XXXI
CHOICE OF ROADS
Leaving Ashbourne, the traveller has still a choice of routes to Manchester. He may go by the bleak and lofty road across the Derbyshire moorlands, with scarce a house for many miles to keep him company, by Newhaven Inn, and in the solemn companionship of the Roman road and the prehistoric tumuli, on to Buxton and by Whaley Bridge to Stockport; or he may choose the way by Leek and Macclesfield to Stockport, which is the old mail-coach route, and therefore pre-eminently the Manchester Road. The Buxton route was, however, the earlier of the two, and only fell out of use after 1762, when the road by Leek and Macclesfield was improved and turnpiked. A better surface than that of this route could not be denied, but the stark loneliness of it, its aloofness from most human interests—it runs as it were along the roof of the world—are rather ghastly. How the isolated inns—the “Jug and Glass,” the “Newhaven Inn,” the “Bull-i’-Thorn,” and the “Old Duke of Cumberland”—pick a living it is difficult to tell.
To go back to still earlier times, neither of these routes formed part of the way between London and Manchester, and a writer of historic novels who sought to give us a true romance of this road in, say, the seventeenth century, would need to set his horsemen, who were then your only travellers, jogging along from Manchester to London by way of the roundabout route of Warrington, Great Budworth, Cranage Heath, Holmes Chapel, Brereton, Church Lawton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, whence they would generally proceed by Stone, Lichfield, and Coleshill. That was, with minor divagations suggested by taste and fancy, or by such circumstances as floods or highwaymen, the old original post-road.
FEROCITIES
The river Dove is crossed at Hanging Bridge, or Mayfield Bridge, where rival inns, one on either side of the water, glower at one another and divide the custom of the contemplative angler and the strenuous pilgrims of the road. It is “Hanging Bridge” because of the legendary execution of rebels here.
The annals of Hanging Bridge are varied by an incident of the ’Forty-five, not yet entirely forgotten, when the innkeeper, in defence of his cellar, was wounded by one of the Highlanders.
It is not so long since the countryfolk ceased talking familiarly of that time; of the farmer who was shot dead by two rebels, to whom he had refused to give up his horse; and of the dreadful fate that befel those stragglers who from one cause or another fell from the ranks of Prince Charlie’s retreating army. I picture the gaunt, ragged Highlander, fallen by the wayside, a stranger in a strange land, understanding nothing of English; and I see the murderous peasantry, revenging themselves upon him for their late terrors, by stringing him up to the nearest tree. Legends tell how these derelicts of the invading army were hanged from signposts, but we may easily disprove that much, for there were not any signposts in 1745. The simple villagers used the trees instead. A horrid story is indeed told of one of the pottery towns, by which it appears that the body of one of these unfortunate clansmen was flayed, and a drum made of his skin.
