Meanwhile I send my epistle thither, to afford you at least an interval, and pray God to have you in his merciful and faithful keeping.
Your ever devoted L——.
LETTER X.
Hawkestone Park, Jan. 2nd, 1827.
Beloved friend,
Though I felt perfectly ‘blasé’ of parks yesterday, and thought I could never take any interest in them again, I am quite of another mind to-day, and must in some respects give Hawkestone the preference over all I have seen. It is not art, nor magnificence, nor aristocratical splendour, but nature alone, to which it is indebted for this pre-eminence, and in such a degree that were I gifted with the power of adding to its beauty, I should ask, What can I add?
Turn your imagination to a spot of ground so commandingly placed, that from its highest point you can let your eye wander over fifteen counties. Three sides of this wide panorama rise and fall in constant change of hill and dale, like the waves of an agitated sea, and are bounded at the horizon by the strangely-formed jagged outline of the Welsh mountains, which at either end descend to a fertile plain shaded by thousands of lofty trees, and in the obscure distance where it blends with the sky is edged with a white misty line—the ocean.
The Welsh mountains are partly covered with snow, and all the cultivated country between so thickly intersected with hedge-rows and trees, that at a distance it has rather the appearance of a thinly planted wood, here and there broken by water or by numberless fields and meadows. You stand directly in the centre of this scene, on the summit of a group of hills, looking down over the tops of groves of oaks and beeches alternating with the most luxuriant slopes of meadow-land, upon a wall of rock five or six hundred feet high, which forms numerous steep precipices and pretty valleys. In one of the gloomiest spots of this wilderness arise the venerable ruins of ‘the Red Castle,’ a magnificent memorial of the time of William the Conqueror.
Now imagine this whole romantic group of hills, which rises isolated from the very plain, to be surrounded almost in a perfect circle by the silver waves of the river Hawke. This naturally bounded spot is Hawkestone Park, a spot whose beauties are so appreciated even in the neighbourhood, that the brides and bridegrooms of Liverpool and Shrewsbury come here to pass their honeymoon. The park seems indeed rather the property of the public than of its possessor, who never resides here, and whose ruinous and mean-looking house lies hidden in a corner of the park, like a ‘hors d’œuvre.’ There is, however, a pretty inn, in which visitors find all that is needful to their comfort. Here we passed the night, and after a good breakfast ‘á la fourchette,’ set out on our long excursion on foot; for the roads are so bad that we could not drive. Our scrambling walk, almost dangerous in winter, lasted four hours.
We crossed a grassy plain, shaded by oaks and covered with grazing cattle, to the rocks I have mentioned, in which the pale green veins show the existence of copper. They rise out of a lofty hanging wood of old beeches, and are crowned at their summits with black firs, the whole effect of which is most striking. In this natural wall is a grotto, which, after climbing wearily along a zig-zag path in the wood, you reach through a dark covered way more than a hundred feet long, hewn in the rock. The grotto consists of numerous caverns incrusted with all sorts of minerals. There are small openings in which are set pieces of coloured glass cut like brilliants; in the dark they gleam like the precious stones of Aladdin’s cave. An old woman was our guide, and excited our wonder by her unwearied walking, and the dexterity with which she climbed up and down the rocks in slippers. The irregular steps of stone were as smooth as glass, and so difficult sometimes to pass over, that our good R——, who had iron heels to his boots, complained bitterly of the efforts he had to make to keep himself up. We reached a summer-house, built of trunks and branches of trees and covered with moss, which commanded a picturesque view of a fantastic hill called the Temple of Patience. Our way then led us to the so-called Swiss Bridge, which is boldly thrown from one rock to another. As the railing is partly broken down and the passage rather a dizzy one, my good Julia, if it were possible for her to have come thus far, would have found an end to her expedition. How fortunate it is to have such an unwearied guide through the regions of imagination—one who bears you in an instant across the giddy bridge, and now places you before a black tower-like rock projecting out of the glittering beeches, overgrown with thorns and festooned with garlands of ivy! This was long the abode of a fox, who lived secure from pursuit in his castle of Malapartus; it is still called Reynard’s House. We went on, up hill and down dale, and at length, rather tired, reached the terrace, an open place with beautiful peeps at the country cut in the wood. Not far from thence, behind very high trees, stands a column a hundred-and-twenty feet high, dedicated to the founder of the family,—a London merchant and Lord Mayor of London in the time of Henry the Third,—whose statue crowns the pillar. A convenient winding staircase in the inside leads to its summit, whence you overlook the panorama of fifteen counties already mentioned. You pass through still wider chasms between the rocks to a lovely cottage, standing in complete seclusion at the end of a green valley, where formerly various beasts and birds were kept, which are now preserved stuffed in a room of the cottage. A young woman showed them to us, with the strange announcement,—‘All these animals that you see used to live formerly.’ I spare you the green-house built of masses of rock and branches of trees, and the Gothic tower—a sort of summer-house, and lead you a long, long way through wood, then over green hills and through a narrow defile to the magnificent ruin, the sublimely situated Red Castle. The decayed walls and the hewn rocky sides are of great extent. You can reach the interior only through a winding passage blasted in the rock, so utterly dark that I found myself obliged to use my guide’s petticoat as an Ariadne’s clue, for I literally could not see my hand before my eyes. Out of this tunnel you emerge into a picturesque alley of rock, with smooth high walls overarched with mountain-ashes. On the side you perceive a cavern, the mouth of which is still closed with a rusty iron gate. Climbing rude steps in the rock, you reach the upper part of the ruin—a high roofless tower, in whose walls, fifteen feet thick, many trees centuries old have struck their roots, and in the interior of which is a well, which appears to sink down to the entrails of the earth. The massy and unshaken barrier around it, the lofty tower through which the sky appears above, and the bottomless depth beneath, where reigns eternal night, produce an effect I never remember to have experienced. You see Hope and Despair allegorically united in one picture before you. The tower, and the rock on which it stands, look down from a giddy height, in a perfectly perpendicular line, upon the valley, in which the huge trees appear like copse-wood.