A little distance onward there stood in coaching days the tollhouse of Flash; not to be confused with that of Flash Bar at Axe Edge, near Buxton. The inns of this neighbourhood were notorious in the late years of the eighteenth century and the opening days of the nineteenth as haunts of the unlicensed pedlars who obtained their stock in the town of Macclesfield and tramped the country, selling buttons, laces, and other trifles, and committing robberies when opportunity offered. They were gregarious folk, fond of the company of their kind, and held at their favoured houses of call veritable rogues’ saturnalia. From this spot and from Flash Bar, up in the hills, greatly frequented by them, are said to have arisen the expressions of “flash talk” and “flashy” articles: in allusion to their vagabonds’ slang and the cheap but showy goods they offered. But however that may be, the old place-name “Flash” merely describes the natural surroundings of the spot, and is but a phonetic variant of “plash”; whence with the addition of an initial “s” we get “splash.” We have an early authority for this; the Promptorium Parculorum of 1440 giving “Plasche or flasche, where reyne water stondyth.” Flash stands in just such a situation, below the hills, by the river Bollin.
PRESTBURY.
Bollington, on the right hand, a new town of cotton-mills and silk-factories, with very bold scenery around it, dyes the waters of the stream, which run red or yellow, blue or green, according to the colours at the moment in use.
PRESTBURY
Prestbury, one of the prettiest and most interesting villages in Cheshire, lies hidden to the left hand of the road. It is a place of much scenic and antiquarian note, for there stands the very reverend enriched Norman doorway of a church older even than the present, built into the wall of the schoolhouse, itself acquiring antiquity, seeing that it was built in 1626. The doorway, placed here in 1747, is mouldering away, but shows abundant traces of an unusual wealth of sculpture. Here, too, is the “Old Vicarage,” a three-storeyed black-and-white building, five hundred years old, and along the street, the quaint “Black Boy” inn. In the churchyard are the remains of a Saxon cross, carefully framed in glass, while queer epitaphs, like that upon Bennison, an old huntsman at Adlington, shock the solemnity of the spot:
The joys of his heart were good hounds and good nappy,
Oh! with him for ever still more and more happy.
The second line sadly wants a gloss to clarify its obscurity, but reads as though it was expected he would find equally good hounds and yet more excellent ale in Kingdom Come.
The epitaph on Edward Green reads like a primitive and clumsy attempt at constructing a Limerick: