As we leisurely wend our way along the broad gravelled path we have time to note the more prominent features of the surrounding country; and assuredly there are few localities in the county where the scenery is more agreeably diversified, the prospect embracing—
Hill and dale, and wood and lawn,
And verdant fields, and darkening heath between,
And villages embosomed soft in trees.
A long line of stately chestnut trees bounds one side of the walk. Eastward the view is limited by a range of undulating eminences that stretch along the line of the horizon, dark, shadowy, and lonely-looking, in places, a kind of mountain wall—the outwork, so to speak, of the Peak hills beyond—with upland pastures and sweet verdant slopes, green where the grass has been newly mown, and tinged with yellow where the grain is ripening in the bright August sunshine, showing where man has encroached upon Nature’s wild domain, and what good husbandry has won from the bleak wastes that once formed part of the great forest of Macclesfield. Hidden from view in a green, cup-like hollow in the hills is the “lordly house of Lyme,” that calls up memories of the deeds at Crescy, in which the flower of the Cheshire chivalry were engaged; for it was in acknowledgment of the seasonable aid Sir Thomas Danyers rendered to the “Boy Prince,” when on that bloody field his Royal father bade him “win his spurs and the honour of the day for himself,” that Richard the Second bestowed the fair domain of Lyme upon Sir Piers Legh, a younger son of the house of Adlington, who had wed Sir Thomas’s daughter. Just above the hall the “Knight’s Low” lifts its tree-crowned summit; tradition hovers around it, and tells us that far back in the mist of ages a knightly owner of Lyme there found his resting-place.
Peeping out from the thick umbrage on the adjacent height we get a glimpse of the modern mansion of Shrigley—the successor of an ancient house that for full five centuries and a half was the abode of the once famous, though now extinct, family of Downes; the chiefs of which held the hereditary forestership of Downes and Taxal, in the Royal forest of Macclesfield, with the right of hanging and drawing within their jurisdiction, and further claimed the privilege of holding the King’s stirrup when he came a-hunting in the forest, as well as of rousing the stag for his amusement; in allusion to which office they bore a white hart upon their shield of arms, with a stag’s head for crest. But Shrigley has other associations. In more recent times the name was identified with an outrageous case of abduction—the carrying off and pretended marriage of the youthful heiress of that pleasant domain by the notorious adventurer, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in 1826. Below, where the great break occurs in the mountainous ridge, and the hills look as if riven asunder by the stroke of a giant’s hand, lies the little town of Bollington, where the cotton trade has established itself, and the tall chimneys—the “steam towers,” as Crabbe calls them—do their best, though in a small way, it is true, to detract from the natural beauties of the landscape. The hill which terminates the ridge nearest to us bears the name of the Nab, and the one that bounds the opposite side of the defile, the summit of which is crowned with a whitewashed summer-house that gleams brightly in the sunshine, is popularly known as White Nancy. With White Nancy the Kerridge hills, famed for their freestone quarries, come in view. The name (Cær Ridge) suggests the idea that the Romans had a camp or minor station in the vicinity, and the opinion is strengthened by the fact that one of their highways led eastwards over the rocky ridge.
Southwards, near the foot of the Kerridge range, lies the old and somewhat dingy-looking town of Macclesfield, the view of which is, however, happily shut out by intervening plantations and the eminence on which stands Bonishall, for a time the residence of Lord Erskine, the grandson of the distinguished Lord Chancellor, and occupying the site of an older house, where, in the days of the Virgin Queen, a branch of the Pigots of Butley, had their abode. Round towards the right, through the openings in the dark belt of trees, the long crescent-like sweep of Alderley Edge is seen rising sheer from the plain to a considerable elevation, and extending a couple of miles or so, with its rough projecting rocks full of changeful picturesqueness of indentation, and rich in their exquisite variety of form and colour. The steep slopes are clothed with vegetation and crested with a miniature forest of pines and fir trees that mingle their dark-hued verdure with the brighter foliage of the oak and the birch, making a little fairyland of woodland beauty, the natural charm of which is heightened by the cloud-shadows gliding slowly across. With a keen eye Stormy Point can be discerned standing out a mass of sombre crag, in striking contrast to the scenery around. The Beacon close by reminds us of the troublous times when our grandfathers were in daily dread of invasion, and erected this signal that they might pass the warning on should their Gallic neighbours put foot on British soil. The Edge is not without its tale of wonder, nor will it lose the recollection of it while the sign of “The Wizard” adorns the neighbouring hostelry, or “The Iron Gates” that of its rival. But we are not now concerned with the legend of the countless milk-white steeds or the nine hundred and ninety-nine slumbering knights—“the wondrous cavern’d band”—
Doom’d to remain till that fell day,
When foemen marshall’d in array,
And feuds intestine shall combine