At West Mill, where the valley opens out on the left, the road continues on the shoulder of the hill, with the village and the railway lying down below; a sweetly pretty scene. West Mill is a name whose sound is distinctly modern, but the place is of a venerable age, vouched for by its ancient church, whose architecture dates back to the early years of the thirteenth century. It is the fashion to spell the place-name in one word—Westmill—an ugly and altogether objectionable form.
WEST MILL.
Buntingford succeeds to West Mill. A brick bridge crossing a little river, an old red-brick chapel bulking large on the left hand, a long, long street of rustic cottages and shops and buildings of more urban pretensions, and over all a sleepy half-holiday air: that is Buntingford. It is difficult to take Buntingford seriously, even though its street be half a mile in length, for its name recalls that hero of nursery rhyme, that Baby Bunting whose father went a-hunting, and went to buy a rabbit-skin to put the Baby Bunting in. Buntingford, for all the length of its long street and the very considerable age of it, is but a hamlet of Layston, close upon a mile distant. That is why Buntingford has no old parish church, and explains the building of the red-brick chapel aforesaid in 1615, to the end that the ungodly might have no excuse for not attending public worship and the pious might exercise their piety without making unduly long pilgrimage. "Domus Orationis" is inscribed on the gable-wall of the chapel, lest perhaps it might be mistaken for some merely secular building; an easy enough matter. Behind it, stands the little group of eight almshouses built in 1684 by Dr. Seth Ward, "born in yis town," as the tablet over the principal door declares; that Bishop of Salisbury who lent his carriage-horses to King James's troops to drag the ordnance sent against the Monmouth rebels on Sedgemoor.
Layston Church stands in a meadow, neglected, and with daylight peering curiously through its roof; and the village itself has long disappeared.
The fifteen miles between Wade's Mill and Royston, forming the "Wade's Mill Turnpike Trust," continued subject to toll long after the railway was opened. With the succeeding trusts on through Royston to Kirby's Hut and Caxton, on the Old North Road, and so on to Stilton, it was one of the earliest undertakings under the general Turnpike Act of 1698, and, like them, claimed direct descent from the first turnpike gates erected in England in 1663, under the provisions of the special Act of that year, which, describing this "ancient highway and post-road" to the North as almost impassable, proceeded to give powers for toll-gates to be erected at Stilton and other places.
To this particular Trust fell the heavy task of lowering the road over the London Road hill, the highest crest of the Downs; a work completed in 1839, at a cost of £1723, plus £50 compensation paid to a nervous passenger on one of the coaches who jumped off the roof while it was crossing a temporary roadway and broke his leg. The tolls at this time were let for £4350 per annum.
Reed Hill, to which we now come, passing on the way the hamlets of Buckland and Chipping, commands the whole of Royston Downs, a tract of country whose bold, rolling outlines are still impressive, even though the land be enclosed and brought under cultivation in these later years. This chalky range is a continuation of the Chiltern Hills, and gives Royston, lying down below in the deep hollow, a curiously isolated and remote appearance. Indeed, whether it be the engineering difficulties in tunnelling these heights, or whether the deterrent cause lies in rival railway politics, or in its not being worth while to continue, the branch of the Great Eastern Railway to Buntingford goes no farther, but comes ingloriously to a terminus in that little town; while the Great Northern Railway reaches Royston circuitously, by way of Hitchin and Baldock, and artfully avoids the heights.
A wayside inn—the Red Lion—crowns the summit of Reed Hill, and looks out upon vast distances. The Red Lion himself, a very fiercely-whiskered vermilion fellow projecting over the front door of the house, and looking with an agonised expression of countenance over his shoulder—passant regardant, as the heralds say—hails from Royston itself, where he occupied a similar position in front of the old coaching-inn of the same name. Alas! when old coaching days ended and those of railways dawned, the Red Lion at Royston, ever in the forefront of coaching affairs in the town, was doomed. The High Street knows it no more, and the Bull reigns in its stead as the principal house.
These windy downs, now robbed of much of their wildness of detail, but losing nothing of their bold outline, long harboured two forms of wild life not commonly found elsewhere. The Royston Crow, indeed, still frequents this range of hills; and on some undisturbed slopes of turf the wandering botanist is even yet rewarded in his Eastertide search for the Anemone Pulsatilla, the Pasque Flower. The Royston Crow, the Corvus cornix of ornithologists, is a winter visitor from Sweden and Norway, and is known in other parts of the country as the "hooded crow." He is distinguished from his cousin corvi by his grey head and back, giving him an ancient and venerable appearance. He is not a sociable bird, and refuses to mix with the blackbirds, the thrushes, and his kindred crows, who, for their part, are content to leave him alone, and doubtless rejoice when in April he wings his way to northern latitudes.