DONCASTER 227 



able current always flowing, and the old river 

 serpentining alongside the artificial, the big levees 

 or flood walls ; the farmsteads, banked round as 

 if fortified ; a general suggestion that ague might 

 be cheap, wild-fowl shooting good in winter, and 

 that the monks had a good time when they 

 flourished. Were they ague-proof, the old 

 Churchmen ? They must have been hard against 

 rheumatism, for they loved to plant themselves 

 down in the damp, with, if possible, a moat or a 

 stew-pond to keep fish in and give off malarial 

 white mists. These old 'uns and their patrons 

 left a beautiful lot of churches round about 

 Doncaster, with stonework of a nature to make 

 one remember with tears that in earlier years he 

 had taken no pains with his architecture. At 

 Brantwith — I believe that is the name — is a 

 Norman porch with one line of hatchet work 

 perfect almost as the day it was cut (not like poor 

 York Cathedral, whose outer skin is absolutely 

 crumbling to nothingness), and circling it a scroll, 

 held, so to speak, by eagles' heads and beaks that 

 a connoisseur would go many miles to see. That 

 is a sight of the village, but to me a more striking 

 one presented itself as I cleared the lock, next to 

 which huge canal works are in progress — you 

 don't come across many new canals in England 

 now, more's the pity — that fairly made me sit up 

 and rub my eyes. What would you say, gentle 

 reader, if all at once, and without notice, you 

 stumbled on a range of, say, two hundred deserted 

 stout barges' dinghies — keels they call them — laid 

 up on a canal's bank, each with a big hawser 

 coiled in it and an anchor ? The explanation is 

 this. When the barges working up Sheffield 

 way arrive at this lock they cannot get through 



