Charles G. Harper

“ Fresh from perusing the domestic records of the eighteenth century, you have a confused mental picture of artists poor in pocket but rich in genius, pervading the country, hoofing it muzzily along the roads, and boozing in every village ale-house. You see such an one, penniless, offering to settle a trivial score by painting a new sign or retouching an old one, and you very vividly picture mine host ungraciously accepting the offer, because he has no choice. ”

“ It is a morsel of certainty, snatched from the midst of the uncertainties of life; it is a sunny moment gleaming out kindly on a cloudy day; and he who has advanced some way on the pilgrimage of existence knows the importance of husbanding even morsels and moments of enjoyment. ‘Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?’ thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back in my elbow-chair, and cast a complacent look about the little parlour of the ‘Red Horse,’ at Stratford-on-Avon. ”

“ Turn we now to Shropshire, to that sweet and gracious old town of Ludlow, where—albeit ruined—the great Castle of the Lords Presidents of the Council of the Marches of Wales yet stands, and where many an ancient house belonging to history fronts on to the quiet streets: some whose antique interiors are altogether unsuspected of the passer-by, by reason of the Georgian red-brick fronts or Early Victorian plaster faces that have masked the older and sturdier construction of oaken beams. ”

“ There is no more romantic opening possible than that of the village inn, with the spiced ale warming on the hearth, and the rustics toasting their toes in the ingle-nook, what time the wind howls without, roars in the trees, like the roaring of an angry sea, and takes hold of the casements and shakes and rattles them, as though some outcast, denied admittance, would yet force his way into the warmth and comfort, out of the cheerless night. ”

“ If the front of the house, with its odd effigy of a black bear eating a bunch of grapes, is fine, much finer, in the picturesque way, is the back, where, from the stable-yard, you see a noble range of Ionic columns, rather lost in that position, and surmounted as they are with gables of a Gothic feeling, looking as though the projector of some ambitious classic extension had begun a great work without counting the cost of its completion, and so had ingloriously to decline upon a humble ending. ”

“ A house rural now that the old semi-urban character of the great road to Oxford has, with the passing of the coaches and the post-chaises, long become merely a memory is the great “George and Dragon” inn at West Wycombe. West Wycombe once called itself a town, and perhaps does so still, but it cannot nowadays make that claim convincingly. If we call it a decayed coaching town, that is the most that can be conceded, in the urban way; for to-day its every circumstance is rustic. ”

“ The “White Hart” is an inn typical of the coaching age along that western highway, and repays examination. Dark and tortuous corridors, a coffee-room decorated in barbaric colours, a capacious stable-yard, all tell of the old days of the Exeter Mail. The inn stands in the centre of the little town of narrow streets, where the Oxford and Southampton Road crosses the road to Exeter, and was thus in receipt of a very great deal of coaching business, travellers from Southampton or from Oxford changing here and waiting for the West of England coaches. ”

“ The stranger stumbles by accident upon the “White Horse” inn while looking for a way uphill to that ancient Saxon effigy of a horse scored in the turf and chalk on the summit; and there, before he tackles that ascent, he does, if he be a wise man, fortify himself against the fatigue of much hard Excelsior business by that best of tourist’s fare—ale and bread and cheese—in the little stone-flagged parlour. ”

“ Unwise is he who concludes the day at populous town or busy city, where modern hotels, pervaded by waiters and chambermaids, remind the Londoner of the metropolis he has just left. Your old and seasoned tourist, afoot or on a cycle, by himself or with one trusty, quarrel-proof companion, avoids altogether the Big Town. He has been there, more often than he could wish, and will be there again. His pleasure is in the village inn, or the tavern of some sequestered hamlet ”

“ The finest old timber-fronted, black-and-white house in Ludlow is the “Feathers” inn, in Corve Street. There are many ancient and picturesque hostelries in England, but none finer than the “Feathers,” and it is additionally remarkable for being as exquisite within as without. You see its nodding gables and peaked roofs among the earliest of the beautiful things of Ludlow, as you come from the railway-station and ascend the steep Corve Street, that leads out of the town, into Corve Dale. ”

“ Now the glory of Stilton, in particular, and of the road in general, is departed, and the rival inns are alike reduced to wayside ale-houses. At the “Bell”—the once hospitable—they look at you with astonishment when you want to stay the night, and turn you away. Doubtless they do so also at the “Angel,” whose greater part is now a private residence.
The great feature of the “Bell” is its sign, which, with the mazy and intricate curls and twists and quirks of its wrought-iron supports, projects far into the road. ”

“ The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down the yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much chipped, dirty, and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room of the present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular apartments adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the curious may find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts and hatches to upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a vanished generation of John Bulls. ”

“ Interesting in a less rural—and indeed a very urban way—is the “Cock” inn, at Stony Stratford, on the Holyhead Road, with its fine red brick frontage to the busy high road, its imposing wrought-iron sign, and, in especial, its noble late seventeenth-century ornately carved and highly enriched oak doorway, brought, it would appear, from the neighbouring mansion of Battlesden Park. ”

“ Certainly unique is the “George and Dragon” inn at Dragon’s Green, between Shipley and Horsham, in Sussex. Dragon’s Green (which doubtless derives its name from the inn-sign) is among the tiniest of hamlets, and few are those wayfarers who find their way to it, unless indeed they have any particular business there. In fact, so out of the world is it that those who inquire for Dragon’s Green, even at Horsham, are like to ask many people before they happen upon any one who has ever heard of the place. ”

“ Magnus the Martyr, whose tall and beautiful tower forms so striking an object in views of London Bridge, is a grim little plot of land, once a churchyard green with grass and open to the sunshine, but now only to be reached through the vestry, and hemmed in by tall buildings to such an extent that sunshine will not reach down there, and the earth is bare and dark. ”

“ Beyond this, in a wooded hollow at the cross-roads respectively to Chipping Sodbury and Chippenham, you come past the wholly deserted “Plough” inn to the half-deserted, rambling old coaching-and posting-inn of “Cross Hands,” where a mysterious sign, unexplainable by the innkeeper, hangs out, exhibiting two hands crossed, with squabby spatulate fingers, and the inscription “Caius Marius Imperator B.C. 102 Concordia Militum.” What it all means apparently passes the wit of man, or at any rate of local man, to discover. ”

“ Broadway is a market street, with continuous lines of stalls and uninviting shops, where only the bakers’ shops and the corn-chandlers are pleasing to look upon and to smell. The new and fragrant loaves, and the white-scrubbed counters and brightly polished brass-rails of the bakers look cleanly and smell appetising, and the interesting window-display of the corn-chandlers compels a halt. ”

“ The inscription is fast becoming obliterated, but the fine old “Bell” inn stands as well as ever it did, on the coach-road between Stourbridge and Bromsgrove, with the sign of a bell hanging picturesquely from it.
Collectors of epitaphs are, however, a credulous and uncritical race, and are content to collect from irresponsible sources. All is fish that comes to their net, and, so only the thing be in some way unusual, it finds a place in their note-books, without their having taken the trouble to search on the spot and verify. ”

“ As usual with the fine old roadside hostelries of this class, the coming of the railway spelled ruin for it. The great house shrank, as it were, into itself; its fires of life burnt low, the outer rooms became empty of furniture, of carpets, of everything save memories. The stable-yards grew silent; grass sprouted between the cobbles, spiders wreathed the windows in webs ”

“ But that should not make us grieve; no builder is guilty of such things to-day; let us rather be thankful for the picturesqueness and the strength of it. Those who axed these timbers out of the tree-trunks, and reared up this framework, built to last; and those others who doubtless will some day pull it down, to make way for modern buildings, will have hard work to do so. It can never merely fall down. The history of it is told in few words. It was not built as an inn, and was indeed originally the vicarage, and so remained for some centuries. ”

“ Thus, very many years ago, Millais painted a “George and Dragon” sign for the “George” inn, Hayes Common. There it hung, exposed to all weathers, and at last faded into a neutral-tinted, very “speculative” affair, when the landlord had it repainted, “as good as new,” by some one described as “a local artist.” Now even the local painter’s work has disappeared, and the great hideous “George” is content without a picture-sign.
The most famous of all signs painted by artists is, of course, that of the “Royal Oak” at Bettws-y-Coed, on the Holyhead Road. ”

“ Among memories of old rural inns, those of the “White Horse” are not the least endearing; but the “Anchor” at Ripley has a warm corner in the hearts of many old-time frequenters of the “Ripley Road,” who, when the world was young and the bicycle high, made it their house of call every week in the summer season, and wavered little in their allegiance to the “Ripley Road” even in autumn and winter. Ripley, in the days of the high bicycle and in the first years of the “safety,” was well styled the “Cyclists’ Mecca,” for it was then the most popular place in the wheelman’s world. ”

“ In the “good old days,” when an artist was supposed to be drunken and dissolute in proportion to his genius, and when a very large number of them accordingly lived up to that supposition, either in self-defence or out of their own natural depravity, it was no uncommon thing to see the wayside ale-house sporting a sign that to the eye of instructed travellers displayed merits of draughtsmanship and colour of an order entirely different from those commonly associated with mere sign-boards. ”

“ The real original “First and Last” is the inn, so-called, that stands next to the grey, weatherbeaten granite church in the weatherbeaten and grey village of Sennen, one mile distant from the beetling cliffs of Land’s End itself; but in modern times, since touring has brought civilisation and excursion brakes and broken bottles and sandwich-papers to the old-time savage solitudes of this rocky coast, there have sprung up, almost on the verge of those cliffs, two [Pg 207] other houses—an ugly “hotel” and a plain white-washed tea-house—that have cut in to share this peculiar fame. ”

“ One of the most striking of the natural features of Cheshire is the isolated hill rising abruptly from the great plain near Alderley, and known as Alderley Edge. So strange an object could hardly fail to impress old-time imaginations, or be without its correspondingly strange legends, and the Edge is, in fact, the subject of a legend well known as the “Wizard of Alderley,” which in its turn has given its title to the “Wizard” inn. ”