A Deserted Railway—Villages of the Stour Valley—Ettington and Squire Shirley—Shipston-on-Stour—Brailes—Compton Wynyates.

There is not an uninteresting road among the eight that lead out of Stratford, and all are beautiful. But none has more beauty than that which runs southward to Shipston-on-Stour. This way, or by the route leading through Ettington and Sunrising Hill, you go to Compton Wynyates, that wonderfully picturesque old mansion of the Comptons, Marquises of Northampton, which has remained unaltered for centuries in its remoteness, and is still not easily accessible. The Shipston road then, for choice, to Compton Wynyates. It follows, more or less closely the valley of the Stour, and here and there touches the river; while companionably, all the way run the grass-grown cuttings and embankments of that long-abandoned Stratford and Shipston Tramway whose red brick bridge is a feature of the Avon at Stratford town.

The deserted earthworks and ivy-grown bridges of this forgotten undertaking, now this side of the road and then the other, excite the curiosity of the stranger, but he will rarely find anyone to tell him the meaning of them, and at the best only vaguely. Their story is one of unfulfilled hopes and money flung ruinously away; for they are the only traces of the Central Junction Railway projected in 1820, to run through to Oxford and London. It was a horsed tramway, and was opened through Shipston to Moreton-in-the-Marsh in 1826. A remunerative traffic in general agricultural produce and goods was expected, but the enterprise seems to have been weighted from the beginning with the heavy expenses of construction. Estimated by Telford at £35,000 for the Stratford-on-Avon to Moreton section, they soon reached £80,000. But the doom of the project was sounded by the introduction of the locomotive engine, almost simultaneously with the opening. In 1845 it was leased to the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, a scandalously inefficient line whose initials, “O. W. W.” suggested to saturnine wags the appropriate name of “Old Worse and Worse.” This ill-managed affair was eventually absorbed into the Great Western Railway, which now owns these relics.

Little villages are thickly set along the course of the Stour, to the right of the road; ancient settlements, each but a slightly larger or smaller collection of farmhouses, barns and thatched cottages, with a church in their midst. Here the Saxon farmers came and early cultivated the rich meadow-lands, leaving the poorer uplands long unenclosed and untitled; and to every little community came the clergy and set up a church and tithed those farmers who earned their livelihood by the sweat of their brows. Such a village is Atherstone-upon-Stour, where a majestic red brick farmhouse, dating from the seventeenth century, neighbours a debased little church. There is little of interest in that church, and the loathly epitaph to William Thomas, a son of the rector, who died in 1710, aged nine, of smallpox, decently veils in the obscurity of eighteenth century pedagogic Latin the full particulars given of his disease.

A rather larger village is Preston-upon-Stour, reached from the highway after passing the lovely elm avenues of Alscot Park. Thatched cottages looking upon an upland green, with village church presiding over it, are the note of Preston. Tall stone gate-piers of the eighteenth century, with fine wrought-iron gates, give entrance to the churchyard. The interior of the church is, however, a very shocking example of the eighteenth-century way with Gothic buildings.

Smaller than any of these places by the lovely little Stour is Whitchurch, just before the larger village of Alderminster. It lies off to the right, not often troubled by the stranger. The place-name is thought to derive from a supposed former dedication of the church to St. Candida, or Wita. “Alderminster” means probably “the alderman’s town,” the property in Saxon times of some wealthy landowner, and has no ecclesiastical associations or monastic history that would account for the “minster” in the place-name.

The road grows extremely beautiful at the crossing of the Stour by Ettington Park and the approach to Newbold. Here, where a by-road to Grimscote goes off on the right, an ornate pillar standing on the grass serves the purpose of a milestone and bears the sculptured arms—the gold and black pales (heraldically paly of six, or and sable)—of a former owner of Ettington Park, generally spoken of in the neighbourhood as “wold Squire Shirley, what lived yur tharty yur agoo.” It was in 1871 that he erected this elaborate stone which I think must be the only poetical milestone in England. It is not great poetry, and there is not much of it; but it shows the immense possibilities of wayside entertainment, if all its fellows were made to burst into song—

“6 miles
To Shakespeare’s Town, whose name
Is known throughout the earth;
To Shipston 4, whose lesser fame
Boasts no such poet’s birth.”

You will see here that my own notion, earlier in these chaste pages, of re-naming the town “Shakespeare-on-Avon” germinated, however unconsciously, in “wold Squire Shirley’s” brain, over forty years since.

But this is not all. Two Latin and English verses are added to the tale of it—

“Crux mea lux,
After darkness light.
From light hope flows.
And peace in death,
In Christ is sure repose.
Spes 1871.
Post obitum Salus.
In obitu Pax
In hue Spes
Post tenebras lux.”

The shields of arms include the nine roundels of the see of Worcester, and a further shield of the Shirley arms, with a canton ermine.

This poetical squire was Mr. Evelyn Philip Shirley, kinsman of Earl Ferrers. He refronted his house at Ettington Park, and indulged himself fully in that elaborate mansion in the verse he loved so well and composed so ill. In the hall still remains the shield of arms he set up there, displaying these same alternate black and gold stripes which come down from the times of Sewallis, and beneath it another of his compositions—

“These be the pales of black and gold
The which Sewallis bore of old;
And this the coat which his true heirs
The ancient house of Shirley bears.”

Ettington Park is now without a tenant and is, I believe, to be sold. Thus passes the pride of this branch of the Shirleys.

It is a lovely park and a stately house, with the ivied ruins of the ancient church adjoining, including the tombs and effigies of older Shirleys and others who would make excellent ancestors for any enterprising purchaser. “I don’t know whose ancestors they were,” says the Major-General in the Pirates of Penzance, of the monuments in the ruined chapel on the estate he has bought, “but I know whose they are.”

The Squire, besides his activities in the way of bad rhymes, stumbling metres, and obvious moral sentiments, was an antiquary, and keen to alter the spelling of the place-name “Eatington” to “Ettington,” on the coming of the railway in 1873. He showed that it is “Etendone” in Domesday Book, and that Dugdale, the historian of Warwickshire, was the first to spell it Eatington in 1656. But Dugdale, who knew the name derived from the watery situation of the place, was right, and Domesday wrong, as it very often is in these matters, the Norman-French compilers of it not being at all well-equipped for rendering the, to them, alien names correctly.

Passing pretty scenes at Newbold-on-Stour, the road bears away from the river and touches it again at the equally pretty village of Tredington. The spire of Honington is then seen on the left, and Shipston-on-Stour is entered. There is a railway station at Shipston, the terminus of a little branch line from Moreton-in-the-Marsh. When the railway reached so far it exhausted all its energies and could do no more. It might be supposed, from the efforts to reach Shipston by rail, that it was an important place, whose traffic was well worth securing—perhaps even, from its name, a port; but it is long since this old market-town was a place of any commercial value, and no ships ever sailed the little Stour. They were sheep, not ships, that gave Shipston its name, and it first appears in history, nine hundred and fifty years ago, as “Scepewasce”; that is to say, the place where the sheep were washed in those Saxon times. It was written “Scepwaesctun” in 1006, and is “Scepwestun” in Domesday; i.e. the Sheepwash Town.

To Brailes, over two miles from Shipston, the road rises, commanding views down upon the left over “the Feldon,” as the district between this and Stratford-on-Avon is known; that clearing in the ancient Forest of Arden which is by no means so bare of timber as might be supposed, and itself indeed looks from this height very like a forest. At Brailes is the parish church, proudly styled the “Cathedral of the Feldon.” It is large, its tower is lofty, rising to a hundred and twenty feet, and it stands in a prominent position. Its Perpendicular architecture is good, too, but there is nothing, internally, of a cathedral about it.

At the “George” inn, Brailes, the traveller to Compton Wynyates will do well to refresh himself before he proceeds further, for not only has he come far, but when he has threaded the steep and winding lanes beyond which that romantic manor-house of the Comptons lies in its deep, cup-like hollow, he will need something wherewith to fortify his energies, especially as it is extremely likely he will lose himself on the way, and as there is no likelihood of his being able to refresh himself when there. Romance, lovely scenery, and picturesque architectural grouping are not well seen when fasting.

“Wynyates” is a puzzling word, which may mean “Vineyards” or “Windgates”: the first for choice. The place, let it be impressed upon the stranger, is a house, not a village; although, looking sheerly down upon the hollow where its crowded gables and many clustered chimneys are seen, with its adjoining church, a village it might appear to be. There was once, indeed, such a place, but it disappeared so long ago that no one can tell us anything about it, and its church, which stood upon the site of the present building, was battered to pieces and “totally reduced to rubbish,” as Dugdale tells us, during the siege of the mansion in 1644.

Thus the Comptons, Marquises of Northampton, have the place all to themselves. And it is very likely that the explorer also will have Compton Wynyates to himself, for this is but one of the residences of that noble family, whose chief seat is at Castle Ashby, away in Northamptonshire, and it is occupied for only a short interval in every year. By an admirable generosity and courtesy the stranger may generally be assured of permission to see the interior of the mansion, a privilege very well worth exercising.

Sir William Compton, the builder of Compton Wynyates, was the descendant of a long line of obscure squires who had been settled here for centuries. He owed his advancement in life to being brought up with Henry the Eighth, who cherished an affection for him and gave his friend the Castle of Fulbrook, which was situated between Stratford-on-Avon and Warwick. Sir William Compton did a singular thing with the gift. He pulled it down and transported the materials by packhorse or mule-train the dozen miles or so across country to this secluded hollow, and with them built the charming house we now see. Fulbrook Castle, it would thus appear, was less of a castle than a slightly embattled manor-house, built of red brick, with tall moulded chimney stacks, in the reign of Henry the Sixth. It had been in existence only some eighty years. Its chimneys, according to tradition, were taken whole, the mortar being so strong that the bricks could not be separated. Thus the singularity of a brick house in a stone district is explained.

Compton WynyatesIt is red brick such as that of Hampton Court: a lovely mellow red, further toned by more than four hundred and fifty years. The remains of a moat, and some beautiful gardens, form an exquisite setting. Little has ever been done to alter the mansion. It is built around a quadrangle, and is entered by the original brick porch with the Royal arms of the Tudor period above. Within is the Great Hall, panelled in oak, with timbered roof and minstrel-gallery. The adjoining dining-room, oak-panelled and with richly-decorated plaster ceiling, displaying the heraldic devices of the Comptons, is next the domestic chapel. On the door above are the withdrawing-rooms communicating with the chapel-gallery. Here is “Henry the Eighth’s Bedchamber,” afterwards used by Queen Elizabeth when she visited Henry Compton, grandson of Sir William, in 1572, shortly after creating him Baron Compton. His son William is the hero of that Compton romance which brought the family great wealth. He fell in love with the daughter and heiress of the enormously rich Sir John Spencer, alderman of London, but the father did not approve of it and refused to allow his daughter to hold any converse with her lover, who then had recourse to an ingenious stratagem. He enlisted the Spencer’s family baker upon his side, bribing him to be allowed to carry the domestic bread to the house, and duly disguised appeared one morning with his load. He was so early that the alderman gave him sixpence and a homily on the virtues of diligence and punctuality. But when the loaves had been delivered, the lady herself took her place in the basket and was carried away in it and promptly married. Her father, cheated of the better match he had looked for, disinherited her, and the Spencer wealth would have gone other ways but for Queen Elizabeth, who when the first child of these enterprising lovers was born asked Sir John Spencer to be sponsor with her at the baptism of a child she was interested in, and to adopt it. He unsuspectingly agreed and thus became godfather and guardian of his grandson, who inherited the riches so nearly lost. The resourceful lover and husband, father of this fortunate boy, Spencer Compton, was created Earl of Northampton by James the First. Spencer, the second Earl, fought for King Charles at Edge Hill, October 23rd, 1642, and was slain at Hopton Heath the following March. In June 1644, the Royalist garrison of Compton Wynyates was besieged, and the house was captured in two days, and held throughout the war by the Roundheads, in spite of the bold moonlight attack in December, when the two brothers, Sir Charles and Sir William Compton, at the head of a daring party from Banbury, surprised the outposts, rushed the drawbridge which then crossed the moat, and fought a long hand to hand fight in the stables, before they were driven back.

The long wooden gallery under the roof on one side of the house is known as “the Barracks.” Here the garrison lay during those times. A panelled room in the tower is known as the “Council Chamber.” Above it is the “Priest’s Room,” apparently at some time used as a secret chapel, for on the wooden window-shelf may be seen the five rudely-cut crosses for an altar.

The church destroyed in the troubles of the civil war was rebuilt in 1663 by the third Earl of Northampton, and contains the battered monuments of Sir William Compton, builder of the mansion, and his wife; and of Henry, first Baron Compton; retrieved from the moat, into which, after being broken up, they had been thrown.