How Haunted Are Your Shadowy Vistas With The Ghosts Of Laughing
Faces!
How from your whispering leaves there softly fall the voices of
long ago!
From Marlow up to Sonning is even fairer yet. Grand old Bisham Abbey,
whose stone walls have rung to the shouts of the Knights Templars, and
which, at one time, was the home of Anne of Cleves and at another of
Queen Elizabeth, is passed on the right bank just half a mile above
Marlow Bridge. Bisham Abbey is rich in melodramatic properties. It
contains a tapestry bed-chamber, and a secret room hid high up in the
thick walls. The ghost of the Lady Holy, who beat her little boy to
death, still walks there at night, trying to wash its ghostly hands clean
in a ghostly basin.
Warwick, the king-maker, rests there, careless now about such trivial
things as earthly kings and earthly kingdoms; and Salisbury, who did good
service at Poitiers. Just before you come to the abbey, and right on the
river's bank, is Bisham Church, and, perhaps, if any tombs are worth
inspecting, they are the tombs and monuments in Bisham Church. It was
while floating in his boat under the Bisham beeches that Shelley, who was
then living at Marlow (you can see his house now, in West street),
composed THE REVOLT OF ISLAM.
By Hurley Weir, a little higher up, I have often thought that I could
stay a month without having sufficient time to drink in all the beauty of
the scene.
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