Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1892-07-30
SOME PRETTY NOOKS
Found by Dispatch Commissioner
on Tour of Western England.
IN THE DREAMFUL VALLEY TOWNS
Away From the Maelstron Lines of Travel,
Among the Hills.
A SERIES OF IDYLLIC SAUNTERINGS

CORRESPONDENCE OF THE DIsPArcH.1
CIRENCEsTER, ENGLAND, July 1S-One
does not know hundredth part of England
even after years of travel among her historic
scenes and about her countless shrines.
I feel this more and more when, after
firing of grand old beaten paths, I step
aside, but a step it sometimes seems, and
find maze upon maze of sweet old hooks,
wonderfully winsome in collective or indi-
vidual aspects; and these could never be
exhausted, if one set out to explore for such
as these and know them never so little
when found, during the natural course of a
lifetime.
1t seems to me that the West of England,
say the western of the midland counties,
furnishes the most extraordinary number of
these half mountain eeries. You need not
go so far south or west as Devon and Somer-
set, nor even into Wales, where scenery
has more the elements of wild and savage
grandeur, and where the good folk who can
speak English as we'll as you can pride
themselves in making you believe they
cannot speak it at all, and that Welsh was
the language of Adam and Eve.
Neither will you have to go so far as the
lake district, which is all sublimity and
hotel aud posting bills; nor to Northumber-
land and Durham, verdureless and suggest
i've of coal nor again to Yorkshire, where
the shuddering fogs flap along the grew
some moors.
Places of Rest and Beauty.
But here in the very heart of England,
where anybody that has two days time,
though he should have two months instead
and two stout legs, can come from any great
English city almost as in holiday stroll,
are these myriad places of restfulness and
beauty, hidden coy from the globe trotters'
lorgnettes in the glens and hollows of these
midland hills, with histories reaching
farther back than the time of the Saxons'
first coming. with the moss of ages upon
them, and yet all of them as sweet and
fresh as the dew trickling from the loftiest
grasses of Cleeve Clouds and Broadway
Beacon, which stand like grim old towers
above the Cotswold hills
1 know the '1ive" American tourist is
hardly worthy of himself it, having ar
rived in Liverpool on Tuesday or Friday
evening, he has not ''done" Chester, dashed
through bennington, nodded in friendly
way to the painted effgy of Shakespeare,
become tired of London, glanced at Kenil-
worth and Warwick and swept around the
lake district to Glasgow, the Trossachs,
Edinburgh, Abbotsford and Melrose, in
naively and quite correctly puts it, before
the first week has barely rolled around.
A Slow Row and a Good One.
A pleasant way to reach this lovely
region is through Warwickshire Stop q
day or more at Stratford if you like, and
loiter about the church beside the Avon
Then get an old boatman, mind you, an old
and garrulous boatman, to row you down
bo or orio OF Ha Mi fa1
about Will Shakespeare and his times than
if the mighty bard had been his schoolmate.
Do not let him row fast. Give him time to
rest and descant upon the origin of Roman
roads and barrows and cromlechs, and above
all give him time for folklore tales and
bugaboos and whispered mysteries of the
lordly halls high up among the parks and
1emesnes.
Never care for the passing hours. The
thatches of cottages lean everywhere along
the Avon-almost to its brink. You have
no need for an inn. With your peasant
you will be welcome everywhere
1T night among the peasantry. By and by
you will come to the wales among the Cots
xolds. Then you will see hamlets and vii |
ages dotting the valleys, imbedded in
orchards, clustering on the hillsides,
oerched upon the heights, and all in a set |
ing of lush orchards, waving fields with in |
checked lines of hawthorn hedges or deuser
'ows of lines, and these In turn backed by |
,anks of forest primeval; all in such dron-
ng quiet, ample content and smiling opu-
ence that, full of the winey exultation of it |
III. YOU again and again irresistibly ex-
lain, Here is Already at lastr'
The Shadows of An Abby Town.
By and by your boat comes under the
hadows of gray old abbey town. Near
t is Deerhurst. where kings older than
Alfred worshiped. The Avon has sung
tself to sleep in the bosom of the silver
severn, and there, by Olney, Canute and Ed
nund Ironsides met and divided England |
'etween Dane and Saxon. Nearer still to
he gray old abbey town is the 'sBloody
Meadow" where the War of the Roses was
ecided.
Back past this now peaceful scene, past
Id thatched cottages, bright gardens and
reen fields, there rises upon the strangers
light mighty silver gray old abbey. 1t is
he abbey Of Tewkesbury. 1t is more than
90 years old, and the Norman pillars its
i'm old nave are the hugest and highest in
England. Few of the English abbeys, or,
indeed, of the great English cathedrals, con-
ain the materials of history and story which
'ewkesburv possesses. ..
Then what wonderful charm there is in
he old half timbered houses of Tewkesbury.
hey lean over the shadowy streets as
tba,, ho1 hal |