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

by Elihu Burritt

In what blacksmith shop or hardware house in America does not Sheffield show its face and faculties? Did any American, knowing the difference between cast-iron and cast-steel, ever miss the sight of Naylor and Sanderson’s yellow labels in his travels? How many millions of acres of primeval forest have the ages edged with their fine steel cut through, and given to the plough! Fashion has its Iron Age as well as its Golden; and, what is more remarkable, the first of the two has come last, in the fitful histories of custom. And this last freak of feminine taste has brought a wonderful grist of additional business to the Sheffield mill. The fair Eugenie has done a good thing for this smoky town, well deserving of a monument of burnished steel erected to her memory on one of these hills. More than this; as Empress of Crinoline, she should wear the iron crown of Charlemagne in her own right. Her husband’s empire is but a mere arondissement compared with the domain that does homage to her sceptre. Sheffield is the great arsenal of her armaments. Sheffield cases ships of war with iron plates a foot thick; but that is nothing, in pounds avoirdupois, compared with the weight of steel it spins into elastic springs for casing the skirts of two hundred millions of the fair Eugenie’s sex and lieges in the two hemispheres. It is estimated that ten thousand tons of steel are annually absorbed into this use in Christendom; and Sheffield, doubtless, furnishes a large proportion of it.

Here I had another involuntary walk, not put down in the programme of my expectations. On inquiring the way to Fir Vale, a picturesque suburb where a friend resided, I was directed to a locality which, it was suggested, must be the one I meant, though it was called Fir View. I followed the direction given for a considerable distance, when it was varied successively by persons of whom I occasionally inquired. After ascending and descending a number of steep hills, I suddenly came down upon the town again from the south, having made a complete circuit of it; a performance that cost me about two hours of time and much unsatisfactory perspiration. Fearing that a second attempt would be equally unsuccessful, I took the Leeds road, and left the Jericho at the first round. Walked about nine miles to a furnace-lighted village called very appropriately Hoyland, or Highland, when anglicised from the Danish. It commands truly a grand view of wooded hills and deep valleys dashed with the sheen of ripened grain.

The next day I passed through a good sample section of England’s wealth and industry. Mansions and parks of the gentry, hill, valley, wheat-fields, meadows of the most vivid green; crops luxuriant in most picturesque alternations; in a word, the whole a vista of the richest agricultural scenery. And yet out of the brightest and broadest fields of wheat, barley and oats, towered up the colliery chimneys in every direction, like good-natured and swarthy giants smoking their pipes complacently and “with comfortable breasts” in view of the goodly scene. The golden grain grew thick and tall up to the very pit’s mouth. In the sun-light above and gas-light below human industry was plying its differently-bitted implements. There were men reaping and studding the pathway of their sickles through the field with thickly-planted sheaves. But right under them, a hundred fathoms deep, subterranean farmers were at work, with black and sweaty brows, garnering the coal-harvest sown there before the Flood. Sickle above and pick below were gathering simultaneously the layers of wealth that Nature had stored in her parlor and cellar for man.

I passed through Barnsley and Wakefield on this day’s walk,—towns full of profitable industries and busy populations, and growing in both after the American impulse and expansion. If the good “Vicar of Wakefield” of the olden time could revisit the scene of his earthly experience, and look upon the old church of his ministry as it now appears, renovated from bottom to the top of its grand and lofty spire, he would not be entrapped again so easily into assent to the Greek apothegm of the swindler.

I lodged at a little village inn between Wakefield and Leeds, after a day of the most enjoyable walk that I had made. Never before, between sun and sun, had I passed over such a section of above-ground and under-ground industry and wealth. The next morning I continued northward, and noticed still more striking combinations of natural productions and human industries than on the preceding day. One small, rural area in which these were blended impressed me greatly, and I stopped to photograph the scene on my mind. In a circle hardly a third of a mile in diameter, there was the heaviest crop of oats growing that I had yet seen in England; in another part of the same field there was a large brick-kiln; in another, an extensive quarry and machinery for sawing the stone into all sizes and shapes; then a furnace for casting iron, and lastly, a coal mine; and all these departments of labor and production were in full operation. It is quite possible that not one of the hundred laborers on and under this ten-acre patch ever thought it an extraordinary focus of production. Perhaps even the proprietors and managers of the five different enterprises worked on the small space had taken its rich and diversified fertilities as a matter of course, as we take the rain, light and heat of summer; but to a traveller “taking stock” of a country’s resources, it could not but be a point of view exciting admiration. I left it behind me deeply impressed with the conviction that I had seen the most productive ten-acre field that could be found on the surface of the globe, counting in the variety and value of its surface and sub-surface crops.

I took tea with a friend in Leeds, remaining only an hour or two in that town, then pursuing my course northward. The wide world knows so much of Leeds that any notice that I could give of it might seem affected and presumptuous. It is to the Cloth-World what Rome is to the Catholic. Its Cloth Hall is the St. Peter’s of Coat-and-trouserdom. Its rivers, streams and canals run black and blue with the stringent juices of all the woods and weeds of the world used in dyeing. The woods of all the continents come floating in here, like baled summer clouds of heaven. It is a city of magnipotent chimneys; and they stand thick and tall on the hills and in the valleys around, and puff their black breathings into the face and eyes of the sky above, baconising its countenance, and giving it no time to wash up and look sober, calm and clean, except a few hours on the sabbath. The Leeds Mercury is a power in the land, and everybody who reads the English language in either hemisphere knows Edward Baines by name.

As I emerged from the great, busy town on the north, I passed by the estates and residences of its manufacturing aristocracy. The homes they have built and embellished should satisfy the tastes and ambitions of any hereditary nobility. They need only a little more age to make them rival many baronial establishments. It is interesting to see how the different classes of society are stepping into each other’s shoes in going up into higher grades of social life. The merchant and manufacturing princes of England have not only reached but surpassed the conditions of wealth, taste and elegance which the hereditary peers of the realm occupied a century ago; while the latter have gone up to the rich and luxurious surroundings of kings and queens of that period. The upward movement has reached the very lowest strata of society. Not only have the small tradesmen and farmers ascended to the comfortable conditions of large merchants and landowners of one hundred years ago, but common day laborers are lifted upward by the general uprising. I should not wonder if all the damp, low cellarless cottages they now frequently inhabit should be swept away in less than fifty years and replaced by as comfortable buildings as the great middle class occupied in the childhood of the present generation.

I found comfortable quarters for the night in the little village of Bramhope, about five miles from Leeds. The next day I walked to Harrogate, passing through Otley and across the celebrated Wharf Vale. The scenery of this valley, as it opens upon you suddenly on descending from the south into Otley, is exceedingly beautiful; not so extensive as that of Belvoir Vale, but with all the features of the latter landscape compressed in a smaller space; like a portrait taken on a smaller scale. As you look off from the southern ridge or wall of the valley, you seem to stand on the cord of a segment of a circle, the radius of which touches the horizon at about five miles to the north. This crescent is filled with the most delicate lineaments of Nature’s beauty. The opposite walls of the gallery slope upward from the meandering Wharf so gently and yet reach the blue ceiling of the sky so near, that all the paintings that panel them are vividly distinct to your eye, and you can group all their lights and shades in the compass of a single glance.

On the opposite side, half hidden and half revealed among the trees of an ample park, stands Farnley Hall, a historical residence of an old historical family. I had a letter of introduction to the present proprietor, Mr. Fawkes, who, I hope, will not deem it a disparagement to be called one of the Knights of the Shorthorns—a more extensive, useful, and cosmopolitan order than were the Knights of Rhodes or of Malta. Unfortunately for me, he was not at home; but his steward, a very intelligent, gentlemanly and genial man, took me over the establishment, and showed me all the stock that was stabled, mostly bulls of different ages. They were all of the best families of Shorthorn blood, and a better connoisseur of animal life than myself could not have enjoyed the sight of such well-made creatures more thoroughly than I did. The prince of the blood, in my estimation, was “Lord Cobham,” a cream-colored bull, with which compared that famous animal in Greek mythology which played himself off as such an Adonis among the bovines, must have been a shabby, scraggy quadruped. Poor Europa! it would have been bad enough if she had been run away with by a “Lord Cobham.” But the like of him did not live in her day.

After going through the housings for cattle, the steward took me to the Hall, a grand old mansion full of English history, especially of the Commonwealth period. Indeed, one large apartment was a museum of relics of that stirring and stormy time. There, against the antique, carved wainscoting, hung the great broad-brim of Oliver Cromwell, with a circumference nearly as large as an opened umbrella, heavy, coarse and grim. There hung a sword he wielded in the fiery rifts of battle. There was Fairfax’s sword hanging by its side; and his famous war-drum lay beneath. Its leather lungs, that once shouted the charge, were now still and frowsy, with no martial speech left in them.