THE Rivers of Yorkshire present to the writer of these pages much the same embarrassment of riches and problems of compression on an only lesser scale than those presented by the general title of this work. One thing, however, reduces the rather bewildering amplitude of the subject as expressed upon the map by not a little, and that is the natural reluctance in a work like this to linger by rivers after they have lost their purity from the refuse of mines and factories, and most certainly after they have actually entered the industrial districts. Another thing which tends to further simplification is that the country generally known as the “Yorkshire dales,” comprising the Upper and most beautiful portion of the best of the rivers, is the district that is associated in the minds of most people with the typical river scenery of this great county. And this region may be roughly described as covering the north-west quarter of Yorkshire, and including the Upper and cleaner portions of nearly all its important rivers. From hence come the Tees, the Swale, the Ure, the Nidd, the Wharfe, and the Ribble, with their many tributaries. It is a curious fact, too, that with the exception of the first and last, every one of them takes a south-east course, and every one eventually pours its waters into the Ouse near the Humber estuary. The Tees, whose northern bank is Durham territory for nearly the whole of its course, flows into the North Sea, having its own ample and busy estuary at Middlesborough. Through the centre of Yorkshire, running north and south, is the great plain, or by comparison a plain with which the traveller on the Great Northern railroad to Scotland is so familiar, and whence thousands of persons no doubt derive their impressions of this distinguished county. But at intervals any such traveller with an eye to the country may see rising far away in the east as on the west, those lofty hills and moors that in the minds of as many others represent the Yorkshire which their memory turns to. I have spoken of the north-western highlands, usually known as the Yorkshire

THE TRENT, NOTTINGHAM

dales, with their rivers pouring away to the south-east. But before dealing with them in greater detail, in accordance with the plan of this chapter and the drift of Mr. Sutton Palmer’s skilful brush, I should like to remind the reader that the greater part of East Yorkshire, from north to south—from the Tees, that is, to the Humber—also consists of either moors or chalk wolds. The former, practically filling the north-east quarter of the county (I leave the three Ridings alone as they have no physical significance), also gives birth to many streams. But the Esk alone breaks its way eastward into the North Sea, having its mouth at Whitby. With the exception of a few trifling brooks all the other rivers of these north-eastern moors, as well as the few small streams of the south-eastern wolds, flow south or south-west to find their way eventually into the Ouse or its estuary the Humber. It is quite curious how, south of the Esk watershed, practically every brook turns its back on the neighbouring North Sea. The infant springs of the Derwent, which eventually carries all the waters of these northern moors between Thirsk and Scarborough to the Ouse, are situated within 3 or 4 miles of the east coast.

But to return to the dales, which more immediately concern us here, the Ribble is the only river among them all that breaks away to the west. Entering Lancashire near Clitheroe, it flows through that county by way of Preston to Morecambe Bay. It rises in the same block of moors—a southern extension of that Pennine range known in outline at least so well to tourists in the Lake Country—as the rest of this group of Yorkshire rivers, and is quite a good-sized stream when it arrives at the picturesque little town of Settle, the first place above the size of a hamlet upon its banks. The limestone crag of Castleberg rises finely to a height of 300 feet above the town, while at thrice that elevation in the near neighbourhood is one of those caves whose discovery in various parts of England excited so much interest early in the last century. This one, like the rest, has been prolific of mammalian fossils and Celtic remains. Giggleswick, with its embarrassing name and well-known grammar school, almost adjoins Settle. Flowing with strong and rapid current through a vale of verdant pasture land, bounded upon either side by rolling grouse moors, the Ribble finds fresh beauties among the woods of Gisburn, the seat of Lord Ribblesdale, and in the yet more striking gorges beneath Bolton Hall,

THE WHARFE, BOLTON ABBEY, YORKSHIRE

the ancient seat of the Pudsays, whose effigies in the parish church tell a long tale of predominance in this Craven country. The Hall is the oldest house in the district, and intimately associated with the wanderings of Henry VI. after his defeat at the battle of Hexham, for the Pudsay of that day gave the hapless king a safe asylum for some weeks. The panelled room he occupied is still preserved, and a spring in the grounds still bears his name. Yet more to the point, a glove, a boot, and a spoon, relics of his sojourn with them, remained in the family till they lost Bolton in the middle of the last century, and are still preserved. A beautifully wooded cliff rising high above the broad rapids of the Ribble near the house has great local notoriety under the name of Pudsay’s Leap. For tradition tells how the owner of Bolton, in the reign of Elizabeth, had acquired great favour at Court, but having discovered silver on the estate proceeded to set up a mint of his own, thereby bringing down upon his head the rough arm of the law. Escaping on horseback from the sheriff and his party, this greatly daring Pudsay is said to have baffled pursuit by leaping his horse down this wooded precipice above the Ribble, and, thence riding to London at incredible speed, thrown himself at the feet of the Queen, with whom he had been a favourite. Confessing his crime, he extracted a pardon from a monarch notoriously exacting where the precious metals were concerned. An old local ballad celebrates the daring Pudsay’s feat:

As the river sweeps on past Clitheroe, which is just in Lancashire, the long ridge ending in the uplifted gable end of Pendle Hill, celebrated of old for its witches, rises finely on the east, and the moors of the forest of Bowland, or Bolland, are equally conspicuous on the west. The large tributary of the Hodder, after a beautiful and devious course through the last-named moors, swells the Ribble considerably below Clitheroe, whose ruined castle keep, lifted high above the town, strikes an appropriate note in the centre of a noble scene. The Calder coming down from Burnley and more tainted sources joins the Ribble on the opposite bank, and henceforward the latter loses in great measure the charm of unpolluted waters and a pastoral atmosphere among the gathering signs of industrial life that mark its course to Preston.

There are many places of interest in the corner where the Ribble, swelling in volume and altering somewhat in character, leaves Yorkshire for the County Palatine. The farmhouse of Waddington, where Henry VI. after spending several months was eventually captured, is still standing. The ruined abbeys, too, of Shawley and Whalley are both near Clitheroe. So also is the great Roman Catholic College of Stonyhurst. And one uses the epithet advisedly, as on the nucleus of a fine Tudor country-house and a large estate, acquired a century ago, additions have been made to the buildings by the thrifty Jesuit managers at a cost of something like £300,000, a figure that might set even the wealthiest of our public schools agog with envy. Indeed, the banks of the Ribble are as closely associated with the ancient faith both to-day and yesterday as any district in England. One is not likely to forget what hopes were placed by both the first and second Pretender on the gentry of this then remote part of England, nor what befell them at the ancient town of Preston, now so expanded and so busy, on the Ribble’s banks.

Of the five rivers—for I have omitted mention of the Aire since it is absorbed so early into the industrial districts of Leeds and Bradford—which flow down the north-western dales towards the central plain of Yorkshire and the Humber, the Wharfe is as notable as any. It is also, next to the Aire, the first to cross the route of any one going northward and across the grain of the country. It is surprising how soon all signs of the vast and murky industries of Leeds are shaken off. For where 8 or 9 miles to the north of it the N.E. railroad crosses the Wharfe and stays near it for a time, the prospect is one of a broad and strenuous river sweeping through a noble vale. Spacious and undefiled woods and homesteads and country houses adorn the slopes, and great Yorkshire fields of meadow or pasture spread back from the banks apparently unconscious of the very existence of the prodigious stir and uproar which beneath vast canopies of murk and smoke is going forward less than a dozen miles away.

Far away the most celebrated spot upon the Wharfe, and one of the most visited of the kind perhaps in all England, is Bolton Abbey. To those who have never seen it the very fact, perhaps, of its propinquity to the industrial districts, and the familiarity of its name, might suggest a scene if not actually overrated at any rate so overrun as to impair its charms. The first is certainly not the case; and as regards the second, though thousands

THE WHARFE, THE STRID, YORKSHIRE

in all come here every summer, there are probably more summer days than not in which, owing to the space covered by the grounds and their variety, you could enjoy them in your own company to practically any extent you chose. Bolton Abbey as a place of pilgrimage consists of the ruins themselves and the deep valley for two or three miles up, down which the Wharfe pursues its rapid rocky course beneath hanging woods of great beauty. Art, to be sure, has to some extent stepped in and cared for the luxuriant timber as it would be cared for in a park or private grounds, which indeed these actually are, though the Duke of Devonshire’s residence here is only a glorified shooting-box and used as such. Paths have been cut high up through the woods for the better displaying of the river as it surges far below with all the restless humours of a northern trout stream, while above the woods the high moors, purple in August with abundant heather, raise their rounded crests. At the Upper extremity of the demesne 2½ miles from the Abbey ruins which stands on the banks of the river at the lower entrance to it, the latter contracts into that singular gut or flume known as the Stridd. Every one upon familiar terms with rivers of this type knows many such spots where the waters are forced through a narrow channel between walls of rock. That the Wharfe just here has to submit to these conditions in a pronounced degree is fortunate, since it exhibits to countless souls whose ways do not lead them by the secluded banks of mountain rivers, a very fine instance of a not uncommon but always beautiful characteristic of their nature. The artist here renders superfluous any verbal description of this beautiful and boisterous portion of the Wharfe, and the same remark applies to the glorious reach above in which Barden Tower will be seen perched among its woods high above the fretting stream amid the grand sweep of the surrounding moors.

Barden Tower is a building of no ordinary personal interest. Originally one of the peel-towers erected in the Middle Ages for the keepers of Barden forest under the Cliffords of the North, it became at the close of the Wars of the Roses the residence of that Henry Lord Clifford whose romantic story every one who knows their Lake Country or their Wordsworth is familiar with. Son of the fierce and formidable Black Clifford, whose life and property the Yorkists deprived him of on the first opportunity, he was sent for safety as a child to a shepherd in the Keswick country, in whose family, and in all respects as one of them, he grew to man’s estate. When with the advent of Henry VII. the Clifford estates, including Skipton and Barden, were restored, their owner was nearly thirty, with the life and uprearing of a peasant as the sole equipment for his new and high position. But heredity counted for much in this case, though curiously enough it took the form of peaceful rather than warlike enterprises. Social instincts, too, seemed to have been effectually stamped out upon the lonely skirts of Saddleback and Skiddaw. For the “Shepherd lord” improved the peel-tower above the Wharfe into a sufficient residence for his doubtless modest estimate of comfort and dignity, and there seems to have lead a life of retirement for the next forty years, cultivating astronomy and the sciences. When called to action, however, he was not wanting in ability and common sense, and at sixty years of age had marched with the Yorkshiremen who formed such an important element in Surrey’s victorious army at Flodden.

He married twice, and his descendant Anne, Countess of Pembroke, who, by an extraordinary succession of deaths, was left sole heiress of the Clifford estates in the time of the Commonwealth, was a lady of enormous strength of character. For when over sixty she returned to the north, and in spite of Cromwell’s protests, restored all her dilapidated castles from Brougham by Keswick to this of Barden on the Wharfe, in order that the sun of her race, for she had no heir, might set at least in splendour. She took her seat, against all precedent and much opposition, as High Sheriff of Westmoreland (a Clifford inheritance), and sat upon the Bench between the judges of assize and did many other racy and forcible things which we cannot tell of here.

The ruins of the Abbey, lifted on a gentle elevation about a hundred yards from the rapid amber streams of the Wharfe, possess every charm of situation that one would wish for in a relic of the great days of ecclesiastical predominance with all its powers for good and evil, its scorn of concentration in crowded haunts, its eye for the beautiful and the remote, and for romantic streams where toothsome fish abound.

Bolton Hall, the Duke’s residence, and the ancient Rectory lying upon the same green meadow with venerable timber all about, and the stir and glitter of the moorland waters in their wide bed,

THE WHARFE, BARDEN TOWER, YORKSHIRE

make for a peace that in the many intervals when the groups of tourists have gone on their way is as profound as one would ask for, and throughout the six months of the year one may feel sure is practically unbroken.

The Abbey, or, literally, Priory church and buildings, were begun in 1154 by a fraternity of the order of St. Augustine, under the endowment of one William de Meschines, a Saxon by blood, and his Norman wife Cecilia. The church was cruciform in shape, and is now all ruinous but the nave which does duty as the parish church. It is more lofty than common, and in the main Early English with some Decorated windows. But an interesting feature is the west tower, whose completion, like that of so many others, was prevented by the cataclysm of the Dissolution. It is rather melancholy that a general ardour for further building in the stateliest Perpendicular style should seem to have broken out just before the shattering blow fell and left all over England so many pathetic instances of incompleted work. Here in Bolton it is held by those most intimate with its story that divine service has been performed without any intermission since the foundation of the Abbey. The nave was spared, it is said, at the dissolution of the House in 1539 for a parish church in consideration of the building having been the site of an early Saxon chapel. There was at one time the usual central tower. But as the ruinous choir and one transept now shows a Decorated upper part and Norman base, it seems likely that the original tower, like so many others, crashed down carrying ruin with it. The Canons’ stalls on each side of the choir under intersecting Norman arches still remain, and as many on each side nearer the High Altar, also under arches of the same period. The remains may be seen, too, of a chantry opening into the south side of the choir through a highly ornamental archway. This was the burial-place of the Cliffords of the North, though it seems to have been ravaged of their remains.

The next valley going northward to the Wharfe is that of the Nidd—and on a high plateau between these two rivers and not far from the latter one, stands the great watering-place of Harrogate. Though possessing none of the immediate beauty of outlook and environment enjoyed by Buxton, Malvern, or Llandrindod, it has in addition to its invaluable waters an atmosphere scarcely equalled in the kingdom for its stimulating qualities. This is worthy of mention, as for any one inclined to explore the Yorkshire dales in a general way, Harrogate is a most admirable centre. Railways carry you from thence in a short time, and upon special terms to practically all of them, leaving a long day to be spent in the investigation of their beauties by any method that the visitor may choose.

The Nidd is smaller than the other rivers. Its best-known point, partly no doubt because it is near and accessible, is Knaresborough, a quaint and clean old town which rises steeply in tiers and terraces above the river bed, crowned by the ruins of a great castle which perches with fine effect upon the summit of a lofty cliff that drops almost sheer into the stream. Held back by a mill the naturally impetuous Nidd runs in a deep and slow channel beneath the town. On its farther shore thick woods fringe the water, and a lofty viaduct, not always an object of beauty but here extremely effective, spans what may in this case be fairly called the chasm. In these fringing woods are some curious dripping crags which fossilize every article submitted to their influence. Within them, too, there is a cave associated with the celebrated Mother Shipton, and all conscientious pilgrims to Knaresborough are ferried over the river and pay their respects to these local deities, the more encouraged, no doubt, to such adventure by the delightful woodland walk thereby entailed. The guide-books call Knaresborough the “Switzerland of Yorkshire.” It is difficult to imagine for what reason unless it be that the town is essentially of the old Yorkshire type, and that the castle is particularly characteristic of the mediÆval English fortress that was concerned with Scottish or Welsh Border wars. It belonged in its day to many famous people, Hubert de Burgh, Piers Gaveston, and John of Gaunt among them. But of chief interest, perhaps, it was the refuge of the four knights who slew Thomas À Becket. In later times, during the Civil War it stood a siege for the King against the troops of Fairfax fresh from the victory of Marston Moor, surrendering with honour. There is a fine church, too, containing some interesting tombs and effigies of the now extinct Slingsby family, who were prominent here for many centuries. Some of my readers will remember the sensation caused throughout England, just forty years ago, by the drowning of the last baronet and many companions as in the course of a day’s hunting they were capsized while crossing the river on a ferry-boat.

THE NIDD, KNARESBOROUGH, YORKSHIRE

The Nidd, though of much shorter course, runs down exactly parallel with the Wharfe, one lofty wall of moors alone dividing them. A single-track railroad runs high up the dale by the river-side to Pateley Bridge, and is one of those instances alluded to in a former chapter that afford frequent and charming views of what in this case is a fascinating and wayward little moorland river, playing hide-and-seek among the meadows and alders. The vale here is narrow, the hills on both sides steep woodland or pasture-field to near their summits, where the outer rim of the heathery moorlands falls down over the nearer ridge.

Pateley Bridge is a dark and sombre little town of miners and quarrymen, but all around is beautiful. Upon the opposite or west bank of the stream thick woods climb far up the hillsides, terminating in a line of cliffs along whose brows the heathery edge of the moorland mantles. A light railway, for serving more than one reservoir now in making amid the moors, runs up to the head-waters of the Nidd, and is of further assistance to the explorer of this fine country. Not far above Pateley Bridge the Nidd disappears into an artificial lake some two miles long which quite fills the narrow valley, and one learns with surprise that this is merely compensation water for a much larger reservoir that the Corporation of Bradford are in process of forming some miles higher up for their actual supply. One gets up here into a wild and lonely country. A reasonable day’s walk across the high wall of moors to the north or to the south would bring the traveller into Uredale or Wharfedale respectively. But there is one considerable drawback to hill walking in much of Yorkshire, for the grouse moors carry such a heavy stock of birds, and are so valuable, that they are regarded almost as sacred against the disturbing intruder as pheasant coverts, and are constantly watched by keepers on this account.

The trees that most flourish in the woods, which clothe the slopes of the lower hills in all these Yorkshire dales, till, with the shrinking stream the country gets too high for any wealth of them, are the ash, the sycamore, and the wych, or, as sometimes called, the “Scotch” elm. Firs are effectively mingled with the others, but one sees less of the stiff purely fir plantation looking down upon the Yorkshire rivers, than in similar situations in Northumberland and Scotland. The hedges, too, till you get right up into a stone wall country, have none of the meagreness of those north of the Tyne, nor yet the prim trimness to which the practical Scotsman reduces them, but they luxuriate here amid the grass fields with almost the picturesque redundancy of the Midlands and the south. The Nidd not far from Harrogate passes Ripley, chiefly distinguished for the castle of the Ingilbys, a family seated there for centuries, and whose chatelaine in the Civil War treated Cromwell, while sheltering within it after Marston Moor, with a frigidity before which even that man of iron is said to have quailed. Farther down the Nidd runs into the Ouse, a few miles above York; and the Ouse is first formed not very far again above this junction by the Ure and Swale, which are the next two dales in the order mentioned, as we move still northward.

The Ure is quite a generous as well as a rapid stream, and requires bridges of many arches to span it successfully. The little cathedral city of Ripon is, of course, its presiding genius; a pleasant old market-town of agricultural, clerical, and residential habit. It manufactures nothing now of moment, though once upon a time it turned out spurs by the thousand, known as Ripon rowels, which were in great request among the Border prickers. The “Wakeman’s horn” is still blown at nine o’clock in the evening, a curious old custom among others that are still cherished in a place which, like Richmond and Knaresborough, looks an appropriate storehouse for such ancient survivals.

The Cathedral, though not among the most interesting, has many striking characteristics, both historical and architectural. In the first sense, it is memorable as virtually the foundation of one of the greatest of northern ecclesiastics during the Saxon periods, namely, St. Wilfrid, Bishop of Lindisfarne and Hexham, and for a time of York, but always with a second home at his monastery of Ripon, where his dust lies; a man of character, of varied and strenuous life, and of deathless fame from Yorkshire to the Tweed. Upon, or near the site of Wilfrid’s foundation, the present structure was begun in the twelfth century. Like many others of the great northern churches, it was burned by the Scots: in this case, during the misfortunes to the English arms following the death of Edward the First and the battle of Bannockburn. Only partially injured, as was usual with such massive buildings, the central tower was rebuilt in the next century, and in two more the almost inevitable, in the case of mediÆval

THE URE, NEAR RIPON, YORKSHIRE

churches, happened, and the wooden spire of the tower crashed down and destroyed the roof of the Choir. This so alarmed the authorities that they removed the spires which then stood upon the two western towers. I must not linger over the details of a cathedral here; but, in accordance with an inclination throughout these pages, to say what little space admits to be said of the less written of, and less hackneyed subjects that confront us, I may pause to note that the West Front of Ripon, with its severe but compact Early English windows, doorways, and arcading, is the chief pride of the Cathedral. Archbishop Roger’s Norman Nave was supplanted by the present one in the Perpendicular period, but some of his work, in the shape of three bays, may still be seen on the north side of the Choir, which portion was not ruined by the fall of the central tower after the Scottish burning. The rest of the Choir is Perpendicular and Decorated, suggestive of the period following the fiercest blaze of Anglo-Scottish hostility. Thus, as in most of our northern churches, the varied styles do not merely proclaim the procession—one must not say the progress—of the builder’s art but tell the story of domestic strife. The Chapter-house and Vestry supported by a Crypt, however, are mainly Norman, and supposed to be of anterior date even to Archbishop Roger’s Church. Below the Nave is the most singular thing in the whole church—a small Crypt of probably seventh-century work, resembling that one beneath Wilfrid’s other church at Hexham, except that the latter is obviously made of stone taken from Roman buildings. In both places they were probably used for the exhibition of relics. Ripon is one of the smaller cathedrals, and also rather encompassed by buildings, but being slightly elevated it makes a fine picture from any point in the country round, standing well up above the rest of the peaceful little town—particularly when the foreground is occupied by the rapid streams of the Ure which are here of no mean breadth.

Though not actually on the Ure but on its little tributary the Skell, whose waters have been made to contribute so vastly to its adornment, stands the most magnificent ecclesiastical ruin in England. If the Abbey Church of Fountains, still roof high and the length of Ripon Cathedral, with the mass of monastic buildings which in various stages of arrested decay still surround it, has rivals, its beautiful environment and the unique approach to it would dispose, I think, of their claims. Studley Royal, the Marquis of Ripon’s seat, is two miles from Ripon, and it is through a couple more of park, laid out in the eighteenth century in lavish arrangement of lake, lawn, walk, and woodland, that the visitor, who for a shilling is free of practically the whole, approaches the glorious remains of the great Cistercian house. There is not here, to be sure, the wild natural beauty of Bolton, or Tintern; but it is landscape gardening on such a prodigious scale, and so cunningly contrived, that the picture of the vast and glorious fabric to which it leads bursts on the visitor without warning in such fashion as to convey an irresistible impression, whatever one’s experiences may have been, that there is nothing equal to it in England. This indeed is, I believe, the generally accepted verdict.

For many miles above Ripon, the lower part in fact of the famous Wensley dale, the Ure, sparkling often over broad shingly flats, runs through but a slightly depressed fertile valley—the back-lying moors not as yet pressing into prominent notice. Some half-dozen miles up the dale the old Church and ruined Tower of Tanfield stand by the river bank. The Tower and Gate House represent what is left of the ancient seat of the Marmions, and the Church contains many of their tombs. Scott has thrown such a halo round the name that, though we know out of his own mouth that the grim and haughty warrior who fell at Flodden was the creation purely of his own brain, I could tell of a true Marmion who, under a vow to carry a fair lady’s guerdon where danger was thickest, rode alone and in cold blood beneath the walls of Norham Castle against a whole squadron of Scottish horse, and was rescued alive by sheer good luck. Three miles higher up is the extremely picturesque little town of Masham, its old stone houses standing since times remote around the four sides of a great square, and flanked by a fine church in which are the monuments of Danby’s former lords, and an extremely fine recumbent alabaster effigy of Sir Thomas Wyvern, whose mother was a Scrope, which historic family also once owned the manor. In the churchyard my eye fell accidentally on two adjoining headstones. The one was “To the memory of Christopher Craggs of Gilling-by-the-foot,” the other to that of “Robert Ayscough of Grimes Hall,” and both ear and instinct seemed to provoke the irrepressible reflection that nowhere outside Yorkshire could such a sturdy harsh collection of names appear in combination. Four miles from Masham, too, is another famous abbey, that

THE URE, AYSGARTH FORCE, YORKSHIRE

of Jervaulx, to whose monks at one time this church and town belonged.

Wensley dale drags its beauteous length for many a long mile upward, noted for its cheeses, its cobby horses, and its peculiar breed of sheep; while, as only natural, so great a dairy country takes infinite pride in its cattle. The grass land is of the finest quality, the farms trim-looking, prosperous and well cared for. Middleham with its castle sits upon the stream. Bolton Castle is near by, where Mary, Queen of Scots, spent the first and pleasantest period of her confinement after leaving Carlisle, and made every young gallant in the neighbourhood her slave for life. At Bolton, too, a great square pile, the Scropes had flourished since the days of that Archbishop who shook the throne of the fourth Henry, and lost his head for it. Aysgarth Force—the latter word of Norse origin and the equivalent in North Yorkshire and Durham for waterfall—is the most conspicuous physical feature of the Ure, and with its peaty waters is most happily portrayed on these pages by Mr. Sutton Palmer. Far away in the high moors the Ure rises in a deep crevice of a bog appropriately named Hell gill. Camden alludes to its source as in “a dreary waste and horrid silent wilderness where goats, deer, and stags of extraordinary size find a secure retreat.” Nor has the region altered much since Camden wrote save in the nature of its ferÆ. If England has changed generally to such an extent that a mediÆval monk of agricultural bent would not recognise it in those moors and mountains at least which we so rejoice in, and that the men of old not reared in them so hated, we may still see the landscape almost as they saw it in every detail.

It is worth noting that the traveller journeying by train from Leeds to Darlington crosses all of the rivers that water four out of the six West Yorkshire dales, and at almost equal interludes, namely, the Wharfe, the Nidd, the Ure, and the Swale; while the main line of the Great Northern and North Eastern only crosses the Ouse, which is bearing, however, the combined waters of all these tributary rivers seaward. Of these the last and the most northerly, the Swale, is claimed by those who live upon it to be the most consistently rapid. As the pace of all these Yorkshire rivers is sufficient to give them all the qualities and the beauty of mountain-born streams, such hair-splitting is of small interest. But the Swale can claim, at any rate, the most romantically situated and most picturesque old

THE SWALE, RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE

town in Yorkshire, for Richmond might fairly be called a glorified Knaresborough. It stands just within the hill country looking westward over a sea of waving moorland interspersed with the contrasting luxuriance of old abiding places. The town climbs up a long slope crowned in turn by the massive Norman keep of the castle whose precincts cover a broad plateau, while its curtain walls hang over the brink of a rocky precipice, beneath which the Swale urges its clear impetuous streams round a partial circuit of the town. Richmond is the centre of an ancient district, once known and still often referred to as “Richmondshire,” a division of Northumbria, later on, with its two hundred manors, termed “The Honour of Richmond.” A marked historical peculiarity of this district is that from the Norman Conquest till the time of Henry VII. it was a fief of the Dukes of Brittany, who included the Earldom of Richmond in their titles. On this account Richmond became occasionally a fief of the King of France, not breaking with this curious foreign ownership till the Tudor period, when France and Brittany were united. This overlordship, however, so far as the life of the district was concerned, is a matter of purely academic interest. Many people will no doubt be surprised to learn that the nowadays more conspicuous Richmond on the Thames took its name while a hamlet from the Yorkshire town. While to turn to comparative but familiar trifles the well-known eighteenth-century song, “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” does not refer to a suburban maiden but to Frances l’Anson, the daughter of a rich London solicitor who had estates in Yorkshire and for a country residence “Hill House,” still standing on high ground above the town. The author was a barrister, one Leonard Mac Nally, who subsequently in 1787 married the subject of his impassioned ode, and the song was first sung at Vauxhall. It is worth noting too, perhaps, that Byron’s wife, Miss Milbanke, a yet more famous beauty, came also from the Hill House at Richmond.

The town is the centre of a great agricultural and pastoral district. Market-day in its spacious, old-fashioned market-place, on the high slope of the town, is an animated spectacle. Purveyors from the manufacturing districts, which, though left now a long way behind us in actual distance, are comparatively near by rail, throng here to purchase supplies. It is a country of small and moderate-sized farmers, all of whom, however, are of sufficient substance to

THE SWALE, RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE

keep a trap of some kind, and in no market-town in any part of England within my experience, which is pretty considerable, have I ever seen such long arrays of unhorsed vehicles awaiting the termination of their owner’s business transaction or his social obligations. This is the most characteristic and spacious part of Richmond, and the stone houses of commerce which border it have an unmistakable flavour of antiquity in spite of the touching up and re-fronting which is inevitable to even a rural market-town not prepared to accept commercial and physical decay. On one side of the market-place is the ancient Church of the Trinity, between the tower and body of which an entire house and shop intervene, while the Gallery which adorns the interior rests upon more shops. The Curfew Bell is rung in this, which was probably the old parish church, both morning and evening, the situation of the house of the town-crier being so conveniently situated that he is said to be able to ring the morning bell from his bed, an advantage of incalculable significance. The parish church, however, stands near the foot of the hill, restored beyond the bounds of any great surviving interest. There is an old grammar school, too, with some new buildings erected in honour of a famous headmaster who flourished near a century ago, Dr. Tate, Canon of St. Paul’s, whose scholarship and personality made his name and his school famous throughout the north, and keeps his memory yet green. Most interesting of Richmond’s ecclesiastical monuments, however, is the fine Perpendicular tower that alone remains of its monastery of the Grey Friars. It was only just finished at the Dissolution, and is pathetically suggestive of the Litchfield tower at Evesham, and one or two other unconsciously expiring efforts of pious Abbots.

But the castle is, of course, the most interesting spot in Richmond, to a stranger at any rate, for the beautiful views, above all from the top of the keep over 100 feet high, which it affords of this moorland country on the one side and the fatter central vale of Mowbray on the other; and again away beyond this to the Cleveland Hills, and the high country on the north-east of the county, while on a clear day the towers of York Minster are distinctly visible. Up the valley of the Swale down which the surging waters of the river, after stormy weather, gleam in their green meadowy trough beneath the folding hills, the outlook hence is indeed a very memorable one. The high castle-yard

THE SWALE, RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE

covers five acres, and though in partial use by the depÔt of the Yorkshire regiment as sergeants’ quarters, is quiet and spacious enough and partly surrounded by the remains, in various stages of ruin, of ward rooms, chapels, state rooms, kitchens, and the curtain-walls of this once great and proudly placed fortress. Here again the artist will give a better notion of the distinction of Richmond, its fine pose above the river with the old bridge as a foreground, than any amount of description. But there are many old tortuous by-streets and wynds on the steep slopes of Richmond well worth exploring. And as “Brave Pudsay” made a famous leap from the top of a cliff into or over the Ribble, so here one Williance has likewise immortalised himself and given his name to a height above the Swale outside the town. This leap was almost contemporary with that of Pudsay, and some special providence indeed must have watched over these redoubtable Elizabethans. But Williance’s performance was not prompted by the pursuing peril of a sheriff’s posse, but by a runaway horse at a hunting party. The hero himself was a successful trader of Ripon, and, as indicated above, his horse bolted in a fog and leaped from the top of Whitecliff scaur, falling on a ledge 100 feet below and thence toppling over another precipice of similar height. The horse was killed, but the rider, marvellous to relate, escaped with a broken leg. Getting out his hunting-knife he ripped open the dead animal’s belly and put the injured limb inside it to keep the cold out till help arrived. This hardy and resourceful person saved his life at any rate, but not his leg, which was amputated. In gratitude for his miraculous escape he set up three stones upon the spot, inscribing them with his thanks to the Almighty. He buried his leg in the churchyard, and ten years later was himself laid beside it as Alderman of Richmond, a man of note and substance, as his will shows; and a piece of plate bequeathed to the Corporation is still in their possession.

Nothing need be said, or rather nothing can be said, here of the upper course of the Swale growing wilder as it approaches its romantic source upon the borders of Westmoreland in the clefts of the Pennine range above Kirby Stephen. A mile or more down the river from Richmond, set upon the edge of the stream, whose amber waters here as everywhere fret and foam beside them, stand the still ample ruins of Easby Abbey. Founded in 1152, it was richly endowed by the Scropes, many

THE SWALE, EASBY ABBEY, YORKSHIRE

of whom lie here in untraceable graves. It was occupied by Canons of the PrÆmonstratentian Order. The entrance gateway is still practically perfect, and throughout the buildings there are evidences of considerable magnificence: fine window tracery, groined arches, and the walls of one room of the monastery over 100 feet long, still in good preservation. Large portions of the Guesting hall, the Frater house, and the Chapter-house are standing. The mass, as a whole, makes a most imposing picture in this scene of quiet peace beside the babbling river.

To say that one Yorkshire dale is like another would be a poor way of expressing the fact that all are beautiful to those over whom moorlands and solitude cast their spell—the present writer, as no doubt will have been gathered from these pages, belonging very much to that particular following. So with the reader’s leave we will conclude this chapter on Yorkshire rivers with a few words about the most northerly, and in some ways the most distinguished of all of them, to wit, the Tees. However much moderns may carp at Sir Walter Scott’s free-flowing verse, he struck the note that flings the glamour of action and romance over natural scenery in a way that no other British poet of recent times has approached. Comparison, though, is of course absurd. It is easy enough to pick to pieces, under the canons of poetic art, Scott’s simple stirring rhyme and his pages of sustained cadence. Swinburne was undoubtedly a greater poet. Swinburne, too, was a Northumbrian of Northumbrians by birth, and has written several much-admired poems on the Borderland of his fathers, but the poet lived for choice in Putney. Genius though Swinburne was, it is not in the least likely that his verse will in any way contribute to the greater glory of Rede or Tyne—nor in his case because it lacks lucidity, cadence, or vigour, or is in the least obscure. Perhaps as a rough basis for deductions that we are not concerned with, and which, after all, are dependent on varying temperaments, one may remark that it is impossible to conceive Walter Scott living in a London suburb! The personality of the man is so absolutely in harmony with the atmosphere through which his stirring verses move. That atmosphere is essentially of the North—not the North of an August holiday as interpreted by some minor poet of “precious” utterance, who probably despises Scott, but a rugged all-the-year-round North, rejoiced in by a son of the soil with a mind imaginative,

HIGH FORCE, TEES, YORKSHIRE

robust, and racy. Here was a genius that baffles all the latter-day critics who, with easy logic, pulverise the hopelessly lucid and deplorably musical measures of Marmion or the Lady of the Lake. They have much within them, no doubt, but not the root of the matter to which Scott appeals, and it is their misfortune. They could not see the Tweed, the Tees, or a northern dale through the glasses in which Scott beheld them to save their lives. The sense is denied them, withered possibly in the attenuated atmosphere of a hot-house civilization. Whether the appeal of Scott can be called popular in the ordinary meaning, I doubt; but there are thousands of persons even yet to whom the sense is not denied, and to whom a landscape or a noble sweep of river valley is not merely a subject for a painter’s brush or for a sonnet, but something infinitely more. A sense of the past would inadequately perhaps represent the quality of the missing ingredient, and one, much more often implanted than cultivated in the human breast, which those denied it cannot distinguish from what appears to them a merely tiresome taste for history or archÆology, but is in fact a deep emotion. Scott, of course, had it prodigiously, and his appeal is made to those who, without his gifts, share in this particular his temperament. To such at least he is infinitely and always stimulating. He is absolutely the right man in the right place. If his verse has the demerit of being lucid and musical, he is not assuming to interpret Nature, to suggest problems, or to pronounce conundrums. Your mood wants none of the two last, and may have its own conceptions of the first. But Scott is playing, as it were, a fine melody in harmony with the streams, the mountains, and the woods, and you feel that the musician is a master of his subject. The music may not be classical, but somehow it makes every subject that it touches classic. The Upper Tees has been thus illumined. Rokeby, to be sure, is not so inspiring a lay as Marmion, nor so familiar. But it has at least made the Tees classic ground. The songs, no doubt, are forgotten. Two or three generations have passed away since young ladies sang in drawing-rooms of how “Brignall woods were fresh and fair and Greta woods were green,” and that they would “rather rove with Edmund there than reign an English Queen,” and were succeeded at the piano by young gentlemen with melting tenors who replied with:

These were but the culled flowers of the lay which in six cantos achieved a wide popularity and took Scott sixteen months to write. For myself, I turn to the Tees with a touch of personal sentiment that in my case the other Yorkshire streams do not arouse—for the simple but sufficient reason that it was my privilege in youth, and with the glamour of Rokeby fresher, alas! than now, to follow the river more than once to its fountain-head, and to spend more than one night in rough quarters amid the dalesmen within sound of the thunder of Cauldron Snout.

The Tees rises under Crossfell, that monarch of the Pennine range whose rounded summit contrasts so painfully with the rugged crests of the Lake mountains, whose altitude it emulates beyond the Eden. But for the whole 10 miles of its course, before it makes the fine though broken plunge of 200 feet at Cauldron Snout, its surroundings are wild indeed—a waste of rolling moors and of black bogs carrying great stocks of grouse; while below Cauldron, in the partially tamed treeless valley spreading downwards to High Force, are specks of whitewashed houses flecking here and there the bare stone-wall country. As the Tees approaches the cliff at the Cauldron, it lingers for a long distance in a most unnaturally sluggish deep, black and gloomy in appearance from the peaty water and known as the Weald, or Wheale. Great trout, in contrast to the little fellows in the rapid streams below the falls, were supposed to lurk here, and expectancy, when a wind curled its surly surface, accompanied the alighting cast—with but slight justification, if memory serves me right. Some of the highest fells in Yorkshire are about us here, Micklefell reaching the altitude of 2600 feet. Below the falls the Maze beck runs in, of importance merely as dividing the counties of Westmoreland and Yorkshire, and, as the east bank of the Tees is in Durham, creating a point where three counties meet. An extremely probable incident used to be told of a sportsman who had flushed some grouse or partridges in Durham, having dropped his right bird in Westmoreland and his left in Yorkshire.

From Cauldron Snout to the great falls of the Tees at High Force is about 6 miles, and the bed of the river is thickly obstructed for much of the way by the roundest and most slippery boulders I have ever encountered in any mountain river, the brown water slipping in a thousand obscure runlets between them.

THE TEES, COTHERSTONE, YORKSHIRE

The whitewash which has always marked the Duke of Cleveland’s buildings is distinctly effective on the wide treeless waste, while some fine crags known as Falcon Clints follow its course and overlook the Tees on the Yorkshire side. High Force is fortunately depicted on these pages more effectively than words could serve such a purpose. Cauldron Snout is, I think, the highest cataract in England with any volume of water, and High Force is certainly the finest one on a good-sized river, no slight vaunt for a single stream within the space of half a dozen miles. A good deal has been done in the way of ornamental planting around High Force, while a hotel, once a shooting-box of the Duke of Cleveland, has stood here ever since I can remember.

One is now getting into the Rokeby country, for a few miles down is Middleton, a large village and the chief centre of Upper Teesdale. Looming on the west are the wild highlands of Lune and Stainmore forests. To the east are more wilds that lead over to the Wear valley at St. John’s and Stanhope, while near Middleton comes in the “silver Lune from Stainmore wild.” The Tees grows apace in volume, and at Barnard Castle both the famous fortress and the fast-swelling river contribute to the measure and quality of the striking picture they together make. The castle stands on the Durham bank of the Tees and derives its name from its Scottish founder, Barnard Balliol. Like every other northern fortress, particularly as one on the wrong side of the river, it had its troubles in the long Scottish wars and raids. The county of Durham, the fat palatinate of an always mighty bishop, was struck at by every generation of Scottish raiders that broke through the Northumbrian marches. Like many other castles in this country, too, it was brought to Richard III. by his wife Anne Neville. The visitor may still climb the tower with Scott’s Warder and survey the beauteous scene with, no doubt, a far greater measure of appreciation than any felt by that romantic figure.

This applies to the course of the river a little below Barnard Castle, where the hard limestone is freely mixed with marble and gives a fine blend of colouring to the bed of the river.

THE TEES, BARNARD CASTLE, DURHAM

From this same castle tower, too, in the words of Scott:

There has always seemed to me a suggestion of bathos in associating the scene of Rokeby and Greta banks with Nicholas Nickleby and the hideous but world-famous picture of Dotheboys Hall. But the great old bare posting-house at Greta Bridge, where Dickens stayed, is still standing and much furbished up as the “Morritt Arms.” There seems no doubt that this Arcadian corner of Yorkshire had a justifiably evil reputation for institutions of the kind. In a letter written from here by Dickens to his wife but eight years after Rokeby was published, he describes with some humour having actually travelled up on the coach with the proprietress of one of them who gradually drank herself into a state of happy insensibility. One would fain, I think, associate the Tees with the flavour of Rokeby rather than of Dotheboys Hall, with Bertram rather than with Squeers! A spot more profoundly out of touch with a Dickens atmosphere it would be difficult to find in all England. The ruins of Eggleston Abbey are here too on the banks of Tees, and the remains of a Roman station at Greta Bridge. These upper reaches by no means exhaust either the beauty or the interest of the Tees, but henceforth the scenery becomes lower and less inspiring, and the high romance fades as the river pursues a more conventional course towards the busy town of Darlington.

THE STOUR, BERGHOLT, SUFFOLK

THE OUSE, NEAR ST. IVES, HUNTINGDONSHIRE