" Thus Staffordshire is described as Loamshire, Derbyshire as
Stoneyshire, and the Mountains of the Peak as the barren hills, while
Oakbourne stands for Ashbourne, Norbourne for Norbury, and Hayslope,
described so clearly in the second chapter of _Adam Bede_, is Ellastone,
the "Donnithorpe Arms" being the "Bromley Arms Hotel," where we stayed
for refreshments. It was there that a traveller is described in the
novel as riding up to the hotel, and the landlord telling him that there
was to be a "Methodis' Preaching" that evening on the village green, and
the traveller stayed to listen to the address of "Dinah Morris," who was
Elizabeth Evans, the mother of the authoress.
[Illustration: ALTON TOWERS.]
Wootton Hall, which stands immediately behind the village of Ellastone,
was at one time inhabited by Jean Jacques Rousseau, the great French
writer, who, when he was expelled from France, took the Hall for twelve
months in 1776, beginning to write there his _Confessions_, as well as
his _Letters on Botany_, at a spot known as the "Twenty oaks." It was
very bad weather for a part of the time, and snowed incessantly, with a
bitterly cold wind, but he wrote, "In spite of all, I would rather live
in the hole of one of the rabbits of this warren, than in the finest
rooms in London.
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