Ouse, slow-winding through a level plain.
Passing through the village of Stoke Goldington, where the golden-brown stone of Northamptonshire—the “sugar-stone,” as it is locally styled—is first noticed in the buildings, Inckley, or Eakley Lane is reached. “Eakley,” which appears to derive from “Ea” = water, and “lea” = a meadow, referring to the neighbouring water-meadows of the Ouse, is the proper name, but the spot was known indifferently by either spelling in coaching days, when it was notable for two inns, the “Bull’s Head” and the “George and Dragon.” Both houses are still in existence, but have long since ceased to be inns.
Old houses that were once inns are indeed remarkably plentiful in these next few miles. At Horton there stands what was formerly “Horton Inn,” now a handsome country residence. Obviously it was built in two separate periods; beginning business in a modest way and then enlarged to twice its original size. Doubtless further enlargements and improvements were in contemplation when the era of railways came in and doomed all such hopes to failure. A spacious drive once led up to the house, but that was long ago walled in and converted into a garden.
Here we come into Northamptonshire, uphill, into the region that was once known as Salcey Forest, which, with the Forest of Rockingham to the east and that of Whittlebury on the west, was in the days of the Plantagenet kings a portion of a vast chase, in which the red deer were of far more account than men.
HORTON INN.
“SUGAR-STONE”
Northamptonshire, which takes its name from Northampton, the county town (itself originally merely “Hampton,” and afterwards styled “North Hampton” for the express purpose of distinguishing it from Southampton), is an undulating shire of what Horace Walpole was pleased to style, rather aptly, “dumpling hills.” It is rich in building-stone of various kinds, largely of that beautiful golden-russet ferruginous sandstone, already referred to as “sugar-stone”; hence the fine substantial character of local buildings. Brick is not introduced largely into the architecture of its towns and villages.
Fuller, who was a native of this shire, writing of it two hundred and fifty years ago, said there was as little waste ground here as in any county of England, and compared Northamptonshire with “an apple without core to be cut out, or rind to be pared away.” His praise was not extravagant, for the country contains little or nothing in the way of bleak heath or barren moor.