[Illustration: Sign of Black’s Head, Ashbourne]
Almost gone are the heavy frames and beams which once stretched across the highways and effectually proclaimed the name and style under which the innkeeper carried on his business. On these beams a group of swans disported in effigy before the _Four Swans_ at Waltham Cross. A fine magpie dangled from the centre at Stonham, Suffolk, while elsewhere a fox was represented crossing the beam and followed by a bevy of hounds. There is still remaining such a beam, from the centre of which a bell is suspended outside the _Bell_ at Edenbridge. Another is still in use at Ashbourne, Derbyshire, where the _Green Man and Black’s Head_, an old Georgian posting house, announces its existence by a long beam stretched across the street, supported at one end by a pole, the other end running into the red brick wall of the building, immediately over the typical archway leading to the inn yard. The black’s head is an effigy in carved and painted wood, planted firmly in the centre of the beam and looking for all the world as if it had only lately been cut off and put there to warn other blacks of a similar awful fate, if ever they should chance to come to Ashbourne. Under the head, suspended from the beam is a big framed picture, and a small secondary beam on each side has recently been placed to carry those two terribly modern words, “garage” and “petrol.” One can fancy the old driver of the four-in-hand, could he come to life again, scratching his head in perplexity over the hidden mysteries of these literary innovations to the familiar sign. Ashbourne, it may be remarked in passing, whilst perhaps not glorying in “one man one public-house,” is certainly as close to that condition of things as any town in England. To a stranger visiting Ashbourne in the middle of the week and feeling the charm of its quiet old-world streets with but few people walking about, it is a matter for wonder as to how all the licensed houses keep going. But go there on market days and note the waggons and farmers’ carts standing in rows outside every hostelry and the matter becomes much more easily understood. Ashbourne, like one or two other towns of the North Derbyshire and Staffordshire moors, has until quite recently been cut off from the run of the country’s traffic, and is still a market centre for a very extensive agricultural district. Within the last year or two a road motor service has placed it in rapid and frequent communication with the county town, so that this comparative isolation is likely to last very little longer.