For half the way from Manchester to Leeds, the drive was about as trying as anything I found in England. The road is winding, exceedingly steep in places, and built up on both sides with houses—largely homes of miners and mill operatives. The pavement is of rough cobble-stones, and swarms of dogs and children crowded the way everywhere. Under such conditions, the numerous steep hills, narrow places and sharp turns in the road made progress slow indeed. It was evident that the British motorists generally avoid this country, for we met no cars and our own attracted attention that showed it was not a common spectacle. However, the trip was none the less an interesting one as showing a bit of the country and a phase of English life not usually seen by tourists.
There is little to detain one within the city of Leeds itself, but there are many places of interest in its immediate vicinity. There are few more picturesque spots in Yorkshire than Wharfdale, with its riotous little river and ruins of Bolton Abbey and Barden Tower. This lies about fifteen miles to the northwest, and while for special reasons we went to Ilkley Station by train, the trip is a fine motor drive over good roads. The park which contains the abbey and castle is the property of the Duke of Devonshire, who keeps it at all times open to the public. The River Wharfe, rippling over shingly rocks, leaping in waterfalls and compressed into the remarkable rapids called the Strid, only five or six feet wide but very deep and terribly swift, is the most striking feature of the park. The forest-clad cliffs on either side rise almost precipitously from the edges of the narrow dale, and from their summit, if the climb does not deter one, a splendid view presents itself. The dale gradually opens into a beautiful valley and here the old abbey is charmingly situated on the banks of the river. The ruins are not extensive, but the crumbling walls, bright with ivy and wall flowers, and with the soft green lawn beneath, made a delightful picture in the mottled sunshine and shadows of the English May day.
On our return to Leeds, our friend who accompanied us suggested that we spend the next day, Sunday, at Harrogate, fifteen miles to the north, one of the most famous of English watering places. It had been drizzling fitfully all day, but as we started on the trip, it began to rain in earnest. After picking our way carefully until free from the slippery streets in Leeds, we found the fine macadam road little affected by the deluge. We were decidedly ahead of the season at Harrogate, and there were but few people at the splendid hotel where we stopped.
The following Sunday was as raw and nasty as English weather can be when it wants to, regardless of the time of year, and I did not take the car out of the hotel garage. In the afternoon my friend and I walked to Knaresborough, one of the old Yorkshire towns about three miles distant. I had never even heard of the place before, and it was a thorough surprise to me to find it one of the most ancient and interesting towns in the Kingdom. Not a trace of modern improvement interfered with its old-world quaintness—it looked as if it had been clinging undisturbed to the sharply rising hillside for centuries. Just before entering the town, we followed up the valley of the River Nidd to the so-called "dripping well," whose waters, heavily charged with limestone, drip from the cliffs above and "petrify" various objects in course of time by covering them with a stonelike surface. Then we painfully ascended the hill—not less than a forty-five per cent grade in motor parlance—and wandered through the streets—if such an assortment of narrow foot-paths, twisting around the corners, may be given the courtesy of the name—until we came to the site of the castle. The guide-book gives the usual epitaph for ruined castles, "Dismantled by orders of Cromwell's Parliament," and so well was this done that only one of the original eleven great watch-towers remains, and a small portion of the Norman keep, beneath which are the elaborate vaulted apartments where Becket's murderers once hid. No doubt the great difficulty the Cromwellians had in taking the castle seemed a good reason to them for effectually destroying it. At one time it was in the possession of the notorious Piers Gaveston, and it was for a while the prison-house of King Henry II. There are many other points of interest in Knaresborough, not forgetting the cave from which Mother Shipton issued her famous prophecies, in which she missed it only by bringing the world to an end ahead of schedule time. But they deny in Knaresborough she ever made such a prediction, and prefer to rest her claims to infallibility on her prophecy illustrated on a post card by a highly colored motor car with the legend,
"Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe."
Altogether, Knaresborough is a town little frequented by Americans, but none the less worthy of a visit. Harrogate is an excellent center for this and many other places, if one is insistent on the very best and most stylish hotel accommodations that the island affords. Ripon, with its cathedral and Fountains Abbey, perhaps the finest ruin in Great Britain, is only a dozen miles away; but we visited these on our return to London from the north.
On Monday the clouds cleared away and the whole country was gloriously bright and fresh after the heavy showers. We returned to Leeds over the road by which we came to Harrogate and which passes Haredale Hall, one of the finest country places in the Kingdom. A large portion of the way the road is bordered by fine forests, which form a great park around the mansion. We passed through Leeds to the southward, having no desire to return to Manchester over the road by which we came, or, in fact, to pass through the city at all. Our objective point for the evening was Chester, and this could be reached quite as easily by passing to the south of Manchester. Wakefield, with its magnificent church, recently dignified as a cathedral, was the first town of consequence on our way, and about twenty-five miles south of Leeds we came to Barnsley, lying on the edge of the great moorlands in central England. There is hardly a town in the whole Kingdom that does not have its peculiar tradition, and an English friend told us that the fame of Barnsley rests on the claim that no hotel in England can equal the mutton chops of the King's Head—a truly unique distinction in a land where the mutton chop is standard and the best in the world.
An English moor is a revelation to an American who has never crossed one and who may have a hazy notion of it from Tennyson's verse or "Lorna Doone." Imagine, lying in the midst of fertile fields and populous cities, a large tract of brown, desolate and broken land, almost devoid of vegetation except gorse and heather, more comparable to the Arizona sagebrush country than anything else, and you have a fair idea of the "dreary, dreary moorland" of the poet. For twenty miles from Barnsley our road ran through this great moor, and, except for two or three wretched-looking public houses—one of them painfully misnamed "The Angel"—there was not a single town or habitation along the road. The moorland road began at Penistone, a desolate-looking little mining town straggling along a single street that dropped down a very sharp grade on leaving the town. Despite the lonely desolation of the moor, the road was excellent, and followed the hills with gentle curves, generally avoiding steep grades. So far as I can recall, we did not meet a single vehicle of any kind in the twenty miles of moorland road—surely a paradise for the scorcher. Coming out of the moor, we found ourselves within half a dozen miles of Manchester—practically in its suburbs, for Stalybridge, Stockport, Altrincham and other large manufacturing towns are almost contiguous with the main city. The streets of these towns were crowded with traffic and streetcar lines are numerous. There is nothing of the slightest interest to the tourist, and after a belated luncheon at a really modern hotel in Stockport, we set out on the last forty miles of our journey. After getting clear of Manchester and the surrounding towns, we came to the Chester road, one of the numberless "Watling Streets," which one finds all over England—a broad, finely kept high way, leading through a delightful country. Northwich, famous for its salt mines, was the only town of any consequence until we reached Chester. We had travelled a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles—our longest day's journey, with one exception—not very swift motoring, but we found that an average of one hundred miles per day was quite enough to thoroughly satisfy us, and even with such an apparently low average as this, a day's rest now and then did not come amiss.
It would be better yet if one's time permitted a still lower daily mileage. Not the least delightful feature of the tour was the marvelous beauty of the English landscapes, and one would have a poor appreciation of these to dash along at forty or even twenty-five miles per hour. There were many places at which we did not stop at all, and which were accorded scant space in the guide-books, that would undoubtedly have given us ideas of English life and closer contact with the real spirit of the people than one could possibly get in the tourist-thronged towns and villages.