The road loaves Leek again downhill, descending to the river Churnet, with the long expanse of Rudyard Lake stretching for two miles on the left hand. This was cut as a reservoir for feeding the Trent and Mersey, and Leek and Cauldon Canals; but has long been, in addition, a holiday-resort and picnic-place, where boating and yachting are to be had, with plenty of elbow-room for any likely number of the excursionists brought to Rudyard station by the North Staffordshire Railway. Rudyard is, in consequence of all these things, a village where every cottage provides teas and refreshments. The most notable of them is the house called Spite Hall, at the north end of the lake. The legendary lore of the place tells how this was originally built by some malevolent person, to “spite” the owner of Rudyard Villa, standing immediately behind it, with the object of obliterating the view; which it certainly very effectively does, the only view that Rudyard Villa now enjoys being the back wall of Spite Hall, at the distance of a few feet. But this is a picturesque way of putting the simple fact that the owner of the land, by exercising his right of building, incidentally disestablished a cherished view. There was not, necessarily, any spite in it. But this is the stuff that legends are made of.

Rushton Marsh stands where Rudyard Lake ends, on a rivulet falling presently into the river Dane. On the hill above, coyly hiding behind some farmyards and cowsheds, and up along muddy tracks that it is a sorrow to trace, stands the little church of Rushton Spencer, with a turret which suggests its having been designed by an architect of packing-cases. A closely ranked number of very grim tombstones fill the ill-kept churchyard, among them one with this inscription:

“Thomas, son of Thomas and Mary Meaykin, interred July 16, 1781, aged 21 years. As a man falleth before wicked men, so fell I. ??a ?a?at??” (= put to death by force).

The tragedy referred to was that of a youth who presumed to love the daughter of his master, who caused him to be drugged and then buried. This happened at Stone, some twenty miles away. The unfortunate young man’s relatives disinterred the body, which they found in a position clearly indicating that he had been buried alive, and conveyed it hither.

Staffordshire is exchanged for Cheshire at the passage of the river Dane, in another mile and a half. The not remarkable village of Bosley follows, with Bosley Reservoir on the right, and on the left the bold hills of Raven’s Clough. And then the fine, broad road goes down in a magnificent, steady way, by a succession of little wooded hills, into Macclesfield.

There are elements of beauty in and around the old town of Macclesfield, but they are sorely mingled with the results of a hundred and fifty years of factory life. It was in 1756 that silk spinning and weaving were introduced here, speedily overshadowing by their importance the old button-making trade of the town; and although silk has had its ups and downs, and has of late years been severely stricken by foreign competition, there is a look of prosperity in the enormous mills that meet the eye at every turn, and are not infrequently extending their operations.

The old original Macclesfield stands high above the sites of these many factories, and centres about the ancient parish church of St. Michael, upon its rock, the successor of a very early church of the same dedication, which indeed furnished Macclesfield with its original name of “Michael’s Field,” whence, by way of “Maxfield” we obtain the present style. The dedication seems, however, to have been changed at some period unknown, to All Hallows, and was so in the sixteenth century: reverting later to the present style.

Steep streets lead up to that hub and core of the town where the church stands, and more steeply still climbs the footway up the one hundred and eight stairs of Brunswick Steps. The view, looking aloft to the church, must once have been particularly fine, but it was long since spoiled by the squalid houses built on the hillside; the very last note of the commonplace being touched in the recently rebuilt “Nag’s Head” public-house, full in the view, where not merely the photographer, but even the artist, must deal with it.

St. Michael’s Church, a grand building beautifully restored, has had varied fortunes. It was damaged when the Parliamentary army besieged and took the town, and was later very largely rebuilt on a semi-pagan “classic” model. The great ornamental iron gates enclosing the stone-flagged churchyard are relics of this period, and incidentally disclose the ironworkers’ ideas of what angels are like: a gilded figure over the principal gate representing a very saucy-looking young woman ecstatically pirouetting on one foot, a kind of celestial can-can, and flourishing a big trumpet.

Time has not yet obliterated the epitaph in the churchyard upon one Mary Broomfield, who died in 1755, aged eighty; and it is still possible to read how “The chief concern of her life for the last 20 years was to order and provide for her funeral. Her greatest pleasure was to think and talk about it. She lived many years on a pension of 9d. a week, and yet saved £5, which at her own request was laid out at her burial.” A day with Mary Broomfield when in her most characteristic mood must have been a real treat: the conversation doubtless resolving itself into a discussion of the suitability or otherwise of fringes on shrouds and the respective merits of copper or brass coffin-plates.

The work of bringing back the old church to something of its ancient state was costly, but the result is striking. There is a very wealth of monuments, many of the Savages, a Cheshire family of great note in their day, lying in effigy in the Savage Chapel and in the Chantry also associated with them: most notable among them all the loving figures of Sir John Savage, 1495, and his wife, Katharine Stanley. These lie side by side; the knight’s right hand clasping her left. It would have been better had the alabaster figures not been blackleaded by some old-time caretaker!

The Leghs, of Lyme and Adlington, vie in the interest of their monuments with the Savages. Of foremost interest is the inscription to “Perkin a Legh”:

Here, then, lie the Leghs of that old time, with a lying epitaph over them; for it was not Perkin a Legh, but his father-in-law, Sir Thomas D’Angers, whose monument is at Grappenhall, who was given Lyme for his loyal devoirs at Crecy. Whether the misstatement was on the original inscription, or was inserted by Sir Peter Legh, who in 1620 “restored” it, does not appear.

There is something of everything in Macclesfield, and while much of the old order of things prevails, and while barbaric granite setts pave almost every street, above or below, there are modern evidences, in the shape of Public Libraries, Technical Institutes, and drinking fountains. Time was when your only drinking fountain was a tankard in one of the inns, and when the silk-mills themselves were the sole technical schools: and yet in those times Macclesfield still contrived to become great. That period of growing greatness, when the factory system first brought wealth to the Roes, the Brocklehursts, and other foremost silk-weavers, is reflected in the long rows of very urban, rather grim, houses as you enter the town from the direction of Leek, and in the great box-like brick front of the old “Macclesfield Hotel” of pre-railway days; and the present period of full-blown prosperity is marked by the public parks and museums. The town is always bustling, but to see it at its busiest—when it is strenuously engaged in the business of making holiday—you must come here either on the 22nd of June, or at Michaelmas. On the first occasion is held “the Barnaby,” i.e. the St. Barnabas Fair, and on the second, “the Wakes”; both crowded pleasure fairs. Still, as in old testimony, the genuine townsfolk reckon time and events, past or future, as so long “since last, or come next Barnaby,” or Wakes, as the case may be. The former is the favourite, and thus becomes associated with the circumstances of life, whether of joy or sorrow, prosperity or adversity, in a family. The aged couple count the length of their wedded life by “the Barnaby”; the mother tells you the age of her children by “the Barnaby”: the simple annals of operative existence measure the periods of working prosperity, or the privations of short time, by “the Barnaby.”

Macclesfield presents a very striking view from the road on to Manchester. No sooner are the last houses of the town left behind than the highway plunges into a beautiful avenue. From it you look out upon that “field,” folded in between the great hills, in which the town is situated. There the church of St. Michael, on its eyrie, seems in the distance to be set about with woods; while down below is the church at Park Green, neighboured by chimney-stacks and gasometers: manufactories set in the lap of scenic beauty.

A little distance onward there stood in coaching days the tollhouse of Flash; not to be confused with that of Flash Bar at Axe Edge, near Buxton. The inns of this neighbourhood were notorious in the late years of the eighteenth century and the opening days of the nineteenth as haunts of the unlicensed pedlars who obtained their stock in the town of Macclesfield and tramped the country, selling buttons, laces, and other trifles, and committing robberies when opportunity offered. They were gregarious folk, fond of the company of their kind, and held at their favoured houses of call veritable rogues’ saturnalia. From this spot and from Flash Bar, up in the hills, greatly frequented by them, are said to have arisen the expressions of “flash talk” and “flashy” articles: in allusion to their vagabonds’ slang and the cheap but showy goods they offered. But however that may be, the old place-name “Flash” merely describes the natural surroundings of the spot, and is but a phonetic variant of “plash”; whence with the addition of an initial “s” we get “splash.” We have an early authority for this; the Promptorium Parculorum of 1440 giving “Plasche or flasche, where reyne water stondyth.” Flash stands in just such a situation, below the hills, by the river Bollin.

Bollington, on the right hand, a new town of cotton-mills and silk-factories, with very bold scenery around it, dyes the waters of the stream, which run red or yellow, blue or green, according to the colours at the moment in use.

Prestbury, one of the prettiest and most interesting villages in Cheshire, lies hidden to the left hand of the road. It is a place of much scenic and antiquarian note, for there stands the very reverend enriched Norman doorway of a church older even than the present, built into the wall of the schoolhouse, itself acquiring antiquity, seeing that it was built in 1626. The doorway, placed here in 1747, is mouldering away, but shows abundant traces of an unusual wealth of sculpture. Here, too, is the “Old Vicarage,” a three-storeyed black-and-white building, five hundred years old, and along the street, the quaint “Black Boy” inn. In the churchyard are the remains of a Saxon cross, carefully framed in glass, while queer epitaphs, like that upon Bennison, an old huntsman at Adlington, shock the solemnity of the spot:

The second line sadly wants a gloss to clarify its obscurity, but reads as though it was expected he would find equally good hounds and yet more excellent ale in Kingdom Come.

The epitaph on Edward Green reads like a primitive and clumsy attempt at constructing a Limerick:

The reading of this uneven verse is like the jolting of a rough road. It is lengthy for a Limerick, and does not end in a workmanlike manner. It might therefore be made to conclude with