“Preye for the soul of Sir Thomas Wortley.  Knight of the body to the kings Edward iv., Richard iii., Henry VII., Henry viii., whose faults God pardon.  He caused a lodge to be built on this crag in the midst of Wharncliff (the old orthography) to hear the harts bell, in the year of our Lord 1510.”  It was a chase, and what he meant to hear was the noise of the stags.

During my residence here I have made two little excursions and I assure you it requires resolution . the roads are insufferable:  they mend them—­I should call it spoil them—­ -with large pieces of stone.  At Pomfret I saw the remains of that memorable castle “where Rivers, Vaughan, and Gray lay shorter by the head;” and on which Gray says,

“And thou, proud boy, from Pomfret’s walls shalt send A groan, and envy oft thy happy grandsire’s end!"(710)

The ruins are vanishing, but well situated; there is a large demolished church and a pretty market-house.  We crossed a Gothic bridge of eight arches at Ferrybridge, where there is a pretty view, and went to a large old house of Lord Huntingdon’s at Ledstone, which has nothing remarkable but a lofty terrace, a whole-length portrait of his Grandfather in tapestry, and the having belonged to the great Lord Strafford.  We saw that monument of part of poor Sir John Bland’s extravagance,(711) his house and garden, which he left orders to make without once looking at either plan.  The house is a bastard- Gothic, but Of not near the extent I had heard.  We lay at Leeds, a dingy large town; and through very bad black roads, (for the whole country is a colliery, or a quarry,) we went to Kirkstall Abbey, where are vast Saxon ruins, in a most picturesque situation, on the banks of a river that falls into a cascade among rich meadows, hills, and woods:  it belongs to Lord Cardigan:  his father pulled down a large house here ’. lest it should interfere with the family seat, Deane.  We returned through Wakefield, where is a pretty Gothic chapel on a bridge,(712) erected by Edward iv., in memory of his father, who lived at Sandal castle just by, and perished in the battle here, There is scarce any thing of the castle extant, but it commanded a rich prospect.

By permission from their graces of Norfolk, who are at Tunbridge, Lord Strafford carried us to WorkSop,(713) where we passed two days.  The house is huge, and one of the magnificent works of old Bess of Hardwicke, who guarded the Queen of Scots here for some time in a wretched little bedchamber within her own lofty one:  there is a tolerable little picture of Mary’s needlework.  The great apartment is vast and triste, the whole leanly furnished:  the great gallery, of above two hundred feet, at the top of the house, is divided into a library, and into nothing.  The chapel is decent.  There is no prospect, and the barren face of the country is richly furred with evergreen plantations, under the direction of the late Lord Petre.