Between Macclesfield and Buxton—five miles from Buxton and seven from Macclesfield—just, by about 1,500 yards—in Cheshire, although commonly said to be in Derbyshire, stands the next highest inn, the “Cat and Fiddle,” at a height of 1,690 feet. It is only a little less dreary-looking a house than that of “Tan Hill,” and wears a weather-beaten air earned by the fierce storms and snow blizzards to which it is in winter exposed. The wooden porch and the double doors within are necessary outposts against the wind. In the winter the inhabitants are sometimes weatherbound for days at a time, and generally take the precaution of laying in a stock of provisions. One may no more visit Buxton without going a pilgrimage to the “Cat and Fiddle” than it would be reasonable to visit Egypt and not see the Pyramids; and consequently, however lonely the place may be in winter, it is in summer visited by hundreds of trippers brought in waggonettes and brakes named after advertising generals and other puffed-up bull-frogs of the hour. The manner and the expressions of those trippers form an interesting study. You see, plainly enough, that they are bored and disillusioned, and that they wonder, as they gaze upon the hideous house, or over the wild and forbidding moorland and mountain-peaks, or down into the deep valleys, why the devil they came at all; but they are all slaves of convention, and merely wait patiently until the time for returning happily comes round.
There surely never was so demoniac-looking a cat as that sculptured here. Of the derivation of the sign there are, of course, several versions, the local one being that the sixth Duke of Devonshire was especially fond of this road, and used often to travel it with his favourite cat and a violin!
The “Traveller’s Rest,” at Flash Bar, in Staffordshire, on the Leek to Buxton Road, occupies the third place, at an altitude of 1,535 feet, while in the fourth comes a house called the “Isle of Skye,” at Wessenden Head, in Yorkshire, near Holmfirth, 1,500 feet.
The fifth highest inn is the “Traveller’s Rest,” at the summit of the Kirkstone Pass, in Westmoreland, 1,476 feet above the sea, a very considerably lower elevation; but you may still see on the front of the inn its repeatedly discredited claim to be, not merely the highest inn, but the highest inhabited house, in England—which, as Euclid might say, “is absurd.” But what the situation of the Kirkstone Pass lacks in height, it has in gloomy grandeur. Probably more tourists, exploring the mountainous country between Ambleside, Windermere, and Patterdale, visit the Kirkstone Pass inn than any other of these loftily placed hostelries—the “Cat and Fiddle” not excepted.
THE “TRAVELLER’S REST,” KIRKSTONE PASS.
The “Newby Head” inn, Yorkshire, between bleak Hawes and lonely Ingleton, stands at a height of 1,420 feet; and the Duchy Hotel at Princetown, on Dartmoor, in far distant Devonshire, seems to be on the roof of the world, with its 1,359 feet.