London, October 7, 1864
I told you last week that I was going down to Shropshire to visit my friend Gaskell. I only returned last night at eight o’clock, and am off again tomorrow to Derbyshire. My visit to Wenlock was very enjoyable. God only knows how old the Abbot’s House is, in which they are as it were picnicing before going to their Yorkshire place for the winter. Such a curious edifice I never saw, and the winds of Heaven permeated freely the roof, not to speak of the leaden windows. We three, Mrs. Gaskell, Gaskell and I, dined in a room where the Abbot or the Prior used to feast his guests; a hall on whose timber roof and great oak rafters, the wood fire threw a red shadow forty feet above our heads. I slept in a room whose walls were all stone, three feet thick, with barred, square Gothic windows and diamond panes; and at my head a small oak door opened upon a winding staircase in the wall, long since closed up at the bottom, and whose purpose is lost. The daws in the early morning woke me up by their infernal chattering around the ruins, and in the evening we sat in the dusk in the Abbot’s own room of state, and there I held forth in grand after-dinner eloquence, all my social, religious and philosophical theories, even in the very holy-of-holies of what was once the heart of a religious community.
Wherever we stepped out of the house, we were at once among the ruins of the Abbey. We dug in the cloisters and we hammered in the cellars. We excavated tiles bearing coats of arms five hundred years old, and we laid bare the passages and floors that had been three centuries underground. Then we rambled over the Shropshire hills, looking in on farmers in their old kitchens, with flitches of bacon hanging from the roof, and seats in the chimney corners, and clean brick floors, and an ancient blunderbuss by the fire-place. And we drove through the most fascinating parks and long ancient avenues, with the sun shining on the deer and the pheasants, and the “rabbit fondling his own harmless face.” And we picnicked at the old Roman city of Uriconium, in the ruins of what was once the baths; and eat partridge and drank Château Leoville, where once a great city flourished, of which not one line of record remains, but with which a civilisation perished in this country.
