On either side of the Town Hall are the more considerable shops, each with square-paned windows and a uniform style of lettering above them in gold. Plain Georgian houses rise above the shop fronts, the windows on the first floor being larger than those on the second and those on the second being larger than those on the top. The roofs are hidden by a low parapet. The material of the houses is mostly limestone, but the Town Hall and The Dolphin which are larger than any other buildings in the street, are of white brick from the recently opened brick-fields outside the town. They are plain but imposing edifices whose beauty depends on that subtlety of proportion which all architects of the late Georgian era had learned from the close study of Greek art and its adaptation to modern buildings, as expressed in the lectures of Sir John Soane. Breaking the uniform grey of these substantial buildings in limestone and plaster or white brick is a large, mellow red-brick mansion, the thick white glazing bars of whose windows, the subtle classical stone-carving of whose keystones, cornices and dressings, the heavy solidity of whose panelled front door, coupled with the absence of any sign of commerce in the way of shop front or sign, betrays the presence of some wealthy person of private means. This is Adamsbec House, the town residence of the Adamsbecs, whose large country estate and house is some distance away. The family rarely comes to it now since the improved method of highway travel has brought the Metropolis within nearer reach.
Except for this cluster of buildings round the centre of the town, Boggleton will not present much of architectural interest to the traveller of 1837.
The rest of the High Street diminishes London-wards into what are little more than stone cottages, some of them bulging with bow-windowed shop fronts or standing apart to admit a glimpse of the meadows to the south and the elm-clad hills to the north of the town. Down one of these alleys is the Quaker Meeting House, a simple affair in limestone with scrubbed benches and white walls within and nicely graded tiled roof distinguishing its plain exterior. The Independent Chapel is also a plain building (1794) resembling, with its two storeys of round-headed windows, a thin private house. It is a little more obtrusive than the Quaker Meeting. House, since it was put up after the persecution of Nonconformists and dares to show itself in the High Street.
The ancient Parish Church will attract the traveller’s antiquarian but not his æsthetic attention. It is an irregular building in the late-pointed style. It stands a little distance behind the Town Hall and is surrounded by alleys between cottages, some of which are built of clunch and clearly very ancient, though scarcely genteel.The church, indeed, stands in the old centre of the town and the cottages round it are a survival, built in the haphazard medieval way of growing, of the village which Boggleton was before it became an agricultural centre, for Boggleton was never a planned medieval city within walls. The citizens objected to their Common being used for sales, so a site north of the church was used for bargaining, where the road entered the village. This was built round and gradually became the market place and new centre of Boggleton life.1
The interior of the Parish Church presents a venerable appearance. An elaborately carved wooden screen runs across the chancel and north chapel. The walls are whitewashed and form a handsome gallery of hatchments and mural monuments. Some of the latter were done by a talented stonemason in the town from a book of engravings for mural monuments published by I. Taylor in 1787. The pews are of good deal and comfortable, being of excellent joinery with well-fitting doors. The cushions in them are of watered silk and one pew at least has a stove in it which warms Mr. Awdon and his family, merchant and Mayor of the town. There is a west gallery for the choir whose instruments are kept there out of the way of the ringers below. The three-decker pulpit is used by the now ageing incumbent who celebrates quarterly Communion.
Having inspected the church and refreshed himself, the coachman and horses, the traveller, will pass on towards Adamsbecton, the large country house of the Adamsbec family. About a mile out of the town, the ruins of Godley Abbey, rise up among the willows and elms of the valley. The pile is a monument to superstition but, at the same time, it has much of the sublime, seeming to draw towards it the surrounding hills.
A row of genteel houses looks on the abbey from the further side of the road.These are airy and cheerful, having been built in 1820.They are in a variety of styles. One in Grecian with a wide verandah commanding the prospect, the other is something like it but plainer and of three storeys with a balcony of elegant ironwork on the first floor. The third is called the Oratory and is in the Gothic taste with pointed windows and an octagonal parlour, a veritable monkish cell. This is nearer the abbey than the other two houses, and is calculated to blend in with that structure. The houses are inhabited by a retired merchant, a retired naval captain, the younger son of a family whose fortunes have declined and two maiden ladies, daughters of a former rector of Boggleton.
Our traveller will now have little to attract him after this glimpse of the picturesque until he comes to Adamsbecton. There he will be permitted to see the gallery which contains a Salvator Rosa, a Lawrence, a Reynolds, three Lelys, a Murillo, a Canaletto and a Guido Reni, as well as several paintings of the Dutch school and even more of the Italian schools.
The people of Boggleton take their town for granted, just as our traveller
