“Gate Open be
To honest folk as free.”
And the gray-whiskered custodian, so rheumatic and feeble that his daughter, a husky peasant woman, guides visitors about the abbey, warmed up to us as we were about to leave and opened his heart about the ruin in which he dwelt and which he seemed to love. He told us its story in the broad West Country dialect and pointed out to us many things of curious interest that we otherwise should have overlooked.
The sky is clearing; the low sun flashes along the hill-crests and floods the Somerset landscape with ethereal beauty, which we drink in as we skim swiftly along the smooth, wet road. We catch a final gleam of the ocean at Weston-super-Mare and pass a long row of imposing hotels. Then we are away for Bristol, the Queen City of the West Country.
[VI]
ODD CORNERS OF THE WELSH BORDER
There are few English castles where the spirit of medievalism lingers as at Berkeley and few that have darker deeds recorded in their long annals of crime. It has had a strange fascination for me ever since I read its story in my boyhood days, and the verse of the poet Gray had given the castle a weird association in my mind:
“Mark the year and mark the night
When Severn shall echo with affright;
When shrieks of death through Berkeley’s roofs shall ring,
Shrieks of an agonizing king.”
It was therefore a keen disappointment to learn on arriving in the quiet Gloucestershire town that it was not a day when the castle was open to visitors. However, we do not regret this so much in retrospect. The castle, grim, many-towered, ivy-clad, the very embodiment of the days of chivalry, still lingers in memory, with nothing to disenchant its mystery and romance. The old keeper at the imposing entrance was evidently sincere in his regret that the rule might not be suspended for our benefit—for indeed we had found such regulations not as the laws of the Medes and Persians, but there was no such good fortune here. “But do not fail,” said he, “to view the castle from the meadows, for no finer sight will you find in England.”