Extract from Visit of Prince Leopold

A Train past Conisborough

As we speed past the lime cliffs which tell us we are in the classic land of Ivanhoe. While we think of the lovely valley immortalised by Sir Walter Scott, there comes in sight the Grey Keep of Conisborough, towering above the trees stripped of their foliage by the blasts of autumn; and there, too, a little further beyond, is the spire of the old church, where Queen Bess came in years gone by.

A barge, drifting lazily, its sails bellying to the wind, is rounding the bend of the canal; and on another, a little further down, an industrious housewife—if housewife is a proper term for one whose home is a canal boat—has got her week’s washing flaunting in the breeze, part of it on board and part on shore.

A pleasant place is Conisborough; and to-day, though the light is dying out of the landscape, it is a place worthy of being catalogued in the beauty-spots of any country. Here they evidently know that a Prince is on the rails. At the station there is a thin line of spectators, and perched on the gate beyond are a dozen children, whose cheery voices come to us as we whisk past at the rate of a mile a minute, and whose bare legs and little handkerchiefs are seen again as the curve in the line brings us sharply to the left.