One mile from Weedon and half-way down Stowe Hill, a broad vale opens to the view, the London and North-Western Railway shooting out below from Stowe Hill Tunnel, with the Grand Junction Canal and the river Nen in close company. Weedon Beck is seen while yet a great way off, its neighbourhood fixed by an immense ugly block of yellow brick buildings on a distant hillside. Nearing the place, these are found to be the officers’ quarters of Weedon Barracks; but before that fact is ascertained the stranger occupies the time between first glimpsing them and arriving at the spot in speculating whether the hideous pile forms a lunatic asylum, a workhouse, an infirmary, or a prison. Weedon, in fact, is a large military depÔt, originally established for the Ordnance Department in 1803. Its situation here is due to one of the periodical scares with which the fear of foreign invasion afflicts nervous Governments once in every half-century or so. The scare that produced Weedon Barracks, among other odd things, was a particularly severe and craven one, for it assumed our being unable to hold our own upon the sea-coast and in the capital, and selected this site as being as nearly as possible in the centre of England, and the safest place for retiring to in the event of a sudden descent upon our shores. So great was the national terror of “Boney” a hundred years ago! Even the needs of the Court were not forgotten, and a pavilion was provided for the use of George III. over against the time when it should be necessary to flee from Windsor Castle!

The name of Weedon “Beck” might not unreasonably be supposed to derive its second half from the river Nen, that ripples not unpicturesquely through the village, were it not that it has clearly been proved an ancient manor of the Abbey of Bee, in Normandy. When Leland was pursuing his antiquarian studies through England, in the time of Henry VIII., he found it “a praty thoroughfare, sette on a playne grounde, and much celebrated by cariars, bycause it stondeth hard by the famose way there comunely caullid of the people Watheling Street.” It became a very busy place in coaching times, and was then chiefly a street of inns. What would have become of Weedon had the military depÔt not been placed here to keep it alive before the railway came, with the thoroughness of a new besom, to sweep the long road clear of traffic from end to end, goodness only knows. There is a Providence that shapes the ends of even old thoroughfare villages; and undoubtedly Weedon believes in the beneficence of that Providence, because, taking away with one hand, it has given double with the other: that is to say, it has a railway junction and a canal, so that when the officers become bored to death in their ugly quarters they can either drown themselves in the canal, or take leave of absence and train to some more lively spot. A third course is to enjoy the billiards and society that the hotels of Weedon afford, or the pleasures of the Grafton Hunt. Those hotels, chiefly of the old coaching type, have all been restored and added to of recent years, and a very large modern one, the “Globe,” taking the name of the old and extinct “Globe” half a mile onward, has been built at that spot where the Holyhead Road and the Watling Street part company for some seventy-three miles: a spot quaintly called by Ogilby, in 1675, “Cross o’ th’ Hand.” The “White Hart” stands next door, and opposite glares the “Red Lion”; while the “New” inn—new in 1740, as a tablet over its doorway tells—is trebled in size by two modern wings. “Cash Stores” spell modernity, and the imposing branch of a Northamptonshire bank speaks of business. In contrast with all this, the old “Bull” inn, situated on the left hand, at the entrance to the village, is now a farmhouse, and the road by which the carriages and post-chaises came to it off the turnpike, though still traceable, has long been stopped at either end.

There is a great deal more of Weedon than the hurried traveller along the Holyhead Road would suspect. It lies down the turning by this same old house and on the other side of the parallel embankments of railway and canal; embankments so tall that they succeed in completely hiding all but the upper stage of Weedon Church tower. “Here,” says that tower, “is Weedon”; and there it is; barracks like model lodging-houses, with children playing and clothes drying upon tier over tier of balconies; women fresh from the washtub, with arms akimbo and rolled-up sleeves, voluble in the entries; and soldiers “married on the strength,” slatternly and listless, at the windows: all very domestic and inglorious. The everyday aspect of the barracks is not inspiring. Only occasionally, when on the neighbouring hillsides a sabre-scabbard flashes by chance in the sun, and the eye thus startled discovers some leisurely horseman scouting, visible to all the world, is the military view of Weedon productive of a thrill.

Many soldiers lie in the crowded churchyard round the ugly church, jammed in an angle between railway and canal: the trains rushing by on a lofty viaduct that looks down upon the damp, sunless and melancholy wedge of land. Among those soldiers lies “Charles Lockitt, who died August 27th, 1877, in the fifty-third year of his age. Deceased was formerly a sergeant in the 97th Regiment, and was present at the storming of the Redan before Sebastopol, September 8th, 1855, where he was severely wounded, from the effects of which he died.”

A much older, and somewhat curious epitaph, is that to “Alice Old, widow, who lived in ye reigne of Queen Elizabeth, in ye reigne of Kinge James ye 1st, in ye reigne of Kinge Charles ye 1st and Kinge Charles ye 2nd, and Kinge James ye 2nd, and deseased ye Second Day of Jany., ye 3rd year of ye reigne of Kinge William and Queen Mary, 1691.”