From “Stony’s” mild annals the two fires that in 1736 and 1742 destroyed great parts of the town stand forth with appropriate luridity. The second was the more destructive, and was caused by the carelessness of a servant, who accidentally set some sheets ablaze. The flaming linen, alighting on a thatched roof, brought about, not only the destruction of many houses, but also of one of the two churches. The tower, the sole relic of that unfortunate building, yet remains in the rear of the High Street, and was for some years rendered conspicuous by an elder-tree taking root and flourishing on the battlements. The remaining church, rebuilt, with the exception of the tower in 1776, is a weird and wonderful eighteenth-century attempt at Gothic. It is the tower of this church that looks so picturesque from the Market Place, an obscure square, hidden from those who hurry along the High Street and so through the town and out at the other end, looking neither to right nor left.

The town is left behind by way of a long causeway and a bridge spanning the Ouse, in succession to the “street ford” that once plunged through it. Once across the river and the canal that runs parallel, and so uphill into the not unpicturesque village of Old Stratford and the frontiers of Buckinghamshire—“the historic county of Bucks,” as Disraeli, posing as a Buckinghamshire farmer in one of his after-dinner political speeches called it—are crossed and Northamptonshire entered. Northants is traditionally the “county of squires and spires”; but the squire as a political force and a great social figure is extinct nowadays, and let it be said at once that, in all the twenty-three miles of Northants through which the Holyhead Road takes its way, only one spire—that of Braunston—is visible: the rest of the churches on the way have towers, save indeed the freakish, classical church of Daventry, rejoicing in a steeple.

Potterspury, succeeding to Old Stratford, is a kind of brother village, as it were, to Paulerspury, a mile away. Potterspury, really owing its name to an ancient pottery trade in common ware of the kitchen utensil and flower-pot sort, stands partly facing the old coach-road and partly down a bye-lane, and is wholly old-world and delightful. One comes into it under the thickly interlacing branches of tall hedgerow elms that conspire to cheer the traveller with a perpetual triumphal arch of welcome. Through this leafy bower one perceives the roadside cottages dwindling away in perspective along a gentle rise. Graceless the village looks awhile, for no church meets the gaze. That, however, is a long distance down the bye-lane, and in the neighbourhood of a little inn with the odd name of the “Blue Ball,” and the still more odd sign pictured in the accompanying sketch. The blue ball, apparently representing the world, is placed below a brown heart, the whole mystical composition semi-circled by the motto “Cor supra mundum.” It is a representation of the triumph of sentiment that would have caused the Rev. Laurence Sterne to shed tears. “Heart above the world.” How idyllic!

It would be as vain to seek the old potteries that gave its name to Potterspury as it would be to enquire for any living representatives of the Paveleys who provided Paulerspury with style and title. The potteries vanished in times beyond the memory of man, and the sole relics of the Paveleys are the thirteenth-century wooden effigies of Sir Laurence de Paveley and his dame in Paulerspury Church.

At some little distance beyond Potterspury, Potterspury Lodge and its lime avenue come in sight, on the right side of the road. A wonderfully picturesque old mansion it is, recently restored by the retired tradesman who has purchased the property. At the rear of the house stands the historic “Queen’s Oak,” whose story has already been told.

The remaining four miles into Towcester, though hilly, had much of their difficulties disposed of when Telford came this way with theodolite, chain, and spirit-level. Plumb Park Hill is not what it was, thanks to this fifteen-foot cutting and the forty-four high embankment in the hollow of Cuttle Mill, where the road goes nowadays on a level with the chimney-pots of old roadside cottages.

At the crest of one of these rises stand Havencote Houses, which it pleased the compilers of old road-books to name “Heathencott,” and beyond come the lodges of Sir Thomas Hesketh’s domain—Easton Neston Park, an originally fine, but now somewhat dreary parade of classical stone columns forming an open screen, with stone stags couchant, and a central display of a coat-of-arms supported by weary-looking lions. The motto, “Hora e Semper”—“Now and Always”—bids a futile defiance to irresistible change.

The lodges on either side are deserted, and their windows boarded up. Somewhere within the park stand the “great house” and the manorial church, with monuments of the Fermors, successively Barons Lempster and Earls of Pomfret, to whom the estates came so long ago as 1527. Those titles, duly engrossed on their original patents in that manner of spelling, derive from the towns of Leominster and Pontefract, and prove the local pronunciation to have been the same then as now. They prove, in addition, that there was no person then at the Heralds’ College who could correctly spell the names of those places; but my Lords Lempster and Pomfret had to take and use the illiterate forms, just as the Earl of Arlington, whose title, conferred in 1663, came from Harlington in Middlesex, was made by those ’eralds to write himself with every signature an ’Arry.