Lancaster was perhaps not the best place we could have chosen for the night, but everything had been running well and we had pushed on simply for the joy of the running. The County Hotel at Lancaster was like other county hotels in England. Verb. sap. They had the audacity to charge two shillings for housing our automobile for the night, and pointed out the fact that this was the special rate given members of the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland.
Well! It was the most awful "roast" we found in England! They must have some grudge against the Club! "B. B. B." cost seven shillings and sixpence, and dinner four shillings more, a bottle of Bordeaux five shillings, etc. Four of us for the night (including a hot bath for each—which cost the hotel practically nothing) paid something like £3 for our accommodation. It wasn't worth it!
We passed the "Lake District" to the left the next morning, where it always rains, we are told. Perhaps it always does rain in some parts of Westmoreland, but it was bright and sunny when we crossed Shap Fell, at a height of something like twelve hundred feet above sea-level. The railway station of Shap Summit is itself at an elevation of a thousand feet. We had crossed nothing like this previously in England, although it is not so very high after all, nor is it so very terrifying in the ascent or descent. The Castle of Comfort Inn in the Mendip Hills was only seven hundred feet, but here we were five hundred feet above it, and the neighbouring Fells, Helvellyn and Scafell in particular, raised their regular, rounded peaks to something over thirty-two hundred feet in the air.
Carlisle is commonly called the border town between England and Scotland; at any rate it was a vantage-ground in days gone by that was of a great value to one faction and a thorn in the side to the other. The conquering and unconquered Scots are the back-bone of Britain, there's no denying that; and Carlisle is near enough to the border to be intimately acquainted with their virtues.
We inspected Carlisle's cathedral, its ugly castle, and the County Hotel,—and preferred the two former. One thing in Carlisle struck us as more remarkable than all else, and that was that the mean annual temperature was stated to be 48° F. It was just that, when we were there, though cloudy and unpromising as to weather. In our opinion Carlisle is an unlovely, disagreeable place.
Gretna Green, with its famous, or infamous, career as a marriage mart, had little to offer a passing tourist beyond some silly, vulgar postcards on sale at a newsdealer's.
Across the border topographical characteristics did not greatly change, at least not at once, from what had gone immediately before, and it was not until Lockerbie was reached that we fully realized that we were in Scotland.
It was a long, long pull, and a hard, hard pull of seventy miles from Lockerbie to Edinburgh, via Moffat, Biggar, and Penicuik, skirting the Fells of Peebleshire and running close beneath the Pentland Hills, with memories of Stevenson's tales ever uppermost in our minds.
Via Dalkeith the entrance into Edinburgh is delightful, but via Rosslyn it is unbeautiful enough until one actually drops down into world-famed Princes' Street.
Romantic Edinburgh is known by European travellers as one of the sights never omitted from a comprehensive itinerary. It is quaint, picturesque, grand, squalid, and luxurious all rolled into one. Its castle crowns the height above the town on one side, and Arthur's Seat does the same on the other, with gloomy old Holyrood in the gulf between, the whole softened and punctuated with many evidences of modern life, the smoke and noise of railways, trams, and factories. There are many guide-books to Edinburgh, but there are none so satisfactory as Stevenson's tales dealing with the town. In "Kidnapped," "The Master of Ballantrae," and "Catriona," he pictures its old streets and "stairs," its historic spots, its very stones and flags, and the charming countryside around in incomparable fashion.