Among the Fells—The Weel—Caldron Snout—High Force—Gibson’s Cave—Bow Leys—Middleton-in-Teesdale—The Lune and the Balder—Scandinavian Names—Cotherstone Cheese—History in Teesdale—Scott’s Description of the Tees—Egliston Abbey—Greta Bridge—Dickens and Mr. Squeers—Brignal Banks and Rokeby—The Village of Ovington—Gainford—Pierce Bridge—High and Low Coniscliffe—Croft—Yarm—The Industries of the Tees—Stockton—Middlesbrough—The Sea.

“You can stand in fower keaunties at yance at Caldron Snout,” said the companionable whip whom I had engaged to drive me, for such distance as the roads went, towards the first joyous springing up of the Tees at Cross Fell. The statement was a palpable exaggeration; no mere biped can stand in four counties at once; the most that is practicable is to straddle from one county to another. But from Caldron Snout the nearest point of Cumberland is distant at least five miles; so that only the counties of Durham, Yorkshire, and Westmorland touch each other where this marvellous waterfall pours through its rocky and precipitous gorge. However, the information was passably accurate. From the natives of Upper Teesdale no exact knowledge is to be extracted, by hook or by crook. They are chiefly remarkable for what they don’t know. From Middleton, Cross Fell was five miles away—six miles, ten miles, fifteen miles, and so on, through an ever-lengthening road. A landlord, who was really not stupid-looking, and who was certainly not indifferent to matters of business, was unable to name the beck which flows within a few yards of his own door. “You will have h’ard o’ th’ High Force?” queried a Middletonian. “It’s a famous place, is th’ High Force. Well, no; I’ve never seen it myself; but I’ve lived five miles from it all my life, an’ it’s a fine, famous place is th’ High Force.” A fair sample of what the inhabitant of Upper Teesdale knows, or cares to know. This singular incuriousness is almost general. The facts of Nature are accepted as matters of course, and without inquiry. The report of the adventurous traveller is enough. In the first fifty miles of wandering by Tees-side I encountered only one man who was proud of his information, and this related exclusively to the places of public entertainment in the village of Yarm. Mr. Samuel Weller’s knowledge of London was not more extensive and peculiar. In a slow, cautious, and yet eager style of speaking, he gave a detailed and exhaustive account of every public-house in the village, with sidelong glances at the characters of the various landlords, and an evidently cultivated criticism of the quality of the refreshment supplied by each.

The long ridge of Cross Fell was grey and cloudlike, as seen in the morning sunshine, from where our pair of horses finished their journey at the Green Hurth Mines. The intervening space of undulating moor was as parched and brown as if some sudden flame had swept across it; and where the clouds moved slowly across the grey-blue of the sky, long bands of dark shadow fell, so intense as to lend the brightness of contrast to what otherwise might itself have seemed to be a mass of shade. Not a single tree was in sight, but only whin-bushes and their yellow bloom. A white gleam of water in occasional hollows of the hills indicated the sluggish beck which divides Durham from Cumberland; and to the left, in a winding course well marked by the depression of the moorlands, the Tees wandered towards Caldron Snout, flanked by the steep side of Dufton Fell. It is here but a thin and narrow stream on dry summer days, but in times of rain it broadens and swells with an amazing suddenness, rushing downwards with a great roar and tumult of waters, so unexpected, sometimes, and with a character so much resembling the opposite phenomenon of the bore on the Severn, that holiday visitors, inapprehensive of calamity, have before now been carried headlong over the terrible cataract of High Force.

The guide-book accounts of Upper Teesdale are mainly remarkable for their singular inattention to facts, and their following of each other. “Murray” confidently places High Force at a distance of five miles below the source of the river at Cross Fell. As a plain matter of fact, it is five miles from High Force to Caldron Snout, a much more amazing waterfall, and there are more than seven miles as the crow flies between Caldron Snout and Tees Head. It is a country bare of inhabitants and abounding in game. There is no village beyond Langdon Beck, where we begin the ascent of the moors. The Tees is joined by numerous little streams before it leaves Cumberland, and flows through the four or five miles of stern valley where Westmorland and Durham face each other. Just before reaching the wild extremity of Yorkshire it thrusts out a broad arm through a deep, long recess of the hills, and “as with molten glass inlays the vale.” The Weel is the odd and unaccountable name which has been given to this winding lake. It lies, white and weird and still, where scarcely even the winds can reach it; and so deserted is it that not so much as a single wild fowl breaks the surface of its ghastly calm. There is henceforth no more rest to the Tees water during the whole of its curiously devious journeying to the sea. Below the Weel it tumbles with desperate tumult over Caldron Snout, foaming down into a pool two hundred feet beneath. Had Southey beheld this waterfall when it was in flood he would scarcely have had the heart to write of the Falls of Lodore. Here there are no mossy rocks or sheltering trees to dapple the scene with their brightness and shadow. The river dashes in a succession of leaps over the bare basalt, swirling and boiling after such manner as easily explains the name given to this most lonely and most splendid of English cataracts, where the creamy waters—

Here the Tees, in a succession of violent cascades, makes a descent, as we have seen, of two hundred feet. At High Force it falls by only seventy-five feet; but, whereas the lonelier cataract is a long and broken slope, the water at High Force falls with plummet-like directness, in a vast broad sheet when the river is in flood, in two straight white columns when the floods are subsiding, and in a single glittering fall when the river is at its normal height. Here the contrast between the Yorkshire and the Durham side of the Tees first makes itself decisively felt. The steep but still gradual declivity of the Durham side is veiled in woods of birch and beech and fir; on the Yorkshire side the basalt descends sheer to the river’s bed, and beyond and above it there is a bare expanse of unprofitable fields, darkened here and there by patches of whin-bush and long streaks of broom. This barren character is maintained, with a gradual decrease of sternness, until the little town of Middleton-in-Teesdale comes in sight.

Middleton is a long, straggling town, starting away from a stone bridge over the Tees, and climbing far away up the sides of the hills. It is built entirely of stone, even to the roofs and the chimneys. This is a peculiarity of all the houses in Upper Teesdale. Slates, in small quantities, have penetrated thus far into the wilds; but of baked clay, otherwise than in the form of pottery, there is no suggestion until the village of Cotherstone is reached, whence emanates the famous Cotherstone cheese. Below the bridge at Middleton the Tees leaves behind it the stern Yorkshire moorlands and scaurs, the hills on either bank withdrawing themselves that it may glitter in the sunbeams over a pebbly bed. Henceforth, until it approaches the large towns, and when it encounters the sea-tides, it flows, broad and open, past richly-wooded banks. In all England there is no more pleasant valley than that which the Tees waters between Middleton and Pierce Bridge. There is an almost equal beauty in the valleys of its numerous tributaries. “All the little rills concealed among the forked hills” have their individual features of loveliness, and hide sweet secrets of their own. About a mile below Middleton the river Lune ripples sunnily down into the Tees. Rising in Westmorland, it flows across that portion of Yorkshire which interposes itself between Westmorland and Durham, wearing one of the deepest of channels for itself, and giving token of frequent floods in the large stones by which its bed is thickly strewn. The river Lune is a favourite stream for trout, but it is still more renowned as a spawning ground for salmon; for as that kingly fish cannot ascend the Tees beyond the seventy-foot precipice at High Force, and as some of the higher tributaries are polluted with water from the lead mines, the Lune and the Balder, a smaller stream which flows into the Tees at Cotherstone, are almost the only accessible breeding beds.

“Fish! I should think so!” says a man who has fishings to let. “Why, there are times in the year when you could take salmon out by the armful.” To the remark that this is not the time when salmon ought to be taken, he replies that there are good trout at any time of the year; and a very cursory observation of the Tees proves this to be true. The keen observation of Sir Walter Scott led him to remark on the blackness of this river. Coming down from the moorlands, it is thickly stained by the peat; but the peaty colour does not in fact obscure the clearness of the water, and looking down from above, one may everywhere see the fish shooting athwart the stream in little shoals. The river is exceedingly well preserved; indeed, on one side it is in the hands of the Duke of Cleveland, on the other it is well tended by Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, the Earl of Strathmore, and Sir Talbot Constable. Nevertheless, fishing is to be had on easy terms—from Henry Ludgate, of Winston, for example, who was formerly gamekeeper to the Earl of Brownlow, and who now keeps a public-house and writes verses. His political ideas take that turn, he observes, and the visitor to Henry’s hostelry may hear some of the verses repeated if he should be so minded as to listen to them.

There are no towns on the Tees until one of the most horrible in all England is reached—Stockton, to wit; but there are innumerable villages. Some of these are quite remarkable for their cleanliness and beauty. Romaldkirk, the second village from Middleton, on the Yorkshire side, is an incomparable village, far scattered, but bound together by a plenitude of trees. Romaldkirk—anciently “Rum auld kirk,” a serious-minded old villager observed, with a trenchant faith in his etymology—is noticeable not only for its combination of all the charms that an English village can possess, but also on account of its parish church and its parish stocks. The stocks are unique, indeed. Shackles of this ancient description are usually of wood; but the stocks at Romaldkirk are bars of iron, fastened in stone posts, and ingeniously bent so that one of the bars, locked down on the other, will imprison two pairs of feet. In winter the parish stocks of Romaldkirk must have been the most uncomfortable parish stocks in all England. The villagers preserve them now with genuine and reasonable pride, and the oldest inhabitant sits upon them and relates sad stories of the last persons who were imprisoned therein. The church has been so little restored that it remains one of the finest examples of early ecclesiastical architecture. It is unusually large for so small a village, a fact which is explained by its erection by the Barons Fitzhugh, who were buried here whenever they chanced to die in their beds. The building dates from the twelfth century, and is in the Early English style. One of the Lords Fitzhugh is kept in remembrance by a statue in chain-armour, still contemplated by the villagers with a mixture of awe and delight.

The Fitzhughs are again in evidence at the village of Cotherstone, two miles further down the Tees. They had a castle there, of which a small portion still remains, bearing the same proportion to a complete feudal castle that an odd brick will bear to a modern house. Cotherstone is a smart, businesslike village, for these parts. Some of its stone roofs have a coping of red tiles, the first to be seen in Upper Teesdale. It has recently built itself a very pretty little church. Above all, it is renowned for its cheese. This cheese of Cotherstone is in shape similar to Stilton; but, however long Stilton cheese may be kept, it can never approach that of Cotherstone in aroma. A Cotherstone cheese, truly, requires a large room all to itself; it is not the kind of cheese that one can live with, even for the short space of lunch; it is a militant sort of cheese—fit to defeat armies. Those who produce it were formerly thought to be rather pronounced rustics by the inhabitants of Teesdale. They were called “Cotherstone calves,” and uncomplimentary references were made to the strength of their heads; but the School Boards have changed all that, and a young Cotherstone calf now speaks with a certain air of refinement, and is not above feeling pleasure in giving information to the intruding stranger.

The Tees is not a river of traditions and memories. It must have a marvellous history, indeed, but it is, for the most part, unknown. Up among the fells, where it rises, one is constantly in danger of falling into pits in which the Romans or the Britons worked for lead; there is scarcely a space of fifty yards by the present roadside which does not bear traces of former mining; from which one surmises that the very road over which one travels has existed from the time when Rome conquered Britain for the sake of the metals which it was supposed to contain. The Watling Street approached the Tees at Greta Bridge; the Leeming Lane went through the river at Pierce Bridge, to cross the Watling Street near Middleton Tyas, in Yorkshire. There are almost innumerable remains of Roman camps and British defences; but, nevertheless, there is no history to speak of. When Sir Walter Scott sought a story with which to connect the scenery of the Tees he went back no further than to the conflict between the Cavaliers and Roundheads. The records of this wide district have, in fact, perished; between the present population and that of the earlier centuries of the Christian era there is no relationship of blood and no inheritance of tradition. The solitary fragment of the Castle of the Fitzhughs is more like a satirical commentary on the past than its memorial.

The Balder joins the Tees at Cotherstone; it is a shady little river flowing through a deep ravine. The Tees itself is at this point exceedingly lovely, streaming in a fine curve from beneath overhanging woods, and winding past a quaint old mill, which nestles by the waterside under high banks that are crowned by a tall fringe of trees. There is, probably, no English river which journeys for so many miles through such beautiful and unbroken woods. From the slope which is occupied by the village of Cotherstone one may see the domes of the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle, rising out of what appears to be a vast forest, interspersed here and there with patches of cultivated ground. No sparkle of water is anywhere visible in the whole wide landscape, but the course of the Tees may be traced by a wavy and depressed line in the woodland verdure; and one guesses how, over many a mile, the bright river is making a sunshine in the shady place.

“Romantic Deepdale” joins the Tees a little above Barnard Castle. It is such a tributary as Wordsworth speaks of, a

Deepdale Burn winds away across Yorkshire, over Bowes Moor, and to the borders of Westmorland, through one of the most lovely valleys in the whole of the north country.

“Barnard Castle standeth stately upon Tees,” says Leland. Stately it is to this day, though it is no more than a group of ruined towers and crumbling walls, and though where the Tees must have flowed deep and wide from below the castle rock there is now at ordinary seasons only a thin stream, threading its way through what might very well be mistaken for a stone-yard. Before the castle is reached we have, in fact, come to the first salmon weir, which, besides its other purpose, is employed to divert the river to the service of industry.

From Barnard Castle these weirs become very frequent, and are, in all cases but this, an addition to the attractions of the stream. It was the weir just below Barnard Castle that supplied Creswick with a subject for one of his most famous and successful pictures. The artist visited the town very frequently, and stayed there for weeks on end; wherefore he is still well remembered by some of the older inhabitants, not always with that kindliness which one would have been glad to associate with his name.

Barnard Castle is one of the oddest and most interesting towns in the North. There is a wholly individual character in its buildings, as if its architects had devised a style of their own. Few of the houses are older than the period of Elizabeth, but they are almost all of them of respectable age. The building material is stone in all cases, and the houses are unusually high and substantial, often of four and sometimes of five stories. On either bank below the castle they are built down into the bed of the river, and as, in Scott’s words, the Tees here “flows in a deep trench of solid rock,” the houses by the riverside descend as much below the level of the street as they rise above it. Yet despite the stoutness and the elaboration of these buildings, the riverside streets present that appearance of misery and squalor which seems inevitable in every manufacturing town, however limited may be the field of its industry. Dwellings which were clearly built for persons of wealth and position are let as tenements, and, there is, consequently, an odd contrast between their stateliness and the dress and appearance of those who lounge about their doors. However, the wide central street of Barnard Castle, sloping down from the Market Place to the river, still preserves an air of old-time respectability, and has the sleepy aspect of a country town, as if it had dozed away a century [Pg 205]
[Pg 206]or two without activity or change. There is in this street a remarkable old Elizabethan house, in which Oliver Cromwell is said to have lodged himself for a while.

The Castle, which enclosed a circuit of six acres or more, was built by Bernard Baliol, a son of that Guy Baliol whom I have had occasion to mention in connection with Bywell-on-Tyne. A descendant of Bernard climbed to the Scottish Throne, doing homage for the Crown at Newcastle to the first Edward. Edward Baliol did like homage to Edward III. for the crown and kingdom of Scotland. It was a short and unfortunate dynasty which the Baliols founded, brought to an end by the battle of Bannockburn. John Baliol presumed too much on his independence as a king, wherefore his patron, Edward I., seized upon his castle and his English estates, and the stately building on the banks of the Tees was given to the Beauchamps of Warwick. Thence it passed by marriage into the hands of the Nevilles, and was part of the dower of Anne Neville, the daughter of the King-maker, when she married the scheming politician who was to become Richard III. Gloucester not only dwelt here for some time, but left decided marks of his tenancy, the latest portions of the building being held by antiquarians to have been erected under his superintendence. Since 1592 Barnard Castle has been a ruin, the survey of that year exhibiting it as tenantless, mouldering, and weather-worn, “the doors without locks, the windows without glass.”

Below Barnard Castle there is an open space of greensward extending over a few acres, and then the river, after falling over Creswick’s salmon pass, plunges once more into the woods. Between this point and the village of Wycliffe lies the most lovely scenery of the Tees. At about a mile from Barnard Castle, on the Yorkshire side, Thor’s Gill flows into the river through a deep ravine, and out of the neighbouring trees rise the impressive ruins of Egliston Abbey. Tired indeed of the world must have been those who came to this wild and lonely place for service and prayer. With Thor’s Gill beside them, and the Tees far down below, in the front of their dwelling, they would look in all other directions over miles of barren moor, now subdued and cultivated by the plough. In time of flood the noise of waters must have drowned the intoning of their psalms, for at this section of its course the river is confined between rocky precipices, and ploughs its way over an amazing bed of that marble for which Barnard Castle formerly had a sort of fame.

There is a fine stone bridge below the Abbey, of one enormous span, with the river flowing a hundred feet beneath,

The Abbey of Egliston was founded about the beginning of the thirteenth century, and was dedicated to St. Mary and St. John the Baptist. Its inhabitants were the Premonstratensian or White Canons, whose alleged object was to ensure a pure and contemplative life, and who, in coming here, certainly removed themselves from the reach of worldly temptations, and secured plenteous leisure for meditative calm. They must have seemed like ghosts amid these woodlands, their dress being a long white cassock, a rochet, a white cloak, and a white cap. They are supposed to have been the schoolmasters of John Wycliffe, who was born some four or five miles away, and who would find only one other place of education within his reach. In Scott’s time some portions of the religious house attached to the Abbey were still habitable, and until quite recently a hermit dwelt in one of the chambers; but the progress of decay has, during the last five or six years, been exceedingly rapid, and before long, probably, this interesting ruin will be no more than a heap of grey stones. At my own recent visit parts of the walls were being removed lest they should fall in, and the materials were being employed in some farm buildings near. There were signs of impending collapse elsewhere, and only such restorations as would be a disfigurement could now save what remains of the Abbey for future generations.

About two miles from Egliston, still on the Yorkshire side, is the fine domain of Rokeby Park, along one side of which the Greta flows to the Tees. Greta Bridge is known to all lovers of literature through the mention of it which is made by Dickens. It was there that Nicholas Nickleby descended from the coach which had brought him thus far on his way towards Dotheboys Hall. “About six o’clock that night he and Mr. Squeers and the little boys and their united luggage, were all put down together at the George and New Inn, Greta Bridge.” Dickens insists that whilst he was not exaggerating the cruelties practised on boys at schools resembling Dotheboys Hall, Mr. Squeers was the representative of a class and not of an individual. This is a view of the facts that the people around Greta Bridge cannot be induced to accept, and there is no doubt that the novelist really did—without intending it, probably—very serious injury to one who is held by those who knew him to have been a very estimable man.

There is now no one living to whom a relation of the facts can give pain, and so they shall be stated briefly here. The school which has been generally accepted as the subject of the great novelist’s savage exposure was situated at Bowes, four miles from Greta Bridge. Bowes is no more than one straggling street, stretching away towards the desolation of Stanmore, and the school which was identified with Dotheboys Hall is the last house in the village, which lies along the Roman road of the Watling Street. The place was kept by a Mr. Shaw, who is said to have died of a broken heart. He had “only one eye,” as Dickens remarked of his grim tyrant; he had also a wife and a daughter who assisted him in the management of the school. So far he “realises the poster,” as an actor would say. There is no doubt, either, that his school was visited, and that he was seen by Dickens and by Hablot Browne. The one eye was in itself, unfortunately, a sufficient means of identification, there being no other one-eyed schoolmaster within any known distance of Greta Bridge. Dickens may have meant no more than to make use of this personal characteristic, combined with characteristics derived from other sources, as in the almost equally unlucky Miss Moucher case; but he had so associated a one-eyed schoolmaster with a place not far from Greta Bridge that no amount of explanation could remove the impression that Mr. Squeers was intended for Mr. Shaw, or could repair what was unquestionably an injury to one who stood high in the good opinion of his neighbours. All the members of the Squeers group of characters, indeed, were identified with persons then living in or around Bowes. John Browdie, for instance, is said to have been a farmer named Brown, and of the Browns there are still several families among the substantial farmers of the district. Of the good-feeling of which Mr. Shaw was the subject there are evidences still remaining in the resentment which is felt by the older inhabitants of Bowes when any inquiry is made as to Dotheboys Hall. “You’d better gan and inquire somewheere else,” one of these remarked when questioned on the subject. “Yow folks come here asking all manner of questions, and then you gan and write bowks about us.” The name of Dickens is absolutely detested by some of those who know the circumstances. As to the lady who was identified with Fanny Squeers, and who died but recently, she is declared to have been distinguished by great kindness of heart, “the sort of woman a dog or a child leaps to instinctively.” In fact, however true it may have been that “Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality,” it seems to be placed beyond question by common testimony that this reality did not exist at the village of Bowes, though nothing whatever can now remove the impression that Dickens intended to represent the school of Mr. Shaw.

Besides the “George,” mentioned by the novelist, there is at Greta Bridge another well-known place of entertainment, the “Morritt Arms.” The village is scarcely of consequence, except as the site of a Roman station, of which the remaining indications are now “a grassy trench, a broken stone.” The Greta is between here and the Tees so beautiful a river that Scott exhausted upon it all his powers of description, both in verse and prose. Having skirted Rokeby Park, it sweeps over a shelf of rock under a moss-covered bridge half-hidden in trees, and there meets with the obstacle of gigantic rocks, which seem as if they had been carried down in some tremendous flood and piled together in the central bed of the stream. Round these the Greta swirls to the Tees in two long rushing curves when the river is high, but in quiet, dry seasons it has one channel only, down which it rushes impetuously out of the leafy shade into the open sunlight.

Two miles above Rokeby are those Brignal banks of which the poet sings—

The present mansion of Rokeby is modern, and occupies the site of a manor house which was burned down by the Scots after the battle of Bannockburn. The Rokebys were a powerful family in these parts up to the occurrence of the civil wars. It was a Rokeby who, according to Holinshed, defeated the insurrection of the Earl of Northumberland, in the time of Henry IV., and slew the earl. Scott gives the whole of the family pedigree in the notes to his poem, showing how the Rokebys were High Sheriffs of Yorkshire through many generations, as well as justiciaries, Secretaries of State, and members of Council. They were destroyed by their loyalty and the bad faith of the Stuarts, as was the case with so many other ancient families, and their estates, after passing through the hands of the Robinsons, have been in the possession of the Morritts through several generations.

There is a remarkable peel tower, with singularly light and graceful battlements, broken into varying heights, on the ridge of a hill just beyond the junction of the Greta with the Tees. It is now surrounded by farm buildings, but is much visited on account of the spectre called the Dobie of Mortham, a murdered lady whose blood the eye of strong faith may still see on the steps of the tower.

High above the Tees on the Durham side, when Mortham has been passed, may be seen the pretty village of Whorlton, the first red-tiled village that we have so far encountered on Tees-side. It is approached by an iron suspension bridge, which crosses the river at a point where its broad bed of solid rock is curiously broken into long uneven steps, giving it the appearance of having been quarried at some remote time, and making a series of falls that, instead of crossing the river, as ordinarily occurs, shelve along one side of it, and continue for long distances, turning the current in an almost indescribable way.

These singular breaks in the river bed mark the course of the Tees until the Yorkshire village of Wycliffe is reached, something over a mile from Mortham Tower. Except for the fact that the great Reformer was born here, the place is as unimportant as a newly-planted city in the American wilds; it consists, indeed, of no more than four or five scattered cottages, a parsonage, a church, and Wycliffe Hall. The parsonage is very large, and the church is very diminutive, seeming to be only an ornament of the parsonage grounds. But around this little church many of the Wycliffes lie buried, and among the monumental brasses there is one recording the death and the burial of the last of the name. Even yet, however, the Wycliffe blood is not extinct, for it flows in the veins of Sir Talbot Clifford Constable, the owner and tenant of Wycliffe Hall. If the “Morning Star of the Reformation” did not receive his first teaching at Egliston Abbey, as Dr. Vaughan has surmised, he must have ascended the hill from Wycliffe to where now stands the pretty village of Ovington, for here was formerly a priory of Gilbertine canons, though no traces of it now remain. Ovington stands higher than any other village on Tees-side, and from the level of its green the woods through which the river surges are far down below, so that even their highest tops do not reach to the crown of the ridge. Ovington is a right sweet and pleasant and prosperous village, much beloved of anglers, there being abundant fish. Nowhere is the Tees more shaded and beautiful, with its stream broken up into many currents by a series of wooded islands, on which the easy-going inadventurous fisher may lie under the leafy branches through torrid summer days.

Ovington is a village with a maypole in the middle of its green—a maypole with tattered garlands still clinging to its iron crown. The neat cottages all have their little gardens in front, and are roofed with rich brown tiles. There is a hostelry with the curious sign of “The Four Alls,” where one may find such entertainment as few villages in England can provide, and sit in rooms over the decoration of which an obviously Æsthetic taste has presided. The sign of “The Four Alls” is weather-stained unduly, but one may still discern pictures of a crowned king, with the motto, “I govern all;” of a soldier, with the motto, “I fight for all;” of a bishop, with the motto, “I pray for all;” and of a husbandman, with his motto of “I pay for all.” This is possibly a product of the native Yorkshire wit, of the same variety as that which has designed the Yorkshire coat of arms, “A flea, a fly, a flitch of bacon, and a magpie.”

The Tees has much loveliness but little variety between Ovington and Yarm; it has lost most of its wilder features, and—through many a winding curve, for it is an erratic river, bending and turning with a strange wilfulness—its deep woods

At Gainford, which clusters round a large village green, there is an air of rustic fashion and luxury, for here reside many prosperous persons who have places of business in Darlington, which is seven miles away. Gainford boasts of a medicinal spring, or spa. It is a pretty strong fountain of water, situated about half a mile from the village, and close to the banks of the Tees, which at this place has a pathway through the woods. It is affirmed of the Gainford spa that whilst the water has the usual “smell of rotten eggs” it is innocent of unpleasant taste, an asseveration which, having tested it, I cannot conscientiously confirm. The church of Gainford, it is stated in all the guide-books, is of great antiquity, having been built by Egred, Bishop of Lindisfarne, between the years 998 and 1018; but as a matter of fact scarcely anything of this old church remains, except a few sculptured stones and fragments of crosses which have been built, in an exceedingly olla podrida manner, into the porch of the present building, where I found displayed a carefully detailed statement of the week’s revenue, amounting to the sum of fifteen shillings and eightpence-halfpenny. On the Yorkshire bank, opposite to Gainford, there is the end of an ancient earthwork, which runs across country from the Swale to the Tees, and which is surmised to be older than the Roman conquest of Britain. At Gainford, Samuel Garth, the poet of the “Dispensary,” was born.

Two miles from this village, and by so much nearer to the wealthy “Quaker town” of Darlington, a noble stone bridge crosses the Tees, connecting the Yorkshire bank with the site of the ancient Roman station of Magis. Pierce Bridge carries the old Roman road—the Leeming Lane—from Durham to Yorkshire. Careless antiquaries call it the Watling Street, which, however, we left behind us at Greta Bridge. For twenty miles or so, or for an equal space on either side of the Tees, the Leeming Lane, which has various local designations, is probably the straightest road in all England. One may see it rising and falling for miles in front, always keeping the direct course, whatever may be the depressions in the land. At Pierce Bridge, which is famous for its fishing, and where the trout may be seen lightly disporting themselves, the forces under the Earl of Newcastle had a skirmish with those of Lord Fairfax in 1642, at the hottest period of the civil war. A mile further down the river is High Coniscliffe, which is quaintly situated above a sudden cliff, so that it seems as if the first buildings erected here must have been intended for defence. It is but a very little cluster of buildings, this High Coniscliffe, taking its name, perhaps, from the fact that the river banks hereabouts are much frequented by rabbits, as, indeed, is the case with the banks of the Tees from Rokeby downwards. The one prominent building is the church, which has the peculiarity of being seven times as long as it is broad. The other singularity is that the pillars supporting the arches of the nave are no more than six feet in height. Low Coniscliffe, two miles away, is a more humble place, with no appearance of a cliff to account for its designation, and with an aspect of old-world poverty such as is presented by no other place with which we have, so far, met. At this point the interest of the river is, for the present, exhausted, and its beauty is gone, for just beyond Low Coniscliffe there is a quarter of a mile or so of waterworks, stretching on either side of the main road to Darlington, the three towns of Stockton, Darlington, and Middlesbrough, here pumping their water from the Tees. Darlington itself we leave to our left, but pass the mansions of some of its wealthy men—the Peases, the Backhouses, the Frys—who, however much they may retain of the old Quaker simplicity, certainly make no striking exhibition of it in the character of their dwellings.

Three miles from “the Quaker town,” and a much greater distance from High Coniscliffe, as the river winds, is the ancient village of Croft, occupying both banks of the Tees. On the Yorkshire side is the famous spa, to which invalids resort to drink the waters and to take the baths, and where marvellous cures are said to have been effected in times past. There are four sulphureous springs, of a much more decided character than the one already visited at Gainford, and owing, it may be, some part of their attractiveness to the sweetness of their situation. Croft is very commonplace on the Durham and very lovely on the Yorkshire side. The stone bridge which connects the two portions of the village, built in 1676, is the finest which crosses the Tees at any part of its course. It is on the site of an older structure, which was deemed greatly important by Henry VIII., as “the most directe and sure way and passage for the king our Sovereign Lord’s army,” when it was necessary to march against the Scots. The present bridge has a series of seven ribbed arches of fair width, and is so substantial that it is likely to endure until it can boast a more than respectable antiquity.

Croft Church is a half-brown, half-grey old building of mixed materials and of most evident age. It has an appearance more worn and dilapidated even than its years warrant, though it was built at least as early as the fifteenth century, seeing that it contains a tomb of one Richard Clervaux, who died in 1492. The interior of the church has great architectural interest, and the exterior is, in its quaint way, one of those “things of beauty” which deserve to remain “joys for ever.” In this church Bishop Burnet may have listened to his first sermon, for it was at Croft that he was born.

The Lord of the Manor of Croft, by the way, formerly held his lands on the peculiar condition that he should meet every newly-appointed Bishop of Durham on Croft Bridge, and, presenting him with a rusty old sword, declare—“My lord, this is the sword which slew the worm-dragon, which spared neither man nor woman nor child.” Traditions of these worm-dragons are plentiful in the north of England. There was, for example, “the Lambton worm,” slain by an ancestor of the present Earl of Durham, which used to devour a maiden at a meal; and there was “the loathly worm of Spindleston Haugh,” with a similarly voracious appetite. The lands of Croft had evidently been given to some supposed dragon-slayer, and were continued to his descendants by the yielding up and the immediate return of the famous sword.

We are now more than ever reminded that the Tees is the dividing line of two counties. Though the river has constantly increased in width, all the towns from Croft downwards are situated more or less on each side of the stream. The first of these is the quiet and sleepy town of Yarm, with a single broad street on one side of the river, and a few scattered houses and windmills on the other. Up to Yarm the tide reaches, and here also the net-fishing for salmon begins, small cobles, with salmon-nets on board, being plentiful in the neighbourhood of Yarm Bridge. What else the people of Yarm do for a living in these days is not readily discernible. In former times they were shipbuilders on a limited scale, though they must have been exceedingly small vessels which could be launched in such a situation. Yet there must have been some period of great prosperity in the previous history of the place, as will be guessed from the fact that the houses are almost all of great width and height, and—as is evident from a peculiarity of style not seen elsewhere—were built with some thought of show. The one street of the place is of the width of three or four streets in the more crowded quarters of the larger towns lower down the Tees, and has in its centre an odd sort of Town Hall, like a large sentry-box on arches. At Yarm we set our faces towards the great, growing Tees-side towns, passing the pretty bridge at Blackwell, where Sir Henry Havelock-Allan has a beautiful seat. Already the smoke of great industries is darkening the atmosphere, and when the wind is still and the clouds are low, a black, unpleasant haze creeps over the face of the country and spreads itself far inland.

By the time it reaches Stockton Bridge the Tees has been transformed from one of the most wild and lovely to one of the most tame and repellent of existing rivers. Its soiled waters henceforth flow between banks of blast-furnace slag; unpleasant odours float about its shores; it is ploughed by great steamships; all around there is the smoke of furnaces, the noise of hammers, the ugliness of trade. Stockton is a town of ancient foundation, which, after sleeping beside the Tees for ages, suddenly woke up to find itself in the nineteenth century, and, full of the nineteenth century desire to “get on,” shook off its old apathy, measured itself against the age, deepened its river, built ships, smelted ironstone, cast and forged and manufactured, until it found itself accepted as one of the most spirited and enterprising of English towns. In the process of growth everything that may have been beautiful in its surroundings has been destroyed, and now, glorying in its ugliness, it flaunts its frightful aspect as one of its claims to consideration.

Stockton Manor was granted to the see of Durham after the Conquest. A fortress was built, as was so necessary in those days, and the place was visited in 1214 by King John. In the sixteenth century Stockton was a town to which a Bishop of Durham might retreat from the Plague. The castle was taken by the Parliamentarians in 1644, and destroyed, the only stone houses in Stockton a few years ago being such as were built from the castle walls. There is one fine street and a Borough Hall, but every other part of Stockton bears witness to the fact that a town which is engaged in growing and prospering has neither time nor inclination to attend to its looks. As to the growth of the last half century, there is only one town—the neighbouring Middlesbrough—by which it has been excelled.

At the beginning of the century Stockton had already a shipping trade, but one that could seem important only in the eyes of its 11,000 inhabitants. At that time the river kept a tortuous, shallow course until it arrived at the wide, sandy flats which stretched far eastward to the sea. The first improvement was a straightening of its course, which dates back to the year 1810. The effect was a heightening of the tide from eight to ten feet at Stockton Quay, and little short of a doubling of the shipping trade. The construction of the first public railway came just in time to encourage the town in its efforts at development. A Tees Conservancy was formed, with the consequence that the river was so dredged, banked up, and reformed generally, that Stockton is now not only a considerable port and an important manufacturing town, but a centre of shipbuilding, the vessels built here being as large as many of those which are constructed on the Tyne. Wealth and population have increased enormously, and there seems no necessary limit to further industrial development.

Any accurate description of Stockton is in many respects applicable to Middlesbrough, a still more wonderful town, which has, within living memory, sprung up close to the estuary of the Tees. Fifty years ago there was only a single farmstead where the great town of Middlesbrough now stands. The United States have few examples of such marvellous growth. At the census of 1831 there were 154 persons in Middlesbrough, and at the census of 1881 the population was 55,281. It was in 1830 that the present town was founded, on 500 acres of marshy land. It has been assisted both by enterprise and good fortune. Originally it was intended as a port for the shipping of coals; but iron was discovered in the Cleveland hills, and blast furnaces were built where it was supposed that only coal-staithes would be seen. The first ton of Cleveland ironstone was mined in 1850, and in sixteen years the output was no less than two and three quarter millions of tons. When the iron trade was declining, a decade since, Middlesbrough men set themselves to devise new methods of manufacturing steel, with the result that Middlesbrough steel is now in demand all over the world. Talent, enterprise, the bounty of Nature, have all combined to make of Middlesbrough one of our large centres of population and industry, and to bring about a growth so rapid as has not previously been witnessed in the history of our country.

The brief voyage down the Tees from Stockton to below Middlesbrough should be made in the night time, when clouds of smoke are shot through by columns of flame; when the furnace fires are blazing out into the darkness; when seething bars of iron, crushing and straining through the rolling-mills, make the forges look like some huge Vulcan’s smithy; when the steel converters are sending out a fiery rain; and when the Tees is reflecting all manner of strange lights and weird coruscations—an appalling sight to one not accustomed to such spectacles, but grand and deeply impressive and wonderfully characteristic of the age in which we live.

Middlesbrough has its fine docks, crowded with shipping. Where, a few years ago, the Tees spread itself over a broad estuary, the channel of the river has been divided from the wide stretch of mud and sand and creeping waves by a curving groin of slag; lines of light stretch downward as far as the eye can follow, guiding ships to the desired haven. Henceforth the Tees—

flows broadly onward to the Northern Sea.

During the last quarter of a century the river below Stockton has been constantly undergoing a process of enlargement and improvement, necessarily accompanied by a destruction of its former picturesque beauty. The work done is in the highest sense creditable to northern enterprise. The foundation stones of two great breakwaters were laid in 1863, these defences against the incoming waves being appropriately built of slag from the furnaces of Middlesbrough and Stockton. The large quantity of 443,000 tons of this material was deposited in a single year, and by 1874, when close upon £100,000 had been spent, it was possible to report that a shifting bed of sand had been replaced by a solid and immovable wall. The breakwaters have cost close upon a quarter of a million sterling at the present date, a sum well expended, for a fine harbour has now been constructed only less important than that of the Tyne. On good authority it has been declared that the recent improvements on the Tees are to be ranked amongst the most successful engineering works of the century.

Messrs. Besant and Rice have made the marvellous development of Middlesbrough the leading motive of one of their most striking novels. The mere history of the place is in itself a romance. So recently as in 1831 the place had only 154 inhabitants, and it has now, it is believed, considerably more than 60,000. Until iron was discovered in the Cleveland Hills the smelting works of the North of England were situated almost solely on the Tyne and the Wear. The finding of Cleveland iron made a vast change in the locale of a great industry, and covered the low-lying and desolate lands near the estuary of the Tees with mighty forges, and blast furnaces, and iron shipbuilding yards and crowded streets. Where, sixty years ago, a shallow stream wound down to the sea, with only an occasional house discernible along its banks, there is now one of the finest outlets of our commerce and manufactures, and a deep river flowing through thickly populated towns. And as regards development the end is not yet. It has seemed more than once that Middlesbrough would collapse almost as rapidly as it has grown up, but it has risen stronger from every depression, and some new invention or discovery has at each crisis brought its assurance of continued life and growth.

However, it is an unlovely Tees that the eye alights upon since the smoke of the blast furnaces came in sight. It would scarcely be possible for a river so beautiful in its upper reaches to undergo a more surprising and spirit-depressing change. Yet standing on the lofty quays at Middlesbrough and looking seaward, one is conscious of a throb of exhilaration, such as the hero of “Locksley Hall” must have felt when, imagining the future, he—

In the perpetual coming and going of great steamers, bringing in cargoes of “wheat and wine and oil,” and carrying out to all lands the produce of English industry and skill, there is a spectacle which very well atones for the destruction of some little picturesqueness here and there. What was bright and pleasant only is often enough in these cases replaced by what, when properly considered, is sublime.

Aaron Watson.