What struck us, however, as being the most interesting feature in Bourn—which though a very ancient town has an aggravating air of newness
A HISTORIC MANSION
generally about it, even our little inn was quite modern—was its old railway station. I must confess, at the same time, that I do not remember ever having admired a railway station before for its beauty. But this is, or was, not a modern railway station but a genuine sixteenth-century one! I am writing seriously, let me explain the mystery. When the line was being constructed it passed close alongside of an ancient and charmingly picturesque Elizabethan mansion, known as the Old Red Hall, which for a long while was the residence of the Digby family, who were implicated in the Gunpowder Plot: it was here, according to tradition, that the Guy Fawkes conspiracy was originated in 1604. The intention was, I understand, in due course to pull this ancient structure down and to erect a station on its site. But sundry antiquaries, learning what was proposed to be done, arose in arms against such a proceeding and prevailed; so for once I am glad to record that the picturesque scored in the struggle with pure utilitarianism. A rare victory! The old-time building, often painted by artists and appearing in more than one Academy picture, was happily spared from destruction and was converted into a very quaint, if slightly dark and inconvenient railway station: its hall doing duty as a booking-office, one of its mullion-windowed chambers being turned into a waiting-room, another into a cloakroom, and so forth. Thus matters remained until a year or so ago, when a brand new station, convenient and ugly, was constructed a little farther along the line, and the old house, one of the finest remaining Elizabethan red-brick mansions in the kingdom, became the stationmaster’s home—happy stationmaster! So it was that until quite recently Bourn boasted the unique possession of a medieval railway station!
Passing Bourn church on the way back to our inn we observed a notice attached to the door, of a tax for Fen drainage and the maintenance of the dykes, a shilling an acre being levied for this purpose “and so on in rateable proportion for any less quantity.” This called to our mind the ceaseless care that is needed to prevent these rich lands from flooding and becoming mere unprofitable marshes again, and the amount of the tax does not seem excessive for the security afforded thereby. On a tombstone in the graveyard here, we came upon, for the third time this journey, the often-quoted epitaph to a blacksmith, beginning:—
My sledge and hammer lie reclined,
My bellows too have lost their wind,
My fire’s extinct, my forge decayed,
And in the dust my vice is laid.
. . . .
This familiar inscription has been stated by guidebook compilers to be found in this churchyard and that; the lines, however, had a common origin, being first written by the poet Hayley for the epitaph of one William Steel, a Sussex blacksmith, and cut on his tombstone in the churchyard of Felpham near Bognor. The inscription at once became popular, and was freely copied all over England, like the ubiquitous and intensely irritating “Diseases sore
ANCIENT EPITAPHS
long time he bore, Physicians were in vain,” etc. In a similar manner, though to a far less extent, the quaint epitaph that formerly existed in a private chapel in Tiverton churchyard, to Edward Courtenay, the third Earl of Devon, and his Countess, appears to have been copied with variations. Writing early in the seventeenth century, Risdon, in his Survey of Devonshire, gives this epitaph thus:—
Hoe! hoe! who lies here?
’Tis I, the good Erle of Devonshire,
With Kate my wife to mee full dere,
Wee lyved togeather fyfty-fyve yere.
That wee spent we had,
That wee lefte wee loste,
That wee gave wee have. 1419.
This appeared in old Doncaster church in the following form:—