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IT is not to the manufacturing districts of England that the traveller in search of the picturesque would most naturally repair. To him they are often a region of tall chimneys and squalid-looking habitations, with a canopy of smoke above and black refuse of coal and iron on the banks of polluted rivers below. Something of this impression is due to the economy of railway companies, which, for the most part, have chosen to enter great towns by their least attractive suburbs, where land is cheapest. Hence, it is not from the carriage-windows of the train that Leeds or Sheffield, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, or Manchester should be judged. The traveller who will alight and explore may find a wealth of natural beauty which would astonish him.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the contrast—due chiefly, no doubt, to geological structure—more apparent than on the edge of the "Black Country" in Staffordshire. From Dudley Castle the views are more curiously contrasted than in almost any other part of England. By night the whole country is lighted up on one side by the flames from the furnaces, which cover the country for many miles. By day the din of hammers and the clank of wheels, the roar of traffic and the shriek of the steam-whistles surge up, through the pall of smoke, upon the ear. Descend, and between the ironworks and coalpits the ground is unsightly with refuse heaps, while its frequent inequalities, and the bending, tottering buildings, show it to be honeycombed with mines. Vegetation is rare; what there is, is blackened and stunted; black also are the outsides of churches, chapels, schools. For inhabitants of such a district to gain any sense of natural beauty, they must be able at frequent intervals to escape; and, happily, to do this is within the reach of most. Railway communication with every part of England is constant and easy; and to know the difference that a few miles' journey will make in the scene, one has only to reascend to Dudley Castle, where it lies in the midst of its fair wooded domain.. Look from it to the north, east, or south, and all is smoke and flame; but turn to the west, and though the traces of unresting labour are still discernible, they soon give way to a country of richly diversified charm: glimpses are obtained of the beautiful valley of the Severn, the Wrekin towers grandly not many miles away, and the Malvern hills are dim and blue in the distance.

In other manufacturing centres, if the contrast is not so marked, yet there is a similar accessibility to many a sequestered and lovely scene. The nearness of the wildest and grandest Derbyshire scenery to busy, unromantic Manchester has been pointed out in a previous chapter; and the neighbourhood of the great Yorkshire centres of industry is full of picturesque beauty. A little way out of Leeds, for instance, where the Liverpool Canal passes over an embankment near to the river Aire, may be found the scene of one of Turner's most charming sketches; and though the locality bears evident marks of the great industrial invasion, much of the beauty still remains. In the same valley, not far off, are the stately ruins of Kirkstall Abbey, while the broad reach of river that encloses it, and the green meadows on the bank, with the low wooded heights on either side of the valley, suggest the memories of a day when the surroundings of the old ecclesiastical building were such as the monks most dearly loved; while Esholt Hall, some few miles higher up the river, at the extremity of a noble avenue of elm trees, was, in its time, a nunnery on low-lying ground, circled by an amphitheatre of hills, in a vale even now rich and beautiful, and which once must have seemed the very abode of tranquillity and peace.

It is, indeed, no small boon to the artizans of Leeds, Bradford, and many other crowded hives of industry in this part of England, that they are within so easy a distance of scenes which, in natural beauty, may vie with almost any in the land. Ivirkstall, as we have said, is close by the former town; and its grounds are thronged on every holiday by busy workers, who, whether intent or not on learning the appropriate lesson from the mouldering walls and tower, are at least fully alive to the advantages of fresh air, and of wide scope and range for healthful amusement. The like may be said of other places, lying only a little further off. There is Roundhay Park, for instance, one of the most splendid domains in England, now, through the wise liberality of the Leeds Corporation, the property of the people; while the public parks of many other towns, as Bradford, Halifax, Barnsley, with Manchester, Liverpool, Blackburn, gratify not only the instinct for recreation, but the desire for beauty.

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Or again, our traveller, in his pause at Leeds, may take the opportunity of visiting Ilkley, with its fine open moorland, where the brain-wearied worker may range at will. Then, a little way beyond Ilkley, lie the fair woods and noble heights encircling Bolton Abbey, where the Wharfe comes down, as yet unpolluted, from the moorland beyond; while the form of the White Doe of Rylstone, or the memory of the ill-fated heir of Egremont, seems yet to haunt the scene.

A little further again, our astonished friend comes upon a Clapham Junction, but it is amid the silence of the hills! Ingleborough, with its marvellous caves, too little known, with its companion heights, Pen-y-gant and Whernside, rise from the valley: and every path is full of beauty, especially that which leads into the heart of Craven, where bold limestone scars, deep glens, and upland moors, with one deep, lonely tarn, dear alike to dreamers and to anglers, yield a succession of pictures, of which, among their many charms, not the least is their easy accessibility from the neighbourhood of clanking mills and inky streams. For Ilkley, Bolton, Harrogate, Craven, Clapham may all be reached by the busy worker of Leeds or Bradford, and much of their beauty enjoyed, in the leisure of a summer Saturday afternoon, or on a "Bank holiday." He who would be free from excursionists, with their loud talk, their demonstrative ways, their baskets and their bottles, must go another time; but even in those holiday-hours there is much to interest. The "trippers" may be an interruption to the dreamer, an annoyance to the sensitive; but it is good that people whose lives are usually so hard-pressed and monotonous should have the means of ennobling enjoyment within easy reach; and though occasionally there may be an element of roughness or even intemperance in the recreation, we should be unjust were we not to record our impression, from what we have often seen, that there is a decided improvement in these respects, and that the free access to hill and moor, to fine scenery and pure air, has its part in checking those vices which spring up like evil weeds in the unwholesome dwellings of a crowded population.

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The "Excursion Season," no doubt, has its drawbacks in Lancashire, Yorkshire, London, and everywhere else. There are holidays that depress rather than invigorate: the spirit of self-indulgence may adopt the pretext of needed recreation, and the Lord's day is too often heedlessly or wilfully disregarded; but on the whole it is good that God's fair world should be thrown open to all who can enjoy its beauties; and that, as we have seen, some of its richest beauties should lie at the very threshold of the hardest workers in the most unromantic scenes.

The topic is almost inexhaustible; and the selection of places to be visited in reasonable time, from these "centres of industry," would be invidious to make. A little way beyond Leeds, as every one knows, lies Harrogate, the high table-land where medicinal waters have for long generations given to the place the fame of a true "city of Hygeia," while we ourselves would still give the chief credit to the invigorating, stimulating air, and to the almost inexhaustible interest of the neighbourhood, occupying the mind of the visitor with a round of healthful delights. The visit to Studley Park and Fountains Abbey will probably rank among the chief of these. Again, as in the cases of Kirkstall and Bolton, reverting to the past, we admire the taste and wisdom shown by the cowled brotherhoods in mediÆval times, in their choice of dwelling-places. Something, indeed, of the beauty which we now see may have been the result of their assiduous culture. It was part of their work to "make the wilderness to smile;" but they had a rare faculty for lighting upon scenes which, if not already beautiful, possessed an evident capability for becoming so. At Fountains both nature and art seem to vie with each other; and in the modern arrangement of the domain, the art may occasionally be the more apparent. The artistic yields to the artificial; the ruins have been maintained at the due stage of picturesqueness by careful oversight and repair; and the carefully prepared "surprise," which awaits the visitor at one stage of his progress through the grounds, is too theatrical to permit even one of the fairest of pictures to have its full effect. But, perhaps, all this is hypercritical, and, with every deduction, this old Cistercian abbey is one of the most beautiful, as it is one of the most complete mediÆval monastic buildings in England. The tower, unlike that of its sister abbey at Kirkstall, is little impaired by the ravages of time, the plan of the edifice is easy to be traced; and the light pillars and lofty arches of the Ladye Chapel give to the whole a finishing touch of stateliness and grace. Then how pleasant to wander through the noble avenues of Studley, to gaze upwards to the gigantic spruce firs, or to climb the mound where linger the decaying forms of the rugged yew trees—remnants, it is said, of the "seven sisters" that spread their shade over the founders of the abbey, more than six hundred years ago!

Still pursuing our way northwards, we reach the country of the Yorkshire Dales, where the Swale, passing by Richmond, the Tees, on the edge of Durham, and many smaller streams, descend from the eastern slope of the Westmoreland moors. Both abound in wild and charming scenery: the upper Tees-dale especially is singularly impressive. The river runs in its deep rocky bed through alpine-looking green meadows, with clean whitewashed cottages scattered here and there. Trees there are few or none, except a small kind of fir; and in place of hedges, low stone walls mark the boundaries of the fields. About five or six miles below its source, there forms the striking waterfall "High Force," tumbling over a black basaltic precipice, fifty feet high; while yet higher up the stream, where it issues from a gloomy tarn on the edge of the Westmoreland moors, descending for some two hundred feet over a steep, irregular staircase, so to speak, of basalt, the weird wildness of the scene, in the midst of its hilly amphitheatre, approaches sublimity. Caldron Snout is the quaint name of this unique rapid, and the curious in geology, as well as the lover of the picturesque, will be well repaid by a visit.

But by this time we have wandered some distance from our manufacturing centres. If, however, we have left the Yorkshire district behind, we are approaching the yet more black and busy coal districts.

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Teesdale itself has two sets of associations, and the same stream, whose rocks and dales are so romantic in its earlier course, becomes, by the time it reaches Stockton, a broad and inky flood, and so passes by Middlesborough—that wonderfully progressive seat of the iron manufacture—to the sea. We now pass on from town to town along the coast, each busier, blacker than the last, but with glimpses of rich beauty between, while the city of Durham, as seen from the rail, is one of the noblest views of rock and river, cathedral, castle, and town, on which the traveller's eye has ever rested. This river is the Weir; then the Tyne is reached, and Newcastle, the "capital of the north," is entered over its splendid High-Level Bridge.

We can imagine no better route for a pedestrian excursion than the way from Denton Hall to Thirlwall Castle—about thirty-four miles; or, if the tourist wishes to see the whole, let him put Dr. Bruce's Condensed Guide and an Ordnance map into his knapsack, devote a week to the exploration, and proceed by leisurely stages from Wallsend, on the Tyne, to Bowness, on the Solway, a distance of seventy-three miles and a half.

But our chief object in visiting these great centres of industry is to explore their neighbourhoods. Few towns in England are better worth a prolonged visit than Newcastle-upon-Tyne; but its attraction to us now is, that we can, at so short a distance from its busy streets, place ourselves amid rural scenes of surpassing interest, as well on their own account as for their historical associations.

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First and foremost, of course, there is the Roman Wall, with its long line of remains, still magnificent, and so varied from place to place, while the scenery that surrounds them is so striking, that sea to sea classic ground.

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A stranger might suppose that, after the lapse of long centuries, all these works, granting their existence once, must have disappeared. It is not so: save in the western portion, there is scarcely an acre without distinct traces; in many places all the lines sweep on together, parts in wondrous preservation; while many of the recent excavations present structures several feet high, giving one the idea of works in progress, so fresh that we are tempted to think of the builders as away but for an hour, perhaps to the noonday meal. To traverse the line of the wall is to pass along one continuous platform, whence the visitor revels in a succession of glorious panoramas.

Returning to the busy east coast, very charming is the transition from the Tyne to the Coquet, loveliest of Northumbrian streams, as it flows down, interesting glimpses into the past opened up at every stage. Few persons, indeed, who have not visited the scene, have any notion of the variety and value of the remains which have withstood the wear and tear of sixteen centuries, during a great part of which period the wall was used as a quarry by the dwellers in the district.

In many places the traveller, especially if aided by some competent guide, may discern the whole outline of the structure. It consisted of seven parts, viz., the Roman Wall proper, comprising ditch on the extreme northern side; (1) the military road; then the earthwork, consisting of (2) a wall; then (3) a space more or less wide from thirty feet to half-a-mile, middle of vallum, along of (4) a mound, or rampart, the largest of three; (5) a second ditch; (6) another mound, the smallest; and (7) yet another mound. The following section exhibits all in one view. Nor is this all, at every three or four miles we have fortified camps of several acres each, at every mile a castle, and between the castles watch-towers. Moreover, there are roads and bridges, traces of villas, gardens, and burial-places, making almost every inch from Thirlmoor, on the verge of the Cheviots, at the foot of heathery hills and through richly wooded vales, to Rothbury—already a famous place of resort from the district, and evidently destined to become more frequented from its surpassing beauty of situation, encircled by romantic hills, with the bright river running swiftly between.

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Thence the Coquet descends in many a winding by scenes of the richest sylvan loveliness to Warkworth, renowned for its hermitage, which is still, as the old Percy ballad describes it, "deep hewn within a craggy cliff, and overhung with wood." And so we reach the sea, where Coquet Island, with its lighthouse, lies amid the gleaming waters, scarcely suggesting, as we gaze upon it in the fair sunshine, how terribly the storm sometimes there rages, or how those dark rocks are chafed by the angry billows!

But for the full splendour of cliff and ocean scenery we journey still a little northward, and come to Dunstanborough Castle. Here a dark ridge of basalt rises in pillared form sheer from the sea, and in the words of Alarmion, "the whitening breakers," surging with ceaseless thunder into the caves which pierce the cliffs, "sound near,"

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The view from the "Lilburn's Tower" in this ruined castle, commanding landwards the broad purple moors, extending in many an undulation to the rounded Cheviots, glimmering blue in the distance, and looking seawards over the restless ocean, beating ever at the foot of the black columns, while sea-birds are ceaselessly wheeling in mid air with shrill outcries, not unfairly vies with the wild magnificence of Tintagel, as described in our earlier pages.

The two coast scenes are, perhaps, unequalled in the British Islands: the difference is that, while the Cornish scene lies in far-away seclusion, this of Northumberland is close by one of the chief lines of traffic, and within accessible distance of crowded populations. Yet even Cornwall is a great industrial centre. Its mining industries are never far away from us. Its wildest cliffs are pierced by shafts and adits leading down, as in the Botallack Mine, to labyrinthine passages far under the bed of the sea, where the miners can hear overhead the rush of the waves and the grinding together of the huge boulders.

We have now reached the limit of our purpose, which was to show how near to the doors of the million is some of the most striking scenery of our land. Else from Dunstanborough Castle we could have pursued our way northwards at least as far as Bamborough Castle, not so much for the sake of admiring its noble ramparts and towers—once a fortress, now a temple of charity—or of gazing again upon the glories of cliff and sea, as of looking out across the waters to those rocky isles which, in our own time, have witnessed one of those deeds of unconscious heroism which do honour to our nature. For it was from one of those sea-beaten crags that, on the 5th of September, 1838, Grace Darling set forth upon her errand of mercy amid the raging waters, to rescue the survivors of the shipwrecked Forfarshire. "Her musical name," it has been said, "is the burden of a beautiful story of that love of man which is the love of Christ translated into human language and deeds." Four years after that great exploit the brave and gentle maiden died of consumption, brought on, it is said, by a visit to her brother, keeper of the lighthouse on Coquet Island: but she has left among our island race an imperishable name. Let us conclude these random rovings by a visit to her monument in Bamborough churchyard. Her figure lies as it were in slumber, an oar upon her shoulder, beneath a Gothic canopy, within sight and hearing of the waves. On the bright day of our visit the waves were murmuring and sparkling far below: the craggy islets in the distance were touched with sunlight, and we turned away, reminded less of the heroism that braved the storm, than of the heavenly home and the everlasting rest. "I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea."

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