Everyman's England by Victor Canning Read Free Book Online

girth and passes Bingley and Shipley. But if the Airedale is doomed, the others remain, and of these, I think, the most beautiful are Wensleydale and Wharfedale, and it was to Wharfedale that I first came on a day not long after Christmas.
    It was a day when, although the sun had a surprising warmth, there was hoar frost in the shadow of the walls and the trees, and the grass crisped beneath my feet as I walked. From the hollows under the topmost crags there came the gleam of snow. I entered Wharfedale by Bolton Abbey, a ruin around which thousands of tourists have dutifully walked, comprehending little and making gentle, insincere gestures of awe and wonder. Most guidebooks are careful to explain that the Abbey was built by one Alice de Meschines, in 1511, as a memorial to a son who was drowned in the Strid while hunting, and then carefully explain that this cannot be true, because the son’s signature appears on a charter which allowed the monks of the Abbey to receive the manor of Bolton in exchange for other concessions. If the legend has been disproved, why bother about it? It would be wiser to omit the damning proof and let us enjoy the fiction. But the writers of official guidebooks are sticklers for truth, and unpractised in the art of falsehoods. And, unless you happen to be a student of architecture, I cannot imagine that you will be interested to know that you must note there is a large, plain, circular-headed recess, high up at W. of S. wall, in connection with a narrow wall passage, for which there is no apparent reason, or that there are two fragments of a limestone slab, with indents – one for garter, and three curvilinear windows N. of aisle, in the Abbey ruin.
    By the time you have worked out which is W. of S. wall and have stared at the wrong thing you will probably have a headache and a crook in your neck and wish that you could hurl one of the slabs of limestone, with indents, at the head of the writer, or push him through any kind of window, French or curvilinear. That the Abbey has beauty and once had even greater beauty is undeniable, but to have to waste a fine afternoon searching for corbels and reliquaries when you could go and sit by the river and eat your sandwiches while you speculated as to how the monks lived, whether they fished from the spot where you are sitting and whether they were such a drunken lot of merry tipplers as history reputes, is an imposition which I resent. The architectural technicalities are useful. There should also be some information for the ignorant, unenlightened being like myself who is aware that the monks who inhabited these places were alive and that the masons who carved the gargoyles and capitals were probably as cheerful and fond of their joke as the masons who walk any modern scaffolding.
    I stood on the spur which overlooks the river just above the Abbey. Below me the river swirled over its boulder-strewn bed, dark and deep on the outside of the curve and frothed with rapids where it broke away over the shallows by the far bank.
    All around was the silence of the fells, their bottom slopes cut into fields and the crests broken in places by black patches of firs. Farther up the valley the ridge of the hills stretched in an unbroken line against the pale grey sky with moving puffs of cloud above them. Between the black trunks of the trees I could see the weathered skeleton of the Abbey, surrounded by its green walks and lichened gravestones. The autumn colours had long gone from all the trees except the beeches to which still clung a few rags of brown leaf. It seemed impossible that these bare twigs and branches would, in a few months, be bursting into green and that even now the tight buds were moving imperceptibly to the swelling sap.
    As I watched the river, I heard the quick whistle of a curlew and then a heron rose from one of the thin spits of golden sand that lay along its banks and with heavy wings flapped away upstream. I wondered how much damage