SULBY ABBEY
The source is modest enough, being but a well amid the “good cabbage” of the inn garden. To-day, a basin of mere brick encloses it; but in 1823, the date of the obelisk, some person of refinement would adorn also Avon Well; and procured from Mr. Groggan of London a Swan of Avon in plaster; and Mr. Groggan contrived that the water should gush elegantly from her bill, but not for long. For the small boy came with stones, after his kind; and now, sans wing, sans head, sans everything, she crouches among the cabbages, “a rare bird upon earth.”
From Avon Well the spring flows to the northwest, and we follow it through “wide-skirted meads” dotted with rubbing-posts and divided by stiff ox fences (the bullfinches of the fox-hunter—for we are in the famous Pytchley country), past a broad reservoir fringed with reed and poplars, and so through more pastures to Sulby Abbey. And always, as we look back, Naseby spire marks our starting-point. About three miles down, the runnel has grown to a respectable brook, quite large enough to have kept supplied the abbey fish-ponds.
WELFORD CANAL HOUSE
On the site of this abbey—founded circa 1155 by William de Wydeville in honor of the Blessed Virgin—now stands a red-brick farm-house, passably old, and coated with ivy. Of the vanished building it conserves but two relics—a stone coffin and the floriated cover of another. The course of the stream beside it, and for some way below, is traced by the thorn-bushes under which it winds (in springtime how pleasantly!) until Welford is reached—a small brick village. Here, after rioting awhile in a maze of spendthrift channels, it recombines its waters to run under its first bridge, and begin a sober life by supplying a branch of the Grand Junction Canal. A round-house at the canal’s head forms, with the bridge, what Mr. Samuel Ireland, in his Beauties of the Warwickshire Avon (1795), calls “an agreeable landscape, giving that sort of view which, being simple in itself, seldom fails to constitute elegance.” Rather, to our thinking, the landscape’s beauty lies in its suggestion, in that here we touch the true heart of the country life; of quiet nights dividing slow, familiar days, during which man and man’s work grow steeped in the soil’s complexion, secure of all but
SWING-BRIDGE NEAR WELFORD
“the penalty of Adam,
The season’s difference.”
It is enough that we are grateful for it as we pass on down the valley where the canal and stream run side by side—the canal demurely between straight banks, the stream below trying always how many curves it can make in each field, until quieted for a while by the dam of a little red-brick mill, set down all alone in the brilliant green. The thorn-bushes are giving place to willows—not such as fringe the Thames, but gray trees of a smaller leaf, and, by your leave, more beautiful. Our walk as we follow the towpath of the canal, having the river on our left, is full of peaceful incidents and subtle revelations of color—a lock, a quaint swing-bridge, a swallow taking the sunlight on his breast as he skims between us and the inky clouds, a white horse emphasizing the meadow’s verdure. The next field holds a group of sable—a flock of rooks, a pair of black horses, a dozen velvet-black oxen, beside whom the thirteenth ox seems consciously indecorous in a half-mourning suit of iron-gray. Next, from a hawthorn “total gules” with autumn berries, we start six magpies; and so, like Christian, “give three skips and go on singing” beneath the spires and towers of this and that small village (Welford and North and South Kilworth) that look down from the edging hills.