202 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 





much foliage, it is months before any colour brightens it. The 

 red flower comes at the end of a pod, and has a tiny white 

 cross within it. It is welcome because by August so many of 

 the earlier flowers are fading."* At the end of this amphi- 

 theatre, where stands an old windmill, the beck finds the grey 

 weatherbeaten church but modern village of Hatcliffe, anciently 

 Haute Cliffe, from the above-mentioned chalky ridges. Here 

 a student of words will remark, as well in the prefix le of the 

 next village, that, like English history and the language itself, 

 the place names of England form a palimpsest, as it were ; 

 Keltic being succeeded by Scandinavian and Teutonic words, 

 and they in their turn replaced by Norman-French vocables. 

 Still the wear and tear of language everywhere continues, as 

 Cocher Plat, a hamlet not five miles hence, testifies, which is a 

 mere corruption in the last forty years of Cottager's Plat. A 

 few grave-stones which have been collected within the church 

 bear the name of Lyon de Hatcliffe, the earliest family con- 

 nected with the parish which can be traced. Their manor- 

 house stood in the adjoining field. Some grassy mounds yet 

 mark its site, but not a stone remains upon another. 



Thence the beck flows throw wide meadows to a picturesque 

 water-mill, with abundance of angles and gables for the 

 sketcher, till it crosses the Roman way known as the Barton 

 Street, from its running to that little town on the Humber. It 

 is carried hence along the first slope of the Wolds, and com- 

 mands grand views over the low country and the German 

 Ocean, while Yorkshire like a faint blue cloud is seen across 

 the ruddy estuary named after the drowned Hun. Memory 

 flies back on passing over the street to its first construction, 

 when Roman legionaries compelled the wretched peasants at 

 the spear's point to lay down chalk and the boulders still 

 sown broadcast over this district, in conformity with the 

 directions of Vitruvius, which have resulted in what is still a 



* Round about a Great Estate, p. 34. 



