“Oh yes,” said she.
Then came the crushing rejoinder: “Why, Miss Worthington, you know perfectly well that no Stilton cheese was ever made at Stilton: they’re all made in Leicestershire; and as you say your cheeses are made at Stilton, they cannot be good, and I won’t have one.”
It is the merest commonplace to say that time works wonders. We know it does: wonders not infrequently of the most unpleasant kind. When we find time bringing about marvels of the pleasant and desirable sort I think we should account ourselves fortunate.
There are marvels nowadays being wrought on the Great North Road in particular, and others in general, in that entirely felicitous manner. I do not here make allusion to the electric tramways that monopolise the best part of the roadways out of London for some ten miles or so of the old romantic highways. Not at all; in fact, far otherwise. The particular miracles I am contemplating are the works undertaken by the Road Club of the British Isles, in the re-opening of ancient hostelries long ago retired into private life, and in bringing back to the survivors a second term of their old-time prosperity. The Road Club, largely consisting of motorists, encourages touring, and has set out upon a programme of interesting all lovers of the countryside in country quarters. The Great North Road is dotted here and there with the inns it has revived: the “Red Lion” at Hatfield, the “George” at Grantham, and so forth, and it has entirely purchased and taken over the management of the “Royal County Hotel” at Durham and the “Bell” at Barnby Moor.
I am in this place not so greatly concerned to hold forth upon the others, but the case of the “Bell” is remarkable. Some years since, in writing the picturesque story of the Great North Road,[1] I discoursed at length upon the history of that remarkably fine old hostelry, which was then, and for close upon sixty years had been, a private country residence. Railways had been too much for it, and the licence had been surrendered, and postboys and the whole staff dispersed.
And now? Why now the “Bell,” or “Ye Olde Bell,” as I perceive the Road Club prefers to style it, is an inn once more. I forget how many thousands of pounds have been expended in alterations, and in re-installing the establishment; but it has become in three equal parts, as it were, inn, club-house and farm-house, fully licensed, with golf-links handy. Here come the motor tourists, and here meet Lord Galway’s hounds, and, in short, the ancient glories of the “Bell” are, with a modern gloss, revived. If the spirits of the jolly old landlords can know these things, surely they are pleased.
Among the old coaching-inns sadly fallen from their former estate, and now surviving only in greatly altered circumstances, in a mere corner of the great buildings they once occupied, is the “Red Lion,” Egham; once one of the largest and finest inns on the Exeter Road.
The “Red Lion” may, for purposes of comparison, be divided into three parts. There is the old gabled original portion of the inn, probably of late seventeenth-century date, now used as a medical dispensary, forming two sides of a courtyard, recessed from the road, and screened from it by an old wrought-iron railing; and added to it, perhaps eighty years later, an imposing range of eighteenth-century red-brick buildings, partly in use as offices for the local Urban District Council and in part a “Literary Institute,” and a world too large for both. This great building is even more imposing within; its immense cellarage, large ball-, or assembly-room, noble staircases, and finely panelled walls, the now neglected witnesses of a bygone prosperity. Traditions still survive of how George the Fourth used to entertain his Windsor huntsmen here. In the rear was stabling for some two hundred horses. Most of it has been cleared away, but the old postboys’ cottages still remain in the spacious yard. The remaining part of the “Red Lion,” still carried on as an inn, presents a white-stuccoed, Early Victorian front to the high road.
THE “BELL,” BARNBY MOOR: MEET OF LORD GALWAY’S HOUNDS.