PART I.
HAD any one been able to sail down the River Calder, say a hundred years ago, long before the present little manufacturing towns had arisen on its banks, he would have passed through some of the most lovely scenery and through one of the loveliest mountain valleys in the county of York. Even to-day, when ugly mills and numberless prosaic tenements of trade disfigure, from an artistic point of view, the once grassy glades and the once gloriously wooded slopes, the prospect in many spots retains much of its virginal sweetness and romantic beauty. There are yet long tracts which commerce has not irremediably mutilated—pleasant meadowlands as fair with wilding flowers as of old; sylvan haunts of birch and elm whose dusky quietude is well-nigh as unbroken and solemn as of yore; bonnie tributary brooklets flashing and hurrying, like silver-footed naiads, through clough and dell and dene. As the eye takes a loftier and farther sweep the rugged contour and massive forms of forest-clad and moorland-capped mountains may be seen to wear much the same aspect they wore in the primal historic days of Roman and Celt. The conquests of commerce over both material and mental difficulties are apparent almost everywhere on the lowlands, for which all sensible and right-thinking minds are grateful, plain and anti-poetical as the outward signs may be in the jumble of viaduct and railway station, of factory and shop. But the old world of chivalry and romance is not altogether pushed aside: there are the ruins of stately and curiously carved gateways whence issued squire and yeoman to join the Pilgrimage of Grace, or later, gallant cavaliers, eager to mingle in the fray on the far-away field of Marston Moor; there are a few old Elizabethan halls with mullioned window and grey stone porch, in whose cool recesses the inmates waited anxiously and breathlessly for tidings about the great Armada; and here and there, built by pious hands that have been still for centuries, there are relics of quiet, quaint chapelle, where repose the ashes of Crusader knight, and of knights who fought so fiercely in the bloody wars of the Red and White Rose; and now and then we come across a grand antique church, crowded by worshippers where the ritual and the language of the worship have undergone many changes, and around whose hallowed precincts have gathered historic traditions and saintly legends, hoarier and older than the lichens that crust the mouldering towers. The tall chimneys are rising in the busy centres of trade, but occasionally we shelter under an oak or a yew-tree whose youth was fanned by less smutty winds; railway whistles have scared the nightingale, but the lark still carols anear human dwellings; graylings no longer leap the river-weir, but the waters sing and gleam as they glide seaward down the hushed moonlit glens.
The Calder, one of the most picturesque of northern rivers, rises near Cliviger Dene, in Lancashire, and enters the county of York through a wild gorge at Todmorden. As to the origin of the word there have been many conjectures, some plausible, but none to my mind satisfactory. An able writer in a provincial publication gives the derivation from two Celtic words, coll, the hazel-tree, and dur, water. The fatal objection to this is that hazel-trees never grew in such abundance in this valley as to be a distinguishing feature. Place-names with the Celtic coll and the Saxon hæsel are very rarely found. Had copses or shaws of the hazel flourished to such an extent as to give a name to the river, their former existence would still be traceable in the abiding nomenclature of the country through which the Calder runs its course. The Rev. Thomas Wright, who published a work on the antiquities of the parish of Halifax, where he was curate for more than seventeen years, noticing the Calder states that the spring is called Cal or Col, and is joined by the River Dar. This is a purely fanciful supposition, and, I believe, not borne out by facts. Dr. Whitaker urges a Danish derivation. The Danes unquestionably won and maintained a lasting hold on the hills overlooking the Calder. As soon as this mountain-born stream assumes the dignity and proportions of a river at Todmorden, it washes on the one hand Langfield, the Long Range of hills, and on the other Stansfield, the Stony Range, whilst a few miles lower down it flows at the foot of Norland, the North-land—all Danish, or more correctly Scandinavian, terms. Then, on the slopes rising from the south banks, we have Sowerby and Fixby, two ancient “by’s,” where families of predatory Danes took up their abode. Other nomenclature traces of the same nation, of the great Canute himself possibly, might be mentioned in favour of the argument on this side of the question; though (I write from memory) I believe Dr. Whitaker does not point out the surrounding Danish indications I have here advanced. Another historian surmised that the original Celtic name was Dur, and that the Saxons on settling in this neighbourhood added the adjective ceald or cold. But this is very improbable, the river in question being no cooler than any other.
I venture to urge a derivation different from any of the above, viz., from the Celtic caoill (wood) and dur (water). That Celts, the Brigantian clan, lived in this locality is an historic fact, the proofs of which need not be here adduced. The Calder beck as soon as it issues from the spring in Cliviger Dene flows by a long stretching sweep of woodland, and farther on among the hills of Yorkshire, a broader and a nobler stream, pursues its course for miles through dense primeval forests, among which may be mentioned the once famous forest of Hardwick. Its precipitous banks were clothed with no mere hazel coppice, but with vast masses of the more majestic oak and ash and birch, woodland in its wilder and more imposing form. Even to-day, though most of the primeval forest has been cut down, and manufacturing villages have sprung up on the ancient sylvan sites, the tourist starting above Todmorden would not, in a walk of thirty miles by the river side, be able to lose sight of the picturesque and far-stretching belts of woodland scenery. It is yet emphatically the Caoill-dur, the water winding through the woods. Of course, in this case the Saxons took up the word as they found it in use among the conquered Celts. Then, to strengthen this conjecture, the very first tributary brook on the north—of size and importance, at least, to give a name to the valley—joining the parent stream is the Colden or Caldene, which probably is the Caoill-dene, the woodland valley. The reader will judge how accurately the word describes this lonely mountain glen when he is told that at a distance the eye can scarcely catch a flash of the waters of this stream as they hurry down this wild sylvan region, so thickly is it overshadowed by a forest of ash and birch. A topographical word derived from two languages is rare in this part, and when we come across one it is generally a Saxon grafted on the more primitive Celtic name of mountain or river. Colden or Caldene is probably an instance to the point.
That caoill was contracted to, or commonly pronounced, cal may be pretty safely supposed, when we know that in the Latinised form or transformation it became cal, as in Caledonii, that is, Caoill-daoin, the people inhabiting the woods. The reader will perceive that caoill is closely akin to the Greek κᾶλον, also signifying a wood.
The Calder, which is a very sinuous stream, runs a most irregular but charmingly diversified course as it winds under scout and scar, now gliding smoothly past belts of woodland or by long stretches of fair pastoral field, or again in narrower channel foaming more rapidly through wild ravine or over rocky weir, only again to slip into more tranquil waters, pleasantly gladdening as with quiet familiarity village and thorpe. Leaving Todmorden the tourist passes on the right the precipitous woods of Erringden, the dene or valley of the Irringas, where of yore probably dwelt a branch of the family of the Aruns; and on the other hand, towering far away on the heights to the north may be seen the bleak, solitary, altar-like mass of rock known as Llads-Law, conjectured by some to be a Druidical ruin. The Celt lived here beyond all doubt, though but few are the traces he has left behind in cromlech or cairn, in speech or blood. The Roman, we know, cut his way through the primeval forests, and on these very mountains laid down his military roads, the long lines of which we can map out, and oft-times does the plough turn up fragments of rusted sword and broken spear which tell how the pierced hand had to drop them for ever. On and near these roads, after the iron legions had ceased to tramp them, sprung up many a Saxon “ton” or town and Danish “by.” There, on the one hand, upon the heights still difficult to scale except to born mountaineers, is perched Saxon Heptonstall, with its grand old tower of Saint Thomas à Becket and antique homesteads clustering around; and yonder, on the far opposite slope to the south-east, is Danish Sowerby, taking us back in thought to the times when the Vikings settled down and fortified their “by” in the forest fastnesses of the hill. Here, too, to this Sowerby came later the Earl of Warren and built himself a castle, and took to his own possession vast tracts of mountain slope and wooded glen, which long retained the name of the Forest of Hardwick, and therein he hunted in right baronial style the boar and the wild deer. Sowerby with its Danish and Norman memories has a not uninteresting story in later ages, and is not a little proud in having given birth to John Tillotson, one of England’s most illustrious primates. Haugh-End, the quaint old house where he was born, is on the southern slope of the hill, and many the pilgrims who turn aside to have a look at the grey old roof sheltered behind the trees and the ivied high wall. Not a bow-shot from the riverside, and nearly opposite Sowerby, is Eawood Hall, the birthplace of Bishop Ferrar, the martyr. Eawood, snugly and picturesquely nestled under the greenwood scars of Midgley, has a conspicuous place in the ecclesiastical history of the county. Here John Wesley preached on several occasions, on one of which he remarked, “I preached to near an hour after sunset. The calmness of the evening agreed well with the seriousness of the people; every one of whom seemed to drink in the Word of God as a thirsty land the refreshing showers.” William Grimshaw, curate of Todmorden and afterwards incumbent of Haworth, a not unworthy coadjutor of Whitefield and the Wesleys, married his first wife from this place, and often preached and stayed here on his home-missionary tours. Not more than a couple of miles away is the birthplace of John Foster, whose Essays at one time had a considerable reputation. Close to Eawood there is many a neighbouring hall of more than local interest, one especially, Brearley Hall, beautifully embosomed in the trees on a gentle eminence on the north side of the river, and formerly the seat of a younger branch of the Lacy family. About half an hour’s walk down the valley brings the pedestrian to Daisy Bank Wood, and Chaucer’s favourite flower still grows on the daisied bank, and there stands yet the old-fashioned house below the wood where was born, in the reign of Elizabeth, Henry Briggs, of logarithm renown, and the first Savilian professor of geometry at the University of Oxford.
(To be continued.)
Archaeology a Confirmation of Historic and Religious Truth.[68]
By the Rev. George Huntington, M.A., Rector of Tenby.