In the lowlands beneath Clifton stands Brougham Hall, and near it Brougham Castle, both beside the Eamont river. A good deal of the Hall is ancient, but most of the exterior, recased in a baronial way, looks like (what it is) an academic attempt at recovering the architectural style of the fourteenth century. When it is said that the work was done in the early part of the nineteenth century, it will be supposed, with a good deal of truth, that the result is dull and lifeless. Anciently the seat of the Broughams, it came at length to the Bird family, from whom the property was purchased in 1727 by the grandfather of the Lord Brougham who was Lord Chancellor and a great political figure in the days of George the Fourth, William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria. Dr. Granville, travelling hereabouts in the middle of the nineteenth century, sampling medicinal spas, looked upon the Hall with awe, as the residence of that statesman.

The Doctor cherished a remarkable veneration for that able, but eccentric personage, and was perhaps the only person to do so. Says he, “Like the ChÂteau de Vernet, Brougham Hall, when the grave shall have swept away prejudices and political animosities, will be visited by thousands, eager to behold the chÂteau of the English Voltaire; he who, to the encyclopÆdic knowledge and pungent wit of the French philosopher, joined the impassioned and fiery eloquence of Mirabeau.” Thus the enthusiastic Granville.

Eloquence? Brougham could tear a passion to tatters with any one, but he ranted. It is true that the post-boys used to drive the chaises of travellers in these regions somewhat out of the direct road, in order to glimpse the residence of Lord Brougham; but those travellers viewed the place, and Brougham himself, with curiosity, just as one might an Icelandic geyser, to which, indeed, he is not inaptly to be compared. His spoutings were as plentiful and as hot.

Not every one looked upon Brougham with awe, as the caricatures of his grotesque physiognomy prove. Jemmy Anderson, a well-known post-boy in this district, was not abashed by him; but then post-boys venerated no one. It was in the days when the future Lord Chancellor was still Mr. Henry Brougham, Q.C., that Jemmy Anderson drove him, post, from Shap to Penrith, and “took him down” an unwonted peg. Jemmy jogged quietly along at about seven miles an hour, mounted upon an almost broken-down wheeler, until the fiery spirit within the post-chaise could stand it no longer. Letting down the front window the future Lord Chancellor vociferated: “Post-boy, I shan’t give you a farthing, for you have driven me like a snail.” “Indeed,” replied the shrewd Cumbrian, “thee wunna gie me a farden, wunna thee? Then ah’ve coomed far enow for nowt!” With that he slowly dismounted and began to detach his horses from the chaise, until an appealing voice from within led to a compromise, by which the angry lawyer, who had been specially retained to appear in a cause cÉlÈbre at Penrith, capitulated, and upon paying his money down—upon which the offended post-boy insisted—Jemmy Anderson was persuaded to finish the stage.

The Brougham family, still owning the Hall, trace their descent from Saxon times, and one of their ancestors, referred to as “Brum,” fortified his residence here so long ago as 1284.

An early ancestor was Udard De Broham, a crusader, who died in 1185. “His soul is with the saints, we trust”; but his skull, ravished from his grave in Brougham Church, grins from its glass case in the Hall, and his trusty sword, that had been buried with him, is near by. It was in 1846, when repairs were in progress at the church, that the skeleton of Udard was discovered, beneath the inscribed slab pictured here, a mere two feet deep. He had been laid here cross-legged and spurred on one heel. With him had been buried a fragment of glass of Phoenician manufacture, blue inside, but externally patterned in black and white stripes not unlike the striped peppermint sweets still dear to rural youth. This was considered a talisman, or luck-compelling object, in the superstitious age in which Udard flourished, and was doubtless brought by him from Palestine and buried with him as his most prized possession.

Nine ancient De Brohams in all were discovered at this time, including the remains of Gilbert, son of Udard, a man of gigantic size, who died in 1230. A curious enamelled metal circlet, of beautiful workmanship, and in perfect preservation, lay beside him; and his grave was duly rifled of it.

But Brougham Castle is finer than the Hall, or than memories of De Brohams. Brougham derives its name, down the long alleys of time, from Brovacum, a Roman station in these outposts of the Roman dominion, thickly studded with such. And a military post of the first importance it continued to be until the time of Henry the Fourth. Normans built the keep of the old castle, and the families of Vipont and De Clifford added to it, and held the marchlands against the Scots, or warred for or against their sovereigns, with more or less success, until their line ended in a woman: the famous Ann Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, who was as good a man as any. She was born in 1590, and enjoyed length of days and strength of mind during the whole of them, dying at last in 1676. Marrying twice, and unhappily on both occasions, she was twice widowed, and left with an only daughter. Upon her second widowhood she retired to these scenes of her youth, and busied herself in rebuilding her ancient and ruined castles of Brougham, Appleby, Skipton, Bardon Tower, Pendragon, and Brough; together with the restoration of numerous churches, and the erection of monuments to various people, including herself. She was as ceaseless and busy a builder as old Bess of Hardwick herself, and an imperious and masterful old lady who even withstood Cromwell. He declared he would ding down her castles as soon as she built them up, but she merely replied that they would be rebuilt every time, and Cromwell was obliged to give in. “Let her build an she will, for me” he said, and build she accordingly did. She is described as having been a “perfect mistress of forecast and aftercast,” who “knew well how to converse of all things, from predestination to slea-silk;” and she certainly was tenacious of her rights, or what she conceived to be her rights; being as remarkable a litigant as she was a builder. By all accounts, she was nothing less than an unmitigated terror, and the plain man, who reads of her autocratic ways, is apt to think that the unhappiness of her marriages was felt by her husbands a good deal more than by herself.

We know a great deal about this extraordinary woman, for among her activities was the writing, at tremendous length, about herself and her ancestors; and in those pages she dwells with an amusing complacency upon the early beauties of her face, her form, and mind.

It was in 1652 that she so thoroughly repaired Brougham Castle, making it afterwards her principal residence; but the day of castles was done, and, as she really must have foreseen, her works were left, after her death, to decay. Her only daughter had married the Earl of Thanet, who in 1728 caused the most part of Brougham Castle to be demolished, and the materials sold. And here it stands to-day, a roofless shell.

“Thys made Roger” are the words boldly carved over the gateway; telling us that the first Lord Clifford was the great builder of the castle. His grandson added largely to it; and a mighty place it must have been. Cliffords of Brougham and a dozen other strongholds dared with impunity what smaller men would have been ruined to attempt the tenth part of; and the messengers of Kings, sent with formidable sealed documents, have been set down to dine at Brougham Castle upon the wax and parchment of the commands they brought, and have made a hearty, but involuntary, meal upon those unappetising materials under the grim eyes of my lord, without wine to wash them down or condiment to flavour them withal.

And now the scene is merely the subject for an artist; and a beautiful subject, too. The old ruins stand in an ideal situation, in an undulating grassy meadow, sloping towards the sparkling Eamont, framed in with trees, and with distant mountains closing in the scene.

Such is the present condition of the old Countess Ann’s pride; but something of her passion for commemoration remains, not so far away, in the monument known in all this countryside as the Countess Pillar; built by her in 1656. It is adorned with her arms and those of allied families, and bears this inscription:

The Eamont, the Eden, and the Lowther were well guarded, as the fortified houses by the fords still prove. Yanwath Hall, an ancient home of the Threlkelds, is a fine example of a peel-tower added to and elaborated into a residence. It is one of the earliest and most interesting, having been built midway in the fourteenth century. The original tower, strong in its walls, six feet thick and embattled, stands fifty-five feet high and looks down into a courtyard, the barmkin, or inner bailey, where the ancient oaken, iron-banded, and studded doors and windows guarded by thick stanchions show how concerned the old owners were for their personal security in insecure times.

Cliburn, Sockbridge, and Barton Kirke were all fortified houses, disposed by these rivers like the castles upon a chess-board. Finest of these old fortified mansions is the romantically situated and picturesquely designed Askham Hall, now the rectory of Lowther, but situated in Askham village. It stands high above the wooded Lowther, foaming down among its rocks under Lowther Park, and was originally the castellated seat of the Sandford family. The front is dour and forbidding enough, and the interior, although oak panelled and converted into a residence after the ideas that were modern two hundred and fifty years ago, does not commend itself as a cheerful residence. But the additions made at the side by Thomas Sandford in 1574 are exquisitely sketchable. They comprise a gatehouse and outbuildings enclosing a courtyard. The drip-moulding over the archway is in a peculiar style, resembling a cable; its ends finished off in the likeness of ammonites. Over the arch are the Sandford arms, with those of Crackanthorpe and Lancaster of Howgill, and this inscription, done in letters run oddly together:

The Sandfords ended at last, after three hundred years, in 1680.