The oldest monument in the church was a stone cross-legged effigy of a warrior in armour, dating from about the year 1300; while the plainest was the image of a female corpse in a shroud, on a gravestone, who was named ...  Elysebeth ...

  The which decessed the yeare that is goone,
  A thousand four hundred neynty and oone.

The church was dedicated to St. Barloke, probably one of the ancient British Divines.

On returning to Ellastone we learned that the inn was associated with “George Eliot,” whose works we had heard of but had not read.  We were under the impression that the author was a man, and were therefore surprised to find that “George Eliot” was only the nom de plume of a lady whose name was Marian Evans.  Her grandfather was the village wheelwright and blacksmith at Ellastone, and the prototype of “Adam Bede” in her famous novel of that name.

[Illustration:  GEORGE ELLIOT’S “DONNITHORPE ARMS,” ELLASTONE.]

It has been said that no one has ever drawn a landscape more graphically than Marian Evans, and the names of places are so thinly veiled that if we had read the book we could easily have traced the country covered by “Adam Bede.”  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.”

We now hurried across the country, along old country lanes and over fields, to visit Alton Towers; but, as it was unfortunately closed on that day, it was only by trespassing that we were able to see a part of the grounds.  We could see the fine conservatories, with their richly gilded domes, and some portion of the ground and gardens, which were in a deep dell.  These were begun by Richard, Earl of Shrewsbury, in the year 1814, who, after years of labour, and at enormous expense, converted them from a wilderness into one of the most extraordinary gardens in Europe, almost baffling description.  There was a monument either to himself or the gardener, on which were the words: