I had expected to see the valley of the Aire sprinkled with the villa residences of the merchants of Leeds; but the busy traders prefer to live in the town, and in all the nine miles on the way to Bradford, you have only a succession of factories, dye-works, and excavations, encroaching on and deforming the beauty of the valley, while the vegetation betrays signs of the harmful effect of smoke.
As the afternoon drew on, I bethought myself that it was the last day of the week, and a desire came over me for one more quiet Sunday among the hills. So I turned aside to Newlay station, and took flight by the first train that came up for Settle, retracing part of my journey through Craven of the week before.
On the way from the station to the town, I made a détour to Giggleswick, a village that claims notice for its grammar-school, a fine cliff—part of the Craven fault—and a remarkable spring. Of his visit to this place Drunken Barnaby chants:
“Thence to Giggleswick most steril,
Hem’d with shelves and rocks of peril,
Near to th’ way, as a traveller goes,
A fine fresh spring both ebbs and flows;
Neither know the learn’d that travel
What procures it, salt or gravel.”
Drayton helps us to a legend which accounts for the origin of the spring. Suppose we pause for a few minutes to read it. Coming to this place, he says:
“At Giggleswick where I a fountain can you show,
That eight times in a day is said to ebb and flow,
Who sometime was a nymph, and in the mountains high
Of Craven, whose blue heads for caps put on the sky,
Amongst th’ Oreads there, and sylvans made abode
(It was ere human foot upon those hills had trod),
Of all the mountain kind and since she was most fair,
It was a satyr’s chance to see her silver hair
Flow loosely at her back, as up a cliff she clame,
Her beauties noting well, her features, and her frame,
And after her he goes; which when she did espy,
Before him like the wind the nimble nymph doth fly,
They hurry down the rocks, o’er hill and dale they drive,
To take her he doth strain, t’ outstrip him she doth strive,
Like one his kind that knew, and greatly fear’d his rape,
And to the topick gods by praying to escape,
They turn’d her to a spring, which as she then did pant,
When wearied with her course, her breath grew wondrous scant:
Even as the fearful nymph, then thick and short did blow,
Now made by them a spring, so doth she ebb and flow.”
It was supper-time when I came to the Lion at Settle. A commercial traveller, who was in the town on his first visit, looked up from his accounts while I sat at table to tell me of a strange word which he had heard during the day, and with as much astonishment as if it had been Esquimaux. Indeed, he had not recovered from his astonishment, and could not help having a good laugh when he thought of the cause. Seeing a factory on the outskirts of the town, he asked a girl, “What do they make in that factory?”
“What do they addle?” replied the girl, inquiringly. And ever since he had been repeating to himself, “What do they addle?” and always with a fresh burst of laughter.
“Pretty outlandish talk that, isn’t it?” he said, as he finished his story.
Settle is a quiet little town, built at the foot of Castleber, another of the grand cliffs of Craven. To the inhabitants the huge rock is a recreative resort: seats are placed at its base; a zigzag path leads to the summit, whence the views over the valley of the Ribble are very picturesque and pleasing. On the north-west the broad top of Ingleborough is seen peeping over an intervening height; Penyghent appears in the north; and southerly, Pendle Hill rises within the borders of Lancashire. Very beautiful did the dewy landscape seem to me the next morning as I sat on the cliff top while the sunlight increased upon the green expanse.