ASSORTED FOLLY
This is all very highly uncomplimentary and interesting, and Gotham seems eminently a place to be visited; but travellers meet with strange disappointments. Gotham is a furiously ugly village of extraordinarily wide and empty roads, and smelling violently of pigs; gypsum mines and soap-works still further render it undesirable. A commonplace inn, the “Cuckoo Bush,” displays a double-sided pictorial sign, very faded, exhibiting on one side the cuckoo and on the other a group of the wiseacres aforesaid, attempting to build him in.
It is indeed, by selecting the fine church, possible to make an illustration of Gotham that shall not be commonplace; and the interior, being in part Transitional Norman, is even finer than the exterior. A singular uncouth carving on the chancel arch, popularly supposed to represent “Toothache,” was probably intended to typify the Divine “gift of speech.”
Resuming the road at Kegworth, the fag-end of Leicestershire is soon ended. Lockington, on the left hand, with a very dilapidated church, being the last village in this angle of the shire, where it joins Notts and Derbyshire, was once considered a remote and out-of-the-way place: hence the old rustic saying, “Put up your pipes and go to Lockington Wake”: i.e. “Be quiet and go away with you.”
XXV
And thus we come to the Trent, but before crossing at Cavendish Bridge and into Derby, we will leave the modern high road, and, striking off to the left, through Castle Donington, come, in something like six miles, to Stanton-by-Bridge and the long causeway that leads up to the famous bridge of Swarkestone. The present line of road between Derby and London, by way of Loughborough, did not come into great use until 1771, when Cavendish Bridge was built. Until that time, the broad and swift Trent, at the best of times not easily crossed, and always peculiarly subject to flooding, was without a bridge anywhere else than at Swarkestone in all those twenty-four miles or so between Nottingham and Burton, and much of the traffic of horsemen, pedestrians and pack-horses, instead of crossing the Trent here, at Wilne Ferry, went southward of Derby by Osmaston, Chellaston, and across the river at Swarkestone, and thence past Stanton-by-Bridge and King’s Newton, coming into a choice of roads for London at Ravenstone, whence one went, at discretion, either by Hinckley and Towcester, or else by Groby and so into Leicester.
THE RIVER TRENT
The Trent was thus, in those ancient days when bridges were few, a barrier of high strategical importance, and whoso held those infrequent bridges commanded the military situation in the midlands: hence the high importance, from an early period, of the castle, town, and bridge of Nottingham.
SWARKESTONE BRIDGE
Between Stanton and Swarkestone, on either side of the Trent, the land stretches out perfectly flat for nearly a mile, and is at this day a fertile expanse of water-meadows in summer. In winter, or in wet seasons, it becomes a vast inland sea, not, even now, altogether without its dangers, but anciently extremely hazardous.