Craven. Starkey Manor-House is rather like a number of rooms clustered
round a grey, massive, old keep than a regularly-built hall. Indeed, I
suppose that the house only consisted of the great tower in the centre,
in the days when the Scots made their raids terrible as far south as
this; and that after the Stuarts came in, and there was a little more
security of property in those parts, the Starkeys of that time added
the lower building, which runs, two stories high, all round the base of
the keep. There has been a grand garden laid out in my days, on the
southern slope near the house; but when I first knew the place, the
kitchen-garden at the farm was the only piece of cultivated ground
belonging to it. The deer used to come within sight of the drawing-room
windows, and might have browsed quite close up to the house if they had
not been too wild and shy. Starkey Manor-House itself stood on a
projection or peninsula of high land, jutting out from the abrupt hills
that form the sides of the Trough of Bolland. These hills were rocky
and bleak enough towards their summit; lower down they were clothed
with tangled copsewood and green depths of fern, out of which a grey
giant of an ancient forest-tree would tower here and there, throwing up
its ghastly white branches, as if in imprecation, to the sky. These
trees, they told me, were the remnants of that forest which existed in
the days of the Heptarchy, and were even then noted as landmarks. No
wonder that their upper and more exposed branches were leafless, and
that the dead bark had peeled away, from sapless old age.

Not far from the house there were a few cottages, apparently of the
same date as the keep, probably built for some retainers of the family,
who sought shelter--they and their families and their small flocks and
herds--at the hands of their feudal lord. Some of them had pretty much
fallen to decay. They were built in a strange fashion. Strong beams had
been sunk firm in the ground at the requisite distance, and their other
ends had been fastened together, two and two, so as to form the shape
of one of those rounded waggon-headed gipsy-tents, only very much
larger. The spaces between were filled with mud, stones, osiers,
rubbish, mortar--anything to keep out the weather. The fires were made
in the centre of these rude dwellings, a hole in the roof forming the
only chimney. No Highland hut or Irish cabin could be of rougher
construction.

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