Ludlow is the centre for fascinating excursions. The delicious air and most lovely scenery tempt one forth on roads that run between bird-haunted banks fringed with luxuriant bracken and lined with all manner of trees to whose very tops climbs the aspiring honeysuckle. The glint of red berries from the mountain ash, the drooping sprays of the larches, the silvery glimpses of far vistas framed in leafy green, the spicy forest fragrances, the freshness and buoyancy of the air, all unite to make the spirit glad. From every rise in the road are views that range over a fair outspread of plain and valley, rimmed by gentle hills. All over Worcestershire we looked, and into Wales, and up through Salop to where the Wrekin smiled a gracious recognition. Points of special interest abound,—Haye Wood, where Lady Alice, daughter of the Earl of Bridgwater, and her brothers lost their way and by their little adventure gave young Milton the suggestion for his Masque; St. Mary's Knoll, once crowned by a venerated image of the Virgin; Oakley Park, with its Druid trees; the little church of Pipe Aston, with its curious semi-cirque of Norman carving over the door; Leinthall church, overtopped at either end by lofty yews; British fort; Tudor mansion; storied battlefield.
Our first goal was Richard's Castle in Hereford, dating from the reign of Edward the Confessor,—a Norman keep before the Norman Conquest. Nothing of that brave erection is left save a mound of earth and a bit of broken wall. Near by stands an old church with some remnants of fine glass and with the rare feature, in England, of a detached bell-tower. We lingered in the church yard, looking out from a massive recumbent slab that was cleft from end to end, as if the impatient sleeper could not wait for the Archangel's trump, eastward to the Malvern Hills, whose earthly blue melted as softly into the blue of the sky as life melts into death. But a line of rooks flapping roostward awoke us to the flight of time, and the pensive appeal of that quiet spot, with its lichened crosses and grave-mantling growths of grass and ivy, was dispelled by a donkey who thrust his head through a green casement in the hedge and waggled his long ears at us with a quizzical expression.
An excursion that could not be foregone, however our consciences pricked us for delay, was that to Wigmore, the once impregnable hold of the Mortimers. As we left Ludlow, we looked back on the looming grey mass of its own still stupendous castle and were hardly prepared to find the rival fortress in such utter desolation of decay. Standing on its sentry height, girdled with its massive walls, it was once a menace to the English throne. Now such towers as yet remain are rent and ragged. Only a curtain of ivy guards the inner gate. Trees have sprung from the dirt-choked embrasures, and purple thistles grow rank in the empty courts. Yet for all the rich cloaking of vine and wall-flower, all the carpeting of moss and blossom, Time has not made peace with this grim ruin. Something sullen and defiant still breathes from those gigantic fragments. Dark openings in the ground give glimpses of stone passages and yawning dungeons that must render the place a paradise for boys. Thence we drove to Wigmore Abbey where the Mortimers lodged the priestly intercessors who had no light task to pray away the sins of that proud and ruthless race. We found a farm resounding with the baaing of sheep and mooing of cows instead of with Latin chants. Wrought into the texture of the grange itself, a weather-stained house of stone, with, as we saw it, a row of decorative pigeons perched on the roof-tree, are remnants of the old carvings and window traceries. At the rear, a long, low building of the Shropshire black-and-white, with a great bundle of straw bulging from an upper window, retains a fine arched gateway. Pleached fruit trees, climbing roses, and purple clematis do their best to console the scene for its lost pieties. On the homeward route, by way of yellow wheat fields, waving woods, and running water, we had a wonderful view of the Welsh mountains bathed in the opalescent hues of sunset, a divine lustre through which rang sweetly the vespers of the thrush, and could hardly persuade ourselves that it was from those glorified heights the wave of war used to rush down to break in blood upon the Marches.
WIGMORE ABBEY—GATE HOUSE AND BARN
Yet even the little round county of Herefordshire, with its soft green levels, its apple orchards and cider-presses, its hop gardens, and those broad fields where graze its famous sheep and cattle, has tragic tales to tell. Wigmore Castle, indeed, is over the Hereford line. A few miles to the northwest are the ruins of Brampton-Bryan Castle, which testifies to the latest war-anguish of these western shires, the struggle to the death between Charles I and Parliament. Here Lady Harley was besieged for over a month by her royalist neighbour, Colonel Lingen, who—ill-done for a cavalier—came up against her, in the absence of her husband and son, with a force of six hundred men. Cheery, gallant, resourceful while the need lasted, Lady Harley gave way when the baffled enemy had withdrawn, and wrote her son that if the castle must undergo another siege, she was sure that God would spare her the seeing it. And having so written, she died the following day. In the spring the royalists returned with cannon and battered down the walls, burning and plundering. At the end of the long strife, Parliament awarded Sir Robert Harley, as some partial recompense for his sorrows and losses, the Lingen lands, but Edward Harley, the son of that brave, tender-hearted mother, called at once on Lady Lingen and presented her with the title-deeds. It may be doubted if all the Herefordshire annals record a nobler victory.
The Wars of the Roses were waged with peculiar ferocity in this section of England. The great battle of Mortimer's Cross, which gave Edward IV his crown, was fought a little to the west of Leominster. Here old Owen Tudor, who had wedded Henry V's French Kate, daughter and widow of kings,—he whose grandson, Henry VII, brought in the Tudor line of English sovereigns, was taken prisoner. He was executed, with all the other prisoners of rank, in Hereford market-place, and his head was "set upon the highest grice of the market cross and a mad woman kemped his hair and washed away the blood from his face, and she got candles and set about him burning, more than one hundred. This Owen Tudor was father unto the Earl of Pembroke, and had wedded Queen Katherine, King Henry VI's mother, weening and trusting always that he should not be beheaded till he saw the axe and block, and when he was in his doublet he trusted on pardon and grace till the collar of his red velvet doublet was ripped off. Then he said, 'That head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Katherine's lap,' and put his heart and mind wholly unto God, and full meekly took his death."[8]
Earlier civil conflicts, that between Edward II and his barons, and that holier war of liberty, won though lost, by Simon de Montfort against his king and prince, have left graphic memories in Herefordshire. But even these strifes seem recent beside the battle-marks of Offa the Saxon, who built an earthen dyke, still in fairly good preservation, from the Severn to the Wye, to keep the Welshmen back; and beside those thick-set British camps and Roman camps that testify to the stubborn stand of Caractacus and his Silures against the all-conquering legions.
We were on a peaceful pilgrimage and could well dispense with visiting Coxwall Knoll, close above Brampton-Bryan, where Caractacus met his crushing defeat, and Sutton Walla, some five miles to the north of Hereford, where Offa, King of the Mercians, betrayed to assassination his guest, King Ethelbert of the East Angles; but we ought to have sought out Holm Lacy, for the sake of the Sir Scudamour of Spenser's "Faery Queene," and to have visited Hope End, near Ledbury, in loving homage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And so we might, had it not been for the innate depravity of man as exemplified in the dourest driver that ever handled reins. His one aim throughout that trip was not to go anywhere we wished. He would sometimes seem to hesitate at a parting of the ways, but it was only to find out which road was our desire, when as deaf and dumb to all our protests as if he knew only the Silurian tongue, as impervious to parasol pokes as if he were cased in Roman mail, he would take the other. The only comfort that came to our exasperated souls was the reflection that at sundown we could dismiss Sir Stiffback with his ill-earned shillings and never see his iron phiz again, whereas the unfortunate women of his household, the possible wife, sister, daughter, would have to put up with the unflinching obduracy of that cross-grained disposition until he went the way of Roger de Mortimer. But not even this cromlech of a coachman, though with the worst intentions, could prevent our enjoying the pastoral charm of the quiet land through which we drove, for this county, as Fuller wrote, "doth share as deep as any in the alphabet of our English commodities, though exceeding in the W for wood, wheat, wool, and water." As for wood, we saw in Harewood Park, by which our Clod of Wayward Marl inadvertently drove us, chestnuts and beeches whose height and girth would do credit to California; in point of wheat the county is said to be so fertile that, for all the wealth of cattle, the people have not time to make their own butter and cheese; the wool was reckoned in Fuller's time the finest of all England; and the salmon-loved Wye, which rises, like the Severn, on the huge Plinlymmon mountain, flows with many picturesque turns and "crankling winds" across the county, receiving the Lug, on which Leominster is situate, and further down, the Monnow, which forms the Monmouth boundary.