June is a month to joy in, for when in a gracious mood it can produce the pleasantest of weather, and the next morning gave us a sample of its occasional perfectness. A glorious sunshiny day followed the promise of the morning with a deep sea-blue sky above, and hardly a cloud in it—a day that made us feel the joy of being alive. So we made an early start, and wandering about deviously we suddenly espied before us, standing gaunt and deserted and lone in a grass field, the ruined hall of Moreton Corbet, its roofless walls, its upstanding gables and great vacant windows, darkly silhouetted against the bright sky. I recognised the old house from a friend's photograph; it had a familiar look, though I had never been there before and had come upon it unexpectedly. The house covers a considerable area of ground, and some of the quaint carvings on its front appeared to be almost as sharp as the day they were carved, and that was centuries ago. Were I an architect, I think I should try to discover the quarry from whence came that enduring stone, for many a fine building I have seen has suffered sadly from the perishable nature of the stone employed in its construction. An architect cannot be too careful in the selection of his material if he wishes his work to last—and what architect does not—not to mention his client, who surely deserves some consideration?
Moreton Corbet was begun by Sir Robert Corbet in 1606, but he died of the plague before the building was finished; his brother Sir Vincent Corbet continued the work, but the house was never finished or inhabited, and now the rambling ruins are but the home of owls and other birds. Camden the antiquary in his day wrote of it: "Robert Corbet began to build a most gorgeous and stately house, after the Italian model, for his future magnificent and splendid habitation, but death countermanding his designs took him off, so that he left his project unfinished and his old castle defaced." The remains of his "defaced" old castle are at hand, with the initials A. C. for Sir Andrew Corbet over its doorway. There is a hazy local tradition that some enemy of the Corbets, when the house was building, uttered the prophecy that "Moreton Corbet shall never be finished." But who can tell, it may be some day, though late the day, for its walls appear sound, the stone mullions stand in the windows still, and I have known ancient houses even more ruined that have come into the hands of a new owner and have been restored and converted into delightful homes. "Patch and long sit," runs the old proverb, but "build and soon flit" it ends, and from my limited experience of the ways of men there is some truth in the proverb. But proverbs are so often contradictory that I have lost faith in them. One says, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder"; then another has it, "Out of sight out of mind," and I might go on quoting familiar proverbs of an antagonistic nature, only to do so would be a waste of space. You can generally by searching find a proverb to fit a special case whichever way you desire—that is the beauty of proverbs.
THE RUINED HALL OF MORETON CORBET.
A ruined home, whether of cottage or mansion, is always, more or less, a pathetic sight and one that appeals to the sentimental traveller, but coming thus suddenly and unexpectedly upon so stately a ruin as Moreton Corbet right in the heart of a quiet country, a country with no suggestion about it but of farms and fields—one expected nothing else—the greater was the appeal to such sentiment. The coming to the notable ruin of an abbey or castle for which the traveller is prepared by guide-book description is quite a different thing; at least I, for one, cannot command my sympathies to the order of a guide-book. To repeat, in effect, a previous remark, I really think that the chief charm of travel is the coming upon the unexpected, the enjoyment of discovery, so that even the lesser sights by the way assume an importance that perhaps is not rightly theirs and become memorable.
Leaving Moreton Corbet we got wandering amongst winding lanes, and very pleasant lanes they were; these eventually brought us to High Ercall, a lonely little village consisting of an ancient church, an old Tudor manor-house of some size standing close by, and a cottage or two. High Ercall had not much to show us, but what it had to show was interesting, chiefly the fine church which retains some features of interest in spite of the fact that it was sadly battered about by the Puritan party, and the time-toned Tudor house built, according to an inscription on it, in 1608. The main portion of the house is of stone, but it has brick gables above that give it an odd appearance. The old home took my fancy. "It looks history," I exclaimed to myself, though at the time I knew nothing of its past. Why I should have imagined that house had a story to tell I cannot say, but so it impressed me, perhaps simply because it was so old. Anyway, on making inquiry I found my intuition not wrong, for I discovered it was one of the many Shropshire houses that had been fortified in the time of the Civil Wars and held for the King, and though but a house, so gallantly was it defended that it successfully resisted several fierce assaults, being indeed the last house in the shire to surrender, only the strongholds of Bridgnorth and Ludlow holding out longer. I wonder if anything eventful will ever happen at High Ercall again. Who would have expected to come upon history there? It looked so innocent of anything of the kind. Certainly the Civil Wars have given the added interest of stirring days to many a now dreamy spot in England, for those wars concerned themselves with the sieges of so many private houses scattered far and wide over the countryside. Those days have passed for ever, for no private house could now be converted into a fortress. Many of these old houses still retain bullet marks on, and sometimes the lead of the bullets in, their thick oak doors; their strong walls too occasionally show, even to this far-off day, the indentations made by some of Cromwell's inexhaustible cannon-balls. You cannot escape from Cromwell's doings when you go a-touring in England.
Beyond High Ercall we crossed over a marshy upland, and over a bridge or two so narrow that there was only just room for the car to pass. The country had a remote look, for we travelled far before meeting a soul, and that soul was a solitary man breaking stones by the side of the road. From the uplands we dropped down to a picturesque old mill, its wheel turned by a sparkling stream; and a pretty picture the old mill made with its foaming weir above, its sleepy pool below, and the green fields gently sloping down to it. The mill was busy that day, and the muffled hum of its machinery, the swish, swish of its wheel and the plash of its weir, broke pleasantly the silence of the spot.
I saw no miller, or any one, about; perhaps the miller was at his dinner whilst his work was being done for him. I wish I could have seen him, for I have a liking for millers, always having found them jovially disposed and not averse to a gossip; now I have a weakness for gossiping with country folk, trusting by so doing to glean something of their views of life. Such folk I have generally found willing to talk about anything but politics—well, I do not care to talk politics, but why they should so carefully avoid the subject I cannot say, nor yet why millers are so cheerful a race, any more than why farmers in contradiction should be given so to grumbling, even when the seasons are good. I remember that picture in Punch of a squire addressing a tenant of his: "Good morning, Mr. Turnips, fine growing day." "Yes, sir," responds the farmer, "'twill make the weeds grow." But the miller looks on the bright side of life; perhaps it is because he seems to have so little work to do, only having to watch whilst the running water or the willing wind do his work for him. I know I have chatted with a miller for an hour or more inside his mill and amongst his whirling wheels, as the flour flowed fast and free from the wooden shoots into the sacks below, and he merely glanced round now and then to see if a sack were nearly filled, so that he might put another in its place; nor did this take him long to do, nor did the work seem hard. It was this miller who so kindly explained to me how much better it was to rely on water than wind power, the latter being so uncertain, for "the wind may drop in the daytime, and then blow at night when you are comfortably in bed, so you may idle away half, or even the whole of a day, but water-power is constant, if you have a decent stream to depend upon." Then the miller told me how in his father's time, for his father was a miller too, the gleaners used to come to the mill to have their gleanings ground, and in those friendly past days the miller used to grind their gleanings without charge in his spare time, as the custom was. "Then helped every one his neighbour," for those were "the good old days," at least they seem good to look back upon.