Sun Pictures (1859) by Mary Howitt

This is the collected 22,000-word travel writing serial titled "Sun Pictures" (1859) by Mary Howitt, being a vivid and lively account of a long trek on foot through the Staffordshire Moorlands of England in the late 1850s. Together with a recent preliminary survey-essay on "The Weird Work of Mary Howitt". Most of the real placenames in "Sun Pictures" are omitted or obfuscated under fictional names. Howitt and her daughter appear to have first taken the local train from Alton to Biddulph. The first encounter with the ornamental gardens and strange organ player are obviously at Biddulph Grange, though the place is not named. Then they took the train from Biddulph to Cheddleton or perhaps Leek; then walked up into the hills. After that presumably Waystones = Ipstones, Rams = Foxt; Foxholes = Swineholes; High Stone Edge = the Ipstone Edge; Wyver = Cauldon; then a walk across Wyver Lowe = Cauldon Lowe; across the unnamed Weaver Hills ("to the west ... lie the great quarries"); Welstone = Ellastone; Sturton = Alton; they end the journey by entering The Dale = Rakes Dale adjacent to Alton Castle, and they arrive at their summer home base at what judging by the maps may have been the small village of Hansley Cross which is adjacent to Alton. Thornborough Hall may then = Alton Towers or perhaps even the Castle, and terming it a "farm-house" may be some jest by the author or some allusion to a common local jest.