Inn yard

“ 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. ”

“ Their faces are impassive and their dark eyes stare mysteriously. The bearers, their day's work done, march with a swinging stride. Suddenly they stop, wheel to the right, into a courtyard, and you have reached the inn. Your chair is set down.
The inn—it consists of a long yard, partly covered, with rooms opening on it on each side—is lit by three or four oil lamps. They throw a dim light immediately around them, but make the surrounding darkness more impenetrable. All the front of the yard is crowded with tables and at these people are packed, eating rice or drinking tea. ”

“ The irregular inn differs in nothing from the ordinary hovel of the village roadway, unless it can boast of a yard with troughs, and can provide entertainment for beast as well as for man. The regular inn of the towns and large villages consists chiefly of a filthy courtyard full of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumble-down gateway. A gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies, mapu, hangers-on, and travellers’ loads make up a busy scene. ”

“ Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish material for a hundred ghost stories. It was in the yard of one of these inns—of no less celebrated a one than the White Hart—that a man was busily employed in brushing the dirt off a pair of boots, early on the morning succeeding the events narrated in the last chapter. The yard presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual characteristics of a large coach inn. ”

“ In those days, it was the first halting-place, after leaving London, of coaches bound along the Holyhead and Great North Roads. The original house presented the usual features of a large old country inn, and “the inn yard, approached by a gateway in the centre, was nearly a quadrangle, with double galleries, supported by plain columns and carved pilasters, with caryatides and other figures.” Now, as we have said, it is merely a very ordinary, everyday modern refreshment house. ”

“ It is no longer an inn, having since been converted into a residential building known as “The Square” and let out in tenements. But it still shows unmistakable signs of its former calling. Its large square yard remains, although want of use has allowed grass to overgrow it; whilst its commodious stabling, empty and bare as it is, conjures up the busy scenes of excitement and animation the mail-coaches and travellers must have created in those far-off days. ”

“ Market lasts all day. The native inns have great dreary yards with little sheds, and little rooms around. Some men and families who have come from far, will sleep in one or other of the little stall-like rooms. Many will sleep on the stones, on the earth, round the market, anywhere. But the asses are there by the hundred, crowded in the inn-yards, drooping their ears with the eternal patience of the beast that knows better than any other beast that every road curves round to the same centre of rest, and hither and thither means nothing. ”

“ I warrant I smell of smoke, like the Nag's Head chimney in the Borough." The inn was well spoken of in a little book called the Epicure's Almanac, published in 1815; there were balls here sometimes in the earlier half of the last century. The tavern business is no longer carried on, the yard and premises being in the hands of the Great Western Railway Company. The building over the entrance to this yard remains, but all those on the north side, that is to spectator's right, including the inn, disappeared some years ago. ”

“ Two or three gigs or chaise-carts were wheeled up under different little sheds and pent-houses, and the occasional heavy tread of a cart-horse, or rattling of a chain at the further end of the yard, announced to anyone who cared about the matter that the stable lay in that direction. When we add that a few boys in smock-frocks were lying asleep on heavy packages, [Pg 228] woolpacks, and other articles that were scattered about on heaps of straw, we have described as fully as need be the general appearance of the ‘White Hart’ inn, High Street, Borough. ”

“ It is, indeed, remarkable what picturesqueness lingers in the courtyards of old inns. The front of the house may have been modernised, or in some way smartened up, but the old gables and the casement windows are still generally to be found in the rear, and sometimes the local church-tower comes in, across the roof-tops, in a partly benedictory and wholly sketchable way, as at the village of Dedham, near Colchester, where the [Pg 225] yard of the “Sun” inn and the church-tower combine to make a very fine composition. ”

“ 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.
THE “BELL,” BARNBY MOOR: MEET OF LORD GALWAY’S HOUNDS.
Not many inns are built upon crypts. ”

“ In short, the old “New” inn impresses the beholder with a very insistent sense of being a live institution, a “going concern.” Most ancient inns of this character are merely poor survivals; archæologically interesting, but wan veterans tottering to decay and long deserted by custom. Here, however, there is heavy traffic [Pg 106] down in the yard: the ostler is busy in his “Ostry” (the name is painted over the door) , bells are ringing, people and luggage coming and going; the big railway parcel-office is as full of parcels as it could have been when it was a coach-office ”

“ Through this the roads lead up by rustic mills always in motion, and orchards laden with ripening fruit, to the commencement of the forest, where a quaint stone fountain stands, commemorating the abode of a sorceress of the olden time who was torn in pieces by a wolf. There is a handsome rustic inn here, where every Sunday afternoon a band plays in the portico, while hundreds of people are scattered around in the cool shadow of the trees or feeding the splendid trout in the basin formed by a little stream. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Beyond it the road follows the Nisqually and Paradise valleys, under glorious groves of pine, cedar, and hemlock, along ravines of striking beauty, past waterfalls and the snout of the Nisqually Glacier, finally to inimitable Paradise Park, its inn, its hotel camp, and its public camping-grounds. Other centres of wilderness life have been since established, and the marvellous north side of the park will be opened by the construction of a northwesterly highway up the valley of the Carbon River; already a fine trail entirely around the mountain connects these various points of development. ”

“ It is now merely a village, but, as a result of its former highway importance, still a place of inns. There are at least ten even now surviving; and it is quite safe to assume that any important-looking old house, now in private occupation, facing the long thoroughfare, was once a hostelry.
The “George,” already mentioned, although re-fronted at some period of the eighteenth century, is older within, and an old gable overlooking the stable yard even has a sixteenth-century barge-board surviving. ”

“ Along the walls directly in front of us, a blaze of purple bloom, stretches the [Pg 375] “largest wisteria in England,” one hundred and eighty feet in length, its stem like a good-sized tree. It has been thus with so many of the old-time inns; each has had some peculiar charm. But surely no architect ever planned the Red Lion Inn; it is a rambling building that seems to have grown up with the years. No straight line curbs its walls; none of its floors maintain the same level; it is a maze of strangely assorted apartments, narrow, winding hallways and odd nooks and corners. ”

“ In the light of morning the isolation of the inn is more apparent than at night. A compact group of stable buildings and barns stands on the opposite side of the road, and there are two or three lonely-looking cottages, but everywhere else the world is purple and brown with ling and heather. The morning sun has just climbed high enough to send a flood of light down the steep hill at the back of the barns, and we can hear the hum of the bees in the heather. ”

“ My course is always through the distant trees, beyond the dwarfish, crumbling church, whose broad low windows seem to have taken root amongst the flat, uneven tombstones, into the old town or village, into its very heart—its market-place—and up to the brown old door of its oldest inn. I know everything that can be said against such places. They are very yellow; they have too strong a flavour of stale tobacco-smoke; their roofs are low, and their floors have a leaning either to one side or the other. ”

“ When Monday morning dawns, the inn is found to have been gayly decorated with garlands of green and flowers, and fluttering ribbons of many colors. The tree nearest the house is ornamented in like manner, and on it the prize to be contended for, conspicuously hangs. On the smooth grass hard by, a strip, a few feet wide and perhaps a hundred long, has been roped in, and at either end of this narrow plot a large, shallow, round-bottomed basket, called a Wanne, is placed, one filled with chaff and the other with eggs, dozens upon dozens, cooked and raw, white and colored. ”

“ It consists mainly of two wide streets, with a fine old church at the end of one and a lofty seventeenth-century inn at the other. Opposite the latter is a monastic barn with blocked-up arched doorway, and facing it a fine row of timbered houses. Wherever you go the pervading tone is grey, and one misses the little front gardens with bright flowers and creepers. By the school stands the village cross. Farther along a great wide porch projects into the street, and over it a charming traceried wooden window. ”

“ For there the winds do generally blow, and, when they do, heaven send you have not to face them, for it is a shelterless common where the “Tan Hill” inn stands in loneliness, and not a tree or a hedge is there to break the stinging blast. ”

“ But these vague whisperings may arise from Mr. Snagsby’s being in his way rather a meditative and poetical man, loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer-time and to observe how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are, also to lounge about the Rolls Yard of a Sunday afternoon and to remark (if in good spirits) that there were old times once and that you’d find a stone coffin or two now under that chapel, he’ll be bound, if you was to dig for it. ”

“ But the great building is still constructionally the house that fifteenth-century monk left, and how well and truly he built it, let its sound and stable condition, after four centuries and a half of constant use, tell.
Such modern touches as there are about this quaintly named “New” inn are the merest light clothing upon its ancient body, and the sitting-rooms and forty or so bedrooms, cosy and comfortable to us moderns, are but modern in their carpets and fittings, and in the paper that decorates their walls, in between the stout dark timber framing. ”

“ These village inns are all of the same type. A quaint and placid building with the mellowed atmosphere that comes with respectable old age, usually of two stories, always with an exceedingly steep roof from which peer a few dormer-windows, like wondering urchins perched in some place of vantage, is pierced through the center by a long, low, cool passageway that leads to the family garden or back yard. Just inside the street entrance this hallway is flanked by two doors, on one of which, in old Gothic letters, is the word “Gastzimmer” (guest-room) . ”

“ Stone-built, with handsome windows and steep slated roof, and carefully designed, even to its chimneys, it is, architecturally speaking, among the very finest of the houses ever used as inns in England, and has more the appearance of having been originally designed as a private mansion than as a house of public entertainment. The sign is now hung in the hall of the house, the corbels it rested on being still visible beside the present door, replacing the old archway by which the coaches and post-chaises entered and left the courtyard of the inn of old. ”

“ In fact, as we approach we can see the blue water shining out only about a mile away across a flat expanse broken by hummocky sandhills. The village is one long straggling street of thatched huts, rather like huge beehives, with broad eaves. Our rickshaw men, who have been showing signs of exhaustion, make a gallant effort at the last, and run us up to the door of the inn in fine style. ”

“ We run for miles with no human habitation in sight save an occasional cottage in a small, barren field surrounded by stone walls. We come upon a large, attractive-looking inn unexpectedly—though it ought not to be unexpected to find an inn anywhere in England—the Two Bridges, situated near the head waters of the Dart, here no more than a brawling streamlet. We leave the car by the roadside and enter the homelike hall, where an array of fishing-tackle makes clear the excuse for this pleasant hotel in the moor. The day has been chilly and, strange to say, a fire flickers in the grate. ”