These are to be
seen in every direction, picturesque, many-gabled, with heavy stone
carvings of coats of arms for heraldic ornament; belonging to decayed
families, from whose ancestral lands field after field has been shorn
away, by the urgency of rich manufacturers pressing hard upon necessity.
A smoky atmosphere surrounds these old dwellings of former Yorkshire
squires, and blights and blackens the ancient trees that overshadow them;
cinder-paths lead up to them; the ground round about is sold for building
upon; but still the neighbours, though they subsist by a different state
of things, remember that their forefathers lived in agricultural
dependence upon the owners of these halls; and treasure up the traditions
connected with the stately households that existed centuries ago. Take
Oakwell Hall, for instance. It stands in a pasture-field, about a
quarter of a mile from the high road. It is but that distance from the
busy whirr of the steam-engines employed in the woollen mills at
Birstall; and if you walk to it from Birstall Station about meal-time,
you encounter strings of mill-hands, blue with woollen dye, and cranching
in hungry haste over the cinder-paths bordering the high road. Turning
off from this to the right, you ascend through an old pasture-field, and
enter a short by-road, called the "Bloody Lane"--a walk haunted by the
ghost of a certain Captain Batt, the reprobate proprietor of an old hall
close by, in the days of the Stuarts.
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