Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/273

 Rh centuries the King was a name, but the great Earl of Chester a reality. Thus men spoke of the "Earl's" highway not the "King's" highway. That the Earls of Chester were constantly at Leek, five miles west of Cauldon, admits of no doubt. The scarce pamphlet history of Rushton Spencer, published in 1856 by the Rev. T. W. Norwood, mentions that a road between that village and Congleton in Cheshire was known as the "Earlsway," and at Congleton itself the same name occurs in a perambulation of 1593.

These two names clearly mark the route between Beeston Castle in Cheshire and Leek and the moorland manors of the Earl. The road now under notice may be a continuation of that, but it looks much more like a route from north to south. Right down to the close of the Middle Ages, long-distance cross-country travelling was substantially confined to two classes—the peddling merchants and the itinerant landlords eating their way from manor to manor; and as a solution I would suggest that the Earl, when on tour from his northern manors (Alstonefield, Warslow) to Chartley and Sandon further south, regularly made the passage of the river Hamps at this point. Whether or not it is to-day the sole or the most suitable route is hardly a relevant inquiry; we cannot judge of the respective advantages of different routes in the light of modern physical geography and road systems, because river levels have altered and obstacles of forest and swamp no longer cramp the traveller.

IV. Another equally interesting illustration of the permanence of folk memory comes from Waterfall, a true moorland village, lying some 900 feet high on the fringe of the vast expanse of stonewall country which forms the backbone of England. It is a mile north of Waterhouses on the Ashbourne and Macclesfield high road, and lies in the centre of a large loop of the river Hamps. The direct road to Waterhouses runs precipitously down to a ford