Thus Burford appeals to the hurrying motorists who speed upon this fine highway. I should not have thought Burford would have done any such thing; it appears to me a little undignified; yet without such a notice the motorists mentioned would doubtless rush along heedless of the ancient, grey old town that sleeps so peacefully in the hollow below. Still, I trust other interesting towns off the highway will not take this as a precedent, else we shall have all England turned into a sort of gigantic peep-show.
Now we got on to a wilderness of lanes, mostly narrow and rough of surface, but they took us into an old-world land of stone-built villages, very ancient, very grey, and past many a time-mellowed home that hinted of legend. One rambling, neglected-looking old home especially took my fancy, with its great gables, clustering chimneys, and shapely stone diamond-paned windows; it had such a look of mystery about it, high-walled in as it was, and half hidden from the road, and over its porch the lichens had traced strange hieroglyphics. There appeared to be no life about the place, though a film of smoke uprose from one tall, solitary chimney. An ancient manor-house fallen to decay—
A jolly place in days of old,
But something ails it now; the place is curst.
In its forsaken courtyard stood a tumble-down pigeon-cote of some size, so that I knew it had been a manor-house, for in the medieval days no lesser personage than the lord of the manor had the right of pigeonry, and the pigeon-cote was very ancient. Unfortunately, owing to the high wall without and the trees that had grown up at their own sweet will close around it, I was unable satisfactorily to photograph the old house. Some day I hope to re-discover it and to see if I can trace anything of its history.
Another fine old manor-house I came to I found has also fallen on to evil days and was doing duty as a farmhouse, the farmer and his wife inhabiting but a small portion of it. By happy chance I came across the farmer in a field and I got a-chatting with him, first diplomatically about the weather and the crops; neither were satisfactory to him—I hardly thought they would be—but I listened to his complaints about both, and to his complaints about the low price of produce. I listened patiently, and I think my patience pleased—I had "an axe to grind." Then I led up to the old house and ventured to remark what a picturesque place it was. "It's all right to look at," said he, "but it's not good to live in. It's too big, and it's so draughty, and it's so cold and damp in winter, it would take a fortune to keep fires going over it to warm it properly. There's only the wife and self lives in it, and it would hold a large family, and they would only fill a part of it. Would you care to take a glance inside?" Now that is just what I wanted. I said I would. In truth it was a rambling old house. We entered by a large hall, with a fine old carved oak but much damaged fireplace at one end, and dog-irons on the wide hearth below. I could fancy that in the old days, when the lord of the manor lived there, merry were the doings and the dances that took place in that now vacant hall; the very thought of such things made it, in its bareness, look the more forsaken. One wing, where the farmer lived, was furnished fairly comfortably; the rest of the mansion, divided from it by the hall, was a very picture of desolation. Even the once strong oak staircase was shaky, and the floors of the rooms were in places so rotten that it was hardly safe to tread on them; in some the panelling was tumbling from the walls, and in others the bare walls were adorned with cobwebs, erst doubtless covered with tapestry. Such is the fate of some old houses that have come down in the world, but there are others that have fortunately found purchasers and have been restored to something of their ancient dignity. I know at least a good dozen fine old houses of the Elizabethan and Jacobean days that had fallen to decay, but which have been so restored by loving hands that they now form delightful and picturesque homes, and yet have not lost the charm of their ancient look.
I met a man, when house-hunting for a friend some little time ago, who confided to me that he made it a business of buying any ruinous old house, if of any architectural merit and agreeably situated, that was for sale at a low price—"and many such houses fetch low prices," he said, "often, the land apart, not more than the value of their materials; sometimes these old houses possess a bit of interesting history, but that goes for nothing"; and purely as a speculation, though the speculation was not without its pleasure, he skilfully restored it, as far as possible, to its pristine estate, and he had done this each time at a considerable profit on the sale of the restored house. "I call myself a house improver," he said, with a laugh, "quite a novel and paying profession." This confession was made to me whilst looking over an interesting old Jacobean house that he had recently purchased and restored, and exceedingly well had he done it. "This," he explained, "had been let and occupied as a farmhouse for years, and little care was taken of it; as you see, it is a picturesque old building, but it was in a dreadful state when I bought it—indeed at first I almost thought it was beyond restoration. I have spent a lot of money on it, but I expect to get it all back with a fair margin of profit. Here you see an ancient house with a formal garden to match, and even an old-fashioned sun-dial in it, to say nothing of the Haddon Hall-like terrace, and all this cost me a lot; but one has to do the thing properly or you may make a failure of it, and this house is ready for occupation. Meanwhile I make it my home; I must live somewhere, and here I abide till I find a purchaser. Then I shall go in search of another old house to restore. The idea of doing such a thing came quite accidentally to me; originally I purchased an old house and restored it for my own occupation, but I had so many unsought offers for it at a big figure, nearly double what it cost me altogether, that I was tempted to sell it. Then I bought another old house and restored it in the same way, and that I sold at a substantial profit; so now I have made a trade of doing this. Look at the panelling of these rooms, all of seasoned oak, a careful copy of old panelling of the period, every bit done by adze and hand; the hinges and locks, too, are copies of old ones I found in the house. I have opened up all the fireplaces, and on removing the modern grates I luckily discovered the open hearths behind; the firebacks are all castings from old ones, and the fire-dogs are copies too from fine past specimens. The whole thing has been properly done. I have pulled down all the plaster ceilings and revealed the old rafters. The one or two sash windows I found I have replaced with mullion ones, so now you have before you the house much as it looked when first built over two centuries ago." This was quite a new way to me of making a living, or a fortune, but one learns many unexpected things when travelling by road.
To some there is a potent magnetism, an irresistible fascination about certain old houses, a subtle influence from which there is no escape. I confess to it myself. I have lived in them and love them. Of course there are old houses and old houses; not all possess this peculiar power to charm, and only those of the Elizabethan or Jacobean period, with their panelled halls and chambers, their beamed ceilings, their great gables, their clustering chimneys, their many mullioned windows and big fireplaces, hold it over me. Those of the Queen Anne or Georgian age leave me cold; they are too formal; they lack the sense of mystery and atmosphere of romance. The old moated granges pictured in the Christmas numbers of the Illustrated London News of many years back, how they charmed me when a boy! What romances about them did not I weave to myself! I thought they were only artists' dreams, but since I have happily discovered them actually existing. I shall never forget the thrill of delightful surprise the first discovery of the kind gave me; I could hardly believe my eyes, yet there before me stood an ancient moated home, grey, gabled, and ivy-clad, with a broken bell-turret on its lichen-laden roof, its leaded-light windows reflecting the sunlight, and its big chimney-stacks rising boldly up against the sky; nor shall I forget the special moment when I crossed the deep moat by a moss-grown bridge and knocked at the great oak and nail-studded door. I felt like one in a dream, that this could not be a reality, and that I should suddenly wake up and find myself deceived, disenchanted, and in the commonplace world again. Happily it was no vain imagining.
But I am digressing. We were wandering on winding lanes south of Burford when I began this overlong digression, and on that maze of lanes we wandered for some miles—many they seemed to me; first in one direction, then in another we went, without arriving anywhere. All the same, it was very pleasant wandering through a land purely given over to agriculture, somnolent and restful. At last we reached a fair road, and this took us to the little Wiltshire town of Highworth, boldly set on a hill, so that we could see it from afar long before we came to it, its grey church tower and irregular roofed houses outlined sharply against the sky. Seen thus the town looked like those one finds in early engravings.
A clean, homely, dreamy little town is Highworth, very ancient, even quaint in parts, and this in spite of the fact that a branch line of railway has found it out; but so far the railway does not appear to have disturbed its old-world tranquillity There I halted a while at "The Saracen's Head," a relic of the old coaching days, and the inn, like the town, seemed half asleep. Then I took a quiet walk round the place, and eventually found my way to the church; there appeared to be nothing else noteworthy there except the old houses and old shops, and these, though they grouped well and made a picturesque whole, were not individually of much interest. So it was I strolled into the church, and there I found the clerk: twice running had I done this unusual thing. I bade him good-morning. He told me he was looking after a bat that had got into the roof of the building and was making a mess there. I have heard of owls in a church tower, but here was a bat in the church itself. "How are you going to catch the bat?" queried I, for he had no ladder, and he believed the bat was somewhere hidden in the beams above. "That's just what I want to know," he replied. "I'm thinking it over; meanwhile I'll show you the church if you like." I thought he might as well do this whilst he was thinking, so I accepted his services. The first thing I noticed was a cannon-ball hanging by three chains from a bracket on the wall; there must be some story attached to that, I thought, and there was. It was another of Cromwell's countless cannon-balls—I have long ago lost count of the many I have seen. "That," said the clerk, "was fired against the church by Cromwell, and it lodged in the tower. I can show you the hole it made there where it struck." Then I learnt that the church had been fortified and held for Charles I., was besieged by the Parliamentarians, who eventually captured it, taking seventy prisoners; the earthworks a little beyond the town, where the cannon was mounted, are still to be made out. Those were stirring times for the countryside; the district between Oxford and Worcester had its full share in them, and in some parts of it the fighting raged furiously.
"Now I think I can show you something that will interest you," exclaimed the clerk; then he pointed out the ancient oak and much worm-eaten stalls (of the thirteenth century, he said they were), and called my attention to a quaint carving on one of them of a mermaid admiring herself in a handglass; but what interested me more than this were the ancient helmet and sword of the Baston family suspended against the wall, and still of greater interest a silk tabard belonging to the same Baston family that was worn over the armour with a coat-of-arms worked on it: this was needful in order to distinguish the mail-clad warriors one from another. The tabard, preserved now in a glass frame, is much decayed and faded, but still a lion boldly worked thereon is visible. I understood that this tabard was discovered stowed away somewhere in the church, and that the vicar had it framed and hung up there, and I commend the action of the vicar. Many of our old churches contain, to this day, treasures of various kinds hidden away and forgotten in oak chests and cupboards, and even lost amongst lumber. There was, too, a priest-chamber belonging to the church, with the usual stone steps leading to it, but this special chamber had the uncommon luxury of a washing place. I noticed when leaving a curious bit of bold sculpture over the entrance doorway; in the dim light of the moment I could not very certainly make out what the carving was about, but I read a notice beneath it stating that it was probably a Norman Tympanon. There I bade the clerk good-day. I wondered how he was going to catch that bat!