Down a Yorkshire River.
PART II.
(Continued from p. 218.)
A FEW miles lower down, passing through Sowerby Bridge, commercially thriving but poetically poor, we come again to green fields and remnants of ancient forest, and notice on the left hand Wood Hall, where the boy Laurence Sterne, of “Tristram Shandy” fame, spent his early years. The Heath Grammar School, where he was educated, is half an hour’s walk beyond the ridge of the hill in the direction of Halifax. Formerly a rustic bridge, little better than a plank, spanned the river near Wood Hall, and it was along this plank, there is little doubt, that Lucy Gray’s footprints were tracked after she had slipped into the water. We have now reached a point where the scenery, if less wild than the glens and gorges near the border hills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, is scarcely less beautiful, and what it loses in ruggedness of natural contour it gains in historic associations and legendary romance. Copley Hall, in the eleventh century the residence of the knightly family of Copley, has long ago been turned into cottages, but the name survives in the pretty modern village and prettier church, and antiquaries love to dwell on the old stories connected with the spot, and tell how Adam de Copley fell fighting for William the Conqueror at the siege of York; how his grandson, another Adam de Copley, became rector of his parish church at Halifax; and how a third Sir Adam, for this was a favourite name, carried away a sister from Kirklees Nunnery, and afterwards joined the Crusaders and died in Palestine. This fair nun, alas! was immured in a tower seven stories high, and mysterious lights were long seen to burn in the ladye’s chamber, the ruins of which are said to have been visible some years ago. Elland, anciently and more correctly Ealand, with its fine old fane and relics of mediæval times, where the Ealands and the Saviles lived in barbaric splendour, was the scene of many a thrilling legend and bloody fray, notably the tragedy, or rather chain of tragedies, which ended in the murder of Sir John Ealand and his little boy as they were crossing the weir-stones on Palm Sunday on their way to matins at Saint Mary’s. By this deed, which took place in the fourteenth century, a feud that had lasted two generations was brought to an end, as was likewise the family name of Ealand, the male line of which became extinct on the death of Sir John’s only boy, the child who shared his father’s fate on the weir-stones. A few miles beyond Ealand, on the hill slope above the Calder, stand the stately groves of Kirklees Priory, so well known, as we have seen, to the gay Sir Adam de Copley. At Kirklees, as many readers are aware, died the most chivalrous of bandits, Robin Hood. His grave, overshadowed by majestic beeches, is not far from the ruins of the Nunnery, but in unconsecrated ground, though it is said there used to be a cross to mark the spot. Calder dale was a favourite haunt of the merry men, and many the fat buck they have run down in this valley. Robin Hood has left his name in several places hereabouts, and the peasantry still love to repeat the traditionary stories of his gallantry and daring. Pinder Green, near Wakefield, as we read in ballad line, was the scene of an encounter between Robin and the Jolly Pinder. But we have not left the ruins of the Priory. I suppose that all lovers of Brontëan literature know that the scene of “Shirley” is laid close to Kirklees, which place figures indeed in the novel as Nunnely. Any one acquainted with the locality will recognise Kirklees very thinly disguised under this name: “The village of Nunnely has been alluded to: its old church, its forest, its monastic ruins. It had also its Hall, called the Priory—an older, a larger, a more lordly abode than any Briarfield or Whinbury owned; and, what is more, it had its man of title—its baronet, which neither Briarfield nor Whinbury could boast.” In another chapter Kirklees is thus spoken of: “Kind gentleman as the baronet is, he asked the tutor too; but the tutor would much sooner have made an appointment with the ghost of the Earl of Huntingdon to meet him, and a shadowy ring of his merry men, under the canopy of the thickest, blackest, oldest oak in Nunnely Forest. Yes, he would rather have appointed tryst with a phantom abbess, or mist-pale nun, among the wet and weedy relics of that ruined sanctuary of theirs, mouldering in the core of the wood.”
The scenery now begins to lose those romantic features down to this point so noticeable in this valley. Larger towns and numerous manufacturing villages disturb the once pastoral quietude. Keeping to the bank of the river we pass Mirfield, and shortly reach Dewsbury, where Paulinus, the first Archbishop of York, preached in the early part of the seventh century—“Paulinus hic prædicavit et celebravit, A.D. 627.” Some years ago there was an old cross commemorating this event. And here in the Calder, I doubt not, the great Apostle of the North baptized hundreds of converts. The ancient Saxon parish of Dewsbury contained an area of 400 square miles. Travel we on and we come to Wakefield, in the meadows close to which was fought one of the most sanguinary battles in the Wars of the Roses. On Wakefield bridge, which spans the Calder, there is a lovely little chapelle, recently restored, thought to have been originally erected in the reign of Edward III., and said to have been rebuilt by Edward IV. to commemorate the death of his father, the Duke of York, and the young Earl of Rutland, the beautiful boy so ruthlessly slain there by Lord Clifford. The Calder, flowing on past the villages of Heath and Stanley, eventually loses itself in the Aire at Castleford. Hence the distich:
“Castleford lasses must needs be fair,
Since they wash themselves both in Calder and Aire.”
Near the border hills, some of the tributary brooks that join the Calder are streams of rare beauty, and flow through regions of sylvan wildness, than which there are none finer in Derbyshire or Devon. If the traveller had to turn aside and wander up one of these glens he would soon leave behind him the din of trade, and find himself in ravine-like woodland solitudes. One of the loveliest and loneliest of these brooks is Turvin, born on the bleak summit of Blackstone Edge, and which precipitates itself in narrow winding channels through many a clough and forest dell. When the shadows of the gloaming steal over the world, it is an eerie sight to watch the mists of autumn as they creep up the gorge and curl round the rocks, and the spectator may almost realise that he is gazing upon some weird and enchanted land. About the middle of last century this glen was the haunt of a gang of coiners who for many years succeeded in eluding and defying the officers of the law. That these daring men carried on their nefarious practices was a fact well known to everybody in the locality, and it is to be feared they were secretly encouraged, as they were assuredly screened, by their neighbours and relatives. Something like a feeling of awe, tradition says, was felt by the cottagers on the distant hills, when they heard in the stillness of night the stroke of the sledge-hammer as the coiners plied, almost defiantly plied, their desperate work. At last some of the ringleaders were captured, tried, and hung. The rest of the gang still at large took their revenge by murdering the excise officer who had been instrumental in bringing the culprits to justice. Other captures were made and more murder followed. But in the end, after a twenty years’ lease of successful defiance, this band of reckless coiners was broken up.
Speaking of Blackstone Edge and the glens leading therefrom down to Calder dale, we are reminded of the impression this mountain with its wild passes and rugged roads had on Taylor, the Water Poet, who crossed over in 1639, and this is what he says: “When I left Halifax I rode over such ways as were past comparison or amendment, for when I went down the lofty mountain called Blackstone Edge, I thought myself in the land of break-necke, it was so steep and tedious.” Over this mountain, but in the opposite direction, wearily paced De Foe when on his way to take refuge in Halifax, perhaps resting a little while by the riverside before he climbed the steep ascent of Skircote. Whilst staying in Halifax he is said to have written part of “Robinson Crusoe.”
Fair features in woman are not irremediably spoiled by accident of cut and scar, or through waste of fever and pain: the lovely lines survive, and the soul beneath breathes unspeakable subtle beauty in smile of the eye and play of emotion on the eloquent face. Such is it with fair Calder dale—a region of poetry and romance, of legendary rock and historic hall, of mountain and glen, of shaw and burn, of daisied meadow and ferny dell. From the spot where I write, looking out at the antique lattice, I see the long sweep of the valley with its wide openings and gorge-like ravines stretching through the heart and the solitude of the everlasting hills, and though smoke blackens and mill mars the landscape, there is a loveliness about the contour of high heath-clad cliff, about the green waving woods musical with bird carol and summer breeze, about the sun-bright waters winding and narrowing miles away to a silver streak, which the accidents of trade and material civilisation have very far from irretrievably ruined.
F.