THE HIGHEST INNS IN ENGLAND

As there are many inns claiming, each one of them, to be the “oldest,” so there are many others disputing the point which is the highest situated. I must confess the subject—for myself, at least—lacks charm. I know—how can you help knowing it?—that to reach those eyries you must use incredible efforts, scaling preposterous heights and faring over roads that are, as a rule, infernally rough. And when you are come, in summer hot, in winter searched through and through by the bitter blast that—Shakespeare notwithstanding—is by a long chalk more unkind than man’s ingratitude, to these unkindly altitudes, what, oh my brothers, do you see? Without exception some plaguy ill-favoured shebeen, presiding over starve-all fields at the best, but generally president over some aching solitude that the hand of man—man being a reasoning animal—has never sought to bring under cultivation. The best you can say of such spots—and it is bad at the best—is that they usually command fine views of better places, whence, you cannot help thinking, you were a fool to come, and from which, you suspect, the innkeepers removed from misanthropical motives, rather than from love of bracing air, or for the mere idea of earning a livelihood.

The peculiar honour of being the highest-situated inn appears, after much contention, to belong to the “King’s Pit,” usually called the “Tan Hill” inn, in midst of a ghastly hill-top solitude in the North Riding of Yorkshire, between Reeth and Barras. You get to it—I will not say most easily and conveniently, for convenience and ease in this connection are things unknown, but with less discomfort and fatigue—by way of Richmond, and, when you have got there, will curse the curiosity that brought you to so literally “howling” a wilderness. For there the winds do generally blow, and, when they do, heaven send you have not to face them, for it is a shelterless common where the “Tan Hill” inn stands in loneliness, and not a tree or a hedge is there to break the stinging blast.

“TAN HILL” INN.

Cheerfulness is not a characteristic of those who keep hill-top inns: hence the suspicion that they are misanthropes who, hating sight or sound of their kind, retire to such unfrequented spots, and, when the stray traveller seeks refreshment, instead of weeping salt tears of joy, or exhibiting any minor sign of emotion, grudgingly attend to his wants, and vouchsafe as little information as they safely can.

The “Tan Hill” inn stands on the summit of Stainmoor, at a height of 1,727 feet above sea-level, and it is one of the most abject, uncompromisingly ugly buildings that ever builder built. The ruins of a toll-house stand near by, silently witnessing that it was once worth the while of somebody to levy and collect tolls on what is now as unfrequented a place as it is possible to conceive; but railways long since knocked the bottom out of that, and for some years, until the autumn of 1903, the licence of the inn itself was allowed to lapse, the house being first established for sake of the likely custom from a coal-pit in a neighbouring valley, now abandoned. The innkeeper lives rent free, with the half of his licence paid on condition of his looking after that now deserted mine.

But there is one day in the whole year when the “Tan Hill” inn wakes to life and business. That is the day of Brough Horse Fair, and the traffic then is considerable: the only vestige of the former business of the road now left to it by the Bowes and Barras Railway.

THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR BUXTON.

Between Macclesfield and Buxton—five miles from Buxton and seven from Macclesfield—just, by about 1,500 yards—in Cheshire, although commonly said to be in Derbyshire, stands the next highest inn, the “Cat and Fiddle,” at a height of 1,690 feet. It is only a little less dreary-looking a house than that of “Tan Hill,” and wears a weather-beaten air earned by the fierce storms and snow blizzards to which it is in winter exposed. The wooden porch and the double doors within are necessary outposts against the wind. In the winter the inhabitants are sometimes weatherbound for days at a time, and generally take the precaution of laying in a stock of provisions. One may no more visit Buxton without going a pilgrimage to the “Cat and Fiddle” than it would be reasonable to visit Egypt and not see the Pyramids; and consequently, however lonely the place may be in winter, it is in summer visited by hundreds of trippers brought in waggonettes and brakes named after advertising generals and other puffed-up bull-frogs of the hour. The manner and the expressions of those trippers form an interesting study. You see, plainly enough, that they are bored and disillusioned, and that they wonder, as they gaze upon the hideous house, or over the wild and forbidding moorland and mountain-peaks, or down into the deep valleys, why the devil they came at all; but they are all slaves of convention, and merely wait patiently until the time for returning happily comes round.

There surely never was so demoniac-looking a cat as that sculptured here. Of the derivation of the sign there are, of course, several versions, the local one being that the sixth Duke of Devonshire was especially fond of this road, and used often to travel it with his favourite cat and a violin!

The “Traveller’s Rest,” at Flash Bar, in Staffordshire, on the Leek to Buxton Road, occupies the third place, at an altitude of 1,535 feet, while in the fourth comes a house called the “Isle of Skye,” at Wessenden Head, in Yorkshire, near Holmfirth, 1,500 feet.

The fifth highest inn is the “Traveller’s Rest,” at the summit of the Kirkstone Pass, in Westmoreland, 1,476 feet above the sea, a very considerably lower elevation; but you may still see on the front of the inn its repeatedly discredited claim to be, not merely the highest inn, but the highest inhabited house, in England—which, as Euclid might say, “is absurd.” But what the situation of the Kirkstone Pass lacks in height, it has in gloomy grandeur. Probably more tourists, exploring the mountainous country between Ambleside, Windermere, and Patterdale, visit the Kirkstone Pass inn than any other of these loftily placed hostelries—the “Cat and Fiddle” not excepted.

THE “TRAVELLER’S REST,” KIRKSTONE PASS.

The “Newby Head” inn, Yorkshire, between bleak Hawes and lonely Ingleton, stands at a height of 1,420 feet; and the Duchy Hotel at Princetown, on Dartmoor, in far distant Devonshire, seems to be on the roof of the world, with its 1,359 feet.