Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home
Of bell and burial.”
The innocent observance lingered longer in Derbyshire than anywhere else, and was not abandoned at Ashford-in-the-Water until 1820. The Wye at this point spreads out its waters, turning weedy wheels, and wandering through lush meadow-lands, finely timbered. At Bakewell the stream is of considerable width, and is spanned by a handsome old bridge evidently the work of an architect of imagination. The town itself is of considerable antiquity, and the church, one of the oldest and finest in the county, stands on a commanding hill, and is a picturesque feature in a glorious landscape. Time has made furrow and wrinkle on the grey old fabric, but
“Still points the tower and pleads the bell,
The solemn arches breathe in stone;
Window and walls have lips to tell
The mighty faith of days unknown.”
Bakewell is the Paradise of anglers, and wonderful stories are told of the trophies captured when the May-fly is on the water. The river now narrows, and winds in many a tortuous curve through the Haddon pastures. Below Haddon Hall, at Fillyford Bridge, it receives the limpid Lathkill, a stream to-day as clear as when Charles Cotton described it to “Viator” in “The Compleat Angler” as “by many degrees the purest and most transparent stream that I ever yet saw, either at home or abroad, and breeding the reddest and best trouts in England.”
THE HIGH TOR, MATLOCK.