The Fisherman’s River—“Awa’ to the Border”—Peat-Hags—Eel-Fishing—Alwinton and Harbottle—The Village of Rothbury—Brinkburn Priory—Weldon Bridge and Felton—Warkworth Hermitage and Castle—The Town of Amble—Coquet Isle.

“There’s a gentleman that will tell ye that just when I had ga’en up to Lourie Lowther’s, and had bidden the drinking of twa cheerers, and gotten just in again upon the moss, and was whigging cannily awa’ hame, twa land-loupers jumpit out of a peat-hag on me or I was thinking, and got me down, and knevelled me sair eneuch, or I could gar my whip walk about their lugs; and troth, Gudewife, if this honest gentleman hadna come up, I would have gotten mair licks than I like, and lost mair siller than I could weel spare; so ye maun be thankful to him for it under God.”

So, with all the generations of Pepper and Mustard frisking about him, did honest Dandie Dinmont explain to his wife how he came by a battered face and a wounded head.

The “peat-hag” is a characteristic not only of the Scottish Border-land, but of wide tracks on the English side, and a very remarkable feature it makes in a wild landscape, being a sort of black precipice made in the green hills by some sudden sinking of the apparently bottomless peat. It is all ancient peat-land together where the river Coquet rises—“Coquet, still the stream of streams,” as one of the poets of “The Fisher’s Garland” has observed; “the king of the stream and the brae,” as has been remarked by another poetical brother of the angle. Other northern rivers the fisherman mentions with respect, and perhaps with joyful remembrance of pleasant and successful days; but of the Coquet he never speaks except with glowing enthusiasm. No tuneful fisher who was friendly with the muse ever failed to give the Coquet a preferential mention in his verse. Now it is—

And now it is—

A much beloved stream, indeed, is the Coquet, rising in an acre or two of marshy land, losing itself for a while among the peat, then winding into the sunlight round the feet of the green hills, and—after many a mile of joyous wandering—plunging into deep embowered woods and mossy thickets, where, to all but its familiars, it is unsuspected and unseen.

All around Coquet Head lies the Debatable Land. Mounting the dark hill of Thirlmoor one may look far away over Roxburghshire, whence, in former rough times, there was many a raid into the rich Northumbrian lands. The district known as Kidland lies along Coquetside, from the Cheviots eastward, and here in the stormy moss-trooping days no soul could be induced to live, even if he were tempted by the offer of free lands. The hills are now covered with sheep; there is a shelter for the shepherds on the top of Thirlmoor; yet to this day Kidland is a country bare of habitations, shrouded for great part of the year in mists; dank, rainy, treeless; swept by fierce winds, treacherous by reason of its numerous bogs. The wild duck may be shot at Coquet Head, but for the most part it lives and breeds here in great safety, too remote from men, too fortunate in its wild surroundings, to be much or frequently incommoded by the English enthusiasm for sport. It is possible, perhaps, to be in as deep a solitude on Dartmoor, but scarcely possible to be so far from the musical church bell and the cheerful cottage smoke.

But even in this wild region there are remains of our old civilisation, and numerous relics of “the grandeur that was Rome.” What are known as the Ad Fines Camps are situated close to Coquet Head; the Watling Street crosses the young stream not far from its source on Thirlmoor; the Outer and the Middle Golden Pot, Roman milestones of an unusual design, are within easy reach of where the river encloses the ancient camps in one of its forks. These stations were of considerable extent when they were made, and were serviceable in after ages as the meeting-place of the Wardens of the Middle Marches of England and Scotland when they assembled to punish offences against the Border laws. Wild stories of lawless times are told by the shepherds on the hills. There was a “Thieves’ Road” over Kidland, along which, doubtless, many a herd of stolen sheep or kine has been driven. Many fights there were in these parts, and much pursuing of raiders from the other side of the Border. The Northumbrians, it must be admitted, were no better than their neighbours, and not the least less inclined to thieving. Even a judge was stolen on one occasion, as he was going the rounds of the King’s Justiciaries, and was kept in prison until his captors could exact from him their own terms.

The country below Coquet Head is veined by little streams, which pour into the river at brief intervals, so that what was but lately a thread of water hidden among the moss soon becomes a laughing, sparkling river, though even so low down as Blindburn, four or five miles from the source, it may, in very dry seasons, be bridged by a lady’s foot.

The first house is at Makingdon, rather more than a mile from Ad Fines Camps, and fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea. There are occasional houses at intervals of a mile or two along the far-winding course of the river to Alwinton. Of one of these a Mrs. Malaprop of the hills remarked that “it was in a very digested state,” meaning thereby that it stood grievously in need of repair. A descendant of the true Dandie Dinmont lived at Blindburn farmhouse until a few years ago, and kept up the famous breed of terriers, giving to each pair the immortal names of Pepper and Mustard. The traveller into these regions is dependent upon the kindly hospitality of the sparse inhabitants, for there is no house of entertainment within many miles, and a weary distance must the shepherd trudge over the moors before he can forgather with his kind.

The Coquet flows through wild and exceedingly rocky scenery between Blindburn and the next house, which is Carl Croft, and anglers, even with long waders, find no inconsiderable difficulty in fishing the stream. Those of the more discerning sort make their way up one of the tributaries, the Carl Croft or the Philip Burn, or, by preference, the Usway—the largest and wildest and most beautiful of the feeders of the Coquet—which joins the river at Shillmoor, distant from the small village of Alwinton only about five miles or so. Near the point of junction the Coquet falls, in leap after leap, among rugged and dangerous rocks. Good eel-spearing may be had here in due season. It is usual to make up a party of ten or a dozen, chiefly composed of the shepherds of the district, and to set out on moonless nights, each man with a torch and four-pronged fork, or “cleek.” Those who have tasted its joys say there is no sport in these islands equal to that of spearing eels in the Coquet, with Border shepherds for company. Sometimes, indeed, eels are not the only prey. The river swarms with bull trout, and how is it possible to resist the temptation of cleeking a fine plump fish if it comes within reach of one’s spear? Such sport is dangerous, however, being against the laws, and numerous have been the conflicts, in times not long past, between the hillmen and the watchers, their hereditary foes. On some occasions the poachers have played sly tricks on those who have intended their capture. They have sent out rumours of their intention to have “a gey night;” then they have sat in some lonely place drinking whisky and telling stories the night through, issuing thence in the morning, when the watchers had convinced themselves of a hoax, to sweep the Coquet and all the neighbouring streams.

The chief resorts alike of shepherds and of anglers are the villages of Alwinton and Harbottle, distant about two miles from each other, and near to where the Coquet winds out of the hills and flows between rich meadow-lands, that slope away to the distant Cheviots on the one hand, and to the nearer Simonside Hills on the other. Alwinton has the large allowance of two inns to about eleven houses. It is one of the most ancient of the Border villages, and had a church in 1293, to which fled one Thomas de Holm, escaped from the prison of the neighbouring town, but taken by Simon Smart and Benedict Grey, who “beheaded him at Simonsett, and hung his head up on the gallows at Harbottle,” as a warning to all like evil-doers. Alwinton has its peel-tower, at about half a mile from the present village; but at Harbottle there are far more striking memorials of a stirring past. There is Harbottle Castle, for example, a ruined mass of masonry on the summit of a steep hill between the village and the river. It must anciently have been almost the strongest place on the Borders, when what is now a small village was doubtless a fairly considerable town. “Here Botl,” the place of the army—such is the name which it is said to have borne before the Conquest, when it contained a stronghold held by Milred, the son of Ackman. “Robert with the Beard,” the lord of Prudhoe, founder of the family of De Umfraville, came into possession of all the surrounding lands in 1076, on condition of defending the countryside against wolves and the enemies of the king. The castle, of which there are portions still remaining, was built in the reign of Henry II., and was the prison and place of execution of all offenders taken in the liberty of Redesdale. Sitting by the castle of Harbottle in these days, and listening to the joyous music of the Coquet stream, the imagination vainly endeavours to piece together the meagre fragments of the past into some consistent whole; for the quiet aspect of things, the sweet rural peace, and this

make it seem incredible that a great Scottish army can ever have sat down before it, and that the place can have been strong enough to resist a determined siege.

When Harbottle has been left behind, the river no longer strains through narrow passes or hurries by great ramparts of riven cliff. It broadens out, indeed, into a quiet, smiling stream, with a brown shingly bed, and with occasional large masses of reeds, in which an otter may hide. There are now frequent small villages along its course, the most interesting of these being Holystone, where there is a well in which, as Alexander Smith has related—

No less than three thousand Northumbrians are said to have received the sacrament of baptism at this place, a statement which will seem the less incredible if we consider that Northumbria was then the most powerful and populous of the Saxon kingdoms. The famous well lies by the junction of two Roman ways, in a little grove of fir-trees, where the water still bubbles up actively through the sand and gravel. There is above it a stone cross with this inscription: “In this place Paulinus the Bishop baptised 3,000 Northumbrians, Easter, DCXXVII.”

Under the brow of Simonside, which is a huge shoulder of mountain thrusting itself up suddenly from the ascending land, there are a few cottages, and one great house, and a mill where are manufactured the Cheviot tweeds. This is the village of Tosson. Hence one looks away across the Coquet to the long range of the Cheviot hills, which seem surprisingly near, and yet are separated from Coquetside by many a mile of rich and pleasant pasture land. The ancient village of Rothbury is close at hand, with its one long street dipping down from the moorside to the Coquet banks, with its picturesque “Thrum Mill,” its ancient church tower, and its great expanse of furze-bestrewn moors, amid the nearest of which Cragside, the residence of Lord Armstrong, is set. “An Act of Parliament is out of breath before it reaches Rothbury,” say the people of the place. It is a saying which has survived from the pre-railroad days, when this portion of the wild Border land seemed as much cut off from the rest of England as if it had been islanded by the sea. Nor, indeed, is the sea so far away. On clear days one may behold it from the top of Simonside, a thin grey streak, scarcely distinguishable from the greyness of the sky.

A turbulent little town was Rothbury in its earlier days. It was here that Bernard Gilpin took down from the church door a glove which had been hung up as a challenge to all and sundry, and then preached a powerful sermon on the wickedness of private war. In the same church many years ago an old man who was listening to a condemnation of robbery rose up and said, “Then the de’il I give my sall to, bot we are all thieves.” Happily that broad statement no longer applies. The people of Rothbury and the region beyond are honest, stalwart, hard-working, prosperous folk, given to no pursuit more lawless than the occasional poaching of bull trout.

And of bull trout, which easily passes for salmon with the unwary, it is well that a word should be said. The salmo eriox has long established its title to the Coquet as its own exclusive stream. “On the Coquet it goes by the name of salmon,” says a writer on angling, “there being no true salmon in that river. Bull trout very rarely takes fly or bait of any kind, except when it is in the kelt state, when it is ravenous. It reaches fifteen and twenty pounds in weight.” A noble fish, it will be remarked; but why should it have laid exclusive claim to the Coquet, with that river lying, as it does, between such salmon-haunted streams as the Tyne and the Tweed? This is a puzzle which the scientific mind finds itself incapable of solving to this day. A generation since it was maintained that the bull trout devoured the young of salmon, and it was decided, therefore, that the salmo eriox should itself be destroyed. By the connivance of the local landowner every specimen of the bull trout was killed as it entered the river from the sea. Breeding ponds for salmon were then established at Rothbury, and 17,000 young fish were turned into the Coquet in a single year. Many of these were branded for future identification, but, so far as was known, not a single fish of the whole 17,000 ever came back to the stream in which it was bred. Some were caught in the Tyne, and some in the Tweed, and some in more distant rivers, but never did the bite of a true salmon reward the patient angler by Coquetside. Worse than all, too, the common trout deteriorated, for they had fed on the spawn of the salmo eriox. These things becoming apparent, as much anxiety was shown to get the bull trout back to the river as there had been eagerness for its destruction. The bull trout is now, in fact, strictly preserved under the salmon laws. There is a Coquet Fish Conservancy Board; and the catching of bull trout in Coquet, alike by nets and by more artificial expedients, is now a considerable industry, much of the so-called salmon exported to France and Spain being no more than the salmo eriox of the English Border. There are those who will not even yet believe that the Coquet cannot be made a salmon river. Now and then some angler confidently announces that he has caught a true salmon in this delightful and prolific stream. Such tales are listened to with interest, but are not believed. Even experienced fishermen are capable of confounding the bull trout with its nobler brother of the streams.

At the foot of the long street of Rothbury, and just on the lower outskirt of the village, is the Thrum Mill, the name of which is explained by the fact that the river here strains through a narrow chasm, or thrum, in a piled-up bed of freestone rock. The mill is an object of the conventionally picturesque description, with a moss-grown waterwheel, and with a tumbling torrent for foreground. A bridge here crosses the Coquet, and to the left, half-way up the steep side of a heathery hill, rises the mixed Gothic and Elizabethan mansion of Lord Armstrong. The site has clearly been chosen for the wildness of its surroundings, for whatever changes may be wrought by cultivation, and however the growth of plantations may soften the harsh brown and softer purple of the heather, untamed Nature will still assert itself here, like Hereward’s wife at Ely, as “captive but unconquered.” At Cragside there is one of the noblest of English picture galleries, the contents of which have been brought together by an exceedingly catholic taste, and by a liberality of expenditure only possible to “wealthy men who care not how they give.” Here are Linnell’s “Thunderstorm in Autumn,” Millais’ “Chill October,” David Cox’s “Ulverstone Sands,” Leslie’s “Cowslip Gatherers,” Wilkie’s “Rabbit on the Wall,” Rossetti’s “Margaret and her Jewels,” and some of the finest works of Turner, Landseer, Phillip, MÜller, and, coming down to living artists, Sir Frederick Leighton.

From Rothbury the Coquet takes a long sweep through the fields and then plunges into the woods of Brinkburn. There are here, one reads, great and dangerous holes in the river bed; but so there are at many places on the Coquet, and not at Brinkburn more remarkably or permanently than elsewhere. Such holes are made by the swirling water of the floods, and may change their situation with every spate. Their more particular association with Brinkburn may arise from the fact that the bells of the priory are believed to have been cast into a hole in the river, from which whosoever recovers them, says the tradition, will come into possession of treasures galore. Brinkburn was one of the earliest religious settlements on the disturbed and lawless English side of the Border. Exceedingly courageous must have been those monks who decided to accept the rough chances of life at Brinkburn Priory. They had the protection of the deep woods, indeed. Even now one may pass by Brinkburn without suspecting what rich memorials of a past age and a venerable faith are hid within its leafy coverts. It is not merely embosomed, but buried, in trees. So, too, it must have been when the monks were here, for the story goes that a party of marauding Scots had already passed the priory, and was well on its way toward places under less saintly protection, when the monks too soon set the bells a-ringing for joy at its departure, with the evil result of revealing their hiding-place, so that the Scots, returning, fell upon the black canons of Brinkburn while they were assembled to offer up prayers of gratitude for their deliverance from danger.

This priory of Brinkburn was founded in the reign of Henry I. by a certain Sir William de Bertram, Baron of Mitford, by Morpeth, who endowed it liberally from his extensive lands. Its monks were of the order of St. Augustine. Of their history little is known, but it must have been troublous enough, and there is reason to think that they were more than once under the necessity of flight. Having resolved to build a church, the Lord of Mitford determined that it should be such a one as would do honour to his name. The present extensive remains still speak eloquently of the original beauty of the edifice. Of the church, partially restored in 1858 by the present owners of the estate, the Cadogan family, it has been remarked that, “the richest Norman work is here inextricably blended with the purest Early English, and the fabric must be regarded as one of the most fascinating specimens of the transition from one to the other that there is in the country.” Out of the ruins of the monastery, and above the cellars in which the monks may have hidden themselves in times of trouble, the present manor house of Brinkburn has been built. It stands not far from the banks of the Coquet, which are here somewhat narrow and steep, with rocky projections, and with no route for the angler except in the bed of the stream, or amid an almost impenetrable confusion of shrubs and brambles and trees. At one point the piers of a Roman bridge may be discerned when the water is low; there is a quaint old watermill by the side of the stream; at a spot but a short distance away, it is averred by a pleasant tradition, the Northumbrian fairies were buried, and there they sleep, like King Arthur under the castle of Sewingshields, until faith shall return to the earth.

The most widely known of all the villages below Rothbury is Weldon Bridge, at which one arrives when the Coquet has left Brinkburn Woods. It is the main resort of those anglers who love quiet fishing, and are not adventurous enough to make their way into the hills. Much has it been besung by the poets of the craft. “At Weldon Bridge,” says one—

It is but a little place, this Weldon Bridge, with a large inn, before whose doors the river flows in gentle music. For the last two or three miles the stream has been characterised by the most capricious bendings, and henceforth, but with rather larger sweeps, it preserves the same wilful habit until it reaches the sea. There are pleasant walks along its banks down to Felton, sometimes diverging into low-lying woods, sometimes climbing the hillsides among farms, and occasionally leading to some ancient ford. At Felton itself the hills close in more narrowly, and the pleasant little village stands on a declivity amongst trees, whilst the river streams through a rocky pass. There is a dam at Felton which furnished material for rather a feeble joke to the late Frank Buckland. He found the fish falling back exhausted from vain attempts to leap the weir, and he posted up a “notice to salmon and bull trout,” telling them to go down the river and take the first turn to the right, when they would find good travelling water up stream, and assuring them of the good will of the Duke of Northumberland, who meant to make a ladder for them by-and-bye. The fact that an inspector of fisheries, like Buckland, should have believed that salmon went up the Coquet with the bull trout is a curious illustration of the indeterminate ideas which have until lately prevailed on the subject of the varieties of fish by which this river is frequented.

Felton is one of those villages at which it is pleasant to spend a night. Its bridge is almost as beautifully situated as that of Bettws-y-Coed. One stands upon it in the evening, and leans one’s arms on the parapet, and looks towards the hills which environ it, and the comfortable village inn, and the quiet cottages, and feels how glorious a land is this England in which we live. There is nothing else to do or to enjoy, unless the river is low, as Frank Buckland saw it, and the fish are crowding up the stream; and then the sight is one that is for the existing moment very exciting and is afterwards difficult to forget.

Felton is an ancient place. The old religion lingers there. The Protestant Reformation scarcely penetrated to north Northumberland, and many of the chief families of the district are still attached to the more ancient forms of faith. Attached to Felton Park is the Roman Catholic chapel of St. Mary. There are remains of a more antique edifice of the same faith about two miles away, the Church of St. Wilfred of Gysnes, given to the canons of Alnwick in the twelfth century. Felton is on the old Northern Coach Road, and is not now far away from the rail. Whosoever desires to make acquaintance with the whole of the Coquet should alight at the neighbouring station of Acklington. He may then go downward to Warkworth, to Amble, and the sea; or he may go upward to Brinkburn, to Rothbury, and the moors.

From Felton until Warkworth is in sight there is little over which one need linger. The country is level more or less, and the river seems to flow in a deep trench, with a fringe of trees on either side of it. At one place it comes through a deep break in the solid rock, which seems as if it must originally have been quarried. One speculates in vain as to the mighty force of the water by which such passages must have been hewn. These clefts for rivers are not uncommon, but they are incomprehensible. The water, one is compelled to feel, was but a minor element in their formation. A mile and a half from Warkworth there is another weir, a great straight wall of cement, with a passage for fish on either side. Yet though the fish may go up to left or right, as they may choose, there is what persons addicted to sport might call “an even chance” in connection with their coming down. If they take the ladder to the right they will get off to sea, but if they come down to the left they will fall into a trap, and will, in all probability, be eaten on French dinner tables as salmon. For, at Warkworth, or within a short distance of it, is the great fishery of Mr. Pape, who has not only the weir to assist his operations, but has the right—acquired by paying a rent to the Duke of Northumberland—to stop up one of the fish passes at the extremities of the weir, which privilege he exercises so ingeniously that every fish that chooses the left side of the river for its downward passage gets into his trap, from which it may be lifted out at will.

Can Edmund Spenser ever have been at Warkworth? If not, how does he come by this description?—

Except as regards the little stream and the sacred fountain this is accurately descriptive of the hermitage at Warkworth. The Coquet is here a tolerably broad river indeed, so that to reach the lowly hermit’s cell one must make employment of the boatman’s art. A little church hewn out of rock, and with a certain architectural skill—that is the famous hermitage of Warkworth. A wood grows high above it; there is a pleasant walk by the riverside below; and above the cave there are some steps by which the hermit is supposed to have ascended to his garden ground. The Hermitage is, as Bishop Percy says—

Never did hermit choose a lovelier spot for his orisons; but this hermit of Warkworth was a man of industry and taste. He used the hammer and the chisel well. He made for himself a chapel, a confessional, and a dormitory, and none of these did he leave without ornament. There is a groined roof, and there is a rood above the doorway, and there is the recumbent figure of a lady with upraised hands. Whosoever chooses to weave legends about the hermitage of Warkworth is at liberty to do so, for nothing is certainly known of the hermit. The received tradition is to be found in Percy’s “Reliques,” where a member of the family of Bertram by mistake slays his sweetheart and his brother, and expiates his double crime by isolating himself from his kind. The Coquet is very beautiful here, with a mile walk through woods and meadow lands. After the Hermitage a sweet bend of the river brings Warkworth Castle in sight. It stands high up on the summit of grassy slopes, which have a few shrubs scattered about them. Here it was that, according to Shakespeare’s narrative of events, Henry Hotspur read the letter of “a pagan rascal—an infidel,” who would not join him in his designs against the Crown. The next scene is in the Boar’s Head Tavern, Eastcheap, with Poins and Prince Hal. Shakespeare was so far adherent to fact that Hotspur actually lived at Warkworth Castle. Edward III. had conferred it on the second Lord Percy, and until the middle of the fifteenth century the Percies preferred Warkworth to Alnwick. The Castle is one of the most beautiful and perfect ruins in England. It is not only finely situated, but is unique in design, suggesting less of strength than of taste in constructing a palace which must also be a stronghold. A living novelist, the best of our story tellers, has made Warkworth the starting-point of one of his Christmas tales, and has most admirably conveyed to the reader the feeling of the place. Whom should I mean but Mr. Walter Besant? The church where his hero did penance, and where his heroine bravely stood beside her lover, is at the foot of the village street, which slopes upward to the height on which the Castle stands. Just beyond the church is the great stone archway through which the town must be entered, standing at the inner side of the bridge over the Coquet stream. Altogether, the village does not amount to much. It has a few good inns, and a few old-fashioned cottages. But it is as sweet a place as is to be found in all the countryside, and is therefore much in favour with persons in search of a brief, quiet holiday.

In Warkworth, small as it is, one feels everywhere the influence of the past. History seems to keep guard over it as an important part of its story. In 737 it was conferred by King Ceowulph on the monastery of Lindisfarne. The town was burnt in 1174 by the army of William the Lion, who was something of a poltroon. King John visited the place in the thirteenth century, and did much mischief farther up the river. General Forster and his Jacobites were here in 1715. That very Mr. Patten who is a principal figure in Mr. Besant’s “Dorothy Forster” writes:—“It may be observed that this was the first place where the Pretender was so avowedly pray’d for and proclaimed as King of these realmes.”

From the turrets of Warkworth Castle one looks over a wide expanse of land and sea. The coast line is visible for great distances, beyond Alnmouth and Dunstanborough on the one hand, and almost to Tynemouth on the other. The great towers of Alnwick are in sight, and mile on mile of the most fertile land in Northumberland, and mile on mile of rabbit-haunted sandhills by the sea. Just beyond the Castle the land slopes downward, past a cottage or two, and a little wood, and a great clump of whin-bushes, to the Coquetside, and then the river flows through flat marsh-land until the small seaport town of Amble is reached. I have never seen those Essex salt marshes in which Mr. Baring-Gould lays the scene of his powerful “Mehalah,” but whenever I read the book I am reminded of the country from Warkworth to the sea. Amble has grown up on a steep above the river; but there are flat spaces all round about it, and the river seems to stagnate where barges and schooners lie grounded in the mud, and beyond the harbour there are great level fields between “the bents” and the sea. Not a cheery place, by any means. Amble is one of the smaller outlets of the Northumberland coal trade. In very early days the Romans had some sort of encampment here, and in the Middle Ages Amble had its Benedictine monastery. It is now an exceedingly prosaic little town, with a harbour quite out of proportion to its size, and with an evident intention of “getting on.”

“The bents” are the grass-covered sandhills which time and the winds have piled up between the ancient landmarks and the present limits of the tide. They rise to very considerable heights, and stretch, in great undulations, along many a mile of shore. The Coquet flows down between them to a wide waste of sand when the sea is out, and one may trace its waters, should they be discoloured by flood, on either side of the Coquet Island, which the river must have worn from the mainland very long ago. The island is a low, level strip, containing some sixteen acres of ground. It has a peculiar history of its own. There was a monastery upon it in the seventh century, and here the Abbess of Whitby is said to have met St. Cuthbert, who, for this occasion, had overcome his generally invincible dislike to women. St. Cuthbert’s own island is in sight from the Coquet, and if the Farnes were not in the way one’s range of vision might extend to Lindisfarne. In later times than those in which Cuthbert taught religion to a rude people the hermit of Warkworth had a rival hermit in the recluse of Coquet Isle; a far more dismal place to reside in, for all around it rage the terrible winter storms of the North Sea. Persons interested in the art of “smashing” may be interested to hear that Coquet Island was resorted to by the makers of false coins—“hard hedds” they were called in those days—so early as 1567. The place was taken by the Scots during the Civil Wars, and there its history ends, except so far as it is continued by shipwreck and disaster at sea. On Coquet Island a lighthouse now stands, tall and white, so that its walls may be seen far away over the sea in the daytime, and its lamps for many a rood at night. Gulls and terns and puffins and guillemots play around it and make their nests amid its sandy turf; and there comes “the dunter,” as the fishermen call it, the porpoise as it is called in more ordinary speech, to devour the bull trout as it is making towards the comparative safety of the Coquet waters. All this may be changed a few years hence, for Amble is developing its trade, and hereafter masts of assembled shipping, and a black prospect of “coal-shoots,” may be the characteristic features of Coquet mouth.

Aaron Watson.

KEILDER MOORS (WITH PEEL FELL TO THE RIGHT).