1st 2nd 3rd
=Fares.=--Single 24s. 6d. 16s. 6d. 14s. 3-1/2d.
Return 49s. 0d. 31s. 6d. 28s. 7d.
=Accommodation Obtainable.=--"Royal George Hotel," etc.
Knutsford still retains the air of old-world quaintness which Mrs.
Gaskell has made so familiar in her delightful _Cranford_. The whole of
Knutsford breathes the fresh and bright tidiness one always
involuntarily associates with such ladies as "Miss Jenkyns," and every
house rejoices in a beautifully neat garden. The Royal George Hotel, in
the High Street, is a perfect feast to the eye of panelled wainscotting,
oak settles, and Chippendale cabinets. The richness, all over the town,
of ancient carvings, staircases, and chimney-pieces, is due to the
prosperity which the coach traffic between Liverpool and Manchester
brought to the place for many years.
Mrs. Gaskell was born in Chelsea in 1810, but her mother dying soon
after, she went to live under the care of her mother's sister, who lived
at Knutsford in Cheshire. Mrs. Gaskell, as a child, was brought up in a
tall red house, standing alone in the midst of peaceful fields and
trees, on the Heath, with a wide view reaching to the distant hills. In
a green hollow near this house there stand an old forge and mill, the
former having existed for more than two hundred years. Mrs. Gaskell had
a lonely childhood, occasionally relieved by a visit to her cousins at
the old family house of Sandlebridge.
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