XXVI
We, none of us, who read the story of the roads, or who make holiday along them, would really like those old times back, when railways were undreamt of, and travelling for the pleasure of it was unknown. It is sufficient to read the old travellers’ tales, to realise what discouragements from leaving one’s own fireside existed then. There was, for instance, toward the close of the seventeenth century, and well on into the eighteenth, an antiquary of repute who lived at Leeds, and journeyed very frequently in the Midlands, Ralph Thoresby was his name. He travelled much, and in all weathers, and knew the Great North Road well. In his day the coaches were often, through the combined badness of the roads and the severity of the weather, obliged to lay up in the winter, like ships in Arctic seas. Like his much more illustrious contemporary, Pepys, he not infrequently lost his way, owing to the roads at that period having no boundary, and once, he tells us, he missed the road between York and Doncaster, fervently thanking God for having found it again. Indeed, all his journeys end with more or less hearty thanksgivings for a safe return. On one occasion we find him missing his pistols at an inn, and darkly suspecting the landlord to be in league with thieves and murderers; but he finds them, after a nerve-shaking search, and proceeds, thanking the Lord for all his mercies. At another time, journeying to London, he passes, and notes the circumstance, “the great common where Sir Ralph Wharton slew the highwayman.” This was doubtless Witham Common, but, although he alludes to the subject as though it were in his time a matter of great notoriety, all details of this encounter are now sadly to seek, and Sir Ralph Wharton himself lives only in Thoresby’s diary.
Thoresby was a very inaccurate person. He mentions “Stonegate Hole, between Stamford and Grantham,” but he is out of his reckoning by forty miles or so, Ogilby’s map of 1697 marking the spot near Sawtry. Accordingly when we find him, going by coach, instead of by his usual method, on horseback, in May 1714, and noting “we dined at Grantham: had the usual solemnity (this being the first time the coach passed in May), the coachman and horses being decked with ribbons and flowers, the town music and young people in couples before us,” we shrewdly suspect he was referring to the festivities of this kind held at Sutton-on-Trent, twenty-three miles further north.
Witham Common passed, we come to the village of Colsterworth, built on a rise, with fine views from it of the upland copses and gentle hills and dales of this hunting country, where the Cottesmore, the Atherstone, and the Quorn overrun one another’s boundaries. Colsterworth is the last of the stone-built villages for many a mile to come, red brick reigning from Grantham onwards, to far beyond York. It is a narrow-streeted village, with an old church, closely elbowed by houses beside the road; the church where Sir Isaac Newton and his ancestors worshipped, and where, on the wall of the Newton Chapel, may yet be seen one of the sundials he carved with a penknife when only nine years of age. In a secluded nook, nearly two miles to the left of the highroad, lies Woolsthorpe Manor House, the Newtons’ ancestral home, now a small farmhouse, with a tablet built into the wall of the room where the philosopher was born. The famous apple-tree whose falling fruit suggested the Law of Gravitation has long since disappeared.
Lincolnshire now begins to thoroughly belie its reputation for flatness, the road descending steeply from Colsterworth and rising sharply from Easton Park to the park of Stoke Rochford, with another long sharp descent beyond, and a further rise of some importance into Great Ponton, another of the very small “Great” villages.
Great Ponton, or Paunton Magna, as it was formerly called, was in early days the site of a Roman camp, and of a turnpike gate in latter times. Both have gone to a common oblivion. If the ascent to the tiny village by the highroad is steep, the climb upwards to it by the country lanes from the lowlands on the east, where the Great Northern Railway takes its easeful course, is positively precipitous. Overlooking the pleasant vale from its commanding eyrie stands the beautiful old church, in a by-way off the main road; the church itself strikingly handsome, but the pinnacled and battlemented tower its peculiar glory. It is distinctly of the ornate Somersetshire type, and a very late example of Perpendicular work. Having been built in 1519, when Gothic had reached its highest development, and Renaissance ideals were slowly but surely obtaining a hold in this country, we find in its lavish ornamentation and abundant panelling an attempt to combine the florid alien Renaissance conventions with that peculiarly insular phase of Gothic, the Perpendicular style. The result is, as it chances, happy in this instance, the new methods halting before that little further development which would have made this a debased example. The building of this tower was the work of Anthony Ellys, merchant of the staple, and of his wife, as a thank-offering for a prosperous career, and of an escape from religious persecution; and his motto, “Thynke and thanke God of all,” is still visible, carved on three sides. His house, a crow-stepped old mansion next the church, is still standing, and recalls the legend of his sending home a cask from his warehouses in Calais, labelled “Calais sand.” Arriving home, he asked his wife what she had done with the “sand.” She had put it in the cellar. He then revealed the fact that it contained, not sand, but the greater part of his wealth.
Prominent on the south-east pinnacle of this tower is a curious vane in the shape of a fiddle. The legend told of it says that, many years ago, there wandered amid the fenland villages of Lincolnshire a poor fiddler who gained a scanty livelihood by playing at fairs and weddings, and not infrequently in the parlours of the village inns on Saturday nights. After some years of this itinerant minstrelsy, he amassed a sufficient sum of money wherewith to pay his fare as a steerage passenger to the United States, to which country his relatives had emigrated some time before. In course of time, this once almost poverty stricken fiddler became rich through land speculation in the backwoods; and, revisiting the scenes of his tuneful pilgrimages in the new character of a wealthy man, offered to repair this then dilapidated church, as some sort of recognition of the kindnesses shown him in bygone years. Only one stipulation was made by him, that a vane representing his old fiddle should take the place of the weathercock. This was agreed to, and, as we see, that quaint emblem is there to this day.
Candour, however, compels the admission that this pretty legend has no truth in it; but the story has frequently found its way into print, and so is in a fair way to become a classic. The original fell in 1899 and was broken. The then rector would have replaced it with another vane of different character, but the old folk were attached to their fiddle, and so a replica was made by subscription, and fixed; and there it is to-day: the first fiddle, said the rector, that ever he heard of in the guise of a wind-instrument!
Among the many curious inn-signs along the road, that of the “Blue Horse,” at Great Ponton, is surely one of the most singular, and is a zoological curiosity not readily explained.