A Walk from London to John O'Groat's / With Notes by the Way

by Elihu Burritt

ROYSTON AND ITS SPECIALITIES—ENTERTAINMENT IN A SMALL VILLAGE—ST. IVES—VISITS TO ADJOINING VILLAGES—A FEN-FARM—CAPITAL INVESTED IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN AGRICULTURE COMPARED—ALLOTMENTS AND GARDEN TENANTRY—BARLEY GROWN ON OATS.

From Chrishall Grange I went on to Royston, where I found very quiet and comfortable quarters in a small inn called “The Catherine Wheel,” for what reason it is not yet clear to my mind, and the landlady could not enlighten me on the subject. I have noticed two inns in London of the same name, and have seen it mounted on several other public houses in England. Why that ancient saint and the machinery of her torture should be alone selected from the history and host of Christian martyrs, and thus associated with houses of entertainment for man and beast, is a mystery which I will not undertake to explore. To be sure, the head of a puncheon of rum is round like a wheel, and if the liquor were not too much diluted with water, it might make a revolving illumination quite interesting, if set on fire and rolled into the gutter. It may possibly suggest that lambent ignition of the brain which the fiery drinks of the establishment produce, and which so many infatuated victims think delightful. Both these inferences, and all others I could fancy, are so dubious that I will not venture further into the meaning of this singular appellation given to a tavern.

Royston is a goodly and comfortable town, just inside the eastern boundary of Hertfordshire. It has its full share of half-legible and interesting antiquities, including the ruins of a royal palace, a cave, and several other broken monuments of the olden time, all festooned with the web-work of hereditary fancies, legends, and shreds of unravelled history dyed to the vivid colors of variegated imagination. It also boasts and enjoys a great, breezy common, large enough to hold such another town, and which few in the kingdom can show. Then, if it cannot cope with Glastonbury in showing, to the envious and credulous world, a thorn-tree planted by Joseph of Arimathæa, and blossoming always at Christmas, it can fly a bird of greater antiquity, which never flapped its wings elsewhere, so far as I can learn. It may be the lineal descendant of Noah’s raven that has come down to this particular community without a cross with any other branch of the family. It is called “The Royston Crow,” and is a variety of the genus which you will find in no other country. It is a great, heavy bird, larger than his colored American cousin, and is distinguished by a white back. Indeed, seen walking at a distance, he looks like our Bobolink expanded to the size of a large hen-hawk. To have such a wild bird all to themselves, and of its own free will, notwithstanding the length and power of its wings, and the force of centrifugal attractions, is a distinction which the good people of this favored town have good reason to appreciate at its proper value. Nor are they insensible to the honor. The town printer put into my hands a monthly publication called “THE ROYSTON CROW,” containing much interesting and valuable information. It might properly have embraced a chapter on entomology; but, perhaps, it would have been impolitic for the personal interests of the bird to have given wide publicity to facts in this department of knowledge. For, after all, there may exist in the neighborhood certain special kinds of bugs and other insects which lie at the foundation of his preference for the locality.

The next day I again faced northward, and walked as far as Caxton, a small, rambling village, which looked as if it had not shaved and washed its face, and put on a clean shirt for a shocking length of time. It was dark when I reached it; having walked twelve miles after three p.m. There was only one inn, properly speaking, in the town, and since the old coaching time, it had contracted itself into the fag-end of a large, dark, seedy-looking building, where it lived by selling beer and other sharp and cheap drinks to the villagers; nineteen-twentieths of whom appeared to be agricultural laborers. The entertainment proffered on the sign-board over the door was evidently limited to the tap-room. Indeed, this and the great, low-jointed and brick-floored kitchen opening into to it, seemed to constitute all the living or inhabited space in the building. I saw, at a glance, that the chance for a bed was faint and small; and I asked Landlord Rufus for one doubtingly, as one would ask for a ready-made pulpit or piano at a common cabinet-maker’s shop. He answered me clearly enough before he spoke, and he spoke as if answering a strange and half-impertinent question, looking at me searchingly, as if he suspected I was quizzing him. His “No!” was short and decided; but, seeing I was honest and earnest in the inquiry, he softened his negative with the explanation that their beds were all full. It seemed strange to me that this should be so in a building large enough for twenty, and I hesitated hopefully, thinking he might remember some small room in which he might put me for the night. To awaken a generous thought in him in this direction, I intimated how contented I would be with the most moderate accommodation. But it was in vain. The house was full, and I must seek for lodging elsewhere. There were two or three other public houses in the village that might take me in. I went to them one by one. They all kept plenty of beer, but no bed. They, too, looked at me with surprise for asking for such a thing. Apparently, there had been no demand for such entertainment by any traveller since the stage-coach ceased to run through the village. I went up and down, trying to negotiate with the occupants of some of the best-looking cottages for a cot or bunk; but they had none to spare, as the number of wondering children that stared at me kindly, at once suggested before I put the question.

It was now quite dark, and I was hungry and tired; and the prospect of an additional six miles walk was not very animating. What next? I will go back to Landlord Rufus and try a new influence on his sensibilities. Who knows but it will succeed? I will touch him on his true character as a Briton. So I went back, with my last chance hanging on the experiment. I told him I was an American traveller, weary, hungry, and infirm of health, and would pay an extra price for an extra effort to give me a bed for the night. I did not say all this in a Romanus-civus-sum sort of tone. No! dear, honest Old Abe, you would have done the same in my place. I made the great American Eagle coo like a dove in the request; and it touched the best instincts of the British Lion within the man. It was evident in a moment that I had put my case in a new aspect to him. He would talk with the “missus;” he withdrew into the back kitchen, a short conference ensued, and both came out together and informed me that they had found a bed, unexpectedly vacant, for my accommodation. And they would get up some tea and bread and butter for me, too. Capital! A sentiment of national pride stole in between every two feelings of common satisfaction at this result. The thought would come in and whisper, not for your importunity as a common fellow mortal were this bed and this loaf unlocked to you, but because you were an American citizen.

So I followed “the missus” into that great kitchen, and sat down in one corner of the huge fire-place while she made the tea. It was a capacious museum of culinary curiosities of the olden time, all arranged in picturesque groups, yet without any aim at effect. Pots, kettles, pans, spits, covers, hooks and trammels of the Elizabethan period, apparently the heirlooms of several intersecting generations, showed in the fire-light like a work of artistry; the sharp, silvery brightness of the tin and the florid flush of burnished copper making distinct disks in the darkness. It was with a rare sentiment of comfort that I sat by that fire of crackling faggots, looked up at the stars that dropped in their light as they passed over the top of the great chimney, and glanced around at the sides of that old English kitchen, panelled with plates and platters and dishes of all sizes and uses. And this fire was kindled and this tea-kettle was singing for me really because I was an American! I could not forget that—so I deemed it my duty to keep up the character. Therefore, I told the missus and her bright-eyed niece a great many stories about America; some of which excited their admiration and wonder. Thus I sat at the little, round, three-legged table, inside the out-spreading chimney, for an hour or more, and made as cozy and pleasant a meal of it as ever I ate. Besides all this, I had the best bed in the house, and several “Good nights!” on retiring to it, uttered with hearty good-will by voices softened to an accent of kindness. Next morning I was introduced into the best parlor, and had a capital breakfast, and then resumed my walk with a pleasant memory of my entertainment in that village inn.

I passed through a fertile and interesting section to St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire. Here I remained with some friends for a week, visiting neighboring villages by day and returning at night. St. Ives is a pleasant, well-favored town, just large enough to constitute a coherent, neighborly, and well-regulated community. It is the centre-piece of a rich, rural picture, which, without any strikingly salient features, pleases the eye with lineaments of quiet beauty symmetrically developed by the artistry of Nature. The river Ouse meanders through a wide, fertile flat, or what the Scotch would call a strath, which gently rises on each side into pleasantly undulating uplands. Parks, groves, copses, and hedge-row trees are interspersed very happily, and meadow, pasture, and grain-fields seen through them, with villages, hamlets, farm-houses, and isolated cottages, make up a landscape that grows more and more interesting as you contemplate it. And this placid locality, with its peaceful river seemingly sleeping in the bosom of its long and level meadows, was the scene of Oliver Cromwell’s young, fiery manhood. Here, where Nature invites to tranquil occupations and even exercises of the mind, he trained the latent energies of his will for action in the great drama that overturned a throne and transformed a nation. Here, till very lately, stood his “barn,” and here he drilled the first squadron of his “Ironsides.”

My friend and host drove me one day to see a fen-farm a few miles beyond Ramsey, at which we remained over night and enjoyed the old-fashioned English hospitality of the establishment with lively relish. It was called “The Four-Hundred-Acre-Farm,” to distinguish it from a hundred others, laid out on the same dead level, with lines and angles as straight and sharp as those of a brick. You will meet scores of persons in England who speak admiringly of the great prairies of our Western States—but I never saw one in Illinois as extensive as the vast level expanse you may see in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. In fact, the space of a large county has been fished up out of a shallow sea of salt water by human labor and capital. I will not dwell here upon the expense, process, and result of this gigantic operation. It would require a whole chapter to convey an approximate idea of the character and dimensions of the enterprise. The feat of Cyrus in turning the current of the Euphrates was the mere making of a short mill-race compared with the labor of lifting up these millions of acres bodily out of the flood that had covered and held them in quiescent solution since the world began.

This Great Prairie of England, generally called here the Fens, or Fenland, would be an interesting and instructive section for the agriculturists of our Western States to visit. They would see how such a region can be made quite picturesque, as well as luxuriantly productive. Let them look off upon the green sea from one of the upland waves, and it will be instructive to them to see and know, that all the hedge-trees, groves, and copses that intersect and internect the vast expanse of green and gold were planted by man’s hands. Such a landscape would convince them that the prairies of Illinois and Iowa may be recovered from their almost depressing monotony by the same means. The soil of this district is apparently the same as that around Chicago—black and deep, on a layer of clay. It pulverises as easily in dry weather, and makes the same inky and sticky composition in wet. To give it more body, or to cross it with a necessary and supplementary element, a whole field is often trenched by the spade as clean as one could be furrowed by the plough. By this process the substratum of clay is thrown up, to a considerable thickness, upon the light, black, almost volatile soil, and mixed with it when dry; thus giving it a new character and capacity of production.

Everything seems to grow on a Californian scale in this fen district. Although the soil thus rescued from the waters that had flooded and half dissolved it, was at first as deep, black, and naturally fertile as that of our prairies, those who commenced its cultivation did not make the same mistake as did our Western farmers. They did not throw their manure into the broad draining canals to get rid of it, trusting to the inexhaustible fertility of the alluvial earth, as did the wheat growers of Indiana and Illinois to their cost; but they husbanded and well applied all the resources of their barn-yards. In consequence of this economy, there is no deterioration of annual averages of their crops to be recorded, as in some of our prairie States, which have been boasting of the natural and inexhaustible fertility of their soil even with the record of retrograde statistics before their eyes. The grain and root crops are very heavy; and a large business is done in growing turnip seed for the world in some sections of this fen country. A large proportion of the quantity we import comes from these low lands.