The church-tower is mossy and much gnawed by time; it has narrow
loop-holes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over
the low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and
irregular, through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight.
Some of those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the
projections of the architecture. The church-yard is very small, and is
encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church
itself. In front of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of
incalculable age, with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty
head of foliage; though its boughs still keep some of the vitality which
perhaps was in its early prime when the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash.
A thousand years is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of a yew.
We were pleasantly startled, however, by discovering an exuberance of
more youthful life than we had thought possible in so old a tree; for
the faces of two children laughed at us out of an opening in the trunk,
which had become hollow with long decay. On one side of the yew stood a
framework of worm-eaten timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled me
exceedingly, till I made it out to be the village-stocks: a public
institution that, in its day, had doubtless hampered many a pair of
shank-bones, now crumbling in the adjacent church-yard.
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