Gawsworth itself passed to an unlineal hand, by a series of alienations complicated beyond example in the annals of the county." Returning to the line of rail, we soon find ourselves at the North Rode Station. Here the North Staffordshire is divided into two lines. It soon takes us out of Cheshire and leads to Derby, passing by Borley, Leeh, and Alton Towers, the seat of the Earl of Shrewsbury. It is a very interesting line, for the country on either side is exceedingly picturesque, being rich in all the varied beauty of dell and woodland, crag and copse, and forest tree. The main line, from which we do not at present diverge, goes through the Staffordshire Potteries. At North Rode the view opens to the right, over the demesne of the Rev. J. Dainty. There is a fine piece of water, at the head of which stands the residence of Thomas Dainty, Esq.; and as the train proceeds, the church at North Rode, which was erected by Mr. Dainty, becomes a conspicuous object. It is built with great good taste. North Rode owns a connexion with Sir Christopher Hatton, the dancing Lord Chancellor of England, who was raised to sudden eminence by Queen Elizabeth, and almost as suddenly cast down, being at once an instance of her capricious favour, and a victim of her remorseless petulance. His enemies said of him that "he was a mere vegetable of the court, that sprung up at night and sunk again at his noon." Fuller, in describing his career, says: "He rather took a bait than made a meal at the Inns of Court, whilst he studied the laws therein. He came afterwards to court in a mask, where the queen first took notice of him, loving him well for his handsome dancing, better for his proper person, and best of all for his great abilities. His parts were far above his learning, which mutually so assisted each other that no manifest want did appear." He died, it is said, of a broken heart, in 1591. The estate of North Rode, originally in the possession of the Mainwarings, descended to the Trussels; from them to the Veres, Earls of Oxford, and from them to Sir Christopher Hatton. It then came into the hands of the Crewes, and from the Crewes passed to the Daintys. The township of North Rode stands on the northern bank of the Dove. Overhanging the river, opposite to North Rode and on the left-hand side of the railroad, there is a remarkable hill called the Cloud. It rises from the plain at first in gentle slopes, but towards the top in a series of craggy heights; it is clothed in part with wood, and presents a striking and picturesque appearance. It is a detached fragment of the great chain of hills which is sometimes called the English Apennines, and which extends to the extreme left into Derbyshire and Staffordshire. From this chain the Cloud stands out in bold relief and solitary state. The pedestrian who ascends it will be well repaid for his toil in the extensive and beautiful view which may be gained from its highest point. the valley through which the Dove flows. It is one of those triumphs of engineering skill to which railway enterprise has given birth. It is built of brick, consists of twenty arches, and carries the line for a distance of four hundred and thirty-six yards, at an elevation of one hundred and thirteen feet above the Dove. Not very far distant from this viaduct the valley is again crossed by another, called the Congleton viaduct. The rails are one hundred and fourteen feet above the bed of the river. It has only ten arches, but they are of fifty feet span. The scenery is still very beautiful, but it changes its rural character. The tower of a church, and wellbuilt houses in the midst of ornamental grounds, with tall chimnies interspersed, bespeak the vicinity of another manufacturing town. We are passing through Bug Lawton, a suburb of Congleton. Of Bug Lawton there is little to be said; but that little is interesting. It was anciently the possession of Orme, surnamed the Harper. From this Orme descended the Touchets, who held it till the year 1535, when it was surrendered to the crown. The Touchets were a gallant but unfortunate race. Sir John Touchet was one of the English knights who fought in France in the reign of Edward III., and was slain, so says Ormerod, in a desperate engagement with theo Spanish Fleet before Rochelle. He married the daughter of James Lord Audley; and it was through this marriage that the Barony of Audley came into the family of Touchet. This James, Lord Audley, was one of the gallant band whose deeds have been chronicled by Froissart. He had Chandos and Knollys, the Captal de Buch and Mauney for his companions, with the Black Prince for the sun of their chivalry. Froissart tells a story of him, characteristic both of the man and the times. He was badly wounded at the battle of Poictiers. The Prince of Wales, hearing of this desired, that he might if possible be brought into his presence. He was accordingly borne to the spot where the royal warrior stood. After such praise from noble lips as is to noble men most justly due, the Prince said, "I make you henceforth my Knight for service, and give you out of my own estate 500 marks by the year." The Knight was no sooner carried back to his own tent than calling together his retainers and his four esquires, he declared that. to his esquires was most due the praise he had received; and that he "disinherited himself," of the princely gift which had been bestowed upon him in order that it might be divided amongst them. Another of these Touchets, James Lord Audley, was slain at Bloreheath in command of the Lancasterian forces in the reign of Henry VI. A little later-in 1497-another James Lord Audley headed the insurrection of the Cornish-men in favour of Perkin Warbeck and was defeated and taken prisoner at Blackheath and afterwards beheaded. The battle of Bloreheath was fatal to the Cheshiremen. Not only were the men of the county on opposite sides in the conflict, but many members of the same Near this part of the rail a splendid viaduct spans noble families were arrayed against each other. T-VOL. I. THE STAFFORDSHIRE POTTERIES. THERE is no county in England more singularly varied than Staffordshire, in respect to the topographical features by which it is marked. We have abundant instances, where one portion of a county is manufacturing and another portion agricultural and picturesque. Warwickshire has its Birmingham on the one hand, and the lovely scenery of the Avon on the other; Yorkshire has its clothiers on the southwest, and its agriculturists and its moorlands in other parts; and so of other counties: if they be not throughout such districts as the artist and the poet would love to contemplate, they generally exhibit some one industrial feature, which spreads itself around a certain centre, and leaves the rest of the county to the graziers, the farmers, and the tourists. But Staffordshire has a double manufacturing existence: it has its iron and coal in the south, and its clay and pottery in the north. Stafford, the county town, stands midway, and holds, as it were, the balance between them. The two halves of the population, or at least those engaged in the departments of industry alluded to, differ as much from each other as if they lived in totally distinct counties: their earnings are regulated by different rules; their working and workshop arrange ments bear little analogy in the two cases; and their domestic and social economy present many a marked contrast. The agriculturists who live between and around them are like agriculturists elsewhere; but the north and the south have, each, something unique about them. An opportunity was afforded for glancing at the iron and coal district of South Staffordshire, in the paper relating to BIRMINGHAM. As in that paper, we will here take a similar view of the remarkable Pottery district of the northern portion of the county. Before we visit this busy hive of workers, it may be well to see what relation it bears to the surface of the country around it. A GENERAL GLANCE. The Pottery district is bounded on the east by a portion of country often strangely wild and barren. A glimpse of a few of the heights composing it can be obtained from the more elevated parts of the Pottery towns; but we must go somewhat away from themtowards Congleton, or Leek, or Cheadle-before these features become very apparent. This north-eastern district, comprising about one-sixth of the county, is designated the Moorlands: it is the southern extremity of the long line of elevated ground which extends through Yorkshire and Northumberland to the Cheviots. These moorlands have been well described as "a singular mélange of wildness, desolation, dreariness, beauty, grandeur, and romance, A tourist who traverses them looks successively upon dismal bogs, irksome upland moors, soaring peaks, and sublime precipices: he is alternately lifted up to the survey of a brilliant panorama, scores of miles in diameter, and pent within the mural faces of a deep ravine, which admits a view of but a stripe of the over-arching sky; and he now wanders amid repulsive gravelly knolls, sectioned into parts by the prosaic dry stone wall, and now luxuriates in lovely dales and glens, embellished with cultivation, and gorgeous in the ornaments of wood, water, cascade, and variegated surface." These moorlands vary in general height from three to six hundred feet above the average level of the rest of the county; but some portions rise to twelve or fifteen hundred feet. In the extreme north of the county, the wild and desolate features are more apparent than in any other-broken expanses of peat-moss and spongy moor, with here and there rugged masses of rock rising in the utmost irregularity above the unreclaimed and irreclaimable soil. Farther east, these features gradually lose their wildness, until at length we come to the lovely scenery of the Dove. Southward, the country assumes the flat characteristics of an iron and coal region; while the valley of the Trent exhibits those numerous varieties of clay and marl which led to the settlement of the Potteries in that locality. Turning to the western side of the Pottery district, between it and Cheshire, we come to a district which gradually softens down in its external features, until we arrive at the great salt region of Cheshire-a region which has its own peculiar characteristics of surface. As to hills or elevated spots, the most remarkable in the immediate vicinity of the Potteries, perhaps, is Mole Cop. It is an elongated ridge, due north of the Potteries, and reaching to a height of considerably above a thousand feet: it is for many miles a remarkable object, as seen from the coach-road from the Potteries through Congleton to Manchester. In the midst of this northern half of the county, then, stand the POTTERIES. In attempting to characterize this remarkable district, we find that any of the usual comparisons would fail. It is not one huge town, springing from one nucleus, and spreading out its suburbs equally on all sides to accommodate its commercial growth. It is not a district, wide enough to have many centres of trade, separated by farms and country villages. It is not a series of valleys intersecting a hilly country, and dotted with manufacturing villages along the sides of the streams. It is not, on the other hand, a hilly range, in which manufactures eling to the hills rather than to the lowlands. The Pottery district is something distinct from all these. It is a row of seven or eight towns, lying along the same turnpike-road, and having the interstices between them gradually filled up with thrice that number of hamlets and chapelries, all of which grow up as much like the parent towns as possible. It is, indeed, one street, about eight miles in length, with a few shorter streets on either side. Nowhere on this route do we lose sight of the Pottery characteristics; although they thicken and accumulate more particularly at the seven or eight nuclei than at other parts. At Burslem, and at Hanley, the works spread out on either side so far, that the district becomes a couple of miles in width; but still the best conception of the whole is of one vast manufacturing street, running from south to north, or more nearly from south-east to north-west, and swelling out to the bulk of large towns at particular spots. Taking the Potteries as represented by the chief towns, we have from north to south, Tunstall, Burslem, Longport, Hanley, Shelton, Stoke, Fenton, and Lane End; but there are so many townships, chapelries, hamlets, and suburbs, between and among these, and all are so intimately connected with the pottery manufacture, that the list becomes a much more formidable one:-Golden Hill, Green Lane, Green Field, Clay Hills, Brown Hills, Tunstall, Longport, Newport, Dale Hall, Hamell, Hot Lane, Burslem, Sneyd Green, Cobridge, Vale Pleasant, Etruria, Hanley, Shelton, Boothen, Penkhull, Stoke, Fenton, Lane Delph, Foley, Longton, and Lane End. It was this remarkable elongated district which was made a Parliamentary borough in 1832, by the name (familiarly, at least,) of The Potteries; though the name given to the borough is Stoke, from that of the chief town in the centre of the borough. Immediately westward of the centre of the Potteries, at a distance of about a couple of miles, stands the large and old town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town which has had some notable manufactures of hats, boots, and other commodities, but which, strange as it may seem, takes no part in the manufacture of pottery. The potters have not wandered out of their eight-mile street so far as to reach Newcastle, except to dig up a particular kind of clay which is found near that town, and which is useful for some of their works. If the Potteries be approached from this direction (which was the case so long as the Grand Junction Railway was the chief medium of communication), we first meet with them at Stoke; if from Manchester, Tunstall; if from the south, Lane End. But whichever be the direction, the characteristics are pretty much the same. There is nothing in the nature of the manufacture to prevent the neighbouring districts from being grassy and pleasant, and dotted by those varied features which distinguish country scenes. There is plenty of smoke, it is true, above the pottery towns themselves; and we soon find that this smoke envelopes and surmounts furnaces of a very different kind from those observable in the iron or cotton districts. A general view of the Potteries, as taken from a village lying westward of them, and including within its range the towns of Etruria, Hanley, and Shelton, is given in the Steel Plate. |