and the lambkins frisk in spring. Even a wet and cold cyclist (who is not easily amused) must shriek with laughter at the antics of the lambs, which are a good deal funnier than those of any low comedian I have ever seen. ”

“ The commercial genius and the farsighted energy of the Scottish people have transformed what was the shallow, muddy estuary of the Clyde into a busy waterway second to none in the world. As a river, the Clyde has never counted for much, but as an estuary it has ever been of importance ”

“ It seemed to him that “a place more destitute of all interesting objects than Manchester it would not be easy to conceive. In size and population it is the second city in the kingdom, containing about fourscore thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness; where you hear from within the everlasting din of machinery ”

“ The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a great turning-point in Manchester’s history. One invention rapidly succeeded another; most of them by local men, for among the sprack-witted Lancashire folk there has ever been plenty of mechanical genius. At the time when Hargreaves was planning his spinning jenny, another was perfecting a similar machine. This was Richard Arkwright, of Preston, the youngest of a poor family of thirteen children, who was born in 1732, and began life as a barber and dealer in hair at Bolton. ”

“ Kirk-by-Kent Dale, is indeed very much among the waters, for here the river Kent, reinforced by tributary streams pouring down from the misty fells, foams down in weirs, and is crossed, in highway and byway, by no fewer than three bridges. There is good fishing for the “gentle” angler in these waters. Though why “gentle” and where the gentleness is more than I can comprehend. For sport, the angler baits his cruel line and, if sport be good, he, himself an exemplar of “nature, red in tooth and claw,” hooks, with his fiendish barb, some unfortunate trout or grayling in the gills. ”

“ The Manchester manufacturer of about 1750, as described by contemporaries, was a humble person, of the greatest simplicity, working like a journeyman among his hands; beginning the day before six o’clock in the morning and ending it proportionably earlier, as the habits of the time and the primitive means of artificial lighting dictated. He both produced the goods and warehoused them, and his combined warehouse and factory was also his home. He not only worked with his weavers, but sat at meals with them, and all helped themselves out of a common bowl of water-porridge, and a dish of milk. ”

“ It is rarely, nowadays, you see a plaid, and not often a kilt. Nowhere is the sight now seen that once astonished travellers: the sight of countryfolk walking barefoot, carrying shoes and stockings in their hands, for sake of economy, until they reached the outskirts of a town, where, for sake of appearance, they put them on. The once poor country has grown a great deal beyond that. But kilts formed the only wear at the time of the rebellion of 1745, when one unhappy detachment of rebels found them rather embarrassing. ”

“ Farleton Knott—most hills in these parts are “Knotts”—strikingly overhangs the road to Kendal, rising in grey scarps, ridges, and terraces above a level stretch, where the humble old whitewashed “Duke of Cumberland” inn stands beside the lonely way. ”

“ The impressive approach to Lancaster Castle is by way of John o’ Gaunt’s gateway, one of the many works added by that historic personage, Shakespeare’s “time-honoured Lancaster,” when his father, Edward the Third, created him Duke of Lancaster and raised Lancashire in consequence to the condition of County Palatine. The “time-honoured” one himself stands in effigy in a niche over the door-way. One would like to think the statue contemporary with him, but the guide-books, from which no derogatory secrets are hid, tell the disappointing tale that it dates only from 1822. ”

“ Let us hope, for the travellers’ own sakes, that they did not take this advice. But let us follow Mr. Kirke indoors. This, according to him, was a Scottish interior: “To enter a kitchen is to enter Hell alive: the stew and stink enough to suffocate you,” while “Musick they have, but not the Harmony of the Spheres, but loud Terrene noises, like the bellowing of beasts: the loud Bagpipe is their chief delight.” ”

“ It was near ten o’clock, the insides had composed themselves to that semblance of sleep which coach travellers could command, and the outsides had wrapped themselves up in their greatcoats, and had so fixed their minds upon more pleasant circumstances than riding in the rain on a cold October night, that they were practically oblivious of their surroundings, when they were suddenly plunged, with the coach, coachman, horses, and guard, into the foaming water underneath the broken arch. There were two outside passengers: one a City merchant named Lund, the other a Mr. Brand of Ecclefechan. ”

“ Equally interesting is the old “Two Lions” inn near by. It looks out up the street in a shy manner, being hidden upon a narrow entry, in a fashion that to a southron seems a strangely retiring pose for an ancient mansion of the landed classes; a complexion from which, in fact, the house has, since ancient times, declined. Time was—in the reign of the more or less good Queen Bess, to be precise—when what is now the “Two Lions” was the “town house” of Gerard Lowther, a notable member of the always rich and powerful Lowther family ”

“ But although Penrith is sheltered by its great godfather hill, it was never at any time effectually protected against the invader. Carlisle, eighteen miles away to the north, was its great bulwark, and if that fortified city fell, or were cleverly avoided, then the case of Penrith was sorry indeed, as in the notable instance of 1345, when the Scots, numbering 26,000 men, came pouring across the Border, and burnt the town and many neighbouring villages; taking prisoners with them, on their return, as many hale and hearty men as they could find, to be sold as slaves to the highest bidders. ”

“ Some of the races for Gretna Green were so near that the betting on the contendants was even amongst the excited spectators of the chase. A pedestrian on the English high-road within a238 mile of the Scotch boundary would be overtaken by a light travelling chariot, drawn at the rate of sixteen miles an hour by four of the fleetest post-horses that the host of Carlisle’s chief inn could afford. Each postilion would give his whip-hand horse a cut with his whip at every bound of the infuriated creature, whilst as frequently he plunged his spurs into the reeking flanks of the animal he bestrode. ”