in all come here every summer, there are probably more summer days than not in which, owing to the space covered by the grounds and their variety, you could enjoy them in your own company to practically any extent you chose. Bolton Abbey as a place of pilgrimage consists of the ruins themselves and the deep valley for two or three miles up, down which the Wharfe pursues its rapid rocky course beneath hanging woods of great beauty. Art, to be sure, has to some extent stepped in and cared for the luxuriant timber as it would be cared for in a park or private grounds, which indeed these actually are, though the Duke of Devonshire’s residence here is only a glorified shooting-box and used as such. Paths have been cut high up through the woods for the better displaying of the river as it surges far below with all the restless humours of a northern trout stream, while above the woods the high moors, purple in August with abundant heather, raise their rounded crests. At the Upper extremity of the demesne 2½ miles from the Abbey ruins which stands on the banks of the river at the lower entrance to it, the latter contracts into that singular gut or flume known as the Stridd. Every one upon familiar terms with rivers of this type knows many such spots where the waters are forced through a narrow channel between walls of rock. That the Wharfe just here has to submit to these conditions in a pronounced degree is fortunate, since it exhibits to countless souls whose ways do not lead them by the secluded banks of mountain rivers, a very fine instance of a not uncommon but always beautiful characteristic of their nature. The artist here renders superfluous any verbal description of this beautiful and boisterous portion of the Wharfe, and the same remark applies to the glorious reach above in which Barden Tower will be seen perched among its woods high above the fretting stream amid the grand sweep of the surrounding moors.
Barden Tower is a building of no ordinary personal interest. Originally one of the peel-towers erected in the Middle Ages for the keepers of Barden forest under the Cliffords of the North, it became at the close of the Wars of the Roses the residence of that Henry Lord Clifford whose romantic story every one who knows their Lake Country or their Wordsworth is familiar with. Son of the fierce and formidable Black Clifford, whose life and property the Yorkists deprived him of on the first opportunity, he was sent for safety as a child to a shepherd in the Keswick country, in whose family, and in all respects as one of them, he grew to man’s estate. When with the advent of Henry VII. the Clifford estates, including Skipton and Barden, were restored, their owner was nearly thirty, with the life and uprearing of a peasant as the sole equipment for his new and high position. But heredity counted for much in this case, though curiously enough it took the form of peaceful rather than warlike enterprises. Social instincts, too, seemed to have been effectually stamped out upon the lonely skirts of Saddleback and Skiddaw. For the “Shepherd lord” improved the peel-tower above the Wharfe into a sufficient residence for his doubtless modest estimate of comfort and dignity, and there seems to have lead a life of retirement for the next forty years, cultivating astronomy and the sciences. When called to action, however, he was not wanting in ability and common sense, and at sixty years of age had marched with the Yorkshiremen who formed such an important element in Surrey’s victorious army at Flodden.
He married twice, and his descendant Anne, Countess of Pembroke, who, by an extraordinary succession of deaths, was left sole heiress of the Clifford estates in the time of the Commonwealth, was a lady of enormous strength of character. For when over sixty she returned to the north, and in spite of Cromwell’s protests, restored all her dilapidated castles from Brougham by Keswick to this of Barden on the Wharfe, in order that the sun of her race, for she had no heir, might set at least in splendour. She took her seat, against all precedent and much opposition, as High Sheriff of Westmoreland (a Clifford inheritance), and sat upon the Bench between the judges of assize and did many other racy and forcible things which we cannot tell of here.
The ruins of the Abbey, lifted on a gentle elevation about a hundred yards from the rapid amber streams of the Wharfe, possess every charm of situation that one would wish for in a relic of the great days of ecclesiastical predominance with all its powers for good and evil, its scorn of concentration in crowded haunts, its eye for the beautiful and the remote, and for romantic streams where toothsome fish abound.
Bolton Hall, the Duke’s residence, and the ancient Rectory lying upon the same green meadow with venerable timber all about, and the stir and glitter of the moorland waters in their wide bed,
THE WHARFE, BARDEN TOWER, YORKSHIRE
make for a peace that in the many intervals when the groups of tourists have gone on their way is as profound as one would ask for, and throughout the six months of the year one may feel sure is practically unbroken.
The Abbey, or, literally, Priory church and buildings, were begun in 1154 by a fraternity of the order of St. Augustine, under the endowment of one William de Meschines, a Saxon by blood, and his Norman wife Cecilia. The church was cruciform in shape, and is now all ruinous but the nave which does duty as the parish church. It is more lofty than common, and in the main Early English with some Decorated windows. But an interesting feature is the west tower, whose completion, like that of so many others, was prevented by the cataclysm of the Dissolution. It is rather melancholy that a general ardour for further building in the stateliest Perpendicular style should seem to have broken out just before the shattering blow fell and left all over England so many pathetic instances of incompleted work. Here in Bolton it is held by those most intimate with its story that divine service has been performed without any intermission since the foundation of the Abbey. The nave was spared, it is said, at the dissolution of the House in 1539 for a parish church in consideration of the building having been the site of an early Saxon chapel. There was at one time the usual central tower. But as the ruinous choir and one transept now shows a Decorated upper part and Norman base, it seems likely that the original tower, like so many others, crashed down carrying ruin with it. The Canons’ stalls on each side of the choir under intersecting Norman arches still remain, and as many on each side nearer the High Altar, also under arches of the same period. The remains may be seen, too, of a chantry opening into the south side of the choir through a highly ornamental archway. This was the burial-place of the Cliffords of the North, though it seems to have been ravaged of their remains.