“Hails the freighted Barge from Western Shores,
Rich with the Tribute of a thousand Climes.”
The Avon, from Tewkesbury to Stratford, was made navigable in 1637 by Mr. William Sandys, of Fladbury, “at his own proper cost.” But the railways have ruined the waterways for a time, and Mr. Sandys’s handiwork lies in sore decay. Till Evesham be passed we shall meet with no barges, but with shallows, dismantled locks, broken-down weirs to be shot, and sound ones to be pulled over that will give us excitement enough, and toil too.
Below the lock we drifted under a hanging copse, the Weir Brake, where a pretty foot-path runs for Stratford lovers. Below it, by a cluster of willows, the Stour comes down; and a little farther yet stands Luddington, where Shakespeare is said to have been married; but the church and its records have been destroyed by fire. From Luddington you spy Weston-upon-Avon, in Gloucestershire, across the river, the tower of its sturdy perpendicular church peering above the elms that hide it from the river-side throughout the summer.
WESTON-UPON-AVON
By Weston our remembrance keeps a picture—a broken lock and weir, an islet or two heavy with purple loosestrife, a swan bathing in the channel between. These were of the foreground. Beyond them, a line of willows hid the flat fields on our right; but on the left rose a steep green slope, topped with poplars and dotted with red cattle; and ahead the red roof of Binton church showed out prettily from the hill-side. As we saw the picture we broke into it, shooting the weir, scaring the swan, and driving her before us to Binton Bridges. By Binton Bridges stands an inn, the Four Alls. On its sign-board, in gay colors, are depicted four figures—the King, the Priest, the Soldier, and the Yeoman; and around them runs this chiming legend:
“Rule all,
Pray all,
Fight all,
Pay all.”
We could not remember a place so utterly God-forsaken as this inn beside the bridge, nor a woman so weary of face as its once handsome landlady. She spoke of the inn and its custom in a low, musical voice that caused Q. to rush out into the yard to hide his pity; and there he found a gig, and, sitting down before it, wondered.
Change and decay fill our literature; but we have not explained either. For instance, here was a gig—a soundly built, gayly painted gig. A glance told that it had not been driven a dozen times, that nothing was broken, and that it had been backed into this heap of nettles years ago to rot. It had been rotting ever since. The paint on its sides had blistered, the nettles climbed above its wheels and flourished over its back seat. Still it was a good gig, and the most inexplicable sight that met us on our voyage. Only less desolate than Binton Bridges is Black Cliff, below—a bank covered with crab-trees and thorns and hummocks of sombre grass. It was here that one Palmer, a wife-murderer, drowned his good woman in Avon at the beginning of the century; and the oldest man in Bidford, not far below, remembers seeing a gibbet on the hill-side, with chains and a few bones and rags dangling—all that was left of him. A gate post at the top of the hill on the Evesham road is made of this gibbet, and still groans at night, to the horror of the passing native.
Soon we reach Welford, the second and more beautiful Welford on the river. It stands behind a stiff slope, where now the chestnuts are turning yellow, and the village street is worth following. It winds by queer old cottages set down in plum and apple orchards; by a modern Maypole; by a little church of stained buff sandstone, with oaken lych-gate and church-yard wall scarcely containing the dead, who already are piled level with its coping; by more queer crazy cottages—and then suddenly melts, ends, disappears in grass. It is as if the end of the world were reached. Of course we wanted to settle down and spend our lives here, but were growing used to the desire by this time, and dragged each other away without serious resistance down to the old mill, where our canoe lay waiting.