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Dorothy Vernon's Steps
Down the steps, over the bridge, gone.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- A grey medieval manor above the River Wye
- Legend from
- 19th-century legend (1822)
- Tone
- Curious
Slip out of the ball, down the garden steps, across the bridge. A horse is waiting.
Haddon Hall passed to the Manners family when Dorothy Vernon married John Manners. A 19th-century legend says her father Sir George Vernon forbade the match, so during a ball at the hall Dorothy slipped away through the gardens, down stone steps and over a footbridge to where Manners waited, and they rode off to be married. Wikipedia says the marriage took place in 1563. The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive notes that the elopement story first came to public attention in Allan Cunningham's 1822 book The King of the Peak, and novelists and poets embellished it afterwards.