Return into Yorkshire—The Old Pedlar—Oh! for the Olden Time—“The Bible, indeed!”—An Emissary—Wild Boar Fell—Shunnor Fell—Mallerstang—The Eden—A Mountain Walk—Tan Hill—Brown Landscape—A School wanted—Swaledale—From Ling to Grass—A Talk with Lead Miners—Stonesdale—Work for a Missionary—Thwaite—A Jolly Landlord—A Ruined Town—The School at Muker—A Nickname—Buttertubs Pass—View into Wensleydale—Lord Wharncliffe’s Lodge—Simonstone—Hardraw Scar—Geological Phenomenon—A Frozen Cone—Hawes.

My next morning’s route took me back into Yorkshire by a way which, leaving the road to Kirkby Stephen on the right, approaches Nine Standards, High Seat, and the other great summits which guard the head of Swaledale. The sight of these hills, and the gradual succession of cultivation and woods by untilled slopes patched with gorse and bracken, impart an interest to the walk. A modern battlemented edifice—Hougill Castle—appears on the left, the residence of a retired physician, and beyond it the wild region of Stainmoor Forest; and here even upon its outskirts we can see how appropriate is the name Stonymoor.

When near the hills I overtook an old pedlar, and slackened my pace to have a talk with him. At times I had fancied my knapsack, of less than ten pounds’ weight, a little too heavy; but he, though aged sixty, carried a pack of forty pounds, and when in his prime could have borne twice as much. He took matters easily now; walked slowly and rested often. From talking about schools, he began to contrast the present time with the past. Things were not half so good now as in the olden time, when monasteries all over the land took proper care alike of religion and the poor. Where was there anything like religion now-a-days, except among the Roman Catholics? Without them England would be in a miserable plight; but he took comfort, believing from certain signs that the old days would return—that England would once more acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope.

“Never,” I replied; “that’s not possible in a country where the Bible circulates freely; and where all who will may read it.”

“The Bible!” he answered sneeringly—“the Bible! What’s the Bible? It’s a very dangerous and improper book for the people to read. What should they know about it? The Church is the best judge. The Bible, indeed!”

Such talk surprised me. I had heard that the Papists employ emissaries of all degrees in the endeavour to propagate their doctrines; but never met with one before who spoke out his notions so unreservedly; and I could have imagined myself thrown back some five hundred years, and the old fellow to be the spokesman in the Somersetshire ballad:

I began to defend the rights of conscience, when, as we came to the foot of the first great hill, the old packman advised me to reconsider my errors, bade me good day, and turned into a cottage; perhaps to sell calico; perhaps to sow tares for the keeper of the keys at Rome.

I made a cut-off, and came upon the road half way up the hill, leaving sultriness for a breezy elevation. Soon wide prospects opened all around me: vast green undulations, dotted with sheep and geese, swelling up into the distant hills and moorlands. That great group of heights on the right—Wild Boar Fell and Shunnor Fell—wherein Nature displays but few of her smiles, is the parent of not a few of Yorkshire’s dales, becks, and waterfalls. In those untrodden solitudes rise Swale and Ure; there lurks the spring from which Eden bursts to flow through gloomy Mallerstang, and transfer its allegiance, as we have seen, to other counties, and the fairest of Cumbrian vales. Our topographical bard, makes the forest of the darksome glen thus address the infant stream:

Talk of royal tapestries, what carpet can compare with the springy turf that borders the road whereon you walk with lightsome step, happier than a king, and having countless jewels to admire in the golden buds of the gorse? It is a delightful mountain walk, now rising, now falling, but always increasing the elevation; so cool and breezy in comparison with the sultry temperature of the road we left below. And the grouping of the summits around the broad expanse changes slowly as you advance, and between the shades of yellow and green, brown and purple, the darker shadows denote the courses of the dales. Wayfarers are few; perhaps a boy trudges past pulling a donkey, which drags a sledge laden with turf or hay; or a pedlar with crockery; but for miles your only living companions are sheep and geese.

With increasing height we have less of grass and more of ling, and at ten miles from Brough we come to the public-house on Tan Hill, situate in the midst of a desolate brown upland, in which appear the upreared timbers of coalpits, some abandoned, others in work. The house shows signs of isolation in a want of cleanliness and order; but you can get oaten bread, cheese, and passable beer, and have a talk with the pitmen, and the rustics who come in for a drink ere starting homewards with cartloads of coal. Seeing the numerous family round the hostess, I inquired about their school; on which one of the black fellows—a rough diamond—took up the question. There had been a dame school in one of the adjacent cottages, but the old ’oman gave it up, and now the bairns was runnin’ wild. ’Twasn’t right of Mr. ——, the proprietor of the mines, to take away 5000l. a year, and not give back some on’t for a school. It made a man’s heart sore to see bairns wantin’ schoolin’ and no yabble to get it. ’Twasn’t right, that ’t wasn’t.

Apparently an honest miner lived beneath that coaly incrustation, possessed of good sense and sensibility. I quite agreed with him, and recommended him to talk about a school whenever he could get a listener.

About a mile from the public-house the road leaves the brown region, and descends rapidly to the Swale, crossing where the stream swells in rainy weather to a noisy cataract, and Swaledale stretches away before us, a grand mountain valley, yet somewhat severe in aspect. Gentle, as its name imports, appears misapplied to a rushing stream; but a long course lies before it: past Grinton, past picturesque Richmond, ancient ruins, towers of barons, and cloisters of monks, and to the broad Vale of York, where, calmed by old experience, it flows at Myton gently into the Ure. And not only gentle but sacred, for Swale has been called the Jordan of Yorkshire, because of the multitudinous baptism of the earliest converts therein by Paulinus; “above ten thousand men, besides women and children, in one day,” according to the chronicler, who, perhaps to disarm incredulity, explains that the apostle having baptized ten, sent them into the stream to baptize a hundred, and so multiplied his assistants as the rite proceeded, while he prayed on the shore.

By-and-by we meet signs of inhabitants—a house or two; a few fields of mowing grass; the heaps of refuse at lead-mines, and our walk derives a pleasurable interest from the hourly change, the bleak, barren, and lonely, for the sheltered, the cultivated, and inhabited. More and more are the hill-sides wavy with grass as we descend, field after field shut in by stone fences, and the dalesmen are beginning to mow. The time of the hay harvest has come for the mountains: a month later than in the south. How beautifully the bright green contrasts with the dark purple distances, and softens the features of the dale! And as I looked from side to side, or around to the rear, as the fallen road made the hills seem higher, and saw how much Swaledale has in common with a valley of the Alps, I felt that here the desire for mountain scenery might be satisfied; and I found myself watching for the first field of grain with as much interest as I had watched for vines in the Val Mont Joie.

I overtook a party of lead-miners, boys and men, going home from work. The boys could read; but there was only one of them who really liked reading. “He’s a good quiet boy,” said the father; “likes to set down wi’ his book o’ evenin’s; t’others says they is tired. He can draw a bit, too; and I’d like well to send’n to a good skule; but I only gets two pounds a month, and that’s poor addlings.” And one of the young men wished that digging for lead didn’t make him so tired, for readin’ made him fall asleep, and yet he wanted to get on with his books. “It don’t seem right,” he added, “that a lad should want a bit o’ larnin’ and not get it.” I said a few words about the value of habit, the steady growth of knowledge from only half an hour’s application continued day after day at the same hour, and the many ways of learning offered to us apart from books. The whole party listened with interest, and expressed their thanks when we parted at the hamlet of Stonesdale. The lad thought he’d try. He’d emigrate, only his wage was too low for saving.

If I had the missionary spirit, I would not go to Patagonia or Feejee; but to the out-of-the-way places in my own country, and labour trustfully there to remove some of the evils of ignorance. Any man who should set himself to such a work, thinking not more highly of himself than he ought to think, would be welcomed in every cottage, and become assured after a while, that many an eye would watch gladly for his coming. One of my first tasks should be to go about and pull up that old pedlar’s mischievous tares, and plant instead thereof a practical knowledge of common things.

With unlimited supplies of stone to draw on, the houses of Stonesdale are as rough and solid as if built by Druids. Every door has a porch for protection against storms, and round each window a stripe of whitewash betrays the rudimentary ornamental art of the inmates. A little farther, and coming to the village of Thwaite, I called at the Joiners’ Arms for a glass of ale. The landlord, mistaking my voice for that of one of his friends, came hastily into the kitchen with a jovial greeting, and apparently my being a stranger made no difference, for he sat down and began a hearty talk about business; about his boyhood, when he used to run after the hounds; about his children, and the school down at Muker. I laughed when he mentioned running after the hounds, for, as I saw him, he was, as Southey has it, “broad in the rear and abdominous in the van.” His agility had been a fact, nevertheless. I praised the beer. That did not surprise him; he brewed it himself, out of malt and hops, too; not out of doctor’s stuff. I asked a question about Hawes, to which I was going over the Pass. “Oh!” said he, “it’s terribly fallen off for drink. I used to keep the inn there. A man could get a living in that day by selling drink; but now the Methodists and teetotallers have got in among ’em, and the place is quite ruined.” Manifestly my heavy friend looked at the question from the licensed victualler’s point of view. Concerning the school down at Muker, however he was not uncharitable. ’Twas a good school—a church school. There was a chapel of ease there to Grinton. Mr. Lowther did the preaching and looked after the school, and the people liked his teaching and liked his preaching. He brought the children on well, gals as well as the boys; that he did.

If, reader, you should go to Thwaite, and wish to have a chat with a jolly landlord, enquire for Matty John Ned, the name by which he is known in all the country round; remembering what happened in my experience. For when, late in the evening, I intimated to mine host of the White Hart at Hawes that Mr. Edward Alderson had recommended me to his house, he replied, doubtfully, “Alderson—Alderson at Thwaite do you say?”

“Yes, Alderson at Thwaite: a big man.”

“O-o-o-o-h! You mean Matty John Ned.”

Below Thwaite the dale expands; trees appear; you see Muker about three miles distant, the chief village of Upper Swaledale: still nothing but grass in the fields; and the same all the way to Reeth, ten miles from Muker. There you would begin to see grain. Not far from Thwaite I turned up a very steep, stony road on the right, which leads over the Buttertubs Pass into Wensleydale, and soon could look down on the village, and miles of Swaledale, and the hills beyond. Among those hills are glens and ravines, and many a spot that it would be a pleasure to explore, to say nothing of the lead mines, and the ‘gliffs’ of primitive manners; and any one who could be content with homely head-quarters at Muker or Thwaite might enjoy a roaming holiday for a week or two. And for lovers of the angle there are trout in the brooks.

The ascent is long as well as steep, and rough withal; but the views repay you every time you pause with more and more of the features of a mountain pass. There are about it touches of savage grandeur, and the effect of these was heightened at the time I crossed by a deep dark cloud-shadow which overspread a league of the hills, and left the lower range of the dale in full sunshine. For a while the road skirts the edge of a deep glen on the left; it becomes deeper and deeper; there are little fields, and haymakers at work at the bottom; then the slopes change; the heather creeps down; the beck frets and foams, sending its noise upward to your ear; screes and scars intermingle their rugged forms and variations of colour; a waterfall rushes down the crags; and when these have passed before your eyes you find yourself on a desolate summit.

More desolate than any of the heights I had yet passed over. A broad table-land of turf bogs, coffee-coloured pools, stacks of turf, patches of rushes, and great boulders peeping everywhere out from among the hardy heather. The dark cloud still hung aloft, and the wind blew chill, making me quicken my pace, and feel the more pleasure when, after about half an hour, the view opened into Wensleydale. A valley appears on the right, with colts and cattle grazing on the bright green slopes; the road descends; stone abounds; fences, large gate-posts, all are made of stone; the road gets rougher; and by-and-by we come to Shaw, a little village under Stag Fell, by the side of a wooded glen, from which there rises the music of a mountain brook. On the left you see Lord Wharncliffe’s lodge, to which he resorts with his friends on the 12th of August, for the hills around are inhabited by grouse. Yonder the walls and windows of Hawes reflect the setting sun, and we see more of Wensleydale, where trees are numerous in the landscape.

Then another little village, Simonstone, where, passing through the public-house by the bridge, we find a path that leads us into a rocky chasm, about ninety feet deep and twice as much in width, the limestone cliffs hung with trees and bushes, here and there a bare crag jutting out, or lying shattered beneath; while, cutting the grassy floor in two, a lively beck ripples its way along. A bend conceals its source; but we saunter on, and there at the end of the ravine, where the cliffs advance and meet, we see the beck making one leap from top to bottom—and that is Hardraw Scar. The rock overhangs above, hence the water shoots clear of the cliff, and preserves an irregular columnar form, widening at the base with bubbles and spray. You can go behind it, and look through the falling current against the light, and note how it becomes fuller and fuller of lines of beads as it descends, until they all commingle in the flurry below. Dr. Tyndall might make an observatory of this cool nook, the next time he investigates the cause of the noise in falling water, with the advantage of looking forth on the romantic and pleasing scene beyond. The geologist finds in the ravine a suggestive illustration on a small scale of what Niagara with thunderous plunge has been accomplishing through countless ages—namely, wearing away the solid rock, inch by inch, foot by foot, until in the one instance a river chasm is formed miles in length, and here, in the other, a pretty glen a little more than a furlong deep.

At the time I saw it, the quantity of water was probably not more than would fill a twelve-inch tube; but after heavy rains the upper stream forms a broad horseshoe fall as it rushes over the curving cliff. In the severe frost of 1740, when the Londoners were holding a fair on the Thames, Hardraw Scar was frozen, and, fed continually from the source above, it became at last a cone of ice, ninety feet in height, and as much in circumference at the base: a phenomenon that was long remembered by the gossips of the neighbourhood.

Hawes cheats the eye, and seems near, when by the road it is far off. On the way thither from Simonstone we cross the Ure, the river of Wensleydale, a broad and shallow, yet lively stream, infusing a charm into the landscape, which I saw at the right moment, when the evening shadows were creeping from the meadows up the hill-sides, and the water flashed with gold and crimson ripples. I lingered on the bridge till the last gleam vanished.

So grim and savage are the fells at the head of Wensleydale, that the country folk in times past regarded them with superstitious dread, and called the little brooks which there foster the infancy of Ure, ‘hell-becks’—a name of dread. But both river and dale change their character as they descend, the one flowing through scenes of exquisite beauty ere, united with the Swale, it forms the Ouse; and the dale broadens into the richest and most beautiful of all the North Riding.