BRAUNSTON HILL.
One leaves Daventry steeply down hill, through a trampish, out-at-elbows, dirty-children-wallowing-in-the-dust-in-the-middle-of-the-road quarter. Hills again rise to left and right: on the left Catesby Abbey; ahead, the exceedingly steep descent of a mile down Braunston Hill, with Braunston spire, a deserted and ruinated windmill, and leagues upon leagues of distant country, unfolded to the startled eye. The “steep and dangerous descent” was to have been improved by Telford, but the design was never put into execution, and the hill still owns those defects, and hurtling motor-cars and cycles descending at extravagant speeds alarm the propriety of the neighbourhood. In the hollow, 197 feet below the hill-top, stands Braunston Station, the “Old Ship” inn nestling beneath the thunderous girders of the railway-bridge crossing over the road; and on the next rise over the Oxford Canal, a roadside forge and the “Castle” inn, as old as Queen Elizabeth’s day. Here the rising road forks, presenting a puzzle to the stranger, for either has the appearance of a high road. The Holyhead Road, however, bears to the left, that to the right leading in an outrageously steep semi-circle to the long, rustic, stone-built street of Braunston village.
BRAUNSTON.
The tower and spire of the fine Decorated church are imposing, but the interior is of little interest—the body of the building, reconstructed some fifty years ago, swept and garnished, and cleared of everything but one old relic: the mail-clad effigy of a splay-footed crusading knight, in the act of violently drawing his sword, thrust in an unobtrusive corner.
XXXVI
Two-and-a-half miles from this point, across country and in the angle formed by the branching of the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road from Weedon, lie the village and the romantic manor-house of Ashby St. Ledgers, the home of Robert Catesby, chief conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot. From Braunston is by no means the best way to Ashby: reached by a long, steep lane, and across six fields and two cross-roads. The only guides on this solitary way are the traveller’s bump of location and a battered sign-post in a cross-road, on one of whose decrepit arms, pointing vaguely through an impenetrable hedge into a ploughed field, the words, “To Ashby St. Ledgers and Crick Station,” can, under favouring circumstances of sunshine, be faintly spelled. A meditative rook, perching on a deserted harrow, typical of solitude, seemed, when the present historian came this way, to hold and keep the secret of the route, only discovered by diligent scouting at the next field-gate.
But Ashby St. Ledgers is worth this effort. At the end of the rather uninteresting village, and closing the view, there suddenly comes the beautiful grouping of old church, gatehouse, and ancient trees, leading to the manor-house itself, glimpsed through the gate—a fine old Elizabethan house, a picturesque pile of terraces, oriel windows and gables, weather-stained and delightfully picturing the orthodox character of a conspirator’s home.
ASHBY ST. LEDGERS.