MONUMENT TO JUDGE NICHOLS.
FAXTON
The little church of St. Denis, Faxton, stands on the edge of a wide, common-like expanse showing many traces of old foundations of buildings, and bordered by half-a-dozen cottages, most of them far gone in decay and deserted. There is no semblance at all of any roadway into the place. The church itself is rotting with damp and mildew, and giant fungoid growths, unreal and fantastic-looking as the imaginings of pantomime, fasten themselves upon its walls, and heave up the stones of the floor. An afternoon service every Sunday more than fulfils the needs of the few inhabitants. But the church, of the interesting period between the Early English and Decorated styles, shows many traces of beauty, and there are finely sculptured corbels, an ancient font, and a sand-table—on which, in the quaint educational methods of over a century ago, children were taught to form the letters of the alphabet with finger-tips in the sand.
Returning to the main road from the muddy hazards and chances of Faxton, a steep descent leads down to the railway level-crossing at Lamport station, and thence steeply up again to the crest of Hopping Hill, where a “Traveller’s Rest” in the form of an elaborate wooden seat stands on the grass, inscribed, “Rest ye, wearie traveller. Jubilee, 1897. Reginald Loder.” It was the squire of the adjoining Maidwell Hall who placed the seat. They do not all jubilate who rest here, for I perceive the inscription, among others, “Sat here, pennyless, June 1st, 1906. J. West, stoney-broke. Pray for me.”
A fine elm avenue conducts into the well-cared-for village of Maidwell, and thence out again. On the left hand is Kelmarsh with church floridly restored and its chancel elaborately lined with beautiful (but incongruous) marbles which the squire, one Naylor, brought home in his yacht from old villas in Rome. At a loss what to do with them, he eventually gave them to the church. He lies outside, in the churchyard, under a tomb of polished granite of the gigantesque and vulgarian orders of architecture. All other tombstones have been abolished, and he lies in a solitude that looks truly imperial.
THE BATTLE OF NASEBY
Away on the left, three miles and a half distant, is the field of Naseby, on the ridge yonder, crowned by the obelisk for remembrance. There, on that lofty plateau, on June 13th, 1645, in shock of battle, the cause of King Charles was finally ruined, and the pursuit that followed the fight tailed away in slaughter towards the north-west. The unfortunate King showed to better advantage at Naseby than at almost any other period in his career. Clad completely in armour, he was in the thick of the fight, and would have rallied his disheartened cavalry for a last effort, had he not been restrained. “Face about once more: give one charge more and recover the day,” he cried, and was placing himself in advance, when the Earl of Carnwath laid his hand upon the bridle of his horse, and restrained him. “Will you go upon your death in an instant,” he said, and turned the horse’s head into the flight that then became general. It is a fine incident, but it had been better, after all, had the Earl let the unhappy King have his way, and go to his death in arms for his cause.
The road, descending from Kelmarsh by Clipston railway station, passes the unremarkable village of Oxendon, and thence comes into the growing town of Market Harborough, where we finally leave the district of the good Northants building-stone and come across the river Welland, into the clays of Leicestershire, and towns and villages of red brick.
XX
Leicestershire is pre-eminently a hunting county. To name the Quorn among hounds is to name the best known, and to mention Melton Mowbray is to name the metropolis of fox-hunting; while the hunting-field is so largely composed of peers that the rustics commonly address the wearer of pink as “my lord,” leading to the well-known retort of a sporting commoner that they “don’t know a gentleman when they see him.”