Our run from Nottingham to Oxford was uneventful, for we roved rather at random for the day through the delightful Midland country. At Nottingham one will find the Victoria is quite up to the standard of station-hotel excellence in England and the rates refreshingly low. The city itself will not detain one long, for the great wave of modern progress that has inundated it has swept away most of its ancient landmarks. The old castle, once the key to the Northlands, has been superseded by a palatial structure which now serves as museum and art gallery. Unless one would see factories, machine shops and lace-making works, there will be little to keep him in Nottingham.

We follow the well-surfaced road to the southeast, and though steep in places, its hills afford splendid views of the landscape. The rain interferes much with the prospect, but in the lulls we catch glimpses of long reaches of meadowland dotted with solitary trees, rich with the emerald greenness that follows summer rain in England.

Melton Mowbray has a proud distinction, for does not the infallible Baedeker accord it the honor of being the “hunting capital of the Midlands?” And the assertion that it is famous for its pork pies very appropriately follows, a matter of cause and effect, perhaps, for the horde of hungry huntsmen who congregate in the town would hardly be satisfied with anything less substantial than an English pork pie. Melton Mowbray has a competitor in Market Harborough, some twenty miles farther, where we stopped for luncheon at a pleasant wayside inn. Each of these towns has a population of about seven thousand, chiefly dependent upon the hunting industry—if I may use such a term—and certain it is that fox hunting is about the only vocation toward which many of the Midland squires are at all industriously inclined. One is simply astounded at the hold the sport has in England and the amount of time and money devoted to it; a leading authority estimates that not less than nine million pounds is spent yearly by the hunters. In a summer tour one sees comparatively little of it, but in the autumn and winter these towns doubtless exhibit great activity, and their streets, crowded with red-coated huntsmen and packs of yelping dogs, must be decidedly picturesque.

From Market Harborough a straight, narrow road carried us swiftly southward toward Northampton and we passed through the Bringtons, of whose memories of the Washingtons I have written in an earlier chapter. The rain, which had been falling fitfully during the day, ceased and the sun came out with a brilliancy that completely transformed the landscape. All about us was the dense green of the trees and meadowlands, bejeweled with sparkling raindrops and dashed with the gold of the ripening grain, stretching away until lost in the purple mist of the distance. Even the roadside pools glowed crimson and gold, and altogether the scene was one of transcendent beauty and freshness. It was exhilarating indeed as our open car swept over the fine Oxford road, passing through the ancient towns of Towcester, Buckingham and Bicester. There is no more beautiful or fertile country in the Island than that around Oxford, and it was a welcome change to see it basking in the sunshine after our dull days on the Yorkshire moors.

One never wearies of Oxford, and the Randolph Hotel is worth a run of many miles to reach at nightfall. Aristocratic, spacious and quiet, with an indefinable atmosphere of the great universities about it, it appeals to both the bodily and aesthetic senses of the wayfarer—but Oxford, with all its interest and charm, has no place in this chronicle, and we leave it, however loath, in the early morning. We hasten over the Berkshire Hills through Abingdon into Wiltshire, where there is much to engage our attention.

Swindon, the first town we encounter after passing the border, is an up-to-date city of fifty thousand people and the newness everywhere apparent, the asphalt pavement and the numerous tram lines impress one with its similarity to live American towns. We learn that it is practically a creation of the Great Western Railway, whose shops give employment to a large proportion of the population. Clearly, there is nothing for us in Swindon and we hasten on to Chippenham, which has the traditions which Swindon so wofully lacks. It is a staid old town of six thousand and was important in Saxon times, having frequent mention in the chronicles of Alfred’s wars with the Danes. Strange indeed the mutations of time—strange it seems that the now decadent and negligible Denmark once sent her “fair-haired despots of the sea” into this remote section of the present mistress of the seas. The town is full of odd old houses and it is the center of one of the most interesting spots in England, as I hope to be able to show. But its hotel would hardly invite a long sojourn; we stop for luncheon at the Angel, and are placed at a large table with several rather red-faced gentlemen who discuss horses and hunting dogs as vigorously as a lively onslaught on the host’s vintage and good cheer permits.

Lacock is only four miles away and they tell us that we should see the abbey; but they do not tell us that the village itself is worth a day’s journey and that the abbey is only secondary. They do not tell us this, because no one about Lacock knows it. The utter unconsciousness and genuineness of the village is not its least charm. Lacock never dreams of being a show place or tourist resort; but despite its unconsciousness, anyone who has seen England as we have seen it will know that Lacock is not easily matched for its wealth of old stone and timber houses and its quaint, genuine antiquity. It is perhaps a trifle severe and its picturesqueness is of a melancholy and somber kind—thatched roofs are few, ivy-clad walls and flower gardens are wanting; there is little color save an occasional red roof to relieve the all-pervading gray monotone. Its timbered houses are not the imitations one sees so often, even in England, or the modernized old buildings shining in black and white paint, but the genuine article, with weathered oak timbers and lichen-covered brick. There are many projecting upper stories and sharp gables with casement windows of diamond panes set in rusty iron frames. The Lacock of today is truly a voice from the past. It must have been practically the same two or three hundred years ago. Its houses, its streets, its church and its very atmosphere carry one back to the England of Shakespeare.

Such a village seems a fitting introduction to the abbey at whose gates it sits; and the abbey itself, gray and ancient like the village, is one of the most perfect monastic buildings in England. Nowhere else did we see what seemed to us a more appropriate home for romance than this great rambling pile of towered and gabled buildings, with a hundred odd nooks and corners, each of which might well have a story of its own. It is opened freely to visitors by its owner, Mr. Talbot, himself an antiquarian of note, who is glad to share his unbounded delight in the old place with anyone who may care to come. We were shown in detail the parts of the abbey that have a special historic and architectural interest. It is guarded carefully and the atmosphere of antiquity jealously preserved. Even the stone steps of the main entrance are grass-grown and moss-covered—“and he wont let us clean them up,” said our guide.

Inside there are many fine apartments and notable relics. The arched cloisters, the chapter house, the refectory and other haunts of the nuns, are in quite the original state. The immense stone fishtank from a solid block sixteen feet long and the great bronze cauldron show that good cheer was quite as acceptable to the nuns as to their brethren. But the exterior of the abbey and the beautiful grounds surrounding it impressed us most. All about were splendid trees and plots of shrubbery, and the Bristol Avon flows through the park. We heard what we thought the rush of its waters, but our guide told us that it was the quaking aspens which fringe the river banks, keeping up their age-long sigh that their species had supplied the wood for the cross. No day is so still that you do not hear them in summer time. We passed around the building to note from different viewpoints its quaint outlines and its great rambling facades with crowded, queerly assorted gables, battlemented towers and turrets, and mysterious corners, all combining to make it the very ideal of the abbey of romance. How easy, when contemplating it in the dim twilight or by the light of a full moon, for the imagination to re-people it with its old-time habitants; and surely, if the ghosts of the gray nuns ever return to their earthly haunts, Lacock Abbey must have such visitants.

But enough of these vagaries—one might yield himself up to them for days in such surroundings. I will not mar them with sober history, in any event, though Lacock has quite enough of that. The guide-book which you may get at the abbey lodge for two-pence tells its story and I have tried to tell only what we saw and felt.

At the postcard shop, where we buy a few pictures and souvenirs of Lacock, the young woman tells us of other Wiltshire nooks that we should see. Do we know of Sloperton Cottage, of Bromham Church, of Corsham, of Yatton Keynell and Castle Combe? These are only a few, in fact, but they are the ones that strike our fancy most and we thank our informant, who follows us to point out the roads. And never had we more need of such assistance, for our search for Sloperton Cottage involves us in a maze of unmarked byways that wind between tall hedges and overarching trees.

And what of Sloperton Cottage? Are you, dear reader, so ignorant as we were, not to know that Tom Moore, the darling poet of Erin, lived in Sloperton Cottage with his beloved Bessie for a third of a century and that both are buried at Bromham Church near at hand? One had surely thought to find his grave in the “ould sod” rather than in the very heart of rural England; but so it is; and after much inquiry we enter the lonely lane that leads to Sloperton Cottage and pause before the long low building, heavily mantled with ivy and roses, though almost hidden from the road by the tall hedge in front. We had been told that it is the private home of two ladies, sisters of the owner, and we have no thought of intruding in such a case—but a neat maid appears at the gateway as we look, no doubt rather longingly, at the house.

“Miss ——,” said she, “would be pleased to have you come in and see the cottage.”

Here is unexpected good fortune, and coming voluntarily to us, we feel free to accept the invitation. We see the cottage and gardens, which are much the same as when occupied by the poet, though some of the furniture has been replaced. The garden to the rear, sweet with old-fashioned flowers, we are told was a favorite resort of the author of “Lalla Rookh” and that he composed much of his verse here, lying on his back and gazing at the sky through over-arching branches. The cottage is quite unpretentious and the whole place is so cozy and secluded as to be an ideal retreat for the muses, and as an English writer has observed:

“It would be an unfeeling person who could stand today before this leafy cottage, so snugly tucked away by a shady Wiltshire lane, without some stirring of the pulse, if only for the sake of the melodies. If they are not great, they are the most felicitous and feeling English verse, taken as a whole, ever set to music, and are certainly world-famous and probably immortal. No one would wish to submit “Dear Harp of My Country” or “Oft in the Stilly Night” to the cold light of poetic criticism. But when the conscientious expert has finished with “Lalla Rookh” and the “Loves of the Angels” and consigned them to oblivion, he goes into another chamber, so to speak, and relaxes into unrestrained praise of the melodies.”

Moore must have written much of the “melodies” at Sloperton Cottage, but before he came here his fame had been made by his oriental poems, whose music and glitter caused them to be greatly over-estimated at the time. As we take our leave and thank the ladies for the courtesy, we are told that the cottage is to let and that we may so inform any of our friends. We do so herewith and can add our unqualified personal indorsement of Sloperton Cottage.

Bromham Church, one of the most graceful of the country churches we have seen, is near at hand. It stands against a background of fine trees with a hedge-surmounted stone wall in front. It is mainly in the Perpendicular style and a slender spire rises from its square battlemented tower. The stained windows are very large, each with many tall upright stone mullions; one is a memorial to the poet and another to his wife, whose memory still lingers as one of the best-loved women of the countryside. She survived the poet, who died in 1852, by fourteen years. They lie buried just outside the north wall of the church. The grave is marked by a tall Celtic cross, only recently erected, and the occasion was observed by a gathering of distinguished Irishmen in honor of the memory of their poet. On the pedestal of the cross is graven a verse which truly gives Moore’s best claim to remembrance:

And indeed it is the harp of his country that is now heard, and not his labored oriental poems.

It is a very quiet, retired country lane that we followed to Corsham, famous for the stately seat of Lord Metheun. Corsham Court is an Elizabethan mansion of vast extent which has many noted pictures in its galleries, among them “Charles I. on Horseback,” which is counted the masterpiece of Van Dyck. Near the park entrance is the almshouse, with its timeworn gables of yellow stone against the dull red of the tile roofing. Just inside is the chapel, always present in early English buildings, a fine Jacobean room with a double-deck pulpit and a gallery behind an intricately carved oaken screen. One finds these almshouses in many of the older English towns. They were founded some centuries ago by charitably inclined persons who left legacies for the purpose, and are maintained for a limited number of old people—women at Corsham—who are admitted under certain carefully specified conditions. Each inmate has a small, fairly comfortable room and usually a little garden plot. We saw such houses at Coventry, Campden and Corsham—all substantially built and unique in their architecture. St. Cross at Winchester and Leicester’s Hospital at Warwick are similar institutions. There is always a long waiting-list of applicants for the charity.

At the queer little village of Yatton Keynell, as odd and uncouth as its name, we found another of the melancholy instances so common in England of the degeneration of a fine manor into a slovenly farm tenement. We drove into the ill-kept farmyard and picked our way carefully through the debris to the front entrance, a solid oaken door under a curious little porch. The house is a good example of the substantial mansion of the old-time English squire, and though still quite extensive, is of only half its original size. It has a solid oak staircase and many touches of its old-time beauty remain. While it has no history or tradition, it is worthy a visit from anyone interested in English domestic architecture and in a rather melancholy phase of social conditions.

A combe, in west of England parlance, is a deep, ravinelike valley. Such a description certainly fits the site of Castle Combe, surely one of the loveliest villages in Wiltshire, or all of England, for that matter. We carefully descended a steep, narrow road winding through the trees that cover the sharply rising hillsides, and paused before the queer old market cross of the little town. Nowhere did we find a more perfect and secluded gem of rural England. The market cross, whose quadrangular roof of tile, with a tall slender shaft rising from the center, is supported on four heavy stone pillars, looks as if it had scarce been touched in the four hundred years during which it has weathered sun and rain. Near by is the solid little church with pinnacled and embattled tower, still more ancient. Along shady lanes leading from the market place are cozy thatched cottages, bright with climbing roses and ivy, and others of gray stone seem quite as bleak as the cross itself. Nothing could be more picturesque than the gateway to the adjoining park—the thatched roof of the lodgekeeper’s house sagging from the weight of several centuries. On either side of the village rise the steep, heavily wooded hills and from the foot of the glen comes up the murmur of the stream. Verily, there is an unknown England—the guide-books have nothing of Castle Combe, and unless the wayfarer comes upon it like ourselves, he will miss one of the most charming bits of old-world life in the Kingdom. And it is all unconscious of its charm; excepting an occasional incursion of English trippers, visitors are few.

The road out of the valley runs along the wooded glen, by the swift stream just below, until a sharp rise brings us to the up-lands, where we enter the main Bath road. And we are glad that the close of our day’s wanderings finds us so close to Bath, for we may be sure of comfort at the Empire—though we may expect to pay for it—and we have stopped here often enough to form the acquaintance so helpful to one in the average English hotel. Bath is in Somerset, but the next morning we recross the border and resume our pilgrimage in Wiltshire.

How lightly the rarest antiquities were valued in England until yesterday is shown by the remarkable history of the Saxon chapel at Bradford-on-Avon. This tiny church, believed to be the oldest in England, was completely lost among the surrounding buildings; as the discoverer, Rev. Laurence Jones, says: “Hemmed in on every side by buildings of one kind or another, on the north by a large shed employed for the purposes of the neighbouring woolen manufactory; on the south by a coach-house and stables which hid the south side of the chancel, and by a modern house built against the same side of the nave; on the east by what was formerly, as Leland tells us, ‘a very fair house of the building of one Horton, a rich clothier,’ the western gable of which was within a very few feet of it, and hid it completely from the general view—the design and nature of the building entirely escaped the notice of the archaeologist.”

About 1865 Rev. Jones, then Vicar of Bradford, was led to his investigations by the accidental discovery of stone figures, evidently rude Saxon carvings, during some repairs to the school-room. From this beginning the building was gradually disentangled from the surrounding structures; excavations were made and many old carvings unearthed, and in short the chapel began to assume its present shape. The history of the church is of course very obscure, though Rev. Jones with great ingenuity and research shows that there is good reason to believe that it was founded by St. Aldhelm, who died in 709. If this be true, the chapel is twelve hundred years old and contests in antiquity with St. Augustine’s of Canterbury.

Architecturally, the little church is the plainest possible—it comprises a tiny entrance porch, nave and chancel. The most remarkable feature of the nave is its great height as compared with its other dimensions, being the same as its length, or about twenty-five feet. The doors are very narrow, barely wide enough for one person at a time, and windows mere slits through which the sunlight struggled rather weakly with the gloom of the interior. The chapel is a regularly constituted Church of England and services are held in it once a year. With all its crudeness, it serves as one of the milestones of the progress of a new order of things in Britain, and a space of only three centuries separates this poor little structure from the cathedrals!

The youth who acted as guide led us into his cottage near at hand when we asked for picture cards of the chapel. His eyes brightened noticeably when he learned we were from America. “Ah,” said he, “I am going there next spring; my brother is already there and doing well. Do you know that more than a hundred people have gone from Bradford to America in the past year? And more are going. There is no chance for a common man in England.” No chance for a common man in England!—How often we heard words to that effect during our pilgrimage.

Bradford has another unique relic in the “tithe barn” built in 1300, a long low structure with enormously thick, heavily buttressed walls and ponderous roof—solid oaken timbers overlaid with stone slabs. Its capacious dimensions speak eloquently of the tribute the monks were able to levy in the good old days, for here the people who could not contribute money brought their offerings in kind and the holy fathers were apparently well prepared to receive and care for anything of value. Today it serves as a cow-barn for a nearby farmer.

We leave Bradford-on-Avon for Marlborough over a fine though rather undulating road. We pause at Devizes to read the astonishing inscription on the town cross:

“The mayor and corporation of Devizes avail themselves of the stability of this building to transmit to future times the record of an awful event which occurred in this market place in the year 1753, hoping that such record may serve as a salutary warning against the danger of impiously invoking Divine vengeance or calling on the holy name of God to conceal the devices of falsehood and fraud. On Thursday, the 17th of January 1753, Ruth Pierce of Pottern in this county agreed with three other women to buy a sack of wheat in the market, each paying her due proportion towards the same. One of these women collecting the several quotas of money, discovered a deficiency and demanded of Ruth Pierce what was wanting to make good the amount. Ruth Pierce protested that she had paid her share and said she wished she might drop down dead if she had not. She rashly repeated this awful wish, when, to the consternation and terror of the surrounding multitude, she instantly fell down and expired, having the money concealed in her hand.”

Surely the citizens of Devizes, with such a warning staring them in the face every day, must be exemplary disciples of George Washington—and what a discouraging place the town would be for the headquarters of an American trust!

The town gets its name from having been a division camp back in Roman days. It figured much in the civil war, its castle, of which no traces now remain, holding out for the king until taken by Cromwell in person. There are in the town two of the finest churches in Wiltshire, second only to Salisbury Cathedral. Nor is it to be forgotten that the parents of Sir Thomas Lawrence were at one time keepers of the Bear Inn at Devizes, and the son acquired his first fame by sketching the guests and reciting poetry to them. He lived here until eighteen years of age, when he entered the Royal Academy at London.

It was a surprise to find at Avebury, a lonely village a few miles farther on, relics of a pre-historic stone circle that completely dwarf the giants of Stonehenge. This great circle was about three-quarters of a mile in circumference and three hundred years ago was nearly perfect. The mighty relics were destroyed by the unsentimental vandals of the neighborhood, and it is said that most of the cottages in the village were built from these stones. Some of them were buried to clear the land of them! Barely a dozen remain of more than six hundred monoliths that stood in the circle as late as the reign of Elizabeth; and the destruction ceased only fifty years ago. The stones are ruder and less symmetrical than those of Stonehenge, but their individual bulk averages greater—mighty fragments of rock weighing from fifty to sixty tons each. The Avebury circle is supposed to have been a temple of prehistoric sun worshipers, but its crudity indicates that it is far older than Stonehenge.

A short run across the downs soon brought us to Marlborough, a name more familiar as that of a dukedom than of a town. But the Duke of Marlborough lives at Blenheim, forty miles away, and has no connection with the Wiltshire town. Its vicissitudes were those of almost any of the older English towns, though it had the rare distinction of having its castle destroyed before the time of Cromwell. It has little of great antiquity, since a fire two hundred and fifty years ago totally wiped out the town that then existed. In the coaching days, it was an important point on the London and Bath road; and perhaps the motor car may bring back something of its old-time prosperity. The Ailesbury Arms, where we stopped for our belated lunch, appeared to be a most excellent hotel and is the only one I recollect which had a colored man in uniform at the door.

Immediately adjoining Marlborough is Savernake Forest, on the estate of the Marquis of Ailesbury, which is said to be the only forest of any extent possessed by a subject. This park is sixteen miles in circumference, and its chief glory is a straight four-mile drive between rows of enormous beeches. This splendid avenue is not “closed to motors” (the inscription that greeted us at the entrance of so many private parks), and our car carried us soberly enough through the sylvan scene, which is diversified with many grassy glades. There are several famous trees, one of which, the King’s Oak, is twenty-four feet in circumference. Savernake is pleasant and impressive in summer time, but its real beauty must be most apparent in autumn, when, as an English writer describes it, “it is a blaze of crimson and yellow—the long shadows and golden sunlight giving the scene a painted, almost too brilliant effect.”

It is growing late and we must not loiter longer by the way if we are to reach Bournemouth for the night. We sweep across the great open Salisbury Plain past Stonehenge and down the sweet vale of the Avon until the majestic spire of Salisbury pierces the sky. Then southward through Ringwood to Christchurch, where we catch a glimpse of the scant fragments of the castle and the abbey church, with its melancholy memorial to Shelley. A few minutes more on the fine ocean road brings us into Bournemouth.