Charles G. Harper

THE OLD INNS OF CHESHIRE

Cheshire, that great fertile plain devoted almost exclusively to dairy-farming, is without doubt the county richest in old inns: inns for the most part built in the traditional Cheshire style—of timber and plaster: the style variously called “half-timbered,” “magpie,” or “black and white.” Of these the “Old Hall” at Sandbach is the finest and most important, having been built originally as the manor-house, about the time of Queen Elizabeth, the inscription, “16 T.B. 56” on a portion of the long frontage, probably marking repairs, or an extension of the building, at that period.

Sandbach is a place famous among antiquaries for its remarkable ninth-century sculptured monolith crosses, and thus the traveller comes to it with a mental picture, evolved entirely out of his own inner consciousness, of some sweet and quiet old country town, left long ago outside the range of modern things. But Sandbach is not in the least like that. It is a huddled-together little town, very busy, very roughly paved with stone setts, rather dirty and untidy, and apparently possessed with an ambition for new buildings, both public and private, which shall be as much as possible unlike the old Cheshire style. These are surprises for the pilgrim, whose life-long illusions are finally squelched when he is told, gently but firmly, and with a kind of pity for his ignorance, that the place-name is not pronounced “Sandback,” with a “k,” but “Sandbach,” with an “h,”—“as it is spelt,” the inhabitants crushingly add.

THE “OLD HALL” INN, SANDBACH.

The poor old crosses stand in the market-place. They have suffered many an injury in their time, and now are islanded amid a sea of market-litter, and are black and grimy. Close by them stands the “Black Bear” inn, a nodding old half-timbered and thatched “Free” house, with the inscription, “16 R K 34.” The lower part is merely brick, but this has been painted white with black stripes, in a more or less laudable attempt to imitate the genuine timber and plaster of the upper storey.

Just off this market-place, opposite the church, stands the “Old Hall” inn, facing the road in a long range of imposing panelled and gabled building, partly fronted by a beautiful lawn. No changes have spoiled the “Old Hall,” which, save for the fact that it has long been an inn, remains very much as it was built. It is the property of the Earl of Crewe.

Stout oaken floors and dark oak panelling furnish the old house throughout. You enter the capacious bar through a Jacobean screen and drink mellow home-brewed in the appropriately mellow light that comes between oaken Elizabethan mullions and through leaded casements. It is not by any fanciful figure of speech that the traveller quenches his thirst here at the “Old Hall” in a tankard of home-brewed. The house, in fact, brews its own ale, and supplies it largely to the farm-houses of the neighbourhood; and a very pretty tipple it is, too.

DOG-GATES AT HEAD OF STAIRCASE, “OLD HALL” INN, SANDBACH.

There are at least three very fine carved oak Jacobean fire-places and overmantels in the house, the finest that in the public parlour; and at the head of the broad staircase remains a curious relic of old times—the “dog-gates” that formerly shut out the domestic pets of the establishment from the bedrooms—and in fact do so still.

Not so large, but in some respects finer even than the “Old Hall,” the “Bear’s Head” at Brereton, five miles from Sandbach, shows most of its beauty on the outside. It was built in 1615, as the date carved on the lovely old timbered porch declares, and in days when the Breretons of Brereton Hall still ruled; as their bear’s-head crest, their shield of arms, and the initials “W. M. B.,” prove. Their old home, Brereton Hall, close by, is traditionally the original of Washington Irving’s “Bracebridge Hall.”

Brereton village is among the smallest of places, and the inn, itself as noble as many an old manor-house, is neighboured only by a few scattered cottages. But, however insignificant the village, the inn was once, and long continued to be, a very busy posting-house on a frequented route between London and Liverpool, as the eighteenth-century additions to the house bear witness. The additional wing, built at that period, is by no means an attractive feature, and fortunately does not obtrude itself in general views of the inn from the best points of view; but the magnificent range of stables added at the same date, on the opposite side of the road, although, of course, not in keeping with the black-and-white timbering of the original building, compose well, artistically, with it, and form in themselves a very fine specimen of the design and the brickwork of that time.

THE “BEAR’S HEAD,” BRERETON.The “Lion and Swan” at Congleton is one of the best and most picturesque features of that old-time manufacturing town, more remarkable for its huge old factory buildings, and its narrow, sett-paved streets in which the clogs of the work-folk continually clatter, than for its beauty. The “Lion and Swan,” therefore, is a distinct asset in the picturesque way, with its beautiful black-and-white gables and strongly emphasised entrance-porch. Within it is all timbered passages and raftered rooms, pleasantly irregular.

One of the most striking of the natural features of Cheshire is the isolated hill rising abruptly from the great plain near Alderley, and known as Alderley Edge. So strange an object could hardly fail to impress old-time imaginations, or be without its correspondingly strange legends, and the Edge is, in fact, the subject of a legend well known as the “Wizard of Alderley,” which in its turn has given its title to the “Wizard” inn.

According to this mystical tale, which is of the same order as the marvellous legends of King Arthur and the wise Merlin, a farmer, “long years ago,” was going to Macclesfield Fair to sell a fine milk-white horse, when, on passing the hill, a “mysterious stranger” suddenly appeared before him and demanded the horse. Not even in those times of “long years ago,” when all manner of odd things happened, did farmers give up valuable animals on demand, and (although the story does not report it) he probably said some extremely rude and caustic things to the stranger; who, at any rate, told him that the horse would not be sold at the fair. He added that when the farmer returned in the evening, he would meet him on the same spot, and would receive the horse.

The Wizard, for it was none other, had spoken truly. Many people at the fair admired the milk-white steed, but none offered to buy, and the farmer wended his way home again. In most cases, with the prospect of such a meeting, a farmer—or any one else—would have gone home some other way; but, in that case, there would have been no legend; so we are to imagine him come back at eventime, under the shadow of the Edge, with the Wizard duly awaiting him.

Not a word was spoken, but horse and farmer were led to the hillside, where, with a sound like that of distant thunder, two iron gates opened, and a magic cave appeared, wherein he saw many milk-white steeds, each with an armed man sleeping by its side. He was told, as a metrical version of the legend has it:

These are the caverned troops, by Fate
Foredoomed the guardians of our State.
England’s good genius here detains
These armed defenders of our plains,
Doomed to remain till that fell day
When foemen marshalled in array
And feuds internecine, shall combine
To seal the ruin of our line!
Thrice lost shall England be, thrice won,
’Twixt dawn of day and setting sun.
Then we, the wondrous caverned band,
These mailÈd martyrs for the land,
Shall rush resistless on the foe.

THE “LION AND SWAN,” CONGLETON.From the crystal cave where these wonders were seen, the farmer was conducted to a cave of gold, filled with every imaginable kind of wealth, and there, in the shape of “as much treasure as he could carry,” he received better payment for his horse than he would ever have obtained at Macclesfield, or any other, fair. We may imagine him (although the legend says nothing on that head) at this point asking the Wizard how many more milk-white steeds he could do with, at the same price; but at this juncture he was conducted back to the entrance, and the gates were slammed to behind him. Strange to say, the “treasure,” according to the story, seems to have been genuine treasure, and did not, next morning, resolve itself into the usual currency of dried sticks and yellow leaves in which wizards and questionable old-time characters of that nature usually settled their accounts.

There are caves and crannies to this day in the wonderful hill, but the real genuine magic cave has never been re-discovered.

That odd early eighteenth-century character, “Drunken Barnaby,” is mentioned elsewhere in these pages. One of his boozy journeys took him out of Lancashire into Cheshire, by way of Warrington and Great Budworth:

The traveller will still find the “Cock” at Budworth, and will notice, with some amusement, that the landlord’s name is Drinkwater. The house is looking much the same as in Barnaby’s day, and has a painting, hanging in the bar, picturing a very drunken Barnaby indeed being carried up to bed. A sundial, bearing the date, 1851, and the inscription, “Sol motu gallus cantu moneat,” has been added, together with a well-executed picture-sign of a gamecock: both placed by the late squire of Arley, Rowland Eyles Egerton Warburton, who seems to have occupied most of his leisure in writing verses for sign-posts and house-inscriptions all over this part of Cheshire. The gamecock himself, it will be noted, has an oddly Gladstonian glance.

From Budworth, by dint of much searching and diligent inquiry, the pilgrim on the borders of Cheshire and Lancashire at length discovers the hamlet of Thelwall, a place situated in an odd byway between Warrington, Lymm, and Manchester, in that curious half-picturesque and half-grimly commercial district traversed by the Bridgewater and the Manchester Ship Canals.

Thelwall, according to authorities in things incredibly ancient, was once a city, but the most diligent antiquary grubbing in its stony lanes and crooked roads, will fail to discover any evidences in brick or stone of that vanished importance, and is fain to rest his faith upon county historians and on the lengthy inscription in iron lettering in modern times fixed upon the wooden beams of the old “Pickering Arms” inn that stands in midst of the decayed “city.” By this he learns that, “In the year 920, King Edward the Elder founded a cyty here and called it Thelwall.” And that is all there is to tell. It might have been a Manchester or a Salford, had the situation been well chosen; but as it is, it teaches the lesson that though a king may “found” a city, not all the kingship, or Right Divine of crowned heads, will make it prosper, if it be not placed to advantage.

THE “COCK,” GREAT BUDWORTH.

Chester itself is, of course, exceptionally rich in old inns, but Chester has so long been a show-place of antiquities and has so mauled its reverend relics with so-called “restorations” that much of their interest is gone. The bloom has been brushed off the peach.

One of the oldest inns of Chester is the little house at the corner of Shipgate Street and Lower Bridge Street, known as the “King Edgar”; the monarch who gives his name to the sign being that Anglo-Saxon “Edgar the Peaceable” who reduced the England of his day to an unwonted condition of law and order, and therefore fully deserves the measure of fame thus given him.

We are told by Roger of Wendover and other ancient chroniclers how, in the year 962, King Edgar, coming to Chester in the course of one of his annual progresses through the country he ruled, was rowed in a state barge upon the river Dee by eight tributary kings; and one is a little puzzled to know whence all these kings could have come, until the old monkish accounts are fully read, when it appears that they were only kings in a comparatively small way of business. According to Roger of Wendover, they were Rinoth, King of Scots, Malcolm, King of the Cumbrians, Maco, King of Mona and numerous islands, and five others: Dusnal of Demetia, Siferth and Huwal of Wales, James, King of Galwallia, and Jukil, King of Westmoreland.

The sign of the inn, a very old and faded and much-varnished painting, displays that historic incident, and, gazing earnestly at it, you may dimly discern the shadowy forms of eight oarsmen, robed in red and white, and with golden crowns on their heads, rowing an ornate but clumsy craft, while King Edgar stands in the stern sheets. Another figure in the bow supports a banner with the sign of the Cross. The whole thing looks not a little like a giant black-beetle crawling over a kitchen-table.

THE “PICKERING ARMS,” THELWALL.

Until quite recently the “King Edgar” inn was the most picturesquely tumble-down building in Chester, a perfect marvel of dilapidation that no artist could exaggerate, or any one, for that matter, care to house in. But it has now not only been made habitable, but so “restored” that only the outlines of the building, and that faded old sign, remain recognisably the “King Edgar.” It is now rather a smart little inn, displaying notices of “Accomodation for Cyclists”—spelled with one “m”—and thus, so renovated and youthful-looking, as incongruously indecent as one’s grandmother would be, were she to let her hair down and take to short frocks again.

Separated from it by only one house, and that as commonplace a building as possible, suppressed so far as may be in the accompanying illustration, by the adventitious aid of “artistic licence,” is the “Bear and Billet” inn, at this time, although repaired, in the most satisfactorily conservative condition of any old inn at Chester. Its front is a mass of beautifully enriched woodwork, under one huge, all-comprising gable. The “Bear and Billet” was not always an inn. It has, in fact, declined from private mansion to public, having originally been the town mansion of the Earls of Shrewsbury, and remaining their property until 1867. Adjoining is the Bridge Gate of the city, associated with the “Bear and Billet” by reason of the fact that the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury, were hereditary Sergeants of the Gate. Long after they had ceased to occupy the house as a residence, they continued to reserve a suite of rooms in it, for use on those state occasions when they resorted to Chester to act their hereditary part.

THE “KING EDGAR” AND “BEAR AND BILLET,” CHESTER.The “Falcon” inn, until recent years an unspoiled house whose nodding gables and every time-worn timber were eloquent of the sixteenth century, and the delight of artists—who, however eager they were to sketch it, were not so ready to stay there—has been so extravagantly renovated, in the worst sense of that word, when dealing with things ancient and venerable, that although, during that work of renovation, much earlier stonework and some additional old timbering were revealed and have been preserved, their genuine character might well be questioned by a stranger, so lavish with the scraping and the varnish were those who set about the work. In short, the “Falcon” nowadays wears every aspect of a genuine Victorian imitation of an Elizabethan house, and, while made habitable from the tourist’s point of view, is, artistically, ruined.

In the same street we have the “Old King’s Head” “restored” in like manner, but so long since that it is acquiring again, by sheer lapse of time and a little artistic remissness in the matter of cleaning, a hoary look. Near by, too, is a fine house, now styling itself “Wine and Spirit Stores,” dated 1635.

In Watergate Street is the “Carnarvon Castle,” with one of the famed Chester “rows” running in front of the first floor; while, opposite, the “Custom House” inn, dated 1636 and in its unrestored original state, recalls the far-distant time when Chester was a port. Indeed, at the extremity of this street still stands the old “Yacht” inn, where Dean Swift was accustomed to stay when he chose the Chester and Parkgate route to Ireland.

A catalogue of all the, in some way, odd inns of Chester would of necessity be lengthy; but mention may here be made of the exquisitely restored little “Boot” inn, dated 1643, in Eastgate Street, with a provision-shop below and a “row” running above, and of the red-brick “Pied Bull” and the adjoining stone-pillared “Old Bell”—“licensed 1494”—at the extreme end of Northgate Street.