Leaving Ashbourne, the traveller has still a choice of routes to Manchester. He may go by the bleak and lofty road across the Derbyshire moorlands, with scarce a house for many miles to keep him company, by Newhaven Inn, and in the solemn companionship of the Roman road and the prehistoric tumuli, on to Buxton and by Whaley Bridge to Stockport; or he may choose the way by Leek and Macclesfield to Stockport, which is the old mail-coach route, and therefore pre-eminently the Manchester Road. The Buxton route was, however, the earlier of the two, and only fell out of use after 1762, when the road by Leek and Macclesfield was improved and turnpiked. A better surface than that of this route could not be denied, but the stark loneliness of it, its aloofness from most human interests—it runs as it were along the roof of the world—are rather ghastly. How the isolated inns—the “Jug and Glass,” the “Newhaven Inn,” the “Bull-i’-Thorn,” and the “Old Duke of Cumberland”—pick a living it is difficult to tell.

To go back to still earlier times, neither of these routes formed part of the way between London and Manchester, and a writer of historic novels who sought to give us a true romance of this road in, say, the seventeenth century, would need to set his horsemen, who were then your only travellers, jogging along from Manchester to London by way of the roundabout route of Warrington, Great Budworth, Cranage Heath, Holmes Chapel, Brereton, Church Lawton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, whence they would generally proceed by Stone, Lichfield, and Coleshill. That was, with minor divagations suggested by taste and fancy, or by such circumstances as floods or highwaymen, the old original post-road.

The river Dove is crossed at Hanging Bridge, or Mayfield Bridge, where rival inns, one on either side of the water, glower at one another and divide the custom of the contemplative angler and the strenuous pilgrims of the road. It is “Hanging Bridge” because of the legendary execution of rebels here.

The annals of Hanging Bridge are varied by an incident of the ’Forty-five, not yet entirely forgotten, when the innkeeper, in defence of his cellar, was wounded by one of the Highlanders.

It is not so long since the countryfolk ceased talking familiarly of that time; of the farmer who was shot dead by two rebels, to whom he had refused to give up his horse; and of the dreadful fate that befel those stragglers who from one cause or another fell from the ranks of Prince Charlie’s retreating army. I picture the gaunt, ragged Highlander, fallen by the wayside, a stranger in a strange land, understanding nothing of English; and I see the murderous peasantry, revenging themselves upon him for their late terrors, by stringing him up to the nearest tree. Legends tell how these derelicts of the invading army were hanged from signposts, but we may easily disprove that much, for there were not any signposts in 1745. The simple villagers used the trees instead. A horrid story is indeed told of one of the pottery towns, by which it appears that the body of one of these unfortunate clansmen was flayed, and a drum made of his skin.

The last incident that is at all worth recording here is that of 1819, when Manchester was thirsty for political reform, and thousands of its people incidentally hungering for bread. A march on London was proposed by the “Blanketeers” after the broken-up meeting of “Peterloo,” but extremely hot weather and other discouragements were in their way. Despite opposition, however, five hundred reached Macclesfield, but there they were dispersed by the military, and only one reached Ashbourne. As a threatening demonstration he was not a success.

At Mayfield lived none other than Tommy Moore, nearly four years, between 1813 and 1817, and here, inspired by the sweet-toned chimes of Ashbourne, he wrote the familiar verses, Those Evening Bells:

At Mayfield Cottage, in midst of typical English scenery, and with the meadows and the cows coming up to his very door, he wrote that work of supercharged Orientalism, Lalla Rookh; and here he first tasted the delights of literary success. Byron had set the fashion in literature and made Eastern subjects pay, and Moore accordingly proposed to take advantage of the prevailing taste and write a poem of giaours, houris, peris, and bul-buls. He knew nothing of Oriental subjects, but that mattered little. Purchasing every available book on the East, he retired to this spot, and, after three years’ studying the library thus acquired, produced that highly successful work. There were great men in those days, but perhaps Longmans were the greatest among them. They agreed to give Moore £3,000 for Lalla Rookh before ever a line of it was written. O! my Anointed Aunt, three thousand of the best, three thousand golden minted quid for so problematical a result.

Here, across Hanging Bridge, the road has left Derbyshire and entered Staffordshire. It goes up a long, long, staggering hill out of the valley of the Dove and comes to some very grim uplands, where the fields have stone walls instead of hedges, and moors presently take the place of fields. The situation is extremely exposed; hence perhaps the name of the neighbouring village of Blore, i.e. a blowy, windy place. Swinscoe, or Swinecote, as it is more properly styled, i.e. “Swine’s house,” is a lonely hamlet with a background of dense plantations crowning two forbidding hills. Calton Moor succeeds to it, with a farmhouse at the cross-roads, once the Calton Moor Inn, and the scenery now grows wildly beautiful; the road at last descending with alarming steepness to Waterhouses, with a dangerous level crossing of quarry, or other, works at the bottom. Here the river Hamps sings along the valley, on its way to join the river Manifold, disappearing underground, among the limestone rocks, for some miles: the neighbouring village of Waterfall taking its name from this phenomenon. Waterhouses was in the coaching days nothing more than its name implies: a few scattered houses, chiefly inns, where the coaches changed horses, built in modern times beside the river Hamps, bordering the road. Nowadays it has grown considerably, and since the recent opening of the Leek and Manifold Valley Railway, with a Waterhouses station, it has grown very popular with trippers to the wonderful scenery of the neighbourhood. There are limestone rocks, picturesque cliffs, and ancient bridges along the valley of the Manifold, and a cavern dedicated by the superstitious Saxons to their deity, Thor.

At Winkhill Bridge, down the road, we had bid good-bye to the Hamps, and then came on a hill-top to what used to be known, perversely enough, as “Bottom” inn, now called the “Green Man.” The green man himself, in the guise of an archer, appears on the sign. Cross-roads go off, left to Cheadle, famed in Limerick-lore for a young lady, a needle, and a beadle, and right to Hartington, passing on the way the hamlet of Onecote, whose name gives a fine opening for cheap wits.

It is now chiefly downhill to the town of Leek, the “metropolis of the moorlands,” as it has been called, but a metropolis only in a very restricted sense, for its inhabitants number only about 15,000. The sombre, rocky moors of this wildest corner of Staffordshire surround it, and indeed have given the place its name, which comes from the Cymric “llech”: a rock. A tall, mouldering cross in the churchyard of the old parish church, covered with ancient Celtic devices, bears witness to the immemorial antiquity of the settlement.

Leek, however, is a surprise to most travellers from the south; being a forerunner, a preliminary specimen in Staffordshire, of the typical Lancashire manufacturing town. Cobbles and setts and clogs, with factories and tall chimney-stacks, are its chiefest features, and the spinning of silk thread its principal business. The public in general know nothing of Leek, but it was discovered not many months ago by a Radical newspaper on the look-out for a sensation. It may be taken as a certain, sure thing that when a newspaper in these times wants a sensation, it is bound to have it, and this is how it was served up:

THE LABEL-LICKERS
How the Child Workers in
Factories Earn a
Pittance
MACHINES TOO SLOW

But why not use the thing for all it was alliteratively worth, “The Little Label Lickers of Leek.”

It was not much of a sensation, after all: resolving itself simply into the facts that among the hundreds of girls employed in the silk-thread factories there are many whose business is to pack and label the reels. They are paid a wage that is, it is true, almost incredibly small: one “full-timer” earning, by this account, only 2s. 9d. in five days, but others up to 10s. Among them there are many who refuse to use the mechanical dampers ready to hand, preferring, for sake of extra speed, to lick the labels. This is done with a speed bewildering to any one who has not himself licked and stuck labels for a living. One girl boxed-up twenty-five gross of reels and licked and stuck a like number of labels in a working day of nine hours and a half. It will be observed that no one was obliged to deal with the labels in this way, and that in some factories the use of a damper was even compulsory; but look at the “scare” headlines to be got!

In common with all other towns that witnessed the march of the Highlanders, and their subsequent retreat, in 1715, Leek long cherished memories of that time. It was an era from which everything else was dated. It was also an era in which the keeping of diaries was the resort of contemplative people, whose observations, entertaining in themselves, are additionally amusing by reason of the diarists’ quaint notions of grammar and spelling. Thus, Squire Mountford, of “the Grange,” is found remarking upon Prince Charlie’s forces as composed of “some very fine men and good horses, but the greater part was such poor, shabby, lowsy, deminutive creatures as never seen in England—one half of ’em without breches; some rid without sadles and halters ... they were expecting the duck’s army would be with them.” By “the duck” we are to understand the Duke of Cumberland, who, sure enough, was with them, later on.

Mountford’s remark as to the Highlanders being without breeches is especially amusing. He had obviously never before seen, or heard of, kilts, and appears to think they went without breeches because they were too poor to afford them. He was not alone in this view of the “petticoat men,” as the people styled them.

In the church of St. Edward is the singular memorial of William Trafford of Swithamley, who died in 1697, aged ninety-three, and is the hero of a legend pictured on the sign of the “Old Rock House” Inn at Barton, near Manchester. Rudely sculptured on the tomb is the figure of a man threshing corn, with the words “Now thus,” alluding to the only words he would utter when, many years earlier, during the Civil War, the Roundhead soldiery burst into his house and found the place empty except for himself, whom they discovered in the barn, monotonously repeating those meaningless words. They thought him a “poor natural,” and so departed, but he was not quite the fool he seemed, for beneath the threshing-floor he had hidden most of his valuables.