upland sort it seemed too all about here ; grass everywhere,
fenced and unfenced, drained and undrained, open fell and
hard sheep sod, big ox pastures skirted by ragged fences or
straggling walls. Windy homesteads, solid and solitary, crowned
the ridges at long intervals, gleaming white against the inky back-
ground of the skies ; unsheltered and exposed, and facing the
storm with philosophic unconcern. High Pike, Great Calva,
Carrock Fell and the other giants of Skiddaw Forest had hidden
their heads in banking clouds and away on the left, shutting



IX



CALDBECK



253



out the plain of Cumberland, the lower and greener slopes of
Caldbeck Fells opened and shut in the lightning flashes. At
Greenrigg, the last farmhouse in the open before the road drops
down again to the enclosed country, John Peel was born, and
there an aged daughter of his still lives, while another survives
in the adjoining homestead which abuts upon the road at the
point where a final gate divides this long stretch of high
common from the country below.

A mile or so of soaking lane and I was in the village street of
Caldbeck, where a gentler rain was falling upon as old-fashioned




Market Place, Hesket Newmarket.

and characteristic looking a collection of habitations as even
fancy could have conceived for the environment of so
picturesque a personage. And by this I do not mean that
there were any architectural gems, such as you nay see in
some ancient villages in the south, nor would such things
have been in keeping with the genius of the place. It was
the old-worldness of the north that brooded over Caldbeck,
of heavy stone fronts that make their character felt, even
through fresh coats of whitewash, of low eaves and old slate



254 AT THE VILLAGE INN chap.

stone roofs and heart oak timbers. I must again remark, with
renewed apologies to the superior person, that, wet as I was, I
felt my blood coursing somewhat quicker as I rode into this
remote village, so unknown in itself, and so curiously and
fortuitously famous, so fiimiliar by name to me, at any rate
as far as memory could go back. There was no doubt about
the village inn ; it stood alone in the middle of the wide turf-
edged space, and looked down towards the church and rectory,
while the Caldew sang unseen below. It was just such an
inn as I should have asked for and expected at Caldbeck.
Snug and comfortable, yet sufficiently primitive, and with no
apparent consciousness of the touring public, which a few miles
away were such an item on the highway.

A big fire was roaring in the kitchen, for it was ironing day,
and I was glad enough to leave the front parlour for later use,
and dry my upper garments, at any rate, by the cheerful blaze,
while a middle-aged hostess and a more venerable dame dis-
coursed to me on the subject of my pilgrimage. Only the
elder lady knew the famous huntsman well, as he died in '54.
They were, I think, his connections in some w^ay, as probably
were most folks in Caldbeck. " He was just a plain ordinary
man," they protested, " one of ourselves." This of course
many of us have known well enough, but modern hunting is a
conventional pursuit, and we are a conventional people. If
John Peel's grey coat and simple habit are overlooked by the
vendors of patent stable mixtures, whose artists are accus-
tomed to depict him in the gorgeous panoply of a fashionable
M.F.H., it is quite likely that he thus vaguely figures in the
fancy of many who crown festive occasions with paeans in
his honour.

It seemed quite fitting that a portrait of the local hero should
face me as I discussed the homely lunch provided in the inn
parlour. It was not a work of art, perhaps, but at the same
time had an air of fidelity, which was much more to the
purpose, and was painted in oils over a generous space. It



IX A PORTRAIT IN OILS 255

represented a Denign looking old gentleman, with a longish
unwrinkled face, blue eyes, and a most beautiful pink com-
plexion. He wore a very tall and rather wide brimmed beaver
hat tilted back on his head, a loosely knotted blue or birdseye
handkerchief round his neck, and a long tail coat of brown or
grey, while his hand grasped a long-lashed hunting whip. I am
quite sure the Hanging Committee of the Royal Academy would
not have given that picture a second's consideration, but from my
point of view it inspired some confidence, and I need not say
much interest, and I drank the health of the original in a
bottle of Workington ale, as seemed fitting, for Woodcock
Greaves, if I remember right, was a Workington man.

John Peel was not a fell foxhunter such as those we have
come across in earlier chapters. Nor yet was he an ordinary
low country M.F.H., but something betwixt and between.
He hunted a small pack of his own for, roughly speaking, the
whole of the first half of the nineteenth century, over the upland
grass country which lies between the mountains and the lowland,
and as the song implies, rode his own horses behind them.
He hunted for his own amusement and according to the
Caldbeck folks who remember him was out nearly every day
in the week and always, like the fell hunters, at daybreak. His
" fields " were of course composed of his immediate friends
and neighbours, when they chose to go with him. Mine hosts
at the inn talked much, too, of his son, who was known as
"Young John Peel" and died at the tender age of ninety not
very long ago.

But I was strongly advised to go and see a venerable
individual known as " Willie Peel," a nephew of the illustrious
John, who had known his uncle well and as a grown man
been a good deal with him. This veteran would be delighted,
so I was assured, to draw upon his memory for my benefit.
And the more so, since what time there yet remained to him
was his own and he was " gey fond of a crack." So as the
rain had now ceased, I lost no time in seeking out this



256 A REMINISCENT NEPHEW chap.

reminiscent member of the house of Peel, who lived with
relatives in a roomy cottage beyond the confines of the
village, and found him all that had been described — and
more.

It was a plain old-fashioned room into which I was genially
welcomed by the veteran's married daughter, and I confess to
some satisfaction at finding that my errand was a novelty to
both. There was a big open hearth in which a turf fire
smouldered, and before the hearth was an oaken settle upon
which we sat and talked, or rather my host did, of the days of
old. Nothing from an artistic point of view could have been
more admirably attuned to the spirit of the theme than this
interior, and to sit here in converse with a man still active for
his years, as I was to discover, who had hunted with John
Peel, I really felt was something of a privilege. I was quite
thankful for the presence. on this important occasion of a third
party of a younger generation. In an early chapter of this
book I referred to the lucidity of the Cumbrian tongue as
usually encountered in these days. If I did not make
reservations I should have done so, and John Peel's nephew
may stand for one of them. He spoke the olden tongue in
all its purity, of that I am quite sure. Though by no means a
stranger to northern vernaculars, he had the better of me
again and again though both ears were eagerly cocked, and I
was genuinely thankful for an interpreter. If the reader
should get a chance to cast his eye over the verses of Anderson
or Stagg or Dr. Gibson, he may perhaps get an inkling of what
a fearsome tongue old Cumbrian is to the uninitiated when
spoken in its pristine ruggedness. I must not linger long
over such personal recollections of John Peel as passed on the
oak settle by the turf fire. My informant when a young man
used to help his uncle in the kennel rather than in the field,
and though full of ordinary incidents there is not much to be
said in a paragraph or two about a man who hunted nearly
every day in the week except Sundays for most of his life.



IX



JOHN PEEL'S HOUSE



257



When he wasn't hunting "he was aye drinkin'," said the free-
spoken nephew. But lest I should be accused of smirching
the character, even at second hand, of the immortal John, I
must hasten to remark that such an implication amounts to
nothing in relation to a Cumbrian statesman of a century
ago.

John Peel died at the ripe old age of seventy-eight, and was
going nearly to the last ; and, if like all his neigbours, he was
of a convivial turn, we must confess he carried it well. His
active career as I have said extended roughly over the first half







x^V^^^^^f^-



/o/in PeeTs Home.

of the century. He was very well-to do as a statesman, owning
land which seems to have brought him in from three to five
hundred a year in rent, if not more ; for, unhke the majority
of his class, he did not farm much himself, which perhaps,
under the circumstances, was just as well.

Peel spent many years in Caldbeck, and his nephew pro-
posed we should go and see the house where he lived and
kept his hounds. This, I need hardly say, had been my fixed
intention all along, but I was glad of so well qualified a guide.
So we set off for the village again, the old gentleman carrying
his four-score years with remarkable agility. The headquarters

.s



2S8 WOODCOCK GREAVES chap.

of the famous sportsman turned out to be a modest house of
whitewashed stone by the roadside that I had already passed,
and consisted of two small rooms some tw^elve feet square,
above and below, with a ' lean-to ' behind. I gathered from the
good lady who now inhabits it that I was by no means the
first stranger who, doubtless to her vast surprise, had made
this demand upon her courtesy. The house has not been
materially altered, I was informed, since Peel lived in it. The
two diminutive low-raftered rooms, one on either side of the door
represented the limitations of the celebrated yeoman's indoor
life, and an adjoining wash-house has equal interest as the
place where at one time those much-sung-of hounds of his
were kennelled. His horses, so said his nephew, were stabled
in some buildings still standing across the road. Woodcock
Greaves has himself told the tale of how the song was written ;
while as for his own story he was the son of well-to-do people in
Workington, and came to Caldbeck as the owner or part-owner
of a small woollen mill, situated in a romantic glen of the
Caldew, near the village, which eventually ruined him. He
was notable as a raconteur, a facile maker of verses both
humorous and pathetic, and a hard-riding sportsman. For
many years he was John Peel's intimate companion. Long
afterwards, alluding to his business affairs at Caldbeck, Greaves
wrote — " I was cheated, robbed, and gulled to such an extent
by those who ought to have been my friends, that I resolved
to go to the farthest corner of the earth. I made a wreck of
all ; left machinery, book debts, &c., in the hands of a friend
to provide for two daughters, while with the four other
children and ^lo I landed in Hobart Town, Tasmania, in
the year 1833."

Here the sporting poet lived to see his family take root and
prosper, himself dying at an advanced age within recent
memory. Indeed, I very well recollect — and this, too, by way
of testimony to the universality of the ballad — reading of his
death in the local i)aper of a remote American town. And



IX IKnV THE SONG WAS WRITTEN 259

by an odd chance a Tasmanian was of the company, and of
course had much to say upon the subject, which I have long
forgotten. Here, however, is what Greaves himself wrote
from Hobart Town, not long before his death : — " Nearly
forty years have now wasted away since John Peel and I sat in
a snug parlour at Caldbeck ; we were then both in the heyday
of manhood, and hunters of the old fashion, taking the best
part of the hunt in the morning, the drag over the mountains
in the mist, while fashionable hunters still lay in the blankets.
We had met one night to arrange about earth-stopping and so
forth. Large flakes of snow were falling. We sat by the fire-
side, hunting over again many a good run, and recalling the
feats of each particular hound, or narrow breakneck 'scape,
when a flaxen-haired daughter of mine came in, saying,
' Father, what do they say to what Granny sings ? ' (Granny
was singing to sleep my eldest son, now a leading barrister in
Hobart Town, with an old rant called 'Bonnie Annie.') The
pen and ink for hunting appointments were on the table, and
the idea of writing a song to this old air forced itself upon
me, and thus was produced, impromptu, ' D'ye ken John
Peel?' Immediately afterwards I sang it to poor Peel, who
smiled, and a tear or two ran down his manly cheek. ' By
Jove, Peel,' I said, in jest, ' you'll be sung of when we're
both run to earth.' "

The music of the song was subsequently elaborated by a
CarUsle musician, if I remember aright, and was first brought
to public notice, some twenty years after its composition,
by the fact of its popularity among Cumbrian sportsmen. My
Peel proved an active as well as reminiscent cicerone. He
took me to the Glen of the Caldew, where a modest bobbin
mill, almost hidden amid a really striking scene of foliage and
tumbling waters, still hums on the site where Woodcock Greaves
sunk his money near a hundred years ago in bigger operations.
We then worked round again to the village, passing the house

s 2



26o PEEL'S GRAVE chap.

where the Beauty of Buttermere, whose woes were recited in
an earlier chapter, spent her married Hfe, and followed the
stream down to the churchyard, where I paid my respects to
the grave of the local hero. This is marked by a plain upright
stone upon which is carved a whip, a horn and a hound and a
simple inscription stating that it covers the remains of John
Peel of Ruthwaite (his farm near Ulldale), who died on
November 14th, 1854, aged 78. As we walked back to the inn,
my companion pointed out some farm buildings by the road-
side where Peel's hounds were kennelled at the time his funeral
cortege passed down this road to the church. I was assured
by my guide, who ought to know, as he was himself a mourner,
that as the hearse passed the doors the orphaned dogs within
broke into a chorus of canine lamentations and that the village
was filled with awe at the nature of the coincidence if, per-
adventure it was nothing more.

It was full late when I succeeded in getting away from
Caldbeck and its entertaining inhabitants, only one or two of
whom it has been necessary to introduce here. But the days
were long, and I elected to go home round the far side of
Skiddaw Forest and Saddle-back, and thus complete the circle
to Keswick. I had lost all faith in the paper road, though on
the map it continued its triumphant course, regardless of hills
and streams and gates and ruts." There is no doubt an excel-
lent road to Penrith, the metropolis, whither the folks of this
district in the main no doubt resort. But at Hesket a quaint
decayed wool market near Caldbeck, over which " Fuimus " is
written in the largest letters, I bid good-bye, to my sorrow, to
the Penrith road, and after many miles of tortuous wanderings
on rocky or sticky byways, where neither finger-posts nor other
travellers nor friendly road-side houses appeared to solve one's
frequent doubts, I struck familiar ground at Mungrisdale.
Here, beneath the shadow of the eastern slopes of Saddleback,
this delectable hamlet sleeps by the upper waters of the Glen-



IX



HOME BY MUNGRISDALE



261



deramakin, but two miles from the Keswick and Penrith road
and twice as many from Threlkeld. A neat but rustic inn
stands above the brawHng brook, and suggests a fitting retreat
for some solitary who would be in the Lake Country but not of
it, in touch with its beauties yet removed from the haunts of
men and well off the route of travel.




Road to Keswick.



ism^'mM'mM4.



mm



?^ _ _



"Sfi?"




T'Z/iT Castle and MJen Bridge, Carlisle.



CHAPTER X.

By those who are not indifferent to everything but the
actual face of nature, the old capital of this western border
land should by no means be left out of any scheme of travel
in Cumberland. In former times a tiresome railway journey
was inevitable to this achievement. Since the advent, however,
of the blessed cycle, it is a simple undertaking as well as a
pleasant one to run there from Keswick or from Penrith over
admirable roads. The one is about thirty, the other some
eighteen miles. Amid days of walking on the mountains or
riding on the rougher roads that intersect them, such an
expedition makes a pleasant interlude with the railroad too, so
handy should strength or weather or machine break down.

For myself, I must say that I do like to approach a town,>and
above all a town of character and high tradition, upon the road-
way ; to first behold it perhaps from afar, and to watch the country
gradually attuning itself to the neighbourhood of its capital ;
to mark the old inns and the many still surviving landmarks
that in former days cheered the approaching traveller, whether on
the coach-top or in lumbering chais3, or on his ambling nag, with
saddle bags and holsters ; to note the seats of ancient stocks,
vanished or still prosperous, whose names are writ large for
centuries on the stone of fortress or cathedral or civic hall.
When, with such pleasant if inconsequent reflections you
have thus passed from country into suburb, and from suburb



CH. X



ROAD OR RAIL



263



into market place, or wherever the pulse of your town most
loudly beats, you feel already to know something of it, to be in
a better mood at least to learn something, than if you had been
dumped out of a railway train you know not where, amid a
militant crowd of busmen, cabbies, hotel-porters and gamins.

From Penrith it is a fine run to Carlisle over the old North
Road by Plumpton and High Hesket with the Petterell on the
left and the Eden on the right, both hurrying to their junction




Near High Hfskct.

beneath the city walls. But as we have wandered back to
Keswick, it is the longer route we must here pursue, though of
a truth in the briefest fashion, as I want to get to Carlisle as
quickly as may be.

Then let us without more ado, and by way of the familiar,
but ever charming road down the Vale of Keswick and over-
looking Bassenthwaite, transfer ourselves to that same Castle
Inn near the foot of the lake which witnessed our start in the
last chapter foi the classic pastures of Caldbeck. Having



264 DOWN TO THE LOW COUNTRY chap.

there selected the northward of the two routes branching from
the coach road, and which leads, so the mile-posts say, to
Carlisle in twenty-one miles, let not the traveller be discouraged
by his experience of the first four. They are little used, for
local reasons which matter • nothing here. They are as lonely
as the road to Caldbeck, and the abounding coney gambles
on your path as confidingly as upon the other. Big pastures,
scantily fenced, sweep away on the left to the ledges above the
Derwent valley, and on the right trend upward to the fir-crowned
ridges of Whitless Scaur. Bothel seems to be perched on the
last step of the descent into the plain of the Solway. which lies
spread below us, fair and rich as we pass out of the quiet old-
fashioned village. Yonder, just in front of us, is Sir Wilfrid
Lawson's house of Brayton, conspicuously set upon a leafy
slope, with every window glittering in the morning sun. Many
another place of note, town and village, hall and church tower,
can be marked amid the bright tints of woods and parks, fields
and fallows which roll away towards the shining Solway. At
Bothel too we strike the main road from Cockermouth to
Carlisle, and may bowl merrily along a highway as good as one
may reasonably look for in Cumberland, which as a county
does not shine in the art of road construction. The generous
fields of wheat and barley, just heading out and rippling in the
breeze, have a strange look after the cramped enclosures and
broken foreground of the mountain valleys. The hay is
mostly carried from the big meadows and on the long red
drills of ribbed tillage land, the turnips are showing in
green and vigorous lines. Shorthorns, are browsing in the
pastures and heavy Leicesters share the croppage with the
small and more shapely Cheviots. It is a fat country for the
most part, this upper lowland. The modest grey and white
homestead of the hill yeoman is no longer much in evidence.
Large buildings of red sandstone here and there face the
highway, but at such intervals as show that a weightier type of
occupant is on the soil. Of red sandstone too are the



X



AN UNEXPECTED CARILLON



265



labourers' cottages, one-storeyed and massive like those in
Scotland, with low eaves and a square window of diamond
panes on either side of the door.

We pass the Waver and the ^Virger rivers, and leave the
market town of Wigton just out of sight upon the left. A
carillon conies wildly sounding on the breeze, of a tone and
quality most wholly unexpected in such a locality. Bruges,
Antwerp, and Ypres rise for a moment to the memory,
for such music sounds strange among English fields, and




Wigton.

stranger still when of a sweetness such as this. A timely
countryman, however, solves the mystery, which is merely that
a neighbouring landowner of wealth and discretion has brought
these fine chimes from Belgium and hung them in a
private belfrey of his own, to the great delectation of his
neighbours. Indeed, a farmer in the neighbourhood assured
me that his annual holiday was no longer an unmixed joy, so
greatly did he miss the cheery music that at home rang out
the passing of his busy hours. We cross the east shore rail-



266



BY CROFTON AND THURSBY



CHAP.



road at Crofton and pass the gates of Crofton Hall, where
Briscoes have lived this many a long day. Now we are
running through Thursby, with a passing thought of the awe in
which the great and shaddowy Norse deity was once held along
these coasts. Now Dalston (not to be confused with Dalton-in-
Furness) is left behind, just off our road (where Romney the
painter was born), and further back upon the right lies the
present residence and historic stronghold of the bishops of
Carlisle. It was early in the fourteenth century that a bishop
had urgent reasons for getting the king's leave to fortify Rose




Dalion-in-Furness Castle.

Castle, for it was the sanguinary period following the Bruce
wars. But as we cannot visit that stately episopal pile upon
the Caldew it is idle touching on its story.

The entry to Carlisle by this Wigton road is not particularly
attractive. The city was of no great account in the mere
matter of population till modern times, and its modern
features are of an industrial kind and intrude themselves in
unromantic fashion on the notice of the traveller from the
south-west. But in visiting Carlisle it will be well to forget
all this and push straight on to the Castle, and there climb up



X A STIRRING PAST 267

and take our stand upon the lofty ramparts, ^^â– ith an average
imagination and a reasonable acquaintance with British
history, border and otherwise, we shall have from this vantage
point the best of what Carlisle has to offer, and that best to
mv thinking is very good. For the old city has played a part
more strenuous by far than any other town of note in England,
and this distinction, one need hardly say, is due to geogra-
phical reasons, and the geography of Carlisle as seen from its
castle walls is significant enough to stir the dullest dog. We
have seen it again and again during this little tour ; the
Solway, the Scottish hills, riven with once hostile glens, the
fat Eden valley, and the plain of Cumberland, and here above
them all the rock around which the tide of battle and the
passions of race hatred surged for centuries and the red walls
of Carlisle Castle, on which in fancy we have taken our stand.

How placid have been the lives of most English towns, how
meaningless their Norman castles, when rated by the standard
of Carlisle. Shrewsbury and Chester almost alone can claim
something of a kinship in stirring record ; but the Welsh March,
as such, ceased from troubling three hundred years before life
and property was really safe outside the walls of Carlisle. Be-
sides the Cathedral, whose sore vicissitudes of fortune give it an
interest like the Castle and a pathos all its own, there is not in
truth very much to be seen here. One fancies perhaps a stern
hard look about the older streets, as if life for them had been
too serious for the arches and gables and mouldings that artists