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Captain Batt was believed to be far away; his family was at Oakwell; when in the dusk, one winter evening, he came stalking along the lane, and through the hall, and up the stairs, into his own room, where he vanished. He had been killed in a duel in London that very same afternoon of December 9th, 1684.
Take Oakwell Hall, for instance. It stands in a pasture-field, about a quarter of a mile from the high road.
The fourteen names are given, doubtless "mighty men of yore;" but, among them all, Sir Fletcher Norton, Attorney-General, and Major-General Birch were the only ones with which I had any association in 1855. Passing on from Oakwell there lie houses right and left, which were well known to Miss Bronte when she lived at Roe Head, as the hospitable homes of some of her school-fellows.
The scenery of that fiction lies close around; the real events which suggested it took place in the immediate neighbourhood. They show a bloody footprint in a bed-chamber of Oakwell Hall, and tell a story connected with it, and with the lane by which the house is approached.
Turning off from this to the right, you ascend through an old pasture-field, and enter a short by-road, called the "Bloody Lane" a walk haunted by the ghost of a certain Captain Batt, the reprobate proprietor of an old hall close by, in the days of the Stuarts. From the "Bloody Lane," overshadowed by trees, you come into the field in which Oakwell Hall is situated.
But the Oakwell property passed out of the hands of the Batts at the beginning of the last century; collateral descendants succeeded, and left this picturesque trace of their having been.
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