Not many inns are built upon crypts. Examples have already been referred to in these volumes, but another may be mentioned, in the case of the “Lamb” inn at Eastbourne; while the “Angel” at Guildford is a well-known instance. No one, looking at the modern-fronted “Angel,” one of the foremost hotels of Guildford, would be likely to accuse it of owning an Early English crypt, but it has, in fact, an exceptionally fine one of three bays, supported by two stone pillars. The ancient history of this undercroft is unknown, and merely a matter for conjecture.
At the “Angel” itself antiquity and modernity meet, for while fully equipped for twentieth century convenience, it has good oak panelling of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the fine hall and elsewhere.
CHAPTER II
THE OLD INNS OF CHESHIRE
Cheshire, that great fertile plain devoted almost exclusively to dairy-farming, is without doubt the county richest in old inns: inns for the most part built in the traditional Cheshire style—of timber and plaster: the style variously called “half-timbered,” “magpie,” or “black and white.” Of these the “Old Hall” at Sandbach is the finest and most important, having been built originally as the manor-house, about the time of Queen Elizabeth, the inscription, “16 T.B. 56” on a portion of the long frontage, probably marking repairs, or an extension of the building, at that period.
Sandbach is a place famous among antiquaries for its remarkable ninth-century sculptured monolith crosses, and thus the traveller comes to it with a mental picture, evolved entirely out of his own inner consciousness, of some sweet and quiet old country town, left long ago outside the range of modern things. But Sandbach is not in the least like that. It is a huddled-together little town, very busy, very roughly paved with stone setts, rather dirty and untidy, and apparently possessed with an ambition for new buildings, both public and private, which shall be as much as possible unlike the old Cheshire style. These are surprises for the pilgrim, whose life-long illusions are finally squelched when he is told, gently but firmly, and with a kind of pity for his ignorance, that the place-name is not pronounced “Sandback,” with a “k,” but “Sandbach,” with an “h,”—“as it is spelt,” the inhabitants crushingly add.
THE “OLD HALL” INN, SANDBACH.