A rather larger village is Preston-upon-Stour, reached from the highway after passing the lovely elm avenues of Alscot Park. Thatched cottages looking upon an upland green, with village church presiding over it, are the note of Preston. Tall stone gate-piers of the eighteenth century, with fine wrought-iron gates, give entrance to the churchyard. The interior of the church is, however, a very shocking example of the eighteenth-century way with Gothic buildings.
Smaller than any of these places by the lovely little Stour is Whitchurch, just before the larger village of Alderminster. It lies off to the right, not often troubled by the stranger. The place-name is thought to derive from a supposed former dedication of the church to St. Candida, or Wita. “Alderminster” means probably “the alderman’s town,” the property in Saxon times of some wealthy landowner, and has no ecclesiastical associations or monastic history that would account for the “minster” in the place-name.
The road grows extremely beautiful at the crossing of the Stour by Ettington Park and the approach to Newbold. Here, where a by-road to Grimscote goes off on the right, an ornate pillar standing on the grass serves the purpose of a milestone and bears the sculptured arms—the gold and black pales (heraldically paly of six, or and sable)—of a former owner of Ettington Park, generally spoken of in the neighbourhood as “wold Squire Shirley, what lived yur tharty yur agoo.” It was in 1871 that he erected this elaborate stone which I think must be the only poetical milestone in England. It is not great poetry, and there is not much of it; but it shows the immense possibilities of wayside entertainment, if all its fellows were made to burst into song—
“6 miles
To Shakespeare’s Town, whose name
Is known throughout the earth;
To Shipston 4, whose lesser fame
Boasts no such poet’s birth.”
You will see here that my own notion, earlier in these chaste pages, of re-naming the town “Shakespeare-on-Avon” germinated, however unconsciously, in “wold Squire Shirley’s” brain, over forty years since.
But this is not all. Two Latin and English verses are added to the tale of it—
“Crux mea lux,
After darkness light.
From light hope flows.
And peace in death,
In Christ is sure repose.
Spes 1871.
Post obitum Salus.
In obitu Pax
In hue Spes
Post tenebras lux.”
The shields of arms include the nine roundels of the see of Worcester, and a further shield of the Shirley arms, with a canton ermine.
This poetical squire was Mr. Evelyn Philip Shirley, kinsman of Earl Ferrers. He refronted his house at Ettington Park, and indulged himself fully in that elaborate mansion in the verse he loved so well and composed so ill. In the hall still remains the shield of arms he set up there, displaying these same alternate black and gold stripes which come down from the times of Sewallis, and beneath it another of his compositions—
“These be the pales of black and gold
The which Sewallis bore of old;
And this the coat which his true heirs
The ancient house of Shirley bears.”