A Month in Yorkshire

CHAPTER XXV

By Rail to Leeds—Kirkstall Abbey—Valley of the Aire—Flight to Settle—Giggleswick—Drunken Barnaby again—Nymph and Satyr—The astonished Bagman—What do they Addle?—View from Castleber—George Fox’s Vision on Pendle Hill—Walk to Maum—Companions—Horse versus Scenery—Talk by the Way—Little Wit, muckle Work—Malham Tarn—Ale for Recompense—Malham—Hospitality—Gordale Scar—Scenery versus Horse—Trap for Trout—A Brookside Musing—Malham Cove—Source of the Aire—To Keighley.

On the second morning of my stay in York, after a farewell visit to the minster, I travelled by rail to Leeds. I had little time, and, remembering former days, less inclination to tarry in this great, dismal, cloth-weaving town; so after a passing glance at the new town-hall, and some other improvements, I walked through the long, scraggy suburb such as only a busy manufacturing town can create, to Kirkstall Abbey. This also was an abode of the Cistercians, founded in 1152 by Henry de Lacy; and they who can discourse learnedly on such subjects pronounce it to be, as a ruin, more perfect than some which we have already visited. But it stands only a few yards from a black, much-frequented road, and within sight and hearing of a big forge, and the Aire flows past, not pellucid, but stained with the refuse liquor of dye-works. Still the site is not devoid of natural beauty; and an hour may be agreeably passed in sauntering about the ruin. It must have been a delightful haunt when Leeds was Loidis in Elmete.

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:

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:

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.

“As we travelled,” says George Fox in his Journal, “we came near a very great hill, called Pendle Hill, and I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high. When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered. As I went down, I found a spring of water in the side of the hill, with which I refreshed myself, having eaten or drunk but little for several days before.” The spring is still there, and known in the neighbourhood as George Fox’s Well.

After breakfast I set out to walk to Malham, about seven miles distant, and was mounting the hill at an easy pace behind the town, when two men came up, and presently told me they also were going to Maum—as they pronounced it. So we joined company, all alike strangers to the road, and came soon to the bye-path of which the ostler at the Lion had advised me: “It would save a mile or more if I could only find the way.” A greater attraction for me was, that it led across the silent pastures on the top of the hills. As I got over the stile, an old man who was passing strongly urged us to keep the road; we should be sure to lose ourselves, and happen never to get to Maum at all. To which I replied, that if a Londoner and two Yorkshiremen could not find their way across six miles of hill-country they deserved to lose it; and away we went across the field. Ere long we were on breezy slopes, which, opening here and there on the left, revealed curious rocky summits beyond, and as we trod the springy turf, my companions told me they had come by rail from Bentham, and were going to Malham for no other purpose than to see a horse which one of them had sent there “to grass” a few weeks previously. They were as much amused at my admiration of the scenery as I was at their taking so long a journey to look at a quadruped. They would not go out of their way to see Malham Cove, or Gordale Scar, not they: a horse was worth more than all the scenery. And yet, judging by their dress and general conversation, they were men in respectable circumstances. Presently, as we passed a rocky cone springing all yellow and gray from a bright green eminence, I stopped and tried to make them understand why it was admirable, pointing out its form, the contrasts of colour, and its relation to surrounding objects: “Well!” said one, “I never thought of that. It do make a difference when you look at it in that way.”

Neither of them had ever been to London, and what pleased them most was to hear something about the great city. They were as full of wonder, and as ready to express it, as children; and not one of us found the way wearisome. We had taken a new departure when in sight of Stockdale, a solitary farm-house down in a hollow, as instructed, and gained a rougher elevation, when the track, which had become faint, disappeared altogether, and at a spot where no landmark was in sight to guide us. “The old man was right,” said the Yorkshiremen; “we have lost the way;” and they began a debate as to the course now to be followed. At length one strode off in a direction that would have taken him in time to the top of Penyghent. I looked at the sun, and declared for the east. But no, the other remained resolute in his opinion, and would not be persuaded. “Let him go,” I said to his companion, who sided with me; “little wit in the head makes muckle work for the heels;” and we took a course to the east.

After a while the other repented, and came panting after us; and before we had gone half a mile we saw Malham Tarn, broad and blue, at a distance on the left; then the track reappeared; then Malham came in sight, lying far down in a pleasant valley; and then we came into a rough, narrow road, descending steeply, and the Yorkshireman acknowledged his error.

“Eh! that’s Maum Cove, is it?” he said, as a turn in the road showed us the head of the valley; “that’s what we’ve heard so much talk about. Well, it’s a grand scar.” He seemed to repent of even this morsel of admiration, and helped his neighbour with strong resolutions not to turn aside and look up at the cliff from its base.

We each had a glass of ale at the public-house in the village. Before I was aware, one of my companions paid for the three, nor would he on any terms be persuaded otherwise.

“Hoot, lad,” he rejoined, “say nought about it. I’d pay ten times as much for the pleasure of your talk.” And with that he silenced me.

Although Gordale Scar is not more than a mile from Malham, they refused to go and see it. However, when we came to the grazier’s house, and they heard that the Scar lay in the way to the pasture where the horse was turned out, they thought they wouldn’t mind taking a look just, as they went. The good wife brought out bread, cheese, butter, and a jug of beer, and would have me sit down and partake with the others; regarding my plea that I was a stranger, and had just taken a drink, as worthless. A few minutes sufficed, and then her son accompanied us, for without him the horse would never be found. We followed a road running along the base of the precipitous hills which cross the head of the valley, to a rustic tenement, dignified with the name of Gordale House; and there turned towards the cliffs by the side of a brook. At first there is nothing to indicate your approach to anything extraordinary: you enter a great chasm, where the crags rise high and singularly rugged, sprinkled here and there with a small fir or graceful ash, where the bright green turf, sloping up into all the ins and outs of the dark gray cliff, and the little brook babbling out towards the sunshine, between great masses of rock fallen from above, enliven the otherwise gloomy scene. You might fancy yourself in a great roofless cave; but, ascending to the rear, you find an outlet, a sudden bend in the chasm, narrower, and more rocky and gloomy than the entrance. The cliffs rise higher and overhang fearfully above, appearing to meet indeed at the upper end; and there, from that grim crevice, rushes a waterfall. The water makes a bound, strikes the top of a rock, and, rushing down on each side, forms an inverted /\ of splash and foam. And now you feel that Gordale Scar deserves all the admiration lavished upon it.

“Well!” exclaimed one of the Yorkshiremen, “who’d ha’ thought to see anything like this? And we living all our life within twenty mile of it! ’Tis a wonderful place.”

“So, you do believe at last,” I rejoined, “that scenery is worth looking at, as well as a horse?”

“That I do. I don’t wonder now that you come all the way from London to see our hills.”

We crossed the fall, climbed up the rock into another bend of the chasm, where the water makes its first plunge, unseen from below, shut in by crags that wear a sterner frown. You look up to the summit and see the water tumbling through a ring of rock, so strangely has the disruptive shock there broken the cliff. The effect both on ear and eye as the torrent breaks into spray and dashes downwards in fantastic channels, is surprisingly impressive.

Only on one side is the pass accessible, and there so steep that your hands must aid in the ascent. We scrambled to the top and found ourselves on the margin of a table-land sloping gently upwards from the edge of the precipice, so bestrewn with upheaved rocks and lumps of stone, that but for the grass which grows rich and sweet between, whereof the sheep bite gladly, the aspect would indeed be savage. Along an irregular furrow, as it may be called, which deepens as it nears the precipice, flows the beck—coming, as the boy told us, from Malham Tarn. There was another small stream, he said, which disappeared in a ‘swallow’ on his father’s pasture; and in that swallow he had many times found large trout, struggling helplessly in their unexpected trap. And, pointing to the highest shoulder of the cliff, he said that a fox, once hard pressed by the hounds, had leaped over, followed by a dog, and both were killed by the fall.

After a few minutes of admiration, the Yorkshiremen and their guide began to move off across the fell, in search of the horse. One of them hoped we should meet again on the way back. The other said, “Not much hope o’ that; for he won’t go away from this till he have learnt it all by heart.” Then we shook hands, and they promised to set up a pile of stones at a certain gate on their return, as a signal to me that they had passed through.

True enough, I was in no haste to depart, and there was much to admire as well as “to learn.” The sight of the innumerable shelves, with their fringe of grass, the diversity of jagged rocks thrusting their gray heads up into the sunlight, of the rugged and broken slopes, set me longing for a scramble. Hither and thither I went; now to a point where I could see miles of the cliffs, and mark how, in many places, owing to the splitting and shivering, the limestone wall resembles a row of organ pipes. Now into a gap all barren and stony with immemorial screes; where, however, you could hear the faint tinkle of hidden water, and pulling away the stones, discover small ferns and pale blades of grass along the course of the tiny current. Anon, returning to the Scar, I climbed to the top of the crag that juts midway in the rear of the chasm, surveying the scene below; then selecting a nook by the side of the beck, a little above its leap through the ring, I lay down and watched the water as it ran with innumerable sparkling cascades from the rise of the fell. Here the solitude was complete, and the view limited to a few yards of the hollow water-course patched with green and gray, and the bright blue sky above.

And while I lay, soothed by the murmur of the water, looking up at the great white clouds floating slowly across the blue, certain thoughts that had haunted me for some days shaped themselves in order in my brain; and with your permission, gracious reader, I here produce them:

The sun was beginning to drop towards the west before I left the pleasant hollow; and then with reluctance, for my holiday was near its close, and months would elapse before I should again hear the voice of a mountain brook, and slake myself in sunshine. Having returned to the village, I kept along the river bank to the head of the valley, where copse and enormous boulders, scattered about the narrow grassy level and in the bed of the stream, make a fine foreground to the magnificent limestone cliff of Malham Cove. Rising sheer to a height of nearly three hundred feet, the precipice curving inwards, buttressed on each side by woody slopes, realizes Wordsworth’s description—“semicirque profound;” and while you look up at its pale marble-like surface, broken only by a narrow shelf—a stripe of green—accessible to goats and adventurous boys, you will be ready to say with the bard,

At a distance you might well imagine it to be a towering ruin, from which Time has not yet gnawed the traces of fallen chambers and colonnades. And perhaps yet more will you desire to see the cataract which once came rushing down in one tremendous plunge from the summit, as is said, owing to some temporary stoppage of the underground channels. What a glorious fall that must have been! more than twice the height of Niagara.

From a low flat arch at the base of the cliff, about twenty feet in width, the river Aire rushes out, copiously fed by a subterranean source. The water sparkles as it flows forth into the light of day, and begins its course clear and bright as truth, yet fated to receive many a defilement ere it pours into the Ouse. Could the Naiads forsee what is to befall, how piteous would be their lamentations! The stream is at once of considerable volume, inhabited by trout, and you may fish at the very mouth of the arch.

Here, too, I scrambled up and down, crossed and recrossed the stream, to find all the points of view; then ascending to the hill-top I traced the line of cliff from the Cove to Gordale. It is a continuation of that great geological phenomenon already mentioned—the Craven fault—which, extending yet farther, terminates near Threshfield, the village by which we passed last Sunday on our way to Kettlewell.

My return walk was quiet enough, and favourable to meditation. The Yorkshiremen had set up the preconcerted signal by the gate. I hope the horse did not drive the Scar quite out of their memory. Perhaps a lasting impression was made; for “Gordale-chasm” is, as Wordsworth says,

I left Settle by the last evening train, journeying for the third time over the same ground, and came to the Devonshire Arms at Keighley just before the doors were locked for the night.

CHAPTER XXVI

Keighley—Men in Pinafores—Walk to Haworth—Charlotte Brontë’s Birthplace—The Church—The Pew—The Tombstone—The Marriage Register—Shipley—Saltaire—A Model Town—Household Arrangements—I isn’t the Gaffer—A Model Factory—Acres of Floors—Miles of Shafting—Weaving Shed—Thirty Thousand Yards a Day—Cunning Machinery—First Fleeces—Shipley Feast—Scraps of Dialect—To Bradford—Rival Towns—Yorkshire Sleuth-hounds—Die like a Britoner.

Keighley is not pronounced Kayley, as you might suppose, but Keatley, or Keithley, as some of the natives have it, flinging in a touch of the guttural. Like Skipton, it is a stony town; and, as the tall chimneys indicate, gets its living by converting wool into wearing apparel of sundry kinds. You meet numbers of men clad in long blue pinafores, from throat to instep; wool-sorters, who thus protect themselves from fluff.

The factory people were going to work next morning—the youngsters clattering over the pavement in their wooden clogs—as I left the town by the Halifax road, for Haworth, a walk of four miles, and all the way up-hill. The road runs along one side of a valley, which, when the houses are left behind, looks pretty with numerous trees and fields of grass and wheat, and a winding brook, and makes a pleasing foreground to the view of the town. The road itself is neither town nor country; the footpaths, as is not uncommon in Yorkshire, are paved nearly all the way; and houses are frequent, tenanted by weavers, with here and there a little shop displaying oaten bread. An hour of ascent and you come to a cross-road, where, turning to the right for about a furlong, you see Haworth, piled from base to summit of a steep hill, the highest point crowned by the church. The road makes a long bend in approaching the acclivity, which, if you choose, may be avoided by a cut-off; but coming as a pilgrim you will perhaps at first desire to see all. You pass a board which notifies Haworth Town, and then begins the ascent painfully steep, bounded on one side by houses, on the other—where you look into the valley—by little gardens and a line of ragged little sheds and hutches. What a wearisome hill; you will half doubt whether horses can draw a load up it. Presently we have houses on both sides, and shops with plate-glass and mahogany mouldings, contrasting strongly with the general rustic aspect, and the primitive shop of the Clogger. Some of the windows denote an expectation of visitors; the apothecary exhibits photographs of the church, the parsonage, and Mr. Brontë; and no one seems surprised at your arrival.

The Black Bull stands invitingly on the hill-top. I was ready for breakfast, and the hostess quite ready to serve; and while I ate she talked of the family who made Haworth famous. She knew them all, brother and sisters: Mr. Nicholls had preached the day before in the morning; Mr. Brontë in the afternoon. It was mostly in the afternoon that the old gentleman preached, and he delivered his sermon without a book. The people felt sorry for his bereavements; and they all liked Mr. Nicholls. She had had a good many visitors, but expected “a vast” before the summer was over.

From the inn to the churchyard is but a few paces. The church is ugly enough to have had a Puritan for architect; and there, just beyond the crowded graves, stands the parsonage, as unsmiling as the church. After I had looked at it from a distance, and around on the landscape, which, in summer dress, is not dreary, though bounded by dark moors, the sexton came and admitted me to the church. He points to the low roof, and quotes Milton, and leads you to the family pew, and shows you the corner where she—that is, Charlotte—used to sit; and against the wall, but a few feet from this corner, you see the long plain memorial stone, with its melancholy list of names. As they descend, the inscriptions crowd close together; and beneath the lowest, that which records the decease of her who wrote Jane Eyre, there remains but a narrow blank for those which are to follow.5