Portal:Cheshire/Quotes/Archive
As featured on the Cheshire Portal.
Chester is a glorious ancient city with a rare elegance in its beautifully preserved old buildings. A sense that all England's history is encapsulated here in its broad, cobbled, enchanting streets and from its 2000 year old walls to the awesome cathedral. Yet it is surprisingly young and lively. A living city with a zing in the air, yet mature and relaxed, a city that knows itself to be happy in its skin. This is the city I grew up in and loved.
- [Alice] went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
- "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
- "I don't much care where –" said Alice.
- "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
- "– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
- "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
We got to Chester about midnight on Tuesday; and here again I am in a state of much enjoyment ... Chester pleases my fancy more than any town I ever saw. I told a very pleasing young lady, niece to one of the Prebendaries, at whose house I saw her, "I have come to Chester, Madam, I cannot tell how; and far less can I tell how I am to get away from it."
This is a pretty Rich land; ... its much on Enclosures and I passed by severall large pooles of waters, but what I wonder'd at was yt tho' this shire is remarkable for a greate deale of greate Cheeses and Dairys I did not see more than 20 or 30 Cowes in a troope feeding, but on Enquiry find ye Custome of ye Country to joyn their milking together of a whole village and so make their great Cheeses.
In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. ... The ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. "A man," as one of them observed to me once, "is so in the way in the house!"
The huge yellow somethings went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them – which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking for all these years. ... Miles above the surface of the planet the huge yellow somethings began to fan out. At Jodrell Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice relaxing cup of tea.
The ayr is very wholesome, insomuch that the people of the countrey are seldom infected with Diseases or Sicknesse, neither do they use the help of the Physicians, nothing so much, as in other countries: For when any of them are sick, they make him a posset, and tye a kerchieff on his head; and if that will not amend him, then God be merciful to him! The people there live till they be very old; some are Grandfathers, their Fathers yet living; and some are Grandfathers before they be married.
There is a whiff of Stalinism in the air. Councillors who oppose the plan are threatened with de-selection. The accountants who have costed it believe that it is not financially viable: a single unitary authority would serve the county better. The chief executive of the County Council describes it as "perverse and deeply flawed". The children are especially at risk, since a single education authority which is a model of its kind would be replaced by two of unknowable quality. The people of Cheshire are up in arms yet feel powerless to resist.
They left the shimmering road for the green wood, and The Wizard was soon lost behind them as they walked among fir and pine, oak, ash, and silver birch, along tracks through bracken, and across sleek hummocks of grass. There was no end to the peace and beauty. And then, abruptly, they came upon a stretch of rock and sand from which the heat vibrated as if from an oven. To the north, the Cheshire plain spread before them like a green and yellow patchwork quilt dotted with toy farms and houses. Here the Edge dropped steeply for several hundred feet, while away to their right the country rose in folds and wrinkles until it joined the bulk of the Pennines, which loomed eight miles away through the haze.
To which I may add, that special gift which God hath bestowed on the soil in and near to that place, for the excellency of the cheese there made; which, notwithstanding all the disputations which many make to the contrary, and all the trials that our ladies and gentlewomen make in their dairies, in other parts of the country, and in other countries of the kingdom, yet can they never fully match the perfect relish of the right Nantwich cheese; nor can, I think, that cheese be equalled by any other made in Europe, for pleasantness of taste, and wholesomeness of digestion, even in the daintiest stomachs of them that love it.
But to have the ability to read Latin and Greek in the original, and also to be the natural speaker of the language of the Gawain poet are riches enough. Where there may be an association that is necessary for me to celebrate in my work is in the Gawain language, for the speaking of which I had my mouth washed out with carbolic soap by a well meaning teacher at the age of five. ... The language of my childhood and of my native culture is, technically, North-West Mercian Middle English. Of course it has changed, as all living language changes, since the time of the Gawain poet. But when I read sections of the poem aloud to my father, he knew, and used, more than 90% of the vocabulary; and the phonetics of the vowels have scarcely changed.
Ere our Kennel a coal-hole envelop'd in smoke,
Blood and bone shall give way to hot water and coke;
Make and shape, pace and pedigree, held as a jest,
All the power of the Stud in a copper comprest;
The green collar faded, good fellowship o'er,
Sir Peter and Barry remember'd no more,
From her Tarporley perch ere the Swan shall drop down,
And her death-note be heard through the desolate town,
Let Geoffrey record, in the reign of Queen Vic,
How the horse and his rider could still do the trick;
Let his journal, bequeath'd to posterity, show
How their sires rode a-hunting in days long ago.
It lay in the midst of a demesne of considerable extent, and richly wooded with venerable timber; but, apart from the somber majesty of these giant groups, and the varieties of the undulating ground on which they stood, there was little that could be deemed attractive in the place. A certain air of neglect and decay, and an indescribable gloom and melancholy, hung over it. In darkness, it seemed darker than any other tract; when the moonlight fell upon its glades and hollows, they looked spectral and awful, with a sort of churchyard loneliness; and even when the blush of the morning kissed its broad woodlands, there was a melancholy in the salute that saddened rather than cheered the heart of the beholder.
The tortuous wall—girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands—wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country.
O! thou thrice happy Shire, confinéd so to be
Twixt two so famous floods as Mersey is and Dee.
Thy Dee upon the West from Wales doth thee divide;
Thy Mersey on the North, from the Lancastrian side,
Thy natural sister Shire; and link'd unto thee so,
That Lancashire along with Cheshire still doth go.
As tow'rds the Derbian Peak, and Moreland (which do draw
More mountainous and wild) the high-crown'd Shutlingslawe
And Molcop be thy mounds, with those proud hills whence rove
The lovely sister Brooks, the silvery Dane and Dove;
Clear Dove, that makes to Trent; the other to the West.
Never had huger
Slaughter of heroes
Slain by the sword-edge —
Such as old writers
Have writ of in histories —
Hapt in this isle, since
Up from the East hither
Saxon and Angle from
Over the broad billow
Broke into Britain with
Haughty war-workers who
Harried the Welshman, when
Earls that were lured by the
Hunger of glory gat
Hold of the land.
Sometyme I was a taverner,
a gentle gossippe and a tapster,
of wyne and ale a trustie bruer,
which woe hath me wrought.
Of kannes I kept no trewe measure.
My cuppes I sould at my pleasure,
deceavinge manye a creature,
thoe my ale Were nought.
And when I was a bruer longe,
with hoppes I made my alle stronge;
esshes and hearbes I blend amonge
and marred so good malt.
Before the advent of the London and North Western and the establishment of its works there was no Crewe. Let the London and North Western depart tomorrow, and Crewe would perish out of the list of living towns as completely as Nineveh or Pompeii. The grass would grow in its streets, its houses would stand in empty rows, its churches would become nesting places for the rooks and owls, its people would fly from it; and pasture fields for sheep and oxen, dotted with, perhaps, half a dozen peasant homesteads, would take the place of one of the most progressive and flourishing towns of modern England.
On Saturday the[y] came to Bartomley, (giving an alarm to the garrison of Crewe Hall,) as they marched they set upon the church, which had in it about twenty neighbours, that had gone in for safety; but the Lord Byron's troop, and Connought, a Major to Colonel Sneyd, set upon them, and won the church; the men fled into the steeple, but the enemy burning the forms, rushes, mats, &c. made such a smoke, that being almost stiffled, they called for quarter, which was granted by Connought; but when they had them in their power, they stripped them all naked, and most cruelly murdered twelve of them, contrary to the laws of arms, nature, and nations.
