Three Wise Men of Gotham Went to sea in a bowl; If the bowl had been stronger, My tale had been longer.
The tragedy of the voyage we can vividly picture for ourselves.
There is, however, a rival Gotham, disputing these doubtful honours. It is a place called Gotham Marsh, situated in the neighbourhood of Pevensey, and the identical tales are told of it; but if any place may be said to be the real original, the Nottinghamshire village is the one, although it must not be forgotten that many places are credited with similar stupidity. Of the village of Towednack, in Cornwall, in the neighbourhood of St. Ives, the identical cuckoo story is told; the people of Coggeshall, in Essex, are said to have chained up a wheelbarrow, after it was bitten by a mad dog, for fear it should develop hydrophobia; and in the ancient world Bœotia and Phrygia were notoriously considered the home of the dunderheaded. We are familiar, too, with the taunt in the Scriptures, “Can any good come out of Nazareth?”
This is all very highly uncomplimentary and interesting, and Gotham seems eminently a place to be visited; but travellers meet with strange disappointments. Gotham is a furiously ugly village of extraordinarily wide and empty roads, and smelling violently of pigs; gypsum mines and soap-works still further render it undesirable. A commonplace inn, the “Cuckoo Bush,” displays a double-sided pictorial sign, very faded, exhibiting on one side the cuckoo and on the other a group of the wiseacres aforesaid, attempting to build him in.
It is indeed, by selecting the fine church, possible to make an illustration of Gotham that shall not be commonplace; and the interior, being in part Transitional Norman, is even finer than the exterior. A singular uncouth carving on the chancel arch, popularly supposed to represent “Toothache,” was probably intended to typify the Divine “gift of speech.”
Resuming the road at Kegworth, the fag-end of Leicestershire is soon ended. Lockington, on the left hand, with a very dilapidated church, being the last village in this angle of the shire, where it joins Notts and Derbyshire, was once considered a remote and out-of-the-way place: hence the old rustic saying, “Put up your pipes and go to Lockington Wake”: _i.e._ “Be quiet and go away with you.”