The Soar—Trent Junction—The Erewash—Gotham and its Wise Men—Clifton Hall and Grove—Nottingham and its History—Colwich Hall and Mary Chaworth—Sherwood Forest—Newark—Gainsborough—Axholme—The Confluence with the Humber.
Shortly after it has received the Derwent and passed by the locks communicating with the Erewash canal, the Trent is joined by another affluent, on its opposite bank. This is the Soar, which, for the latter part of its course, bounds on the west a portion of the county of Nottingham. Rising in the Leicestershire uplands, some miles to the south of the county town, it passes—traversing a rather wide and open valley—by Leicester itself, skirting the precincts of the Abbey—now marked by but scanty ruins—where Cardinal Wolsey died in the “winter of his discontent,” disgraced by the king whom he had too well served. Then it flows northward by the lime-kilns of Barrow, and near the granite quarries of Mount Sorrel, wandering through water meadows, flat and at times flooded, but for several miles bounded on its western side by the rugged hills of Charnwood Forest, that insular outcrop of old-world rock which so strangely interrupts the monotonous opulence of the “red marl” scenery, and makes a little Wales in England. To the Soar come tributary streams from the pasture lands of Leicester, dear to the fox-hunter, which tributaries, like the river itself, glide past many a quiet village, of which the churches are often of no little interest, and the houses not seldom afford to us excellent specimens of the domestic architecture of our country from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The junction of the Soar is not far from another junction, which has given both an origin and a name to what is rapidly becoming a town. Here the main line of the Midland Railway receives one or two important tributaries, and as the result, Trent Junction has sprung up. As we approach, tall factories are seen to rise above lines of red-brick houses, and the College—a young but important school, which has helped to make the name of the place familiar—is conspicuous just on the outskirts of the town. The valley here is wide and level, and the scenery naturally becomes a little monotonous, but its right bank, near to which the river, for a time, is flowing, is sometimes rather steeply scarped. One of the prettiest spots is near to the place where the railway crosses the Trent, shortly after emerging from the cutting which conducts it from the valley of the Soar to that of the main river. The side of the valley is steep and broken, a pleasant combination of rough grassy slope and clustering trees. The uniform flow of the water is interrupted by a weir, and its surface is flecked with white bubbles, roughened and broken for a time with ripples, while above and below the bridge our eyes range up and down the level meadows broken but slightly with lines of green hedges and dots of trees.
Shortly below this place the Trent receives another tributary, the Erewash, a river which traverses the Nottinghamshire coalfield, and is now blackened in many places with collieries and ironworks. Attenborough Church, with its monuments, is of some note, and in the village was born Henry Ireton, son-in-law to Cromwell. Some two miles south of the river is a village known throughout the length and breadth of England, for its inhabitants in olden time have made it a household word. This is Gotham, where wisdom was once to be found; for are not its wise men proverbial? Thoroton, the county historian, thus relates the origin of the saying:—“King John, passing through the place towards Nottingham, and intending to go through the meadows, was prevented by the villagers, who apprehended that the ground over which a king had passed would for ever become a public road. The king, incensed at their proceedings, sent some of his servants to inquire of them the reason of their incivility, that he might punish them by way of fine, or any other way he thought proper. The villagers, hearing of the approach of the king’s servants, thought of an expedient to turn away His Majesty’s displeasure. When the messengers arrived, they found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel; some were employed in dragging carts on to a barn to shade the wood from the sun; others were tumbling their cheeses down the hill to find their way to Nottingham; and some were engaged in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched upon a bush; in short, they were all employed in some foolish way or other, whence arose the old adage.” Obviously, when we remember the monarch with whom they had to deal, they were not quite such fools as they seemed.
THE TRENT, FROM THE DERWENT TO THE HUMBER.
The Trent now begins to draw near to Nottingham, and the villages show signs of the approach to a great centre of manufacture. On a cliff above the river is Clifton Hall. According to the county historian, the house stands on a rock of alabaster, “curiously inlaid in many places with beautiful spars.” It is approached by “an avenue of trees, a mile in length, upon gentle swells of the earth, which happily destroy the formal line which would have been shown upon a level surface. Below, the silvery Trent meanders.” Tradition links a grim story of a murder to the pleasant groves of Clifton, for here, as we are told, “the Clifton Beauty, who was debauched and murdered by her sweetheart, was hurled down the precipice into her watery grave. The place is shown you, and it has been long held in veneration by lovers. Agreeable must be the shady walks above or below on the water’s brink. Here the blackbird and the thrush whistle through the day, and the little redbreast in the evening sings the creation to calm repose in plaintive song. Here commerce is wafted from shore to shore, and industry flows for the reciprocal benefit of the human race.” Since these words were written, industry has gone on flowing to an extent which would have astonished the historian, and would perhaps have rather deranged the measured progress of his periods. But, even now, the barges not seldom form groups—as they did when Turner sketched—tempting to the artist, and the natural beauty of the approach to Nottingham has not been wholly destroyed by tall mills and lofty chimneys. The Cliftons, from whom the Hall and Grove take their name, are an old and important Nottinghamshire family. Thoroton duly records the items of a feast given at the marriage of one of its members in the year 1530, which are so curious as to be worth repeating as an indication of the state of England some three and a half centuries since. For the more solid comestibles were provided two oxen, six calves, six wethers, seven lambs, and ten pigs. Among the lighter were “sixty couple conys,” four dozen chickens, twelve swans, eight cranes, sixteen “hearonsews” (herons), and ten bitterns. To quench the thirst of the guests, there were three hogsheads of wine, “one white, one red, and one claret.” The prices were very different from those of Nottingham market at the present time. A pig cost fivepence, a wether two shillings and fourpence, and a calf fourpence more. A chicken could be purchased for a penny, and a couple of rabbits for fivepence. A swan was priced at sixpence, and a crane at fivepence; for the sixteen herons and the ten bitterns the same sum was paid, viz., fourteenpence. One might visit Nottingham market now for a long time before getting a chance of buying any one of these four birds, and would then have to pay a fancy price for it. Cygnet, as everyone knows who has tasted it, is an excellent dish, but we should have thought that the other wild birds would have needed a hunter’s appetite.
Clifton Grove is also inseparable from the memory of Henry Kirke White, the young poet who died at Cambridge, from overwork, in his twenty-first year. The following quotation from his poem on the place may serve as a specimen of his verses, which we think, in the present day, would not have greatly pleased “reviewers, men, or bookstalls,” and may give an idea of the Grove at the beginning of the present century:—
“And oh, how sweet this walk o’erhung with wood
That winds the margin of the solemn flood!