Scrooby – Nottinghamshire – William Henry Bartlett (1854)

William Henry Bartlett gave the following illustration and written account of the bucolic landscape near Scrooby in the 1850s:

"It is one of those rich pastoral districts common enough in merry England, which, having no marked features of hill and dale, the hand of industry has so covered with exuberant crops of corn, neatly divided by green hedgerows, that the eye rejoices to look upon it, and its aspect of peaceful serenity sinks into the heart. In its centre, and occupying the lowest level, yet but little beneath that of the surrounding corn-fields, is a tract of rich marsh land of vivid green, enlivened with grazing groups of cattle. The glassy stream of the Idle winds through the plain, after a fashion which beseems its name, in slow and mazy coils between the villages of Austerfield and Scrooby, the former concealed among trees, but the latter marked out by the graceful fabric of its church, rising above the green level with its gray sky-pointing spire. Thus peaceful and unpretending is the physiognomy of this nursery of the pilgrims!"

The illustration and prose description show the association of Mayflower tourism with a romantic ideal of the English countryside. Rural tourism was developing rapidly in the nineteenth-century, with guidebooks, tourist brochures, and tours sold to the urban middle classes as an escape from city life. Bartlett’s work shows the connection with the Mayflower story and this growing industry.

William Henry Bartlett, The Pilgrim Fathers, or, The Founders of New England in the Reign of James the First (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & co, 1854), p.ix.