[Illustration: THE "BELL" INN, DALE ABBEY.]
Perhaps the finest of the inns that are inns no more was the famous "Castle" inn at Marlborough. It was certainly the finest hostelry on the Bath Road, as the inquisitive in such things may yet see by exploring the older building of Marlborough College. For that was the aristocratic "Castle" until 1841, when the Great Western Railway was opened to Bath and Bristol, and so knocked the bottom out of all the coaching and the licensed-victualling business between London and those places.
[Illustration: THE "WINDMILL," NORTH CHERITON.]
I have termed the "Castle" 'aristocratic,' and not without due reason. The site was originally occupied by the great castle of Marlborough, whose origin itself goes back to the remotenesses and vaguenesses of early British times, before history began to be. The great prehistoric mound that (now covered with trees) still darkens the very windows of the modern college buildings was first selected by the savage British as the site of a fortress, and is in fact the "bergh" that figures as "borough" in the second half of the place-name. From the earliest times the Mound was regarded with awe and reverence, and was the centre of the wild legends that made Marlborough "Merleberg" or "Merlin's town": home of the great magician of Arthurian legend. Those legends had never any foundation in fact, and even the otherwise credulous antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dismiss them as ridiculous, but the crest surmounting the town arms still represents the Mound, and a Latin motto dedicatory to "the bones of the wise Merlin" accompanies it.
The mediæval castle of Marlborough that arose at the foot of this early stronghold gave place to a splendid mansion built by Francis, Lord Seymour, in time for the reception of Charles the Second, who halted here on one of his progresses to the West. This was partly rebuilt and greatly enlarged in the time of William the Third, and then assumed very much the appearance still worn by the main building of the present College. In or about 1740 the great mansion became the residence of Lady Hertford, under whose rule the grounds were planted with formal groves of limes and set about with yews trimmed into fantastic shapes, and further adorned with terrace-walks and grottoes, intended to be romantic. She converted the spot into a modish Arcadia, after the ideals of her time; and fashionables posed and postured there in the guise of Watteau nymphs or old Chelsea china-ware shepherds and shepherdesses, and imagined they were being rural and living the Simple Life when, in fact, they were being most artificial. The real Wiltshire peasantry, the true flesh-and-blood shepherds and shepherdesses of the surrounding wind-swept downs, who lived hardly upon rye bread and dressed in russet and homespun woollens, looked with astonishment, as well they might, upon such folk, and were not unnaturally amazed when they saw fine ladies with short skirts, silken stockings and high-heeled shoes, carrying dainty shepherds' crooks tied with cherry-coloured ribbons, leading pet lambs combed and curled and scented, and decorated with satin rosettes. Those Little Bo-Peeps and their cavaliers, dressed out in equally fine feathers, were visions quite outside their notions of sheep-tending.