LEATHLEY STOCKS.
A pleasant meadow walk by the riverside leads to Leathley, which has a Norman church, but can scarcely be called a village, for there is no inn. A formidable pair of stocks stand ready by the churchyard; but as nothing stronger than milk can be procured, they have not been worn out with too much work. Again, at Weston on the other side of the Wharfe river we come across the roadside stocks (like the usual Yorkshire type, with two uprights of stone) by the spreading roots of an ancient tree. Weston Hall is a long low Tudor building, with at one end a broad bay of three storeys. An old banqueting-house in the grounds is ornamented with shields of arms; and formerly the windows of it were full of heraldic stained glass, some of which is now in the windows of the Hall. From here we went northwards in search of Swinsty Hall, over a lonely moorland district. The road goes up and up until you are not surprised when you come to a signpost pointing to "To Snowdon." To the left, you are told, leads to "Blubberhouses," wherever that may be. For preference we chose the latter road, and soon got completely lost in the wilds. The only sign of civilisation was a barn, where we had the fortune to find an old man who presumably spoke the pure dialect, for we couldn't make head or tail of it. "Swinsty—ai, you go on ter road until it is," was the direction he gave, and we went on and until it wasn't. At length, however, after plodding knee deep in marshy land and saturated heather, we found the object of our search perched in a lonely meadow above a wide stretch of water. It looked as if it had a gloomy history; and no wonder that some of the upper rooms are held in awe, for there the ghost of a person with the unromantic name of Robinson is said to count over his ill-gotten gains, which he brought down from London in waggons when the Plague of 1666 was raging. He had the good fortune to escape contamination, and once back with his plundered wealth he meant to have what nowadays we call "a good time"; but the story has a moral, for it got winded abroad how he got his gold, and nobody would have anything to do with him or his money, and by the irony of fate he had to spend the rest of his days in trying to wash away the germs of infection.
STOCKS AT WESTON.
The hall is entered through a spacious porch in the roof of which is hung an enormous bell. The room you enter is by no means gloomy. A carved oak staircase with balustrade of peculiar form leads to other rooms panelled to the ceiling, with fine overmantels. The leads of the small window-panes are of fanciful design; one bears the date 1627 and the initials I. W. H., and these occur again with the date 1639 in some oak carving in one of the bedrooms. A "well" stone staircase between rough-hewn stone walls leads up to the attics, which have open timber roofs with semicircular span to the main beams. They look as if they were but recently put up, so fresh does the wood look, and the pegs that join the timbers still protrude as if they had just been hammered in, and awaited the workman's axe to cut them level. A word upon the subject of these old roofs may not be out of place. When old houses are restored, of course it is the proper thing to open out an original timber roof where the original hall or chamber has been divided and partitioned, but in so many instances nowadays flat ceilings are removed to show the open timbers which were never intended to be seen. Bedrooms are thus made cold and bare, with not nearly enough protection from the draughts from the tiles. The attics at Swinsty are a proof of this, there being no great distance between the floor and the roof. Another thing, if the floors were done away with here, Mr. Robinson would have to come down a storey, and that is not desirable.
