Just below, on the north bank, rises Blacklow Hill, whither, on the 19th of June, 1312, Piers Gaveston, the favorite of King Edward II., was marched out from Warwick Castle by the barons to meet his doom. His head was struck off, and, rolling down into a thicket, was picked up by a “friar preacher” and carried off in his hood. On the rock beside the scene of that grim revenge this inscription was rudely cut: “P. Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, beheaded here + 1312;” and to-day a simple cross also marks the spot.
Hence, by the only rocks of which Avon can boast—and these are of softest sandstone, their asperities worn all away by the weather—we wind beneath Milverton village, with its odd church tower of wood, to the weir and mill of Guy’s Cliffe.
The beauties of this spot have been bepraised for centuries. Leland speaks of them; Drayton sings them.
GUY’S CLIFFE MILL
“There,” says Camden, “have yee a shady little wood, cleere and cristal springs, mossie bottoms and caves, medowes alwaies fresh and greene, the river rumbling heere and there among the stones with his streame making a milde noise and gentle whispering, and, besides all this, solitary and still quietness, things most grateful to the Muses.” Fuller, who knew it well, calls it “a most delicious place, so that a man in many miles’ riding cannot meet so much variety as there one furlong doth afford.” The water-mill is mentioned in Domesday-book, and has been sketched constantly ever since—a low, quaint pile, fronted by a recessed open gallery, under which the water is forever sparkling and frothing, fresh from its spin over the mill-wheels, or tumble down the ledges of the weir.
GUY’S CLIFFE
And below this mill rises the famous cliff, hollowed with many caves, in one of which lived Guy of Warwick, slayer of the Dun Cow, of lions, dragons, giants, paynims, and all such cattle; who married the fair Phyllis of Warwick Castle; who afterwards repented of his much bloodshed, and trudged on foot to Palestine by way of expiation; who anon returned again on foot to Warwick, where was his home and his dear Phyllis. And coming to his own house door, where his wife was used to feed every day thirteen poor men with her own hand, he stood with the rest, and received bread from her for three days, and she knew him not. So he learned that God’s wrath was not sated, and betook him to a fair rocky place beside the river, a mile and more from his town; where, as his words go in the old ballad,