Past the old “Butley Ash” inn we come to Milne House, an ancient stone and half-timbered farmhouse of considerable distinction, standing by the roadside. It was once the “dower-house” of the Leghs of Adlington Hall: the place of banishment to which the ancient widowed ladies of the Hall were retired when their sons married and their rule was done. The provision of a “dower-house” was an old English recognition of the hoary provision of nature, that mothers-in-law and children-in-law cannot agree: hence the dowager was provided always with a home of her own, to which she was relegated when she was superseded as mistress of the Hall. I could easily find a tear and a sigh for the dowager, but it must be remembered that she had once been a young bride and had in her own time disestablished the ancient lady of the Hall. “With whatsoever measure ye mete, it shall be meted to you again.” So away with sentiment!

Presently, at a turning to the left, past the “Adlington Arms,” a post-office, three or four cottages, and another inn, the gates of Adlington Park are seen, very carefully locked, and hiding from unauthorised wayfarers the approach to the Hall.

There have been Leghs at Adlington for six centuries and Leghs remain there yet. The Cheshire families of Legh are numerous enough to form a clan, and historic enough for a very long antiquarian discussion, if this were the place for it. They were renowned in the field of battle and in the bower of love, and indeed one of the Leghs of Adlington is the hero of the ancient ballad, The Spanish Lady’s Love. This was Sir Urian Legh, who shared the tented field in company with the Earl of Essex at the siege of Cadiz, and captured a young, beautiful, and wealthy Spanish lady, who fell violently in love with him, as the passionate old ballad declares. But Sir Urian, unfortunately, was a married man, and the song woefully concludes with the lady’s determination to enter a convent.

It was Sir Thomas, father of this captivating knight, who built the most striking portion of the timbered Hall. He was proud of his work, it seems, for it is duly set forth on a tablet over the entrance how in 1581 he, “Thomas Legghe and Sibbell, daughter of Sir Urian Brereton of hondforde,” were responsible for it. Equally proud of their own doings were Charles and Hester Legh, who in 1757 added the great brick wing with classic pillared front, in the taste of that age: very fine, but utterly out of keeping with the Elizabethan work. The Leghs honoured themselves by entertaining Handel, who stayed at Milne House and played upon the organ still in the Hall. The legend of the “Harmonious Blacksmith” being composed by him at Whitchurch, near London, is familiar to most people, and circumstantial accounts are given, connecting the incident with that place: clinched by the sculptured tombstone in the churchyard to the original blacksmith, William Powell, who died in 1721. The association with Whitchurch is so generally accepted that Powell’s anvil, which rang out the suggestive notes, was in recent times sold at auction for a considerable sum. But Adlington also stoutly claims to be the place where the famous melody was written, and Hollingworth smithy the spot that suggested it. The verdict of the court is, however, with Whitchurch. A variant upon these stories is the assertion that the melody of the “Harmonious Blacksmith” is really an arrangement of an old French air. Musicians characterise the ringing anvil origin of the air as absurd.

Passing Hope Green, the road becomes paved as to half of its width with granite setts, and then approaches Poynton, a cheerful village of modern red-brick country cottages with pleasant gardens and the “Vernon Arms” inn, displaying a heraldic sign boldly declaring Vernon semper viret—“Vernon always flourishes.” A railway bridge, spanning the road at the end of the village, brings us to Hazel Grove, situated where the highway to Chapel-en-le-Frith and Buxton goes off.

Here the country ends suddenly, as though it were shorn off in a clean cut. Looking backwards, through the railway bridge, there is the sunny road; in front, in the direction of Manchester, is the greyer atmosphere of town. One might easily imagine that bridge to be the veritable doorway into Manchester and its congeries of satellite towns; or, coming from Manchester, the entrance into the region of rural things. There, through the archway, is Poynton, as yet rustic, with birds singing on the hedgerow spray: here the costermonger is crying his wares, and you encounter the terminus of a series of electric tramways that lead with little intermission as far as Bolton. And in between there is an ever-deepening gloom, a continuously increasing racket of traffic on the terrible granite setts that Manchester affects; a growing throng of anxiously hurrying people, units in that wonderful, and to some minds no less terrible than wonderful, assemblage of four millions of human beings who inhabit these next few miles.

The name of Hazel Grove is as poetic as that of the village of “Falling Water” Rip Van Winkle knew before he went off in his long twenty years’ sleep. When he awoke, you will remember, he found it become a very different place, and renamed “Washington.” But the reverse process has taken place here. In the old days this was merely “Bullock Smithy,” into which you cannot read poetry, epic or pastoral. Bullock Smithy was just a wayside forge which is said to have taken its name from the cattle-drovers bringing their steers to be shod here, on the long journey down the road. They may have done, and probably did so; but the name really originated in 1560, when the smithy, even then existing, was bequeathed to the smith, Richard Bullock, of Torkington, by “John de Torkinton.”

The place by degrees became a little settlement of residences built by Manchester men who loved the country, and some of these country houses may even yet be seen in the long street, looking very much out of place amid their new neighbours: notably a large stuccoed house with a tablet bearing the date 1761, and the initials H. J. M. “Bullock Smithy” then no longer served. The name was too redolent of cattle-drovers, and so “Hazel Grove” was invented. On the front of the great white-faced “Red Lion” inn may be seen carved the legend, “Village of Hazel Grove, 1796,” but this does not appear to have been cut until 1836, and the old road-books go on calling the place by its older name until coaching and Cary were both snuffed out.

Some pathetic relics of a bygone day still remain, chiefly in the names of houses and side-streets. But “Cherry Tree Lane” nowadays contains no cherry-trees, and no Jargonels or Bons ChrÉtiens grow in the garden of “Pear Tree Cottage.”

But still, for a little way ahead, it is only the main road that is so urban. Open fields, a little sickly, it is true, extend on either side, behind the fringe of houses; and away to the left, nearly two miles off, Bramhall Hall, one of the finest of the ancient timbered halls of Cheshire, may be found.

It is interesting, with an interest almost pathetic, to journey on to Manchester and to notice how the urban undertone of the road grows to be the dominant note: how the wayside fringe of bricks and mortar widens and the meadows give place first to brickfields and finally to grey streets. You pass from place to place and think them all one: from Hazel Grove to Heaviley, and thence to Stockport, Heaton Norris, Heaton Chapel, Levenshulme, Grindley Marsh, Longsight, and Ardwick Green, finally coming into Manchester by the infernal din of the thronging traffic at London Road railway station.

I am a southerner. It has been borne in upon me, on this progression to Scotland, that I am journeying to what is, to all intents and purposes, a foreign land; and on the way to that country across the Border I encounter a growing strangeness. Leicester is the ultimate place on this road wherein the Londoner finds himself on equal terms with the inhabitants. At Derby he notices a slight change; but on approaching Manchester, he finds himself on the threshold of another order of things. He notices a suppressed energy in even the least active, and an abundant vitality everywhere; and he finds a strange accent and strange new expressions. For example, even on the land-agents’ notice-boards, here, on the outskirts of Manchester, there will be seen a something incomprehensible to the stranger from the south: as thus “This Land to be Let, or Sold on Chief.” This strange term, “on Chief,” which looks like a variant of “Freehold,” is really a species of ground-rent: the landowner “selling” his land, yet with the odd reservation of a perpetual “Chief Rent”; by which if he does not precisely achieve the impossible feat usually described as “Eating your cake and having it too,” he certainly does seem to approach that marvel.

The suburban road is here sufficiently broad, and approaching Stockport, where the fine modern church of St. George looks along the vista with its great bulk and graceful spire, it is even imposing, but the prevalent grey atmosphere dims and flattens everything; obscuring details, like an impressionist painter. The great church of St. George, in the newly formed parish of that name, was built in 1897, at the enormous cost of £90,000; borne entirely by one person. With a rather touching, but misplaced, confidence it is surrounded by trim lawns, and an almost rural-looking vicarage rises close by; but the stone-work of the church shows signs of turning black, the earth is growing dank and stale, and the lawns are by degrees going bald.

Stockport, in its local patriotism, would probably resent being lumped with “Manchester,” and Manchester itself might object, but to the passer-by, ignorant of local divisions, it is all one with the great city, although the town is not even in the same county with it; the river Mersey here dividing Stockport in Cheshire, from Manchester in Lancashire. Cheshire, in its most characteristic condition, is the Cheshire of the cheese-farms in the great fertile plain, where mild-eyed cows stand knee-deep in pastures; and a great manufacturing town is entirely out of sympathy with such idyllic scenes. I give you my word there are no idylls in Stockport: only a road where the granite setts are greasy; the pavements thronged with busy people and the girls of the cotton-mills; the sky smoky, and the air filled with distracting noise. But to see a less crowded and less noisy Stockport would be a sorry thing, for it is the wealth-producing commerce of the place that makes it what it is, and the times when the railway-lorries cease to crash and rumble along the streets, and when the waggons, laden with mountainous heights of grey shirtings, are no longer seen on their way from the cotton-mills to Manchester warehouses, will be troublous times for not only mill-hand and manufacturer, but for every one.

Commerce is typified in the statues that decorate public buildings by a woman of noble proportions, clothed in classic dress, and in her face a majestic calm; but that is an abstraction. Commerce as understood here—and indeed everywhere—is a matter of telegrams and telephones, of bales, packing-cases, and feverish hurry; and I suppose—if you must feminise—the nearest real human beings to that classic convention are the mill-girls and the typists. For the rest, commerce is what you perceive here; a polluted river, darkened by factories, bridges, and railway viaducts; and great goods yards, advertisement hoardings, banks, and the hundred-and-one kinds of buildings in which the business of the twentieth century is carried on.

The tall railway viaduct that spans the Mersey and goes high over the steep and grimy streets leading down to it, is impressive in its very bulk and in the smoky atmosphere that reveals it only in a broad flat effect; and, in the same way, the towering buildings that have no beauty of detail, gloom down upon you with an ogreish aspect that transcends their ugliness and elevates it into the region of horrific romance.

That such a place can ever have been the site of a castle wherein dwelt the glittering creatures of chivalry is scarce thinkable: and yet there was such a stronghold. But the very ruins of it were cleared away so long ago as 1775. They were very scanty, and no sort of use to Prince Charles, when he passed here, going and returning in the ’45. His Highlanders, we learn from one of the diarists of that time, “were very rough as they went through Stockport, and took Mr. Elcock and 2 or 3 more with ’em, with Halters about their necks.”

Those good old times again, when England was Merry England. What fun!

But these good Stockport people were not strung up, after all, and returned later in the day to the bosom of their families.

A relic of an older Stockport that knew nothing of cotton-mills or other factories is to be found in the street called Great Underbank. This is the old timbered town house of the Ardernes of Harden and Tarporley. This ancient family resorted hither in the long ago from their various country seats, and called it “coming to town.” The Manchester and Liverpool District Bank now occupies the fine old place.

The “White Lion” was an interesting old inn, but it has gone down before Stockport’s growing commercial greatness. It was the house, according to usually received accounts, where the following tribute to the management was to be seen, inscribed on a window-pane by some dissatisfied guest of nearly a century and a half ago:

I think this is all the historian who is merely a gossip can say about Stockport. But stay! One very prominent feature has been passed over, and as I have no wish to incur the wrath of the burgesses, I hasten to repair the omission. Stockport is intensely proud of possessing the largest Sunday School in the world: proud, that is to say, of the large roll-call of its scholars, and possibly also of the mere bulk of the great building. Of its appearance, which is that of any large factory, there could not possibly be any pride. But in these days of secular advances and of a growing godless Socialism in great industrial centres, it is at once surprising and hopeful to see the like of Stockport’s great Sunday School: and in Manchester itself to witness the really wonderful Whitsuntide sight of the Sunday Schools’ processions through the chief streets of the great city.