The poor old crosses stand in the market-place. They have suffered many an injury in their time, and now are islanded amid a sea of market-litter, and are black and grimy. Close by them stands the “Black Bear” inn, a nodding old half-timbered and thatched “Free” house, with the inscription, “16 R K 34.” The lower part is merely brick, but this has been painted white with black stripes, in a more or less laudable attempt to imitate the genuine timber and plaster of the upper storey.
Just off this market-place, opposite the church, stands the “Old Hall” inn, facing the road in a long range of imposing panelled and gabled building, partly fronted by a beautiful lawn. No changes have spoiled the “Old Hall,” which, save for the fact that it has long been an inn, remains very much as it was built. It is the property of the Earl of Crewe.
Stout oaken floors and dark oak panelling furnish the old house throughout. You enter the capacious bar through a Jacobean screen and drink mellow home-brewed in the appropriately mellow light that comes between oaken Elizabethan mullions and through leaded casements. It is not by any fanciful figure of speech that the traveller quenches his thirst here at the “Old Hall” in a tankard of home-brewed. The house, in fact, brews its own ale, and supplies it largely to the farm-houses of the neighbourhood; and a very pretty tipple it is, too.
DOG-GATES AT HEAD OF STAIRCASE, “OLD HALL” INN, SANDBACH.
There are at least three very fine carved oak Jacobean fire-places and overmantels in the house, the finest that in the public parlour; and at the head of the broad staircase remains a curious relic of old times—the “dog-gates” that formerly shut out the domestic pets of the establishment from the bedrooms—and in fact do so still.
Not so large, but in some respects finer even than the “Old Hall,” the “Bear’s Head” at Brereton, five miles from Sandbach, shows most of its beauty on the outside. It was built in 1615, as the date carved on the lovely old timbered porch declares, and in days when the Breretons of Brereton Hall still ruled; as their bear’s-head crest, their shield of arms, and the initials “W. M. B.,” prove. Their old home, Brereton Hall, close by, is traditionally the original of Washington Irving’s “Bracebridge Hall.”
Brereton village is among the smallest of places, and the inn, itself as noble as many an old manor-house, is neighboured only by a few scattered cottages. But, however insignificant the village, the inn was once, and long continued to be, a very busy posting-house on a frequented route between London and Liverpool, as the eighteenth-century additions to the house bear witness. The additional wing, built at that period, is by no means an attractive feature, and fortunately does not obtrude itself in general views of the inn from the best points of view; but the magnificent range of stables added at the same date, on the opposite side of the road, although, of course, not in keeping with the black-and-white timbering of the original building, compose well, artistically, with it, and form in themselves a very fine specimen of the design and the brickwork of that time.
