At four miles and three-quarters from Kendal, at Watchgate, the finest view opens, along Sleddale. Beyond it comes the “Plough” inn, with pictorial sign and the couplet—

a statement to which farmers do not unanimously subscribe.

Beyond this again comes Hucks Brow, the end of the first stage out of Kendal, and Forest Hall, which, with the Abbey Farm at Shap, forms one of the two largest sheep-farms in Westmoreland. Another rise of a mile and a half, and a steep descent leads to Boroughbridge, a hamlet where an ancient bridge spans a mountain stream and is neighboured by a few cottages and the “Bay Horse” inn. From this point the final and most trying ascent is made. An old road goes winding away in the valley below, past Hausefoot Farm, but it has long ceased to be of any but strictly local use.

The road across Shap summit is built upon peat bogs, and needs constant repair. The boggy nature of the foundation is not apparent to the casual wayfarer, but may readily be discovered by standing beside it at the passing of a motor-car, when it very perceptibly shakes.

At the descent from the summit towards Shap village, the old road crosses to the right hand, and away to the right, half a mile across the moors, the hotel of Shap Wells is seen, rising from its wooded hollow.

Dr. Granville, who wrote a work on English spas in 1845, came in due course to Shap Wells, and remarks justly upon the wild and remote situation of the wells and the hotel, but he does not lay any stress upon the truly awful ancient-egg flavour of the medicinal waters, which, if their medicinal virtues be in proportion to their taste, must needs be very remarkably curative. He talks rather of the colour scheme of the water, than of bouquet, and waxes eloquent on its bluish, opalescent hue. He was here in the height of summer, and found at the hotel a “lady sitting at a roasting fire (of which by-the-by I was glad to partake also) on the 6th of August.” But notwithstanding the curious taste and flavour of the waters, the hotel is greatly frequented. It is not the waters, but the bracing air, that now forms the attraction.

The village of Shap, although itself of no mean altitude, seems quite sheltered after the four miles’ run down from the summit. Still stands the old “Greyhound” inn of coaching days, as you enter the village. And not only of coaching days, but of times earlier, as the tablet over the door, dated 1703, proclaims. This was the inn, doubtless, at which Prince Charlie called, on his way, and found the landlady a “sad imposing wife.” The weird greyhound sculptured on the tablet somewhat resembles the Saxon idea of a horse, as carved on White Horse Hill, in Berkshire.

Shap is a large village, with cattle-market, and an odd squat building styled a “market cross,” now used as a parish room, but it is chiefly famous among tourists for its Abbey, which exists only in scanty ruin, a mile away, in a lonely situation: lonely, that is to say, except for its great Abbey Farm. You approach it over a sheep track down and across a narrow bridge built by the old monks so well that it stands soundly to this day and does not let my Lord Lonsdale through when he drives visitors across in his big motor-car, to see the ruined tower, practically all that remains of the Abbey. Shelter was more to the point when I came here, chased by rain-storms and thunder-storms that spouted and rumbled among the hills, and I know more of the kindly hospitality of the farm than of the antiquities of the Abbey, which, after all, are few beyond broken columns and the stone coffins of departed and forgotten abbots and brethren. The Abbey was resigned in 1541 by Richard Evenwode, the last Abbot. Its revenue was then £154 per annum, a good deal in those days. To-day black-faced, horned Scotch mountain-sheep roam the Abbey lands.

Hackthorpe village, with an old hall, now a farmhouse, beside the road, brings us to the neighbourhood of Lowther Castle and its beautiful park, seat of the Earl of Lonsdale. The mansion itself, built by Smirke in 1808, is magnificent, in the sense that it is huge and was costly to build and is princely in its appointments, but it is not a castle nor is it Gothic architecture, although the architect who designed it, and the second Lord Lonsdale, for whom it was designed, fondly imagined it to be so.

The wicked Lowther, the “bad Lord Lonsdale,” i.e. the first Earl (1736-1802), once haunted this superstitious countryside, after he had run his earthly course with sinful Éclat, and was a dreaded “boggle”—which is Westmoreland and Cumberland for “ghost.” This once notorious character, “this brutal fellow,” as Boswell styled him, was eccentric to a degree, and actually acknowledged himself to be “truly a madman, though too rich to be confined.” One of his eccentricities was the keeping of wild horses, instead of deer, in his park at Lowther. Too rich and powerful to care a rap what was thought of him, he drove about in gloomy, out-of-date majesty in an ancient mildewed carriage drawn by shaggy, unclipped horses. The entry of this equipage into Penrith, where he owned most of the property and, politically speaking, all the inhabitants, was regarded with awful expectation of what he would do next, and was feared almost as much as the coming of some mediÆval judge armed with a commission to try rebels.

In life representative of the worst and coarsest feudal barons of the Middle Ages, he was held in still greater terror in his death. The awe-stricken rustics long continued to tell how he was with difficulty buried, and how, while the clergyman was praying over him, his mischievous disembodied spirit very nearly knocked the astonished cleric from his desk. Disturbances at the Hall and noises in the stables followed, and men and horses had no rest. The Hall became almost uninhabitable, and out of doors there was constant danger of meeting the noble but malignant spook, either driving in his ghostly “coach and six,” or walking along the dark roads. In a desperate case of this kind, a Catholic priest was thought to be essential as a spirit-layer. The Established Church would not serve, and as for Dissenters—bah! The priest came and prayed, but Jemmy was obstinate and stood a long siege, and when conjured by all that was holy, was only willing to be banished to the Red Sea—to which troublesome spirits are rusticated, as a sort of spiritual Botany Bay—for a year and a day. This was not considered good enough. The district had experienced too much of him in life, and ardently wished to be shot of his ghost for good and all, and so the priest was urged to pray for all he was worth, which he did, finally overpowering the tyrant. Instead of transporting him to the Red Sea, he was laid under the great rock of Walla Crag, Haweswater, for ever!

It is at Clifton, just south of Penrith, that the real Borderland begins. We are still thirty-five miles short of the actual border-line, but we have come now within the “sphere of influence” (as international politicians might now phrase it) of the old mosstrooping, cattle-lifting, and plundering and burning rascals from the Scottish side, who ever and again came across the Solway in well-mounted bands that numbered perhaps twenty, or perhaps five hundred, and often swept the countryside clean of stock; returning as swiftly as they had come, and leaving burning homesteads behind them. Those times have left plentiful traces, still plain to see, in the old domestic architecture of mansion and farmstead. Castles we have here, as elsewhere, but this borderland is the country of the peel-tower. In ages when the south of England lived in security, and men no longer built homes that were half fortresses, these oft-raided northern counties still lived in constant and well-founded apprehensions, and every one who had anything to lose had his own stronghold, in the little peel-tower that was, according to circumstances, his entire home, or a considerable part of it. Many of the peel-towers remain, as uninhabited ruins: others form the central portion of houses and mansions since enlarged. At Clifton stands such a one.

It is a fair type of the defences once absolutely necessary. You see the care taken to build strongly, with thick walls that no swiftly moving band of raiders could have leisure to demolish; and you see, too, that it was equally impossible to burn. The ground floor was not only exceptionally solid, but it had no entrance from without, and was reached only by a trap-door in the floor above.

So soon as the farmer or the squireen of those days had taken alarm, he drove his stock into the barmkin, or enclosure, attached to his tower of refuge, and, summoning all his family and securing his valuables, ascended with them by a ladder to the first floor, and, withdrawing the ladder after him, awaited events. For defence he had a store of heavy stones on the leads above the second floor; or from the narrow-slitted windows could shift to shoot arrows, or fling hot water, boiling tar, or domestic sewage upon enemies who came near enough.

But the cattle were still in danger, and the men of the house were usually concerned to garrison the tower with the women and children, and to give fight, if the odds were not overwhelming, outside; and many a Westmoreland and Cumberland farmer has died in protecting his stock.

Clifton should be marked on maps with the conventional crossed swords indicating the site of a battle, for it was here, on the evening of December 18th, 1745, that the Battle of Clifton Moor, the last ever fought on English ground, was decided. It is true that, judged by the standard of killed and wounded, it was no great affair, but it probably gave a final turn to the fortunes of the Young Pretender. It was fought midway in the panic-stricken retreat from Derby, and was a rearguard action, covering the retirement of the main body upon Penrith and Carlisle. Some two thousand Highlanders made a stand here, in the muddy road and fields, in advance of the village, as the sun went down, and the Duke of Cumberland’s force, consisting chiefly of Kerr’s, Bland’s, Montagu’s, Kingston’s, and Cobham’s dragoons, attacked them in the growing darkness.

The rebel cavalry were off at once. According to the account of Lord George Murray, on the Scottish side, “our horsemen, on seeing the enemy, went to Penrith”: an innocent phrase, which rather obscures the prudent, if inglorious, fact that they “bunked,” as a schoolboy would say, or “did a guy,” as the slangy would remark: leaving the Highland infantry to do the best they could. It was a haphazard hurly-burly that ensued. No one could see any one. The Highlanders were quite invisible, and the English dragoons only to be seen by the gleam of their buff belts in the darkness. Mr. Thomas Savage, a Quaker, whose house was in the thick of the encounter, was anxious for himself, and for his cattle, which interposed between the combatants, but he had really little cause for alarm; for both sides fired so high and so wide that not even a cow was killed, and after all the shooting and the hacking was done, and the rebels had fled, leaving the more or less stricken field in the possession of the enemy, it was found that but twelve (or according to one account, five) Highlanders had been killed and some forty to seventy made prisoners. On the English side, eleven dragoons were killed, and twenty-nine wounded. Many a railway accident has wrought more havoc.

The registers of Clifton church bear witness to this event, in the following entries:

“The 19th of December, 1745, Ten Dragoons, to wit, six of Bland’s, three of Cobham’s, and one of Mark Kerr’s Regiment, buried, who was killed y^e evening before by y^e Rebels in y^e skirmish between y^e Duke of Cumberland’s army and them at y^e end of Clifton Moor next y^e town.”

“Robert Atkins, a private Dragoon of General Bland’s Regiment, buried y^e 8th Day of January, 1746.”

This last was obviously one of the wounded.

The Duke of Cumberland wanted a lodging for the night, and stayed accordingly in the house of Mr. Savage, who, during the progress of the affair, had locked himself in, while his daughter-in-law hid in the kitchen cupboard. The Quaker’s account of the Duke was, “pleasant agreeable company he was—a man of parts, very friendly, and no pride in him.”

None came so well out of that fight as Colonel Honeywood of Howgill, who seems to have been a host in himself, and would have done even better had it not been for an accident by which even the bravest of the brave might be brought ingloriously to earth. His prowess was vouched for by a Highlander, who, asked how his people got on, quaintly replied: “We gat on vary weel, till the lang man in the muckle boots cam ower the dyke, but his fut slipped on a turd, and we gat him down.” The Highlanders nearly did for the “lang man,” for they gave him three sword cuts on the head, and then left. He seems to have lived a charmed life, for he was at that time invalided home from Continental warfare, in which, at the Battle of Dettingen, he had received no fewer than twenty-three broadsword cuts and two musket balls.

His hurts do not seem to have permanently harmed him, for he lived forty years longer.