William Masons' Aston in 1900
The following extract from the Leeds Mercury describes William Masons' Aston as it was in 1900
Aston, William Mason's village, with its model cemetery of two acres, is a picture of peace and repose. There are red tiled cottages and old fashioned little bits of garden, where aconites and arabis spring from the sod almost before the sun has entered into Aries.
At the top of the street are Squire Verelst's lodge gates guarded by tall trees, and fronted by triangular swards brilliantly green, which passing vehicles take good care not to graze. The park vista is a pretty study, and the grassy verdure underfoot has a certain richness at all times of the year.
Beyond, rising from the highest ground obtainable, is the hoary old hall full of windows, from which the noble D'Arcys, Earls of Holderness, who held great store by this manor, scanned the countryside. In 1771 the last Earl sold the estate to a gentleman of the name of Verelst, who had been Governor of Bengal, the present owner and occupier being his descendant. Mr. H. W. Verelst, J.P.
The handsome tree lined road curves softly round towards the Yellow Lion Inn, wherefrom the village, with its red cots and lichened walls, its lengths of chained wood palisades, and solid square church tower - not hoary, for it is composed of red sand stone - is shut out immediately. Sounds steal on the air from the village rookery, mingled with the barking of a dog at the rear of the outlying Yellow Lion, and a mellow chime from the region of the embowered deep brown tower, decorated with its mass of black pinnacles and arcades.
At the other end of the village, quite out of sight, there is a "Blue Bell," non-hyacinthine, of course, and in its considerateness it chimes not to irritate the rampant "Yellow Lion" before me. Opposite is the quaint cottage of Mr Verelst's gamekeeper, entered through a little green gate in the wall, and a goodly stretch of garden intervening. The road, slipping modestly into tree-land shadow, partly green, and partly blue, finds its mission in conducting the traveller to Todwick, South Anston, and Worksop. One gets a sense of hawthorn hedges, and wide spreading oaks, of open lead-set lattices half hidden with honeysuckles, and distant voices of haymakers returning home in the rosy after glow fall dreamily on one's ears, as sounds should fall when fancy listens. It is so easy to imagine this road a counterpart of what one might see around Stoke Pogis, for here at Aston strolled Thomas Gray, of "Elegy" fame, with his college friend, the Yorkshire Rector, constantly arguing prosody and philological matters, and turning anon to the more subtle strophes and antistrophes, hexameters, and pentameters, and other abnormal poetic "feet.
