KENDAL CASTLE, AND THE ROAD INTO KENDAL.
Now Kendal is approached, its ruined castle surmounting a rounded green hill and thrusting out ragged walls almost in the likeness of some rocky outcrop. Kendal Castle seems to have been so threatening a fortress—and it still looks especially formidable from the north, whence most of its possible enemies could come—that no one appears ever to have attacked it. They went round the other way, if another way could be found, or—better still—stopped at home.
KENDAL
At Kendal was born the much-married Katherine Parr, whose family at the time were lords of the castle. Thirdly, she was married by Henry the Eighth, and was so fortunate as to survive him. How little she regretted that Royal husband we may judge by the fact that, two months after his death she married, fourthly an old flame, Admiral Lord Seymour of Sudeley, and then, a year later, died, aged thirty-six.
On the Milnthorpe road, a mile short of Kendal, stands the little manor-house of Collin Field, a halting-place for the night often used by that formidable lady, Ann, Countess of Pembroke, on her journeys between her various residences. It was purchased in 1660 by her secretary, George Sedgwick, who long lived there and occupied his leisure in writing of his great mistress. The house is an admirable specimen of the semi-fortified smaller residences of that age.
XVIII
And so into Kendal, across the river.
Kendal, originally Kirkby Kendal, i.e. Kirk-by-Kent Dale, is indeed very much among the waters, for here the river Kent, reinforced by tributary streams pouring down from the misty fells, foams down in weirs, and is crossed, in highway and byway, by no fewer than three bridges. There is good fishing for the “gentle” angler in these waters. Though why “gentle” and where the gentleness is more than I can comprehend. For sport, the angler baits his cruel line and, if sport be good, he, himself an exemplar of “nature, red in tooth and claw,” hooks, with his fiendish barb, some unfortunate trout or grayling in the gills.
The streets of Kendal are mostly “gates,” as Stramongate and Strickland gate, and were once picturesque, in the stern way of these northern latitudes; but Kendal, in these days a highly prosperous agricultural town, and in a favourable position at the gate of the Lake Country, is being greatly rebuilt, and looks, to those who hurry by, little removed from the common run of provincial towns. Motor-tourists to and from the Lakes do not deign to halt at Kendal, and he who does may notice, any day of summer and autumn, a veritable procession of cars hurrying to and from those resorts and regarding Kendal as an unwelcome incident, containing inhabitants and dogs, which are to be run over only at risk to car and purse.
The great church of Kendal lies low, by the river, and is great, not in height, nor in any imposing architectural design, but in the sheer ground-space it covers. It has no fewer than five aisles, and by consequence of them looks squat. It is a kind of Westmoreland Westminster Abbey, the place of sepulture of barons and squires innumerable from the castle on the hill yonder and from the country round about. Their private chapels, where Parrs and Bellinghams, Stricklands, Howards, and others lie, are now not a little the worse for wear, and no longer private; and their mortuary glories obscured. But to one of the old school of county historians or patient genealogists, the interior of Kendal church would be, in the way of hatchments, heraldic carvings, and flatulent epitaphs, the study of years. More to my purpose are the strange incidents and the odd inscriptions of the place.