NORTHUMBERLAND is a county of generous limits as well as of character and distinction far above the common. For the entire space of its greatest length—which runs north and south, speaking freely, or from the Tweed to the Roman Wall and the South Tyne—a deep belt against its western frontier, spread the solitudes of Cheviot. Here, as in South Wales, is a vast watershed, covering a little matter of 700 or 800 square miles of silent mountain and moorland, not to reckon its overlap into Roxburgh and Cumberland, which, like the other, the outside world knows absolutely nothing about. Crossing the head waters of the South Tyne and the Eastern Derwent, which last divides Durham and Northumberland, the Cheviot range (not locally thus designated for the whole distance) merges at length into the Durham moors on the one hand and the Pennines on the other. A fine block of mountain solitude this, and, judged by our English standards, of really vast extent, as well as of worthy altitude; for the “Great Cheviot” on the north is 2700 feet, and Cross Fell on the Pennines, a range familiar in the distance, at any rate, to Lake tourists, is higher still. Humped up between the Irish Channel and the North Sea these highlands pour their waters copiously to the right and left through the intervening low country into either ocean. Eastward go the North and South Tyne, the Allen, the Wandsbeck, the Aln, the Coquet, and the Till, the last alone swerving northward, and, as every one who knows their Scott will remember, flowing by Flodden Field into the Tweed. Most of its farther waters flow westward into Scotland, save the Eden and the Irthling, while the Liddel at any rate touches Cumbrian soil. One may remember, too, that Northumberland owns the right bank of Tweed for its last 20 miles, and both banks at its mouth. But one turns to the Tyne instinctively—though Durham has claims upon one shore in its final uproarious stages—as the typical, as it is much the greatest, of Northumbrian rivers.

One shrinks, however, amid such an atmosphere

THE TYNE, HEXHAM, NORTHUMBERLAND

as lies between the covers of this book, with something of dismay from the smoke, the uproar, and the resounding clamour through which the Tyne moves from Newcastle to the sea, with its busy shipyards, its coal-mines, its foundries. But from another point of view it is well worth the voyage down by one of the little steamers that ply continually to Tweedmouth, in which brief hour or two the very heart and vitals of the industrial North reveal themselves at close quarters; for the Tyne, though full of the largest ships, is comparatively narrow to its mouth both on the Durham and Northumbrian shores, each resounding with human energy in its noisiest and most strenuous forms. A striking feature of the Tyne, too, is the alacrity with which at the last moment it shakes all this off, and flows out under the ruinous Abbey of Tynemouth and over the narrow bar, between yellow sands and woody cliffs, into the fresh blue sea, as if the murky pandemonium had been but a hideous dream.

Almost every one knows the look of Newcastle, seeing how imposing is the view of town and river from the lofty railroad bridge on the highway to Scotland. Nor from that point is it easy to realise that, 12 or 15 miles above, this same river is brawling wide over a stony bed, with trout and samlets leaping in its clear streams. The “Tynesider” is the product of this lower and industrial stretch of the river, and not by any means a person who lives anywhere upon its banks. He is a type unto himself, and speaks a vernacular all his own, and the most unintelligible to the stranger of all North-country dialects. His ancestors were, for the most part, ordinary rural Northumbrians, dalesmen or otherwise. But the atmosphere of the coal trade, carried on quite actively since the Tudor period, has formed a type of man blunt of manner and raucous of speech, into which all who come are absorbed. Such is the Tynesider in the true meaning of the term. As a matter of fact, the colliery district of Northumberland is extremely small, and mainly confined to the south-eastern corner of the county, the rest of which is as sweet as Westmoreland. Twenty miles up the river, and half-a-dozen beyond the limits of the smirched country, the finely situated uplifted town of Hexham, crowned with its exquisite Abbey church, stands near the parting of the streams. If the Tyne is relatively narrow at Newcastle for the navies it floats, it is extremely wide at Hexham for a river of its boisterous quality. The sober interludes in which both Wye and Severn indulge between their shallows are brief and rare upon the Tynes. Severally and in their final partnership they remain gigantic mountain brooks almost to the end, and this is why they have punished Newcastle so fearfully in former days. In the eighteenth century the main bridge, covered then with dwellings, and full at the time of sleeping inmates, was swept into space and darkness in a few seconds. Few of the bridges on either Tyne have failed to succumb at one time or another to its fury. That at Hexham has seven arches, which will indicate the breadth of the river. Even when parted just above, each branch forms a salmon river of the first class as regards size, while the North Tyne is so in the more literal sense. The South Tyne, rather the smaller, and though always imposing and often beautiful the least so of the two, comes up from the very south-east corner of the county.

Rising just over the Cumbrian border at Alston, tapping the gorges of the wild, shapely, mountainous hills which girdle that racy and romantic little market-town, the river brawls northward through a deep and tortuous vale to Haltwhistle. Gathering becks from the Cumbrian fringes and further burns as it descends—for the change from a Scandinavian to a Saxon etymology is here well defined—the South Tyne now turns sharply eastward, and runs along the foot of the ridge bearing towards Hexham. Here too it meets the Carlisle and Newcastle railroad, which follows its valley the whole way to the sea. Receiving the Allen at the mouth of Allendale, the South Tyne becomes a fair-sized river, and Haydon Bridge, which in the old raiding days was the only one on the South Tyne, and was “chained” in periods of alarm, rests upon six arches, through all of which the clear impetuous currents shoot even in low water. It is a formidable thing for any one on tolerably intimate terms not merely with their banks but with their traditions and literature, to be confronted by the Tynes and but a few pages at disposal. It is the Severn and the Wye over again—the Border atmosphere surcharged with memories and traditions and many things beguiling to a discursiveness that must be at all costs resisted.

But here we have all the physical sternness of the north, above all of the north-east. The bed of a salmon river or a rocky trout stream whether in Breconshire or Northumberland differs nowise. The swirling pools, the gliding shallows, the angry rock-fretted rapids, the mossy crags and fringing woods or fern-clad banks, are approximately the same on Tyne or Wye, on Dove or Dart, and of a kind that has never yet bred satiety in those whose ways have lain much beside them. The same music, in all its infinite variety of tone and chord, is played by the Coquet, the Monnow, or the Wharfe; the same familiar flies, the drakes and duns, the alders and march-browns, dance to the familiar harmonies, while the white-breasted ousel and his summer visitor the sandpiper are as inevitably in evidence on the Tyne as on the Tamar. It is outside the immediate fringe of such a river that local character and features assert themselves. The South Tyne, from Haltwhistle to Hexham, sweeps bravely down a valley of grass farms, with here and there a village of stern uncompromising stone and slate set on its banks. There is no charm of village architecture in Northumberland, or scarcely any. Nor on the lofty slopes of Tynedale does the rose-embowered, orchard-girdled, thatched-roof cot that Wordsworth saw on the high terraces of the Wye, and sang of, send up its smoke wreaths.

The Northumbrian is practical and rectangular in his handling of the landscape. In other words, he is an advanced farmer and generally a big one, only surpassed by the Scotsman in those merits which are fatal to picturesque detail in landscape so far as it can be controlled. The Northumbrian dalesman was a picturesque cattle-lifter, or constant fighter of cattle-lifters, long after the rest of England had settled down to humdrum respectability, and even the Welsh Border had for two centuries buried the hatchet. But when he reformed he did so to some purpose, and has for some generations been very far ahead of the others in eliminating all those luxuriant irregularities of Nature that in the South make for artistic foregrounds. But Northumberland is in many vital respects altogether too much for him. He can trace big rectangles with stone dykes or bridled hedgerows, and lay out well-drained fields in the broader valleys, and erect square, comfortable, unlovely homesteads of whinstone that would stand a siege; but the spirit of the country in its uplifted hills, its wild moors, remains untouched in spite of him. If the modern dwelling by the Tyne, scattered enough in any case, is deplorable from the artist’s point of view, the nearer hills to the southward trend upwards gradually in mile-long sweeps to wild and lonely moors, from which come, winding down to the main valley, beautiful glens like those of the two Allens or the Devil’s Water, even still more exquisite. It was in the dense woods of Dipton Dene, upon the latter stream, that Queen Margaret, abandoned after the second battle of Hexham in the Wars of the Roses, threw herself and infant son on the mercy of the bandit, and, as we all know, was safely harboured by him. At its mouth, too, on the Tyne, and just below Hexham, are the ruined towers of Dilston, home of the ill-fated Derwentwater, who was lord of all this country till the Jacobite rising of the “Fifteen” cost him his head and his heirs their vast estates. If there are no half-timbered cottages or few Tudor homesteads upon the Tyne, the valley still abounds in the remains of peel-towers and bastel houses, redolent of the raiding days; while here and there a great castle suggestive of some dominant name, some Warden of the March or Keeper of the dale, broods over the stream with its four grey towers and lofty curtains, and strikes a fine stern note against the waving background of the moorish hills of Hexhamshire. Dilston, as related, is below Hexham, and so is Prudhoe, the whilom fortress of Umfravilles and Percies, whose massive walls are yet more proudly perched. This South Tyne valley was thick with Ridleys and Featherstonhaughs, a very cradle of many families of which these were the chief. Men did not wander about the country and set up houses anywhere and everywhere in the old Border days. They were wanted at home, and by no means in demand in other dales, the stamping ground of other and probably unfriendly stocks, though some of them were badly enough wanted in another sense. Clans or “greynes” had to stick together both for purposes of offence and defence, and fighting men were valuable. Constant raids of Elliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, and Scotts from beyond Cheviot and the necessity for retaliation kept both long dales of Tyne on the alert.

Nowadays so thinly peopled, in the time of the Tudors and the early Stuarts they contained more of these wild and lawless people than the country could legitimately support. “Honest men all, but who did a little shifting for their living,” as a contemporary play puts it with some humour; the despair alike, together with their Scottish equivalents across the Cheviots, of English and Scottish Kings, of Parliaments and officials. Williemoteswyke, a chief stronghold of the Ridleys, whence came the celebrated martyr Bishop, still survives by the South Tyne, a later farm-house built into the ancient towers. But all along the line of the river, from Haltwhistle eastwards, within two or three miles for the most part, and cresting the second ridge to the northward for the entire distance, is a monument much older than the peel-towers of Ridleys or Featherstonhaughs. The Roman Wall, as perhaps needs no telling, ran here from sea to sea. Much of it was destroyed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Half the farm-houses, cottages, and barns to the north of the river are built of its stones, quarried and squared at the expense of Imperial Rome in the second century. But parallel with this stretch of the South Tyne, for many miles the Wall still pursues with an average height of 6 to 8 feet its direct and lonely course along a wild and rugged skyline. Edging the face of the rock escarpments, plunging into deep ravines, dividing the comb of lofty whinstone ridges, this old northern barrier of the Roman Empire forges always onward, regardless of obstacles, in its undeviating pursuit of the highest points in an uplifted and lonely land. To the south of the Wall, in the green troughs and broken ridges that divide it from the South Tyne, lie the scattered homesteads of small sheep-farms, built at the expense of its diminished stature, for even in the time of Elizabeth it still retained its original height of some 18 or 20 feet.

To the northward the Roman soldier, whether bred in Spain or Gaul or on the Rhine, looked down over what is even to-day an unpeopled wilderness stretching far away over bog and heather and moor grass, to dim and distant hills that mark the windings of the North Tyne. No reminders of the Roman occupation in all England, no excavated towns, no dug-up villa foundations among the haunts of men, are comparable in dramatic significance with this persistent pile of masonry, punctuated with the remnants of its walled camps and watch towers, in which Rome traced, through this remote and wild land, the limit for three centuries of her Imperial rule. About 12,000 men lay here perpetually along the 60 miles between Carlisle and Newcastle. We know precisely, too, from the Roman army list and the corroborating testimony carved upon scores of tablets and altars, what regiments they were: which were the cavalry and which the infantry stations. We know also the names of numbers of their officers, for memorial tablets to the dead and inscriptions of honour to the living are abundant. We see the officers’ quarters, the men’s barracks, the baths, the market-houses; the narrow double gateways, their stone lintels deeply rutted with the waggon wheels of this mysterious and remote age. An amphitheatre here, a shrine there, confronts one with rows of altars to forgotten gods, gathered upon the walls of local museums. Here again is a milestone, elaborately inscribed to the glory of emperors and pro-consuls, and ending like any county council finger-post with the mileage to the nearest camp. But we know nothing more of this wonderful and exasperatingly dark period, of three long centuries at least, when England was mute, peaceful, and the sharer in an advanced exotic civilization. One certainty amid the darkness we are sure of, namely, that this perilous and war-like frontier above the Tyne, now so lonely, was, by virtue not merely of its permanent garrison but of the tributary communities which ministered to their service and support, one of the most populous parts of England.

Hexham, standing at the forks of Tyne, was the ancient entrance to the raiding dales. Beyond it the stranger would have most assuredly needed the very best of introductions, while over the altars of its Abbey church the heady champions of Tynedale hung their gloves for him to pluck who held himself a sufficiently stout man to take the consequences. Scott remembered this in Rokeby—

The seventeenth-century evangelist, Dr. Gilpin, on his first appearance in Hexham Church, says a well-known story, terrified the more peaceful souls around him by plucking one of these profane gauges of battle from the sacred wall. Only his piety, eloquence, and undaunted front saved the doctor from rough treatment at the hands of those sons of war who had gathered from the dales to hear such an arraignment of their wild ways as they were not accustomed to. Founded late in the seventh century by St. Wilfrid, then Bishop of York, the crypt, largely fashioned of Roman stones from the great station at Corbridge, still remains of the original Abbey, ultimately destroyed by the Danes. Endowed by Queen Etheldreda with her own dowry, the lands, still comprised in the three large upland parishes south of the Tyne, and known as Hexhamshire, remained with the monastery till the Dissolution. Rebuilt in 1112 by another Prelate of York, the church was again practically destroyed by the Scots. But what we now see used as the parish church is a choir, tower, and transepts of beautiful Early English work throughout, save for a recently and badly restored east end. Whether the original nave was ever completed or not is a matter of contention. A new one at any rate is being now built—a proceeding which provokes a good deal of reasonable dissension from archÆologists. The wide, square market-place of Hexham was quite recently the most picturesque in the North. Modern innovations have much damaged its reputation; but it still possesses, fronting the Abbey, the Edwardian Moot Hall with its Gothic archway surmounted by towers, warlike of aspect in their corbels and machicolations, and yet another tower behind of equal age and imposing look. Our artist’s admirable and suggestive sketch of Hexham leaves us little to add regarding its felicitous pose and charm of site and outlook.

If, like the salmon, we prefer the North to the South Tyne, it is after all but a selection between good things; for the valley of the former, winding for 30 miles to its source just over the Scottish frontier, is, together with its tributary the Rede, the absolute embodiment, the quintessence, not merely of Border and Cheviot scenery, but of that stirring past which gives the Anglo-Scottish Border an atmosphere all its own. The Welsh Marches are instinct with the same spirit. The difference in their detail for those to whom both have made their appeal furnish an interesting and instructive contrast with which we have no business here. But rivers after all play such a conspicuous and romantic part in both. The streams of Wye and Dee, of Usk, Severn, and Towy on the one hand, of Tyne and Coquet and Till and Tweed on the other, blend their music with the harp of the bard or the voice of the minstrel, and their names bite deep into every page of the moving chronicle. The one has upon the whole a note of a pathos, something of the wail of a conquered race, not as the Saxon was conquered, but of a small people contending long and heroically against hopeless odds to a climax that in the long run brought little to regret. The other, robust and racy of retrospect with the consciousness of equal struggle. The one Celtic to the core, clad in a tongue unknown to the conquerors, who in their turn celebrated, so far as I know, no single triumph in ode or ballad, and accompanied two centuries of mortal strife with no single verse. In the other we have two communities, bone of the same bone, flesh of the same flesh, furnished with almost the same racy variety of the same rich tongue, who flung ballads across the Border as they shot arrows or crossed spears. But above all, they left off quits, and amid a hundred fights have always a Flodden for a Bannockburn, and a Homildon Hill for an Otterburn. “I never hear,” wrote Sir Philip Sidney, “the old song of Percy and Douglas that I find not my heart more moved than by a trumpet.” One luminous and sufficiently accurate fact may be remembered in this connection, namely, that the end of one long struggle was the beginning of the other; that the same iron hand which, speaking broadly, crushed the last gleam of Welsh independence, permanently alienated by efforts of similar intent the hitherto not unfriendly northern kingdom. For till the Scottish wars of Edward the First and the days of Bruce and Wallace, Border feuds in the full meaning of the term had little significance. The very Border line upon the North Tyne and Rede was vague. Scotland and England fought occasionally and vigorously, but there was no rancour nor unfriendliness when the game was over. Redesdale and Liddesdale cut each other’s throats and lifted each other’s cattle no doubt, as did other dales, promiscuously, but not as Scot and Southern and as bitter hereditary foes.

Nowhere in its whole course is the North Tyne more striking in its actual bed than for the last mile before its confluence at Hexham, when its amber peat-stained waters fret amid a huge litter of limestone crags and ledges between the woods of Warden. It is curious, too, in time of spate to watch the powerful rivers rushing into one another’s arms at the meeting of the waters; the one a yellowy-brown, the other a rich mahogany-black, as if no fallowed field or muddy lane had cast a stain upon it. A few miles up, in a stretch of park land on the very banks of the river, is Chesters, one of the principal Roman stations on the wall, which last here leaped the stream. Much skilful excavation has been done, laying bare the foundations and the lower walls of a large cavalry station, for all to see on the day of the week when those in possession, who have performed this admirable labour of years, admit the public. Here too, in a normal state of the water, you can yet see the remains of the Roman bridge which have defied the floods of Tyne for all these centuries. As one travels up the river, pursuing its narrow and for a time much-wooded vale, places of ancient fame or the scene of Border ballads hold one at every mile. Houghton Castle, long restored and inhabited, but still plain and grim, with much of the old fabric and its ten-foot walls, stands proudly upon a woody steep above the wide churning stream. Built in the thirteenth century by a Swinburne when North Tynedale was Scottish ground, it was occupied by his descendants through much of the turbulent period; for when the Border was shifted it became the nearest castle of importance to the Scottish raiding valleys, and many a moss-trooper has languished in its dungeons. A space farther up on the other bank is Chipchase Castle, the ancient seat of the Herons, where is still the original peel-tower, bearing a roof of six-foot flagstones with battlements corbelled and machicolated, circular corner towers, and the wooden fragments of a portcullis still embedded in its pointed archway. Annexed to this is a beautiful Late Tudor house of 1621, the first, no doubt, of its kind on this wild frontier. In the sixteenth century Chipchase was the headquarters of a corps of light horsemen, stationed here for the policing of Tynedale under the command of its “Keeper,” who was generally a Swinburne or a Heron, subject in turn to the orders of the Warden of the Middle March, very often a Dacre. But the little village of Wark, where a modern bridge crosses the river, still some 50 or 60 yards wide, was in older times than this the capital of North Tynedale. Here law was administered and the visiting Scottish judges sat, before the embittered Border feuds began to make any law other than that of the sword almost a farce. Above Wark the valley grows wilder and more open, the river losing nothing, however, of its size, and still proceeding, in a succession of rapids and splendid salmon pools, between woods of birch and larch and ash. Dark burns come splashing down anon from the high moors through bosky denes, and an innocent-looking stream, not much bigger, pipes quietly in on the east bank, and gives the name of Reedsmouth to a trifling hamlet. This is the far-famed Rede, and this the mouth of Redesdale, that dark and bloody ground, that inmost artery of Border feud. For over 20 miles the little river goes winding away amid the moors and sheep-farms of the Cheviots, with a village here and a hamlet there, till at the Reidseweir by Carter Fell, scene of a famous Border fight, it finds its source in the watershed and the Scottish Border. The main road that in a stretch of 50 miles climbs the Cheviots into Scotland now runs up Redesdale, and the frequent motor traffic along it seems something of a jarring note amid the solitude of the great hills and the wide sweeping moors. It is an old main highway nevertheless, and the world hurrying through it in flying fragments at intervals seems incongruous in method rather than in act; for Redesdale was not only a favourite pass for Border raiders, but for large Scottish and English armies. The valley forms a V with that of the North Tyne, both leading up to a pass over the spine of the Cheviots. Though the Rede carries, as always, the highway, the Tyne, with but a rough route for wheel traffic, has now a little railroad, which at long intervals awakes its echoes. Redesdale, like Tynedale, from its mouth to its source is a string of landmarks that tell of doughty deeds, of triumph and defeat, of valour and treachery. At Otterburn by the Rede, as every one knows, took place that most famous of all true Border fights, when Hotspur and Douglas, with a great force of Borderers behind either, maintained the most ferocious struggle known even to Froissart, through most of a moonlight night, to the death of Douglas, the capture and worsting of the Percies. Between Rede and Tyne is a pathless solitude of moor and fell. Between North Tyne and the Roman Wall, as already related, is just such another. The not unpicturesque village of Bellingham, effectively poised on a high bank above the river, is now the capital of the dale and the rendezvous of its widespread sheep industry. The descendants of the men who formed the greynes or clans of Tyne, soldiers, moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, the terror of the low countries, are all here in absolute possession—Charltons, Robsons, Hedleys, Dodds, Halls and Milburnes—great sheep-farmers many, landowners still some of them. But tempting as it is to pursue this wild and beautiful valley to the springs of Tyne on the Scottish watershed, with its still surviving peel-towers, its wealth of tradition and legend, it is necessary to forbear, for I have already somewhat exceeded the limits of my space.

“Coquet” and Northumbrians, like the Scots, it may be noted, are addicted to dropping the article in alluding to their larger rivers, which conveys a pleasant suggestion of greater intimacy and affection,—Coquet, then, rises also in the Cheviots, and, not far from Rede, pursues her way through the same class of scenery, and boasts more or less the same stirring story as the Tynes. A fine, lusty, peat-tinged stream after a long pilgrimage through fern and heath-clad uplands, amid which Scott laid the opening chapters of Rob Roy, the river finally parts company with the Cheviots at the pleasant town of Rothbury, that nestles beneath their outer ramparts, at this point of considerable height and more than common shapeliness. Thence for 15 miles the river urges its streams over a clean rocky bottom, through the undulating lowlands of Northumbria to the sea. Coquet holds the affections of Northumbrians, I think, above all their rivers. There is an obvious feeling in the county that it is their typical representative stream, partly perhaps because it flows right through the centre of it, and is more generally familiar than the remoter dales of Tyne. The North Tyne, as a river, has a greater volume of water, and is more imposing. Both have a stormy and dramatic past, but that of Tyne and Rede, since they were notable passes into Scotland, is on a more imposing scale, though the raider was in no way bound to beaten routes. But Coquet is a fascinating and delightful river, and one understands the point of view which makes it the darling of its county and the subject of much local verse, racy and vigorous or sentimental, within the last century.

Northumberland, Yorkshire, Wales, and other regions of like character are the true land of the angler. Wiltshire, Hampshire, and their prototypes have great reputations. But the native to any extent worth mentioning is not a trout fisherman. He neither knows nor cares aught about it, nor has any opportunity for contracting the habit or love of trouting. The conditions are all against him. The fat trout of these “dry-fly” countries, to put the matter in technical but concrete fashion, are the quarry of a few individuals: groups of men mainly strangers, or, in any case of necessity, persons of means or the friends of such. It is like pheasant-shooting. The farmer and the well-to-do tradesmen, much less the labourer or mechanic of these counties, have scarcely more instinct for fly-fishing than if they lived in the fens. But in counties like Northumberland and many others dealt with in this book, the rivers are objects of popular affection or at least of general understanding. Every third man can throw a fly in some sort of fashion, or cast a worm for trout in clear water. Opportunities in recent years, owing partly to the increase of fishing among

THE COQUET, AND WARKWORTH CASTLE, NORTHUMBERLAND

wealthy townsmen and partly to an ignorance of the whole subject on the part of many new landowners, have been enormously curtailed for the humbler sportsman. But the instinct is an inheritance of all classes in those counties where hills mount high and streams run fast. The North Tyne is a good salmon and sea-trout river and a splendid trout stream. It is a little remote, and withal, of late years, somewhat exclusive; but the Coquet is naturally as good. It has always been, and even still is, more accessible to the Northumbrian angler. The salmon, the bull trout, the sea trout, and the brown trout thrive in its clear mountain waters.

Now the laymen, even such as are in the highest degree susceptible to the charms of Nature and scenery, cannot easily realise the hold that streams of this type and their localities acquire over the affections and imaginations of anglers; not all, of course, for the fraternity includes every kind of temperament. But to a considerable proportion, and by no means of necessity only those whom education and culture make susceptible to such emotion, the appeal of the river, quite apart from the mere act of killing fish, is overmastering. It is no figure of speech but a mere simple statement of fact that, compared to the trout fisherman’s familiarity with a stream, the relationship of the rest of the world to it is a mere nodding acquaintance. Long days are spent in the closest intimacy with its ever-changing surface and the ever-changing melodies it plays. Miles of water, much of it buried in woody dingles from every eye but the fisherman’s, its only visitor, are traversed by him on the bank edge, or in the stream itself, over and over again, till every eddy and pool, every rock and pendent bough, becomes printed in the mind, and hung, so to speak, in its picture gallery. Weeks or months of days, from youth to age, on many streams gives the properly constituted disciple of old Izaak a feeling towards them that can have no counterpart outside the craft, and at the best could be but vaguely realised.

A man would be a dull dog to be continuously exposed, in what are, prim facie, among the happiest hours of his life, to surroundings that are the most perfect of all Nature’s efforts and not grow to associate them with something more than a mere love of killing things; and there are fewer dull dogs among trout fishermen, one may fairly hazard the statement, than in the ranks of any other sport or pastime. There is a poetry in all field-sports. But in most others there are also accessories which attract the crowd, which conduce to vanity, or popularity, or give a leg up to the social climber. There is usually an audience of some sort, the applause of a circle or a multitude. The fisherman, in this respect at least, is beyond suspicion. He is at any rate genuine and the real thing. Very often, indeed, he is a poet, generally of course an inarticulate one, and unconscious of any such label. But his gratification belongs in part to the higher senses: the romance of the river is strong within him, and it would be strange indeed, seeing the sort of scenes among which he spends his hours, if it were otherwise. The fishermen of the Coquet, however, are not all inarticulate. The river has invoked a good deal of verse on the part of its frequenters, which, if not Swinburnian, is melodious and from the heart, and reveals the love of the Northumbrian angler for its winsome streams. Heaven forbid I should suggest that only an angler can appreciate the glories of a mountain stream; I have but attempted to indicate the more intimate affection for it that men must have, and do have, whose happiest hours are associated with its inmost haunts and with its thousand moods, and whose very ears sing in the evening of long days with its unending melodies.

In the northern counties, as in Wales, the rivers play a greater part in local lore and in the affections of the people generally than in the south. They are intertwined with their legends and their folklore, their ordinary interests. They stimulate the local imagination by their capricious moods, their fury in flood-time, their tempestuous qualities. Even the untutored rustic, one may think, feels insensibly the influence of the cataract, or the charm of the summer shallows where as an urchin he paddled or tickled trout. They riot beside his village street, and their little tributaries plunge beside his cottage door. The southern or midland river is apt to steal noiselessly through interdicted water-meadows, and seems to feel neither storm nor drought till one day, perchance, the valley gradually fills with gently oozing water that recedes with unexciting deliberation.

The considerable remains of Brinkburn Priory, an Augustinian house, stand near the banks of the Coquet, while at Felton Bridge, a village of some note in Northumbrian story, it has been forced to cut a channel through hard ledges of rock, which results in some fine grouping of foam and foliage. Our illustration, however, represents the final stage of the river, where in its more peaceful mood it winds beneath the renowned Castle of Warkworth towards the sea. Though abandoned for centuries as a residence, its great Keep, built in the third Edward’s stirring days by a Percy in star-shape fashion, with eight lofty clustered towers, is practically intact and eminently imposing, while some of the outer walls and other buildings still survive around the great outer bailly. Originally a fortress and manor of the Claverings, it was granted by the same Edward to Henry Percy in payment for his expenses as Warden of the March, and also as a recognition of his share in the defeat of the invading Scots at Neville’s Cross, while the King and his army were fighting the campaign of Crecy. It was their chief seat, rather than Alnwick, for some generations, including that of Hotspur. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, here lays the scene in which that fiery soul is planning his intended revolt against Henry the Fourth which ended on the fatal field of Shrewsbury, and repels his curious wife’s persistent sallies anent his moody ways and broken, restless nights. The second part of the same play also opens here at Warkworth, where the old Earl awaits the news from Shrewsbury, and receives the messenger announcing the rout of his friends and Hotspur’s death.

Warkworth, like Alnwick, fell into decay during the long absence of the Percys from the north, a compulsory absence but little broken for generations, and wholly due to the fear of them felt by the Tudors, who were strong enough to coerce those they feared. When in the person of the first Duke they returned during the eighteenth century to a permanent residence in Northumberland, it was a mooted question whether Alnwick or Warkworth should be restored, the former, as we know, being selected. And if the Alne, winsome little river though it be, cannot compare with the Coquet, it has some compensation in the miles of beautiful and diversified park it waters, and in the honour of laving the feet of the proudest and greatest castle in all England. On arriving beneath the high-perched towers of Warkworth, the Coquet has relapsed into a smooth gliding stream, and in a red sandstone cliff abutting on its banks, just above the castle, is a quite remarkable cell or hermitage, like those on the Severn near Bewdley. But this one is more elaborate by far, and uncanny to a high degree. A flight of steps hewn in the rock mounts up from the river bank to a cave, entered by an ecclesiastically-fashioned porch. The interior itself was cunningly wrought some six centuries ago into the form of a chapel of Gothic design, some twenty feet by seven, with a two-light window, an altar, and a vaulted roof with central bosses supported by short circular columns, all being hewn out of the solid rock. To the south of this altar, under the window, is the rather gruesome explanation of these pious labours. For here lies the rude and greatly worn figure of a female, with a man seated at her feet resting his head upon his hand, and though much worn by time still eloquently indicating an attitude of remorse and despair. Over the outside of the door is carved a Latin inscription signifying, “My tears have been my meat day and night,” while within is another chamber of a ruder kind.

The story runs thus, that the man is a Bertram of Bothal and the lady a Widdrington, his intended bride, whom he killed by mistake, and then, fashioning this hermitage, mourned her here in seclusion for the remainder of his life. How the mistake arose and the tragedy came about is too long a tale for these pages. Hotspur’s son, when an exile in Scotland, after his father’s death and attainder, is supposed to have contracted a stealthy marriage with a daughter of the rival Marcher house of Neville, whom he afterwards publicly espoused, in this same hermitage. Just beneath the cliff is a small ruinous building on the river bank, built of hewn rock in the fifteenth century; concerning this, however, there is no mystery though some interest, as the cell of a priest attached to the Percy family under ordinary conditions, which are still preserved in writing. The inevitably sombre, but in a sense rather picturesque little town of Warkworth, with its market cross, straggles up from the fifteenth-century bridge, guarded by an old turreted gateway, to the castle in most suggestively feudal fashion. So soon after this does the Coquet join the sea that Warkworth considers itself something of a watering-place, though no disturbing evidences of anything of the kind mar the bygone flavour of dominant castle and tributary townlet which it still so pleasantly retains. Passengers to and from Scotland on the main line must assuredly be familiar with these proud towers standing out above the bare fields, a mile or two eastward against the sea. Not so obvious is a beautiful glimpse of the Coquet which must be snatched at precisely the proper moment. But as the train crosses the river some four miles from its mouth, it may be seen for a few brief seconds down a long straight half-mile trail of glancing light between luxuriant walls of woodland.

The Till, though not one of the artist’s subjects on these pages, must have a brief word, if only because it is quite unlike any other river on the Border, and is, moreover, the only English stream that feeds the Tweed. Rising, like the Alne, and not far from it, in the Cheviots about half-way down their course, it fails to achieve the other’s feat and break through that isolated central block of North Northumbrian moors between the Cheviots and the sea. Thus baffled and turning away to the north quite in its infancy, it runs along the eastern base of the Cheviots to the Tweed. Passing Chillingham and thence to Wooler, the Till winds with extraordinary contortions through broad level meadows, the great humpy masses of the Northern Cheviots, reaching here the height of 2700 feet, towering majestically above it. Rippling gently over gravelly shallows of singularly lustrous colouring and many hues, it lingers long and constantly, so slight is the fall, in sullen deeps, into which the high crumbling red sandstone banks are continually toppling. In actual appearance the Till is almost a replica of those famous Hereford grayling rivers the Teme and the Lugg, and, as is but natural, that useful and handsome fish, which was only introduced here fifteen years ago, now swarms in its streams somewhat to the ousting of the trout, its natural denizens, and no doubt to the disgust of its autumn visitors, the salmon and the sea-trout. These, however, pass on for the most part up the brawling tributaries which the grayling do not face, and it is an interesting sight to watch the “sea-fish,” as inland Northumbrians call the salmon tribe, leaping the dam on the Wooler burn in a half flood.

Mild as it looks and gently as it murmurs, the Till is formidable in flood for the wide grazing lands it submerges at short notice, when the fountains of the Cheviots are loosed. Beautiful burns hurry down from the not very distant heart of this narrow but lofty northern point of the range, into the Till, babbling through deep glens, clad like the hills above with bracken, sprinkled in fine confusion with birch and alder, and littered with fragments of grey rock. The stone bridge over which Surrey led the English army as he marched down its valley to Flodden, whose high green ridge confronts you everywhere, still spans the Till. Above it, abrupt and bare, like a lower buttress to the Cheviot range, rises Homildon Hill, where Hotspur defeated ten thousand Scots under another Douglas with fearful slaughter by archers alone, and no great force of them, without moving a single horseman from his ranks—the only instance of the kind known, according to experts, in mediÆval warfare; a battle by no means after Hotspur’s heart, extraordinary triumph though it was, and more particularly as most of these triumphant archers were Welsh mercenaries. But the Till, opening straight to Scotland and to the Tweed, is literally steeped in such doings, and lest I find myself drifting into the tale of Flodden Field, in which the “Sullen Till” played so notable a part, it will be prudent to cross the watershed at once without further delay or palaver. Anent the leisurely habits of the Till, however, they are commemorated on the Border by the time-honoured jibe with which Tweed greets the appearance of its only English tributary, and the latter’s effective rejoinder:—

It is in those central highlands south of the Tyne, made up of portions of the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Westmoreland, and Cumberland, that the Tees, with its tributaries the Greta and Lune, also the Swale and Lancashire Lune, and last, but not least, the Eden, all find their source, not merely in this wild upland, but actually within the confines of west Westmoreland. The Eden, though nowhere touching that famous district known as Lakeland which the two counties mostly share, is by far the foremost river in Westmoreland or Cumberland. The very fact of its propinquity to the Lake District makes for its isolation as regards the stranger in search of the picturesque, just as the Pennines, which at Crossfell almost touch 3000 feet, are obscured by the near neighbourhood of the Lake mountains, whose shapes, like those of Wales, as much as their heights, exalt them beyond comparison with the most inspiring and the wildest of round-capped moorlands. Between the Pennines and the Lakeland mountains, always with a north-westward course, the Eden urges its quickly gathering waters through Westmoreland, with a swish and swirl and ripple rather than any great show of agitation, traversing the pleasant pastoral and agricultural

THE EDEN, SAMSON’S CHAMBER, NEAR CARLISLE

valley amid which Appleby, the little capital of Westmoreland, lies astride the stream. To the east of the Eden for practically its whole journey to Carlisle, spreads an unbroken wilderness of moor and fell. Upon the west, from Kirkby Stephen, above which it rises, through Appleby to near Penrith, and reaching to the edge of the Lake country, lies a picturesque, broken region of small valleys, secluded villages, and farms. From the Pennines and its eastern fringes, numerous becks hurry to the Eden, and from the west, by long courses with the grain of the country, many little rivers eventually reach the generous shingly bed of the same hospitable stream. From Penrith, on the edge of Cumberland and but four miles to the west, comes down the beautiful river Eamont, which is the outlet of Ulswater, just as the Lowther, another arrival at the same moment, brings the burden of Haweswater. This Westmoreland Eden has also a particular interest as the open valley of the West Marches and the natural channel for such Scottish raids as broke past Penrith and its surrounding group of fortified houses. This whole corner, indeed, between the Eden and the latter town and just around it still proclaims to the observant wanderer what a vital spot it was. The fortified granges of Yanwath and Blencowe, the perfect little fortalice of Dacre, the numerous peel-towers such as Clifton, and those embodied in the later mansions of Brougham, Newbiggin, or Hutton John, and the fine old red ruins of Brougham Castle itself, with many others that recur to memory, lend an abiding interest to this particular neighbourhood. A broad gap was this between the rugged chaos of Lakeland, which offered the Scots nothing to the south but a possible ambush of hardy mountaineers, and the Pennine wilderness upon the inner side. Over the levels of central Cumberland horsemen could travel anywhere once Carlisle was evaded or disposed of. The narrow streets of Penrith again, all converging into open spaces for the better safe-guarding of herds of cattle and other valuables, are significant enough of the perilous days of old for the few to whom such things appeal, whilst up on the crest of the ridge above the town there is still the iron cage in which flared the beacon light of war, when all heights to the northward twinkled with the ominous news that the Scots had crossed the Solway.

In broad and surging current the Eden now courses between more precipitous steeps with greater commotion and of more inspiring character than marked the pleasant but gentler murmurs of its previous wanderings. At Kirkoswald, Crossfell displays its smooth but lofty brow, the virtual peer of Skiddaw and Helvellyn in all but the little matter of quality and distinction, in something like intimacy with the river, and spreads its skirts almost to its eastern shore. At Kirkoswald, too, is an ancient monastery, developed at the Dissolution into a manor house acquired by the Featherstonhaughs, who still possess it, and on the hill slope are the scant remnants of “one of the fairest castles,” says an Elizabethan writer, “that ever eyes beheld.” Won by a Dacre, who raiding south on a certain occasion instead of north, carried off its heiress from Warwick Castle, it gathers some added interest from having been the fortress whence the Dacre of Flodden fame marched to that immortal field with his thousand Cumbrian horse, the only cavalry on the English side. A detached church belfry, standing high and alone near the castle site, gives pause to the ecclesiologist as an almost unique spectacle in the north, and from its summit presents a delightful view to such chance visitors as might light upon Kirkoswald of the Eden valley and the Pennines. The river has already swept past Salkeld, with its red embattled church tower and traditions of Dick Whittington and the first Lord Ellenborough, who were both born here. Nearly opposite Kirkoswald is Lazonby, on whose high banks our artist, it will be seen, has set up his easel. Below Kirkoswald is the nunnery, an ancient manor house celebrated for its walks and woods and waterfalls upon the banks of the river. Farther on towards Carlisle is Ormathwaite, where for a time the Eden ceases from troubling and is overhung by crags and woods and the ancient castle of the Skeltons. Just before reaching Carlisle the Irthling, a mountain river of some length and volume, comes down from the wildest portion of the old Middle March, just north of the Upper Tyne beyond Gilsland and about Bewcastle, whose moss-troopers and cattle-lifters were perhaps the most incorrigible of all English Borderers. It is a common saying among old men, with probably a half truth in it, that the King’s writ within their memory did not run in Bewcastle. And at Carlisle, too, comes in the Petteril, which has run northward from near Penrith through the vanished forest of Inglewood, a parallel course to the Eden and quite near to it. Here the Calder arrives almost at the same moment from the far back of Skiddaw Forest,

THE EDEN, NEAR LAZONBY, CUMBERLAND

watering in its infancy the hill village of Caldbeck, which John Peel has made famous, and murmuring by the churchyard where that hero lies beneath a tombstone decorated with the emblems of the chase. The Eden then, it will have been gathered, is a great and important river, as our English standards go, watering a broad region of singular beauty and romantic interest, and drawing tribute both from the Lake country, the Pennines, and the lower Cheviots.

The city of Carlisle, which rises on its sandstone ridge above the Eden, steeped in the stirring deeds of centuries, must for that very reason be passed lightly by. The river, however, it should be noted, had its share in the Roman wall of Hadrian, which crossed it here upon a bridge and finished at Stanwix, just below Carlisle, where stood the Roman station of Lugubalium. Roman Carlisle with its camps, roads, and garrisons, was of extreme importance, but the later Carlisle, from the time when it ceased to be Scottish ground in the thirteenth century till the rebellion of 1745, when so many things happened here, is altogether too racy and stirring a subject to mock at with a page or paragraph. In connection, however, with this last leisurely progress of the Eden to the Solway estuary, it is worthy of note that the seven or eight miles of country through which it winds, the corner lying between Carlisle and Scotland, that is to say, is a dead level; a melancholy expanse of reclaimed moss, as the prevalent fir-woods significantly proclaim, while peat hags even yet show here and there between the grey fallows and pale pastures. It was along here, too, just to the east of the Eden, that runaway couples in former days galloped hot foot before their pursuers to Gretna Green, which lies at the farther end of it. But as a matter of fact this belt of level country, over which the castle walls of Carlisle look so proudly to the Scottish hills across the Solway, strikes a perfect note in this romantic and significant Border topography. The Eden could not possibly contrive a more harmonious finish than in this complete change of scene and demeanour, this silent progress through unadorned, infertile, almost uncared-for looking levels, that for this very reason seem to keep a firmer hold of the grim spirit of the past; a tramping ground of hostile armies, a cockpit of lawless clan warfare, a treacherous galloping ground of the moss-trooper with the rope dangling for him on Carlisle Castle, each in their day and generation. This even still rather thinly peopled

THE DERWENT, GRANGE, BORROWDALE

region terminates near the mouth of Esk, where Solway Moss of old renown, bristling with scrub pine-trees and waist deep in spongy heather, still spreads a quaking bog for many a level mile, while the once threatening dales of Esk and Liddel open significantly in whole or part for any traveller with a soul within him who pursues the shaking highway across the moss. But these levels of the Eden and the Solway mouth are even in a mere physical sense a fitting complement to this wide prospect of the Western March. For away in their rear, where Carlisle springs at its southern edge, and away again behind the low indefinite undulations of agricultural as opposed to mountainous Cumberland, the pale cone of Skiddaw with its lesser satellites leaps high into the southern sky. On the north the dark Dumfriesshire moors fill a long horizon with their billowy forms, and all about the mouth of the Eden are the wide-spreading yellow sands of the Solway estuary, white with sea-fowl and blended with blue waters just flaked, as they come back to me, with the snowy caps of a breezy June morning. Here, perhaps, under other conditions, the more sombre memories of Redgauntlet would be uppermost, or on the bridge of Esk the shadows of Dandie Dinmont and Guy Mannering might displace the sterner realities of the Grahams of Netherby—those watch-dogs of the Western March—of Musgraves, Armstrongs, or Scotts of Buccleuch. The Eden, being a clean, unpolluted river, is naturally the haunt in season of the salmon and sea-trout. But above all it is a trouting stream of the very highest class, often ranked by those well qualified to judge as the best of its kind in the whole north of England, yielding to the expert hand heavy creels of fish, which average two to the pound, a standard which the habituÉ in rapid waters knows well is more often a paper than an actual one.

And now what is one to say about those beautiful but short-lived streams that in Lakeland link lake to lake, and which all the world after a fashion knows so well? Their identity is in a sense lost, absorbed and merged in the famous and familiar region, to whose well-nigh matchless beauties, however, they so materially contribute. Hitherto we have been for the most part beside rivers of great individuality, but by comparison with these others unknown, save by name, to the outer world; rivers steeped in history and tradition, and that have themselves helped much in the making of both. Here, on the other hand, we are in a little

SKELWITH FORCE, NEAR AMBLESIDE, WESTMORELAND

enchanted land that, speaking relatively, has no history. A democracy in the past of yeomen or peasant owners, with little story but their own extremely racy and domestic one, they owed nothing to landlord, chief, or king but the service of military tenure by which they held their farms, and which they rendered when called upon by the Warden of the Western March, but offering small temptation to the predatory instincts of the Scottish raider. The Lakelanders were neither raiders nor Border fighters in the same sense as the men of the Tyne and Eden, or only incidentally so. They led comparatively humdrum lives. Their ancient condition is one of no little economic and social interest, but not of the kind to stir the blood of the stranger as does that which existed on the Solway, the Irthling, the Tynes, the Coquet, and the Tweed. The modern literary associations of Lakeland have absolutely obscured any ancient story it might have to tell, while the temperament of neither Wordsworth, Southey, the Coleridges, nor de Quincey turned in any appreciable degree to the past of the country that so closely held their affections. Others have done so, if not in very popular or accessible fashion, for those to whom such things appeal. If Wordsworth, however, did not sing much of the past, he sang of his native streams to such effect that it seems likely they will play accompaniments to his verse in the ears of such visitors as have got any so long as time lasts. The Rothay into which the Brathay runs might seem, perhaps, to have the greatest claim on Wordsworth or he on it, since it plunged beneath his very gate on its journey from Rydal to Windermere. But Wordsworth was everywhere. He did not stay indoors all day like the industrious Southey, who must, nevertheless, have accomplished most of his life’s work with the song of the Keswick Greta in his ears. Wordsworth lived in the open, was possessed of a stout pair of legs as well as an unrivalled imagination, and looked like a country farmer, little enough as he resembled one. His outward man fitted his environment as a grey mossy rock blends with a mountain stream; and one likes to have it so, for the Nature poet is sometimes in habit and person rather painfully at odds with the scenes of which he sings.

One is now among beauteous short-lived rivers and becks innumerable that almost everybody—for who has not been in Lakeland?—is more or less familiar with. Since crossing the Pennines, too, we have been in a country where Scandinavian

THE DERWENT, BORROWDALE, CUMBERLAND

blood and etymology is everywhere in striking evidence; whereas on the east of them the Saxon is held to be almost untouched with Norse blood. We there walked by “burns” and “forces” and beneath “laws.” Of “becks” and “ghylls” there were none, nor scarcely any “fells,” till the spine of the dividing range was almost reached. Many of the Lakeland streams run under their original name to the sea; the Kent, rising behind Mardale and flowing by Kendal to Morecambe Bay; the Leven, carrying the waters of Windermere under Newby bridge by a short course to the same destination; the Esk, rising under Scafell and pursuing its own delightful dale to Ravenglass on the coast of Cumberland. The Irt bears the burden of Wastwater to the same destination, while the Ehen carries the waters of Ennerdale to the coast upon its own account. The Duddon, which Wordsworth invoked so freely, rising near Langdale Pikes, runs a long course, dividing Cumberland from Lancashire to Broughton-in-Furness and its own well-known estuary. But these streams themselves, save while nameless becks, are not so familiar to Lakers—to use an obsolete term—as the Derwent, which, gathering size above Rossthwaite within a very short space, races down Borrowdale into Derwentwater, a beautiful and lusty river. Indeed, the head of the Lake knows Derwent well: when raging down in flood from the rainiest watershed in England, to lift its surface over field and roadway. Every one, too, knows the Derwent during its three-mile run through the meadows by Portinscale into Bassenthwaite. Thence it leaves the rather circumscribed bounds of the Lake tourist, and, running a rapid picturesque course to Cockermouth, where the Cocker brings down to it the waters of Buttermere and Crummock, soon afterwards passes into the sea at Workington amid much signs of coal smoke, of which there was little enough when Mary Queen of Scots made the landing here which sealed her fate. But amid such a maze of spouting rivers, a score of which will leap to the memory of those who know and love this glorious bit of England, it will be seen at once how futile it would be to single out any one or two of them merely to dwell in ineffective prose upon their natural charms.