Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

To one fresh from a town it is delightful. As you step on the leads and gaze around on what was once called “the Lowths,” you are surprised by the apparently boundless expanse – a great champaign of verdure, far as eye can reach, except where, in the north-west, the wolds begin to upheave their purple undulations. The distance is forest-like: nearer the woods stand out as groves, belts, and clumps, with park-like openings between, and everywhere fields and hedgerows innumerable. How your eye feasts on the uninterrupted greenness, and follows the gleaming lines of road running off in all directions, and comes back at last to survey the town at the foot of the tower! Few towns will bear inspection from above so well as Beverley. It is well built, and is as clean in the rear of the houses as in the streets. Looking from such a height, the yards and gardens appear diminished, and the trim flower-beds, and leafy arbours, and pebbled paths, and angular plots, and a prevailing neatness reveal much in favour of the domestic virtues of the inhabitants. And the effect is heightened by the green spaces among the bright red roofs, and woods which straggle in patches into the town, whereby it retains somewhat of the sylvan aspect for which it was in former times especially remarkable.

Comment

Comment

Chapter 5 of the 31 of White’s month of July, so perhaps the 5th.

John Ray re lowth:

In many words we change ol and owl into au; as for cold they say caud; for old, aud; thence Audley, as much as to say Old Town; for Elder, Auder; or as we write Alder; thence Alderman, a Senator; for Wolds or Woulds, Wauds; thus the ridge of hills in the east, and part of the North Riding of Yorkshire (our Apennine), is called: and sometimes the country adjoining is called the Wauds. But that which lies under the hills, especially down by Humber and Ouse side, towards Howden, is called by the country people the Lowths, i.e. the low country, in contradistinction to the Wauds. Though some call all the East Riding besides Holderness, and in distinction from it, the Woulds (Ray 1691).

The James Gilchrist quote is from his Intellectual patrimony (Gilchrist 1817).

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Original

“On my first coming to England I landed at Hull, whose scenery enraptured me. The extended flatness of surface—the tall trees loaded with foliage—the large fat cattle wading to the knees in rich pasture—all had the appearance of fairy-land fertility. I hastened to the top of the first steeple—thence to the summit of Beverley Minster, and wondered over the plain of verdure and rank luxury, without a heathy hill or barren rock, which lay before me. When, after being duly sated into dullness by the constant sight of this miserably flat country, I saw my old bare mountains again, my ravished mind struggled as if it would break through the prison of the body, and soar with the eagle to the summit of the Grampians. The Pentland, Lomond, and Ochil hills seemed to have grown to an amazing size in my absence, and I remarked several peculiarities about them which I had never observed before.”

This passage occurs in the writings of the late James Gilchrist, an author to whom I am indebted for some part of my mental culture. I quote it as an example of the different mood of mind in which the view from the top of the tower may be regarded. To one fresh from a town it is delightful. As you step on the leads and gaze around on what was once called “the Lowths,” you are surprised by the apparently boundless expanse—a great champaign of verdure, far as eye can reach, except where, in the north-west, the wolds begin to upheave their purple undulations. The distance is forest-like: nearer the woods stand out as groves, belts, and clumps, with park-like openings between, and everywhere fields and hedgerows innumerable. How your eye feasts on the uninterrupted greenness, and follows the gleaming lines of road running off in all directions, and comes back at last to survey the town at the foot of the tower!

Few towns will bear inspection from above so well as Beverley. It is well built, and is as clean in the rear of the houses as in the streets. Looking from such a height, the yards and gardens appear diminished, and the trim flower-beds, and leafy arbours, and pebbled paths, and angular plots, and a prevailing neatness reveal much in favour of the domestic virtues of the inhabitants. And the effect is heightened by the green spaces among the bright red roofs, and woods which straggle in patches into the town, whereby it retains somewhat of the sylvan aspect for which it was in former times especially remarkable.

438 words.

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• Apennine Mountains (1) ·
• Beverley Minster (7) ·
• Beverley (21) ·
• East Riding of Yorkshire (66) ·
• English phonology (2) ·
• Gilchrist, James (1783-1835) (1), English author, minister at Newington Green, father of Alexander Gilchrist ·
• Holderness (14) ·
• Howden (3) ·
• Humber (20) ·
• 📌Kingston upon Hull (65) ·
• River Ouse, Yorkshire (19) ·
• Scotland (37) ·
• White, Walter (10), writer ·
• Yorkshire Wolds (23) ·

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