RIVINGTON PIKE.
The great reservoirs beside the road, fenced from it by an ugly dwarf wall and iron railing, are full of fish, and in most respects like natural lakes; but the scenery, bold though it be, is scrubby and hard-featured, and the scant trees look to those used to the softer and more luxuriant vegetation of the south, starved. But if one has courage sufficient to follow the waggonette-loads of beanfeasters from Bolton, who favour these scenes, there will be found a quite charming wooded glen and waterfall at Dean, beyond Rivington village.
RIVINGTON PIKE FROM THE ROAD.
MILES STANDISH
That, however, is by no means the way to Chorley; but rather a side dish: albeit a good deal more appetising than the main road itself. Chorley was in Leland’s time, the matter of four hundred years ago, down in doleful dumps. “Chorle,” he notes, painstaking traveller that he was, “wonderful poor, having no market.” This is where your modern Chorleian smiles the smile of conscious worth, for the place is the antithesis of what it was then and is wonderfully rich and populous. At the same time, I do not find anything at all to say about it, except that continual tale of cotton-mills, supplemented here by calico-printing. There is an ancient parish church, with relics of St. Lawrence, its patron saint, brought from Normandy in 1442 by Sir Rowland Standish, and enclosed doubly behind glass and an iron grille; and with the elaborate canopied pew of the Standish family of Duxbury Park, near by. The Standishes number among their ancestors such diverse characters as that loyal squire, John Standish, who helped to dispatch Wat Tyler; and the much more famous Miles Standish, “a blunt old sea-captain, a man not of words, but of actions,” who, born in 1584, sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers to America in the Mayflower, in 1620. The Chorley parish register of baptisms in 1584, in which his name should occur, is defaced, lending some support to the theory that his claim to be the rightful heir to the Duxbury estate was feared by his contemporary relatives, who are in this manner suspected of seeking to invalidate it. Whatever his prospects of success, he relinquished them in sailing for New England, where he became the best-known of those early colonists, and has found apotheosis in Longfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish. The poet represents him as the elderly widowed Governor of Plymouth, in love with Priscilla, and, at once too shy and too busy to do his own love-making, despatching his youthful secretary, John Alden—himself in love with Priscilla—to woo her, “the loveliest maiden in Plymouth,” by proxy. Poor John went on his mission, as he was bid, and loyally fulfilled it. But without avail. Miles, in John’s arguments, appeared to every advantage. He was a great man, the greatest in the colony, and heir to vast estates; a gentleman, like all the Standishes, with a silver cock, red-combed and wattled, for arms, and all the rest of it. But these great gifts were nothing to Priscilla, who no more than any other girl could endure love-making by deputy, and, seeing the true condition of affairs, asked, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”
A monument, 120 feet in height, stands on Captain’s Hill, Duxbury, to the memory of this stout but bashful sailor, and when the elements are kindly forms a conspicuous landmark. But rain is your portion in these latitudes, which perhaps is the reason why the present writer, not alone in this disability, failed to find that “Sea View” of which the sign of a wayside inn on the road from Chorley to Preston speaks. But after all, rain or shine, that is no wonder, for measured on the map, across the flattest of country, it is seven miles thence to the sea.
Hard by, on the right hand, is Whittle-le-Woods—there should be elements of humour in the name to Americans, that nation of whittlers—celebrated (a strictly local celebrity) for its alkaline springs, sovereign, so they say, for rheumatic affections, but more potent, it would appear, in brewing, for “Whittle Springs Ale”—a kind of stingo—obtrudes upon you, on sign and hoarding, all the way into Preston.
Clayton Green is an outlying settlement of Clayton-le-Woods, one of the several unimportant villages in the neighbourhood with that foreign conjunction. There is nothing whatever to be said of Clayton Green, which has a place in my memory only as the spot where, in an inclement summer, I stood sheltering under the dripping trees at the entrance to a park, and saw, as I shivered there in the cold wet blast, a hundred-legged insect happily crawl into his warm, snug crevice between the stones of the dry walling, out of the miserable day. And the cold wind blew, the rain, fell, and the motors swashed by in the ankle-deep slush of the muddy road, and it was yet over five miles to the outskirts of Preston.
