Made misty with the floating meal.”
Glutton Dale, a rocky gorge, gives access to the odd, old-world village of Sterndale, with a tavern the sign of which is “The Silent Woman.” It is a pictorial sign in the most pronounced Van Daub style; but the designer must have been a satirical humourist, for the lady depicted is without a head!
The Dove for the next few miles loses its wild features. There are no deep gorges or rocky chasms. The walk now is through lush meadows, and the progress of the stream, so swift and tumultuous in its upper reaches, is in comparison almost sluggish. It ripples with soothing murmur over pebbly shallows, or reflects patches of blue sky in deep and glassy pools. Here and there a water-thread from either the Staffordshire or the Derbyshire side, is welcomed, and trout and grayling invite the angler. Past Beggar’s Bridge, Crowdecote Bridge, Pilsbury, Broad Meadow Hall, and a fertile country dotted with dairy farms, and we are at the patrician village of Hartington, with its Elizabethan hall on the hill, and its venerable church with pinnacled tower, dating back to the first part of the thirteenth century, temp. Henry III. Hartington, which gives the Marquises their title, is eleven miles from Dove Head, and the length of the river from its source to its junction with the Trent is exactly fifty-six picturesque unpolluted miles, without an uninteresting point along the entire course. A riverside path brings us to Beresford Dale, perhaps the most secluded portion of the valley, for the Dove Dale tourist and the “cheap tripper” rarely penetrate so far up the zigzag windings of the river. Here the stream resumes its romantic features. Limestone tors embroidered with foliage shut it out from the world. There is a strip of white cloud above, and a gleam of liquid light below. Pellucid pools reflect wooded height and gleaming crag. All around is the sense of solitude and the rapture of repose, broken only by the soliloquy of the stream and the song of the wild birds.
At Pike Pool (there are no pike), alluded to in the “Compleat Angler,” rises from the centre of the Dove a pinnacle of weather-beaten limestone forty feet high. Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton indulge in a characteristic colloquy concerning this isolated needle, “one of the oddest sights.” The intimacy of the reckless young squire who penned the indecencies of “Virgil Travestie,” and the rigid moralist who wrote the Lives of Hooker and George Herbert, is one of the curiosities of famous friendships. It can only be accounted for by the conclusion that true love is like the law of magnetism—the attraction of opposites. Here, however, “Piscator” and “Viator” cease to be abstractions, for, behold! this is the classic Fishing House, wherein “my dear son Charles” entertained his “most affectionate father and friend.” Externally it is the same as when Izaak and Charles smoked their morning pipe, which was “commonly their breakfast,” and discoursed of the joys and contentment of country life. The little temple is built on a green peninsula at a pretty bend of the river, with the swing of trees above and the song of the stream below. “It is”—says the author of “Pictures of the Peak”—“a one-storied building, toned with the touch of time. In shape it is a perfect cube of eighteen feet, with a pyramidal stone roof, from which springs a stone pillar and hip knob. There are lattice windows and shutters on all sides. The doorway, with its three moss-grown steps, faces the dale, and over it is a square panel with the inscription—
Piscatoribus
Sacrum
1674.
A monogram, similar to the one at Dove Head, declares the affinity between the two old-world fishermen!” Formerly the oak wainscoting was covered with paintings of riverside scenes, and the portraits of the “father” and his “adopted son” decorated the panels of the buffet. The old fireplace, the marble table, and the carved oak chairs, however, remain intact.
THE MONOGRAM AT DOVE HEAD.
Not far from this fishing house stood Beresford Hall, the ancestral home of Charles Cotton. It was pulled down some years ago, when it was condemned as being structurally unsafe. But the owner (the late Mr. Beresford Hope) had all the stones carefully numbered and marked with a view to their re-erection somewhat after the old style. They now lie in an adjacent meadow. Beresford Hall in Charles Cotton’s days was a noble building. It stood in plantations among the rocks with woodland vistas opening out to the windings of the water. The hall was wainscoted in oak. It was rich in old carved furniture, ebony coffers, and trophies of the chase. The most prized possession, surrounded with arms and armour, hunting horns and falcons’ hoods and bells, antlers and fowling-pieces, was the fishing rod presented to Charles Cotton by old Izaak, whose bed-chamber, “with sheets laid up in lavender,” was one of the choicest apartments of the house. There were figured patterns over the chimney-piece, and angels’ heads stamped in relief on the ceiling. On the rocks above the site of the hall are to be seen vestiges of the Prospect Tower, the basement of which was Cotton’s study, and the summit a beacon where flambeaux were lit by his wife to guide her husband home in the darkness, even as Hero’s watch-fires brought her beloved Leander to her bosom. Cotton himself called this observatory “Hero’s Tower,” and in a poetic epistle, describing his journey from London to Basford Hall, he thus alludes to the building:—
“Tuesday at noon at Lichfield town we baited,