Turning off from this to the right, you ascend through an old pasture-field, and enter a short by-road, called the "Bloody Lane"-- a walk haunted by the ghost of a certain Captain Batt, the reprobate proprietor of an old hall close by, in the days of the Stuarts.

From the "Bloody Lane," overshadowed by trees, you come into the field in which Oakwell Hall is situated.

It is known in the neighbourhood to be the place described as "Field Head," Shirley's residence.

The enclosure in front, half court, half garden; the panelled hall, with the gallery opening into the bed- chambers running round; the barbarous peach-coloured drawing-room; the bright look-out through the garden-door upon the grassy lawns and terraces behind, where the soft-hued pigeons still love to coo and strut in the sun,--are described in "Shirley." The scenery of that fiction lies close around; the real events which suggested it took place in the immediate neighbourhood.
They show a bloody footprint in a bed-chamber of Oakwell Hall, and tell a story connected with it, and with the lane by which the house is approached.

Captain Batt was believed to be far away; his family was at Oakwell; when in the dusk, one winter evening, he came stalking along the lane, and through the hall, and up the stairs, into his own room, where he vanished.