THE “OLD SWAN,” ATHERSTONE.
The uniquely projecting porch of the “Old Ship” at Worksop, and the old gabled house behind it, still keep a rustic air in the streets of that growing town, just as the “Old Swan” at Atherstone, restored in a judiciously conservative manner, will long serve to maintain memories of the old England of four hundred years ago.
All the old inns of the decayed port of Sandwich have, by dint of the fallen circumstances of that once busy haven, become, with all their surroundings, rural. Golfers have of late years enlivened the surroundings of Sandwich, and partly peopled the empty streets, but commerce has for ever forsaken this old Cinque Port. In one of the most silent streets stands the inn now known as the “King’s Arms,” although, according to the date of 1592 on the richly carved angle-post of the building, and with the additional evidence of the Royal Arms supported by the Red Dragon of the Tudors, it was erected in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The grotesque figure carved in high relief on the angle-post appears to be a Tudor Renaissance combination of Sun-god and the great god Pan. The front of the house is covered with plaster, but there can be little doubt that here, beneath that coating, as in numberless other instances, a good half-timbered construction awaits discovery. Already, when the “King’s Arms” was built, Sandwich haven was being choked with the sand and shingle brought by the Channel currents, and the seaport was seen to be doomed to extinction. He was, therefore, a rash man who then built anew here, and few indeed have been the new houses since then.
A characteristic old inn of Sandwich is the queer old house with peaked gables, contemporary with the “King’s Arms,” bearing the sign of the “Malt Shovel,” and exhibiting one of those implements of the maltster’s trade over the doorway.
The fisher village of Mousehole, in Cornwall—whose name is a perennial joy to visitors—possesses a manor-house turned inn; a private house made public: if indeed it be not altogether derogatory to a picturesque village inn to style it by a name more usually associated with a mere modern urban drinking-shop.
THE “KING’S ARMS,” SANDWICH.
Mousehole may be found a little to the westward of Penzance and Newlyn. Like most of its fellows, it lies along the sides and in the bottom of a hollow, where the sea comes in like a pool, and gives more or less shelter to fisher-boats. No one who retains his sense of smell ever has any doubt of Mousehole being engaged in the fish trade, for there are fresh fish continually being brought in, and there are fish, very far from fresh, preserved in the fish-cellars that are so striking a feature of the place, in the olfactory way. In those cellars the pilchards that are the staple of the Cornish fishery are barrelled until such time as they are wanted for export to the Mediterranean, whence, it is commonly believed, they return, in all the glory of oil, tinned and labelled in strange tongues, “sardines.”
