MS Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
My dear Elizabeth
I wonder whether you are taking your holiday at home or abroad. Of course I am only having the grace to write to you to ask you to help me, but I daresay you will excuse that. I think you went once to Buxton. Do you happen to have a guide book or the like with a description of Pools’ hole, or did you see the latter (if you hate caverns as much as I do, I don’t suppose you did) I have a story on the stocks about Mary of Scotland in her captivity, in which a good deal turns on Buxton, and you know there is a tradition of her visiting Pools’ hole, and there is a stalagmite called after her.1
I can’t find anything of a description in any book in the house and I don’t want to say anything impossible, so if you could give me a few touches – such as how far it is from Buxton, whether it is in a wooded place or what might have been so then – how you get into it, and if it is watery at the bottom or dry – anything in fact that will help out the story. My heroine is – not your JP. with the Holy rood coffin, but the possible daughter said by some to have been born at Lochleven.
I go on spinning stories but how many of the friends who were kind about them are gone. There is no one whose approval or criticism I shall miss more than Sir William Heathcote’s. He is a grievous loss to all the county, such a prince and patriarch of it all, as he was.
It has been a terrible year and Oxford will never be the same again without Mr Coxe.2 I hope you are all well, and able to enjoy your vacation
Yours affectionately
C M Yonge