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"Jonas," I said, as Bill was cooling off at the end of a row, "why don't you get an automobile?" "I take the eggs down to the store every two weeks and get a shave; but I don't need a car much, havin' Bill," he replied, smashing a vicious greenhead on Bill's withers that was keeping her mixed up with the traces and the teeth of the harrow.
It is on Greenhead Ghyll "upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale" that the poet has laid the scene of Michael, the poem which paints with such detailed fidelity both the inner and the outward life of a typical Westmoreland "statesman."
The high crags which here shoulder the Wall are part of the Great Whin Sill, an intrusive dyke of dolerite which stretches from Greenhead northeastward across the county nearly to Berwick.
Now the Wall descends to a level and pastoral country, leaving behind it the wild moorland and craggy heights across which it has travelled so long; but unfortunately much of it has been destroyed by the quarrying operations at Greenhead.
Leaving Vindolana, this road goes on westward to Magna, where it joins the Maiden Way, another important Roman road, which runs from north to south. Coming from the neighbourhood of Bewcastle Fells, it enters Northumberland at Gilsland, and leading eastward as far as Magna, then turns directly southward past Greenhead.
It was at Lille that -But the train is slowing down. There is the slope of the hillside, black against the night sky, and among the trees I see the glimmer of a light beckoning me as the lonely lamp in Greenhead Ghyll used to beckon Wordsworth's Michael. The night is full of stars, the landscape glistens with a late frost: it will be a jolly two miles' tramp to that beacon on the hill.
"Our intercourse with the Wordsworths," Arnold wrote on the occasion of his first visit in 1832, "was one of the brightest spots of all; nothing could exceed their friendliness, and my almost daily walks with him were things not to be forgotten. Once and once only we had a good fight about the Reform Bill during a walk up Greenhead Ghyll to see the unfinished sheep-fold, recorded in Michael.
Accordingly, with respect to the fairs of pious origin, I, without expounding my secret motives, persuaded the council, that, having been at so great an expense in new-paving the streets, we ought not to permit the heavy caravans of wild beasts to occupy, as formerly, the front of the Tolbooth towards the Cross; but to order them, for the future, to keep at the Greenhead.
In a letter printed in Stanley's Life my grandfather mentions "a good fight" with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of 1832, on a walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl friend of the family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How, accompanied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount.
This was, in a manner, expurgating them out of the town altogether; and the consequence was, that the people, who were wont to assemble in the High Street, came to be divided, part gathering at the Greenhead, round the shows, and part remaining among the stands and the booths; thus an appearance was given of the fairs being less attended than formerly, and gradually, year after year, the venerable race of sweety-wives, and chatty packmen, that were so detrimental to the shopkeepers, grew less and less numerous, until the fairs fell into insignificance.
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