From Gretna Green to Land's End
A LITERARY JOURNEY IN ENGLAND
_By_
KATHARINE LEE BATES
_Professor of English Literature in Wellesley College_
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
BY KATHARINE COMAN
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1907
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY
Published, October, 1907
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
TO
MY FARING-MATES
KATHARINE COMAN
AND
ANNIE BEECHER SCOVILLE
_Daffodil and furze and wheat,
Shining paths for truant feet;
From that golden blossoming
Wilted sprays are all I bring.
You who know their fault the best,
To their fault be tenderest,
For a breath of fragrant days
Whispers you from wilted sprays._
"_Some Shires, Joseph-like, have a better coloured coat than others;
and some, with Benjamin, have a more bountiful mess of meat belonging
to them. Yet every County hath a child's proportion._"
THOMAS FULLER.
These summer wanderings through the west of England were undertaken at
the request of _The Chautauquan_, from whose pages the bulk of this
material is reprinted. But the chronicle of this recent journey has
been supplemented, as the text indicates, by earlier memories.
K. L. B.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
THE BORDER 1
THE LAKE COUNTRY 30
THREE RUSH-BEARINGS 52
A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES 76
THE HEART OF ENGLAND--WARWICKSHIRE 137
THE COTSWOLDS 184
OXFORD 199
COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY 230
SOMERSET AND DEVONSHIRE 298
CORNWALL 350
ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Wordsworth's Home at Cockermouth _Frontispiece_
PAGE
King Edward's Tower, Lanercost Abbey 26
Island in Grasmere Lake 44
The Rush-Bearing at Grasmere 60
The Quadrant, Liverpool 78
The Trent and Mersey Canal 90
In the Potteries--A Child-Mother 128
Feeding the Peacocks at Warwick Castle 160
Wilmcote, the Birthplace of Shakespeare's Mother 166
Charlecote Park Entrance 170
Tower of Chipping Campden Church 188
The Rollright Stones 192
The Tower, Magdalen College 210
The Severn below the Quarry, Shrewsbury 232
Wigmore Abbey--Gate House and Barn 262
Tewkesbury Abbey 282
St. Peter's Church, Clevedon 320
A Devon Cottage 334
The Fal 340
Church of St. Columb Minor 360
Arthur's Castle, Tintagel 364
Boscastle 368
The Lizard Light, Cornwall 372
Land's End 376
_From Gretna Green to Land's End_
THE BORDER
The dominant interest of the northwestern counties is, of course, the
Lake District, with its far-famed poetic associations; yet for the
student of English history and the lover of Border minstrelsy the
upper strip of Cumberland has a strong attraction of its own.
An afternoon run on the Midland brought us from Liverpool to Carlisle.
Such are the eccentricities of the English railway system that the
"through carriage" into which guard and porter dumped us at Liverpool,
a third-class carriage already crowded with one sleeping and one
eating family, turned out not to be a through carriage at all; and a
new guard, at Hellifield, tore us and our belongings forth and thrust
us into an empty first-class, lingering in the doorway until we had
produced the inevitable shilling. But the freedom of an empty carriage
would have been well worth the honest price of first-class tickets,
for as the train sped on from the Ribble into the Eden Valley, with
the blue heights of the Pennine range and the long reaches of the
Yorkshire moors on our right, and on our left the cloud-caressed
summits of Lakeland, we needed all the space there was for our
exultant _ohs_ and _ahs_, not to mention our continual rushing from
window to window for the swiftly vanishing views of grey castle and
ruined abbey, peel tower and stone sheep-fold, grange and hamlet, and
the exquisite, ever-changing panorama of the mist.
Carlisle, "the Border City," a clean, self-respecting, serious town,
without beggars, with no superfluous street courtesies, but with
effectual aid in need, is the heart of one of the most storied regions
of England. The River Drift man and the Cave man seem to have fought
the mammoth and the elk and gone their shadowy way untraced in this
locality, but the museum in Tullie House contains hammers and axes,
found in Cumberland soil, of the Stone Age, and spear-heads and
arrow-heads, urns for human ashes, incense cups, food vessels and
drinking vessels of the Bronze Age,--mute memorials of life that once
was lived so eagerly beneath these same soft, brooding skies.
As for the Romans, they seem here like a race of yesterday. A penny
tram took us, in the clear, quiet light of what at home would be the
middle of the evening, out to Stanwix, originally, it is believed, an
important station in the series of fortresses that guarded the
northern boundary of Roman Britain. These frontier lines consisted of
a great stone wall, eight feet thick and eighteen feet high, ditched
and set with forts and towers, running straight from the Solway to the
Tyne, a distance of some seventy-three miles, and a little to the
south of this, what is known as the _vallum_, a fosse with mounds of
soil and rock on either side. The local antiquaries, urged on by a
committee of Oxford men, have recently discovered a third wall, built
of sods, between the two, and excavation and discussion have received
a fresh impetus. Was the _vallum_ built by Agricola,--earthworks
thrown up by that adventurous general of the first Christian century
to secure his conquest? Was the turf wall the erection of the great
emperor Hadrian, who visited Britain in the year 120, and was the huge
stone rampart constructed, early in the third century, by the Emperor
Severus? Or does the stone wall date from Hadrian? Or did he build all
three?
While the scholars literally dig for truth, we may sit on the site of
this mighty, well-nigh perished bulwark at Stanwix, with what is
perhaps the wrinkle left on the landscape by the wall's deep moat
dropping, under a screen of hawthorns and wind-silvered poplars, sheer
at our feet, and thence we may look out across the Eden, with its
dipping gulls and sailing swans, its hurrying swifts and little
dancing eddy, to the heights of Carlisle. For the city is built on a
natural eminence almost encircled by the Eden and its tributaries, the
Petteril and the Caldew. It is a fine view even now, with the level
light centred on the red sandstone walls of the grim castle, though
factory chimneys push into the upper air, overtopping both the castle
and its grave neighbour, the cathedral; but for mass and dignity, for
significance, these two are unapproachable: these are Carlisle.
We must not see them yet. We must see a lonely bluff set over with the
round clay huts of the Britons, and then, as the Roman legions sweep
these like so many mole-hills from their path, we must see in gradual
growth a Roman town,--not luxurious, with the tessellated marble
pavements and elaborate baths that have left their splendid fragments
farther south, but a busy trading-point serving the needs of that
frontier line of garrisons which numbered no less than fifteen
thousand men. Some few inscribed and sculptured stones, remnants of
altars, tombs, and the like, may be seen in the museum, with lamps,
dishes, and other specimens of such coarse and simple pottery as was
in daily use by common Roman folk when the days and the nights were
theirs.
The name Carlisle--and it is said to be the only city of England which
bears a purely British name--was originally Caer Lywelydd, British
enough in very sooth. This the Romans altered to Lugubalia, and when,
in 409, the garrisons of the Wall were recalled for the protection of
Rome herself, the Britons of the neighbourhood made it their centre,
and it passed into Arthurian tradition as Cardueil. Even the ballads
vaguely sing of a time when
"King Arthur lived in Merry Carlisle
And seemly was to see."
But although the Britons sometimes united, under one hero or a
succession of heroes, to save the land, now abandoned by the Romans,
from the Saxons, they were often at war among themselves, and the
headship of their northern confederacy was wrested from Carlisle and
transferred to Dumbarton on the Clyde. The kingdom of the Cumbrian
Britons, thenceforth known as Strathclyde, fell before the assault of
the English kingdom of Northumbria, in which the Christian faith had
taken deep root. For though the Britons, in the fourth century of
Roman rule, had accepted Christianity, the Angles had come in with
their own gods, and a new conversion of the north, effected by
missionaries from Iona, took place about the sixth century. Sculptured
crosses of this period still remain in Cumberland and Westmoreland,
and the Carlisle museum preserves, in Runic letters, a Christian
epitaph of "Cimokom, Alh's queen."
"Holy into ruin she went,"
is the eloquent record, and from her grave-mound she utters the new
hope:
"My body the all-loving Christ
Young again shall renew after death,
But indeed sorrowing tear-flow
Never shall afflict me more."
For a moment the mists that have gathered about the shelving rock to
which we are looking not merely across the Eden, but across the river
of time, divide and reveal the figure of Cuthbert, the great monk of
Northumbria, to whom King Egfrith had committed the charge of his
newly founded monastery at Caerluel. The Venerable Bede tells how,
while the king had gone up into Scotland on a daring expedition
against the Picts, in 685, Cuthbert visited the city, whose officials,
for his better entertainment, took him to view a Roman fountain of
choice workmanship. But he stood beside its carven rim with absent
look, leaning on his staff, and murmured: "Perchance even now the
conflict is decided." And so it was, to the downfall of Egfrith's
power and the confusion of the north. After the ravaging Scots and
Picts came the piratical Danes, and, about 875, what was left of
Carlisle went up in flame. A rusted sword or two in the museum tells
the fierce story of the Danish sack. At the end of the tenth century
Cumberland was ceded to Scotland, but was recovered by William Rufus,
son of William the Conqueror. Carlisle, the only city added to England
since the Norman conquest, was then a heap of ruins; but in 1092, says
the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," the king "went northward with a great
army, and set up the wall of Carluel, and reared the castle."
No longer
"The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,"
but there is still the castle, which even the most precipitate tourist
does not fail to visit. We went in one of those wild blusters of wind
and rain which are rightly characteristic of this city of tempestuous
history, and had to cling to the battlements to keep our footing on
the rampart walk. We peeped out through the long slits of the
loop-holes, but saw no more formidable enemies than storm-clouds
rising from the north. The situation was unfavourable to historic
reminiscence, nor did the blatant guide below, who hammered our ears
with items of dubious information, help us to a realisation of the
castle's robust career. Yet for those who have eyes to read, the
stones of these stern towers are a chronicle of ancient reigns and
furious wars, dare-devil adventures and piteous tragedy.
The Norman fortress seems to have been reared upon the site of a Roman
stronghold, whose walls and conduits are still traceable. After
William Rufus came other royal builders, notably Edward I and Richard
III. It was in the reign of the first Edward that Carlisle won royal
favour by a spirited defence against her Scottish neighbours, the men
of Annandale, who, forty thousand strong, marched red-handed across
the Border. A Scottish spy within the city set it on fire, but while
the men of Carlisle fought the flames, the women scrambled to the
walls and, rolling down stones on the assailants and showering them
with boiling water, kept them off until an ingenious burgher,
venturing out on the platform above the gate, fished up, with a stout
hook, the leader of the besiegers and held him high in the air while
lances and arrows pierced him through and through. This irregular mode
of warfare was too much for the men of Annandale, who marched home in
disgust.
During Edward's wars against Wallace he made Carlisle his
headquarters. Twice he held Parliaments there, and it was from
Carlisle he set forth, a dying king, on his last expedition against
the Scots. In four days he had ridden but six miles, and then breath
left the exhausted body. His death was kept secret until his son could
reach Carlisle, which witnessed, in that eventful July of 1307, a
solemn gathering of the barons of England to mourn above the bier of
their great war-lord and pay their homage to the ill-starred Edward
II. A quarter century later, Lord Dacre, then captain of Carlisle
Castle, opened its gates to a royal fugitive from Scotland, Balliol;
and Edward III, taking up the cause of the rejected sovereign, made
war, from Carlisle as his headquarters, on the Scots. After the Wars
of the Roses, Edward IV committed the north of England to the charge
of his brother Gloucester, who bore the titles of Lord Warden of the
Marches and Captain of Carlisle Castle. Monster though tradition has
made him, Richard III seems to have had a sense of beauty, for
Richard's Tower still shows mouldings and other ornamental touches
unusual in the northern architecture of the period.
But the royal memory which most of all casts a glamour over Carlisle
Castle is that of Mary, Queen of Scots. Fleeing from her own subjects,
she came to England, in 1568, a self-invited guest. She landed from a
fishing-boat at Workington, on the Cumberland coast,--a decisive
moment which Wordsworth has crystallised in a sonnet:
"Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,
The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore;
And to the throng, that on the Cumbrian shore
Her landing hailed, how touchingly she bowed!
And like a star (that, from a heavy cloud
Of pine-tree foliage poised in air, forth darts,
When a soft summer gale at evening parts
The gloom that did its loveliness enshroud)
She smiled; but Time, the old Saturnian seer,
Sighed on the wing as her foot pressed the strand
With step prelusive to a long array
Of woes and degradations hand in hand--
Weeping captivity, and shuddering fear
Stilled by the ensanguined block of Fotheringay!"
Mary was escorted with all courtesy to Cockermouth Castle and thence
to Carlisle, where hospitality soon became imprisonment. Her first
request of Elizabeth was for clothing, and it was in one of the
deep-walled rooms of Queen Mary's Tower, of which only the gateway now
remains, that she impatiently looked on while her ladies opened
Elizabeth's packet to find--"two torn shifts, two pieces of black
velvet, and two pairs of shoes." The parsimony of Queen Bess has a
curious echo in the words of Sir Francis Knollys, who, set to keep
this disquieting guest under close surveillance, was much concerned
when she took to sending to Edinburgh for "coffers of apparell,"
especially as she did not pay the messengers, so that Elizabeth, after
all, was "like to bear the charges" of Mary's vanity. The captive
queen was allowed a semblance of freedom in Carlisle. She walked the
terrace of the outer ward of the castle, went to service in the
cathedral, and sometimes, with her ladies, strolled in the meadows
beside the Eden, or watched her gentlemen play a game of football, or
even hunted the hare, although her warders were in a fever of anxiety
whenever she was on horseback lest she should take it into her wilful,
beautiful head to gallop back to Scotland.
But these frowning towers have more terrible records of captivity.
Under the old Norman keep are hideous black vaults, with the narrowest
of slits for the admission of air and with the walls still showing
the rivet-holes of the chains by which the hapless prisoners were so
heavily fettered.
"Full fifteen stane o' Spanish iron
They hae laid a'right sair on me;
Wi' locks and keys I am fast bound
Into this dungeon dark and dreerie."
Rude devices, supposed to be the pastime of captives, are carved upon
the walls of a mural chamber,--a chamber which has special
significance for the reader of "Waverley," as here, it is said, Major
Macdonald, the original of Fergus MacIvor, was confined. For Carlisle
Castle was never more cruel than to the Jacobites of 1745. On November
18 Bonny Prince Charlie, preceded by one hundred Highland pipers, had
made triumphal entrance into the surrendered city, through which he
passed again, on the 21st of December, in retreat. Carlisle was
speedily retaken by the English troops, and its garrison, including
Jemmy Dawson of Jacobite song, sent in ignominy to London. Even so the
cells of the castle were crammed with prisoners, mainly Scots, who
were borne to death in batches. Pinioned in the castle courtyard,
seated on black hurdles drawn by white horses, with the executioner,
axe in hand, crouching behind, they were drawn, to make a Carlisle
holiday, under the gloomy arch of the castle gate, through the
thronged and staring street, and along the London road to Harraby
Hill, where they suffered, one after another, the barbarous penalty
for high treason. The ghastly heads were set up on pikes over the
castle gates (yetts), as Scotch balladry well remembers.
"White was the rose in his gay bonnet,
As he folded me in his broached plaidie;
His hand, which clasped mine i' the truth o' luve,
O it was aye in battle ready.
His lang, lang hair in yellow hanks
Waved o'er his cheeks sae sweet and ruddy,
But now they wave o'er Carlisle yetts
In dripping ringlets clotting bloodie.
My father's blood's in that flower tap,
My brother's in that hare-bell's blossom;
This white rose was steeped in my luve's blude,
And I'll aye wear it in my bosom.
"When I cam' first by merrie Carlisle,
Was ne'er a town sae sweetly seeming;
The white rose flaunted o'er the wall,
The thistled banners far were streaming!
When I cam' next by merrie Carlisle,
O sad, sad seemed the town, and eerie!
The auld, auld men came out and wept--
_O, maiden, come ye to seek ye'r dearie?_"
But not all the ballads of Carlisle Castle are tragic. Blithe enough
is the one that tells how the Lochmaben harper outwitted the warden,
who, when the minstrel, mounted on a grey mare, rode up to the castle
gate, invited him in to ply his craft.
"Then aye he harped, and aye he carped,
Till a' the lordlings footed the floor;
But an the music was sae sweet,
The groom had nae mind o' the stable door.
"And aye he harped, and aye he carped,
Till a' the nobles were fast asleep;
Then quickly he took off his shoon,
And softly down the stair did creep."
So he stole into the stable and slipped a halter over the nose of a
fine brown stallion belonging to the warden and tied it to the grey
mare's tail. Then he turned them loose, and she who had a foal at home
would not once let the brown horse bait,
"But kept him a-galloping home to her foal."
When the loss of the two horses was discovered in the morning, the
harper made such ado that the warden paid him three times over for the
grey mare.
"And verra gude business," commented our Scotch landlady.
The most famous of the Carlisle Castle ballads relates the rescue of
Kinmont Willie, a high-handed cattle-thief of the Border. For between
the recognised English and Scottish boundaries lay a strip of
so-called Debatable Land, whose settlers, known as the Batables, owed
allegiance to neither country, but
"Sought the beeves, that made their broth,
In Scotland and in England both."
This Border was a natural shelter for outlaws, refugees, and "broken
men" in general,--reckless fellows who loved the wildness and peril of
the life, men of the type depicted in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."
"A stark moss-trooping Scot was he,
As e'er couched Border lance by knee:
Through Solway sands, through Tarras moss,
Blindfold, he knew the paths to cross;
By wily turns, by desperate bounds,
Had baffled Percy's best bloodhounds;
In Eske, or Liddel, fords were none,
But he would ride them, one by one;
Alike to him was time, or tide,
December's snow or July's pride:
Alike to him was tide, or time,
Moonless midnight, or matin prime:
Steady of heart, and stout of hand,
As ever drove prey from Cumberland;
Five times outlawed had he been,
By England's king and Scotland's queen."
Although these picturesque plunderers cost the neighbourhood dear,
they never failed of sympathy in the hour of doom. The Graemes, for
instance, were a large clan who lived by rapine. In 1600, when
Elizabeth's government compelled them to give a bond of surety for one
another's good behaviour, they numbered more than four hundred
fighting men. There was Muckle Willie, and Mickle Willie, and Nimble
Willie, and many a Willie more. But the execution of Hughie the Graeme
was none the less grievous.
"Gude Lord Scroope's to the hunting gane,
He has ridden o'er moss and muir;
And he has grippit Hughie the Graeme,
For stealing o' the Bishop's mare.
* * * * *
"Then they have grippit Hughie the Graeme,
And brought him up through Carlisle toun;
The lasses and lads stood on the walls,
Crying, 'Hughie the Graeme, thou 'se ne'er gae doun.'"
They tried him by a jury of men,
"The best that were in Carlisle toun,"
and although his guilt was open, "gude Lord Hume" offered the judge
"twenty white owsen" to let him off, and "gude lady Hume" "a peck of
white pennies," but it was of no avail, and Hughie went gallantly to
his death.
For these Batables had their own code of right and wrong, and were, in
their peculiar way, men of honour. There was Hobbie Noble, an English
outlaw, who was betrayed by a comrade for English gold, and who,
hanged at Carlisle, expressed on the gallows his execration of such
conduct.
"I wad hae betray'd nae lad alive,
For a' the gowd o' Christentie."
The seizure of Kinmont Willie was hotly resented, even though his
clan, the Armstrongs, who had built themselves strong towers on the
Debatable Land, "robbed, spoiled, burned and murdered," as the Warden
of the West Marches complained, all along upper Cumberland. The
Armstrongs could, at one time, muster out over three thousand
horsemen, and Dacres and Howards strove in vain to bring them under
control. Yet there was "Border law," too, one of its provisions being
that on the appointed days of truce, when the "Lord Wardens of England
and Scotland, and Scotland and England" met, each attended by a
numerous retinue, at a midway cairn, to hear complaints from either
side and administer a rude sort of justice in accordance with "the
laws of the Marches," no man present, not even the most notorious
freebooter, could be arrested. But William Armstrong of Kinmont was
too great a temptation; he had harried Cumberland too long; and a
troop of some two hundred English stole after him, as he rode off
carelessly along the Liddel bank, when the assemblage broke up,
overpowered him, and brought him in bonds to Carlisle.
"O have ye na heard o' the fause Sakelde?
O have ye na heard o' the keen Lord Scroope?
How they hae ta'en bauld Kinmont Willie,
On Haribee to hang him up?
* * * * *
"They led him through the Liddel rack
And also through the Carlisle sands;
They brought him to Carlisle castle,
To be at my Lord Scroope's commands."
But this was more than the Scottish warden, Sir Walter Scott of
Buccleuch, could bear.
"And have they ta'en him, Kinmont Willie,
Against the truce of the Border tide,
And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
Is Keeper on the Scottish side?
"And have they ta'en him, Kinmont Willie,
Withouten either dread or fear,
And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
Can back a steed or shake a spear?
"O! were there war between the lands,
As well I wot that there is nane,
I would slight Carlisle castle high
Though it were builded of marble stane.
"I would set that castle in a low[1]
And sloken it with English blood;
There's never a man in Cumberland
Should ken where Carlisle Castle stood.
"But since nae war's between the lands,
And there is peace, and peace should be,
I'll neither harm English lad or lass,
And yet the Kinmont freed shall be."
So Buccleuch rode out, one dark night, with a small party of
Borderers, and succeeded, aided by one of the gusty storms of the
region, in making his way to Carlisle undetected.
"And when we left the Staneshaw-bank,
The wind began full loud to blaw;
But 'twas wind and weet, and fire and sleet,
When we came beneath the castle wa'."
The sudden uproar raised by the little band bewildered the garrison,
and to Kinmont Willie, heavily ironed in the inner dungeon and
expecting death in the morning, came the voices of friends.
"Wi' coulters, and wi' forehammers,
We garr'd[2] the bars bang merrilie,
Until we cam' to the inner prison,
Where Willie o' Kinmont he did lie.
"And when we cam' to the lower prison,
Where Willie o' Kinmont he did lie:
'O sleep ye, wake ye, Kinmont Willie,
Upon the morn that thou's to die?'
"'O I sleep saft, and I wake aft;
It's lang since sleeping was fley'd frae me!
Gie my service back to my wife and bairns,
And a' gude fellows that spier[3] for me.'"
But his spirits rose to the occasion, and when Red Rowan,
"The starkest man in Teviotdale,"
hoisted Kinmont Willie, whose fetters there was no time to knock off,
on his back and carried him up to the breach they had made in the
wall, from which they went down by a ladder they had brought with
them, the man so narrowly delivered from the noose had his jest ready:
"Then shoulder-high with shout and cry
We bore him down the ladder lang;
At every stride Red Rowan made
I wot the Kinmont's airns[4] play'd clang.
"'O mony a time,' quo' Kinmont Willie,
'I have ridden horse baith wild and wood.[5]
But a rougher beast than Red Rowan
I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode.
"'And mony a time,' quo' Kinmont Willie,
'I've pricked a horse out owre the furse,
But since the day I back'd a steed,
I never wore sic cumbrous spurs.'"
It is high time that we, too, escaped from Carlisle Castle into the
open-air delights of the surrounding country. Five miles to the east
lies the pleasant village of Wetheral on the Eden. Corby Castle, seat
of a branch of the great Howard family, crowns the wooded hill across
the river, but we lingered in Wetheral Church for the sake of one who
may have been an ancestor of "the fause Sakelde." This stately sleeper
is described as Sir Richard Salkeld, "Captain and Keeper of Carlisle,"
who, at about the time of Henry VII, "in this land was mickle of
might." His effigy is sadly battered; both arms are gone, a part of a
leg, and the whole body is marred and dinted, with latter-day initials
profanely scrawled upon it. But he, lying on the outside, has taken
the brunt of abuse and, like a chivalrous lord, protected Dame Jane,
his lady, whose alabaster gown still falls in even folds.
We drove eastward ten miles farther, under sun and shower, now by
broad meadows where sleek kine, secure at last from cattle-lifters,
were tranquilly grazing, now by solemn ranks of Scotch firs and
far-reaching parks of smooth-barked, muscular beeches, now through
stone-paved hamlets above whose shop-doors we would read the familiar
ballad names, Scott, Graham (Graeme), Armstrong, Musgrave, Johnston,
Kerr, and wonder how the wild blood of the Border had been tamed to
the selling of picture postal cards.
Our goal was Naworth, one of the most romantic of English castles. Its
two great towers, as we approached, called imagination back to the
days
"When, from beneath the greenwood tree,
Rode forth Lord Howard's chivalry,
* * * * *
And minstrels, as they marched in order,
Played, 'Noble Lord Dacre, he dwells on the Border.'"
Naworth is the heart of a luxuriant valley. The position owes its
defensive strength to the gorges cut by the Irthing and two
tributaries. These three streams, when supplemented by the old moat,
made Naworth an island fortress. The seat of the Earls of Carlisle, it
was built by Ranulph Dacre in the fourteenth century. Even the present
Lady Carlisle, a pronounced Liberal and a vigorous worker in the
causes of Temperance and Woman Suffrage, though claiming to be a more
thoroughgoing Republican than any of us in the United States, points
out with something akin to pride "the stone man" on the Dacre Tower
who has upheld the family escutcheon there for a little matter of five
hundred years. In the sixteenth century the Dacre lands passed by
marriage to the Howards, and "Belted Will," as Sir Walter Scott
dubbed Lord William Howard, proved, under Elizabeth and James, an
efficient agent of law and order. Two suits of his plate armour still
bear witness to the warrior, whom the people called "Bauld Willie,"
with the same homely directness that named his wife, in recognition of
the ample dower she brought him, "Bessie with the braid apron," but
his tastes were scholarly and his disposition devout. Lord William's
Tower, with its rugged stone walls, its loopholes and battlements, its
steep and narrow winding-stair guarded by a massive iron door, its
secret passage to the dungeons, is feudal enough in suggestion, yet
here may be seen his library with the oak-panelled roof and the great
case of tempting old folios, and here his oratory, with its fine
wood-carvings, its Flemish altar-piece, and its deep-windowed recess
outlooking on a fair expanse of green earth and silver sky.
This castle, with its magnificent baronial hall, its treasures of art
and spirit of frank hospitality, was harder to escape from than
Carlisle. There was no time to follow the Irthing eastward to the
point where, as the Popping Stones tell, Walter Scott offered his
warm heart and honest hand to the dark-eyed daughter of a French
_emigre_. But we could not miss Lanercost, the beautiful ruined abbey
lying about a mile to the north of Naworth. An Augustine foundation of
the twelfth century, it has its memories of Edward I, who visited it
with Queen Eleanor in 1180 and came again in broken health, six years
later, to spend quietly in King Edward's Tower the last winter of his
life. The nave now makes a noble parish church in which windows by
William Morris and Burne-Jones glow like jewels. The choir is
roofless, but gracious in its ruin, its pavement greened by moss,
feathery grasses waving from its lofty arcades, and its walls
weathered to all pensive, tender tints. The ancient tombs, most of
them bearing the scallop-shells of the Dacres, are rich in sculpture.
Into the transept walls are built some square grey stones of the Roman
Wall, and a Roman altar forms a part of the clerestory roof. The
crypt, too, contains several Roman altars, dedicated to different gods
whose figures, after the lapse of two thousand years, are startling in
their spirited grace, their energy of life.
[Illustration: KING EDWARD'S TOWER, LANERCOST ABBEY]
But Lanercost reminds us that we have all but ignored Carlisle
Cathedral, and back we drive, by way of the village of Brampton with
its curious old market-hall, to the Border City. After all, we have
only followed the custom of the place in slighting the cathedral.
Carlisle was ever too busy fighting to pay much heed to formal
worship.
"For mass or prayer can I rarely tarry,
Save to patter an _Ave Mary_
When I ride on a Border foray."
The cathedral dates from the time of William Rufus, and still retains
two bays of its Norman nave, which suffered from fire in the early
part of the thirteenth century. A still more disastrous fire, toward
the close of that century, all but destroyed the new choir, which it
took the preoccupied citizens one hundred years to rebuild, so that we
see to-day Early English arches in combination with Decorated pillars
and Late Decorated capitals. These capitals of fresh and piquant
designs are an especial feature of the choir, whose prime glory,
however, is the great east window with its perfect tracery, although
only the upper glass is old. The cathedral has suffered not alone
from a series of fires, but from military desecration. Part of its
nave was pulled down by the irreverent Roundheads to repair the
fortifications, and it was used after Carlisle was retaken from Prince
Charlie as a prison for the garrison. Even to-day canny Cumberland
shows a grain too much of frugality in pasturing sheep in the
cathedral graveyard. Carlisle Cathedral has numbered among its
archdeacons Paley of the "Evidences," and among its archdeans Percy of
the "Reliques." Among its bridegrooms was Walter Scott, who wedded
here his raven-haired lady of the Popping Stones.
One drive more before we seek the Lake Country,--ten miles to the
north, this time, across the adventurous Esk, where a fierce wind
seemed to carry in it the shout of old slogans and the clash and clang
of arms, and across the boundary stream, the Sark, to Gretna Green,
where breathless couples used to be married by blacksmith or innkeeper
or the first man they met, the furious parents posting after all in
vain. Then around by Longtown we drove and back to Carlisle, across
the Solway Moss,--reaches of blowing grass in the foreground; dark,
broken bogs, where men and women were gathering in the peat, in the
middle distance; and beyond, the blue folds of hills on hills. It was
already evening, but such was the witchery of the scene, still with
something eerie and lawless about it despite an occasional farmhouse
with stuffed barns and plump ricks and meadows of unmolested kine,
that we would gladly, like the old Borderers whose armorial bearings
so frequently included stars and crescents, have spent the night in
that Debatable Land, with the moon for our accomplice in
moss-trooping.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Blaze.
[2] Made.
[3] Inquire.
[4] Irons.
[5] Mad.
THE LAKE COUNTRY
There are as many "best ways" of making the tour of this enchanted
land as there are Lake Country guidebooks, volumes which, at prices
varying from ten shillings to "tuppence," are everywhere in evidence.
One may journey by rail to Keswick or to Windermere; one may come up
from Furness Abbey to Lakeside, passing gradually from the softer
scenery to the wilder; or one may enter by way of Penrith and Pooley
Bridge, ushered at once into the presence of some of the noblest
mountains and perhaps the loveliest lake.
This last was our route, and very satisfactory we found it. Our stay
at Penrith had been abbreviated by a municipal councillors' convention
which left not a bed for the stranger. We had been forewarned of the
religious convention which throngs Keswick the last full week in July,
and, indeed, an evangelist bound thither had presented us with tracts
as we took our train at Carlisle. But we had not reckoned on finding
Penrith in such plethoric condition, and, after an uphill look at the
broken red walls of Penrith Castle, which, with Carlisle, Naworth, and
Cockermouth, stood for the defence of western England against the
Scots, we mounted a motor-bus, of all atrocities, and were banged and
clanged along a few miles of fairly level road which transferred us,
as we crossed the Eamont, from Cumberland to Westmoreland. The hamlet
of Pooley Bridge lies at the lower end of Ullswater, up whose
mountain-hemmed reaches of ever-heightening beauty we were borne by
_The Raven_, a leisurely little steamer with a ruddy captain serenely
assured that his lake is the queen of all. The evening was cold and
gusty,--rougher weather than any we had encountered in our midsummer
voyage across the Atlantic,--but, wrapped in our rugs and shedding
hairpins down the wind, we could have sailed on forever, so glorious
was that sunset vision of great hills almost bending over the
riverlike lake that runs on joyously, as from friend to friend,
between the guardian ranks.
We lingered for a few days at the head of Ullswater, in Patterdale,
and would gladly have lingered longer, if only to watch the play of
light and shadow over St. Sunday Crag, Place Fell, Stybarrow Crag,
Fairfield, and all that shouldering brotherhood of giants, but we must
needs take advantage of the first clear day for the coach-drive to
Ambleside, over the Kirkstone Pass,
"Aspiring Road! that lov'st to hide
Thy daring in a vapoury bourn."
A week at Ambleside, under Wansfell's "visionary majesties of light,"
went all too swiftly in the eager exploration of Grasmere and
Coniston, Hawkshead, Bowness, Windermere, and those "lofty brethren,"
the Langdale Pikes, with their famous rock-walled cascade, Dungeon
Ghyll. The coach-drive from Ambleside to Keswick carried us, at
Dunmailraise, across again from Westmoreland to Cumberland. Helvellyn
and Thirlmere dominated the way, but Skiddaw and Derwent Water claimed
our allegiance on arrival. What is counted the finest coach-drive in
the kingdom, however, the twenty-four-mile circuit from Keswick known
as the Buttermere Round, remained to bring us under a final
subjection to the silver solitude of Buttermere and Crummock Water and
the rugged menace of Honister Crag. The train that hurried us from
Keswick to Cockermouth passed along the western shore of pleasant
Bassenthwaite Water, but from Workington to Furness Abbey meres and
tarns, for all their romantic charm, were forgotten, while, the salt
wind on our faces, we looked out, over sand and shingle, on the dim
grey vast of ocean.
The Lake Country, it is often said, has no history. The tourist need
not go from point to point enquiring
"If here a warrior left a spell,
Panting for glory as he fell;
Or here a saint expired."
That irregular circle of the Cumberland Hills, varying from some forty
to fifty miles in diameter, a compact mass whose mountain lines shut
in narrow valleys, each with its own lake, and radiate out from
Helvellyn in something like a starfish formation, bears, for all its
wildness, the humanised look of land on which many generations of men
have lived and died; but the records of that life are scant.
There are several stone-circles, taken to be the remains of British
temples, the "mystic Round of Druid frame," notably Long Meg and her
Daughters, near Penrith, and the Druid's Circle, just out of Keswick.
About the Keswick circle such uncanny influences still linger that no
two persons can number the stones alike, nor will your own second
count confirm your first. Storm and flood rage against that mysterious
shrine, but the wizard blocks cannot be swept away. The Romans, who
had stations near Kendal, Penrith, and Ambleside, have left some
striking remembrances, notably "that lone Camp on Hardknott's height,"
and their proud road, still well defined for at least fifteen miles,
along the top of High Street ridge. A storied heap of stones awaits
the climber at the top of
"The long ascent of Dunmailraise."
Here, in 945, the last king of the Cumbrian Britons, Dunmail, was
defeated by Edmund of England in the pass between Grasmere and
Keswick. Seat Sandal and Steel Fell looked down from either side upon
his fall. Edmund raised a cairn above what his Saxon wits supposed was
a slain king, but Dunmail is only biding his time. His golden crown
was hurled into Grisedale Tarn, high up in the range, where the
shoulders of Helvellyn, Seat Sandal, and Fairfield touch, and on the
last night of every year these dark warders see a troop of Dunmail's
men rise from the tarn, where it is their duty to guard the crown,
bearing one more stone to throw down upon the cairn. When the pile is
high enough to content the king, who counts each year in his deep
grave the crash of another falling stone, he will rise and rule again
over Cumberland.
Here history and folk-lore blend. Of pure folk-lore the stranger hears
but little. Eden Hall, near Penrith, has a goblet filched from the
fairies:
"If e'er this glass should break or fall.
Farewell the luck of Eden Hall."
The enchanted rock in the Vale of St. John is celebrated in Scott's
"Bridal of Triermain." St. Bees has a triumphant tradition of St.
Bega, who, determined to be a nun, ran away from the Irish king, her
father, for no better reason than because he meant to marry her to a
Norwegian prince, and set sail in a fishing-boat for the Cumberland
coast. Her little craft was driven in by the storm to Whitehaven,
where she so won upon the sympathies of the Countess of Egremont that
this lady besought her lord to give the fugitive land for a convent.
It was midsummer, and the graceless husband made answer that he would
give as much as the snow should lie upon next morning, but when he
awoke and looked out from the castle casement, his demesne for three
miles around was white with snow.
Wordsworth's "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," "The Horn of
Egremont Castle," and "The Somnambulist" relate three legends of the
region, of varying degrees of authenticity, and Lord's Island in
Derwent Water brings to mind the right noble name of James Radcliffe,
third and last Earl of Derwentwater, who declared for his friend and
kinsman, the Pretender of 1715. On October sixth the young earl bade
his brave girl-wife farewell and rode away to join the rebels, though
his favourite dog howled in the courtyard and his dapple-grey started
back from the gate. On October fourteenth the cause was lost, and the
Earl of Derwentwater was among the seventeen hundred who surrendered
at Preston. In the Tower and again on the scaffold his life was
offered him if he would acknowledge George I as rightful king and
would conform to the Protestant religion, but he said it "would be too
dear a purchase." On the evening after his beheading the Northern
Lights flamed red over Keswick, so that they are still known in the
countryside as Lord Derwentwater's Lights.
The dalesfolk could doubtless tell us more. There may still be
dwellers by Windermere who have heard on stormy nights the ghastly
shrieks of the Crier of Claife, calling across the lake for a
ferry-boat, although it was long ago that a valiant monk from Lady
Holm "laid" that troubled spirit, binding it, with book and bell, to
refrain from troubling "while ivy is green"; and in the depths of
Borrowdale, on a wild dawn, old people may cower deeper in their
feather beds to shut out the baying of the phantom hounds that hunt
the "barfoot stag" through Watendlath tarn and over the fells down
into Borrowdale. There is said to be a local brownie, Hob-Thross by
name, sometimes seen, a "body aw ower rough," lying by the fire at
midnight. For all his shaggy look, he has so sensitive a spirit that,
indefatigable though he is in stealthy household services, the least
suggestion of recompense sends him weeping away. He will not even
accept his daily dole of milk save on the condition that it be set out
for him in a chipped bowl.
But, in the main, the Lake Country keeps its secrets. The names are
the telltales, and these speak of Briton and Saxon and the adventurous
Viking. _Dale_, _fell_, _force_ (waterfall), _ghyll_ (mountain
ravine), _holm_ (island), _how_ (mound), _scar_ (cliff-face), are
Icelandic words. Mountain names that seem undignified, as Coniston Old
Man or Dolly Wagon Pike, are probably mispronunciations of what in the
original Celtic or Scandinavian was of grave import. There appears to
be a present tendency to substitute for the unintelligible old names
plain English terms usually suggested by some peculiarity in the
mountain shape, but it is a pity to give up the Celtic Blencathara,
Peak of Demons, for Saddleback.
The jubilant throngs who flock to Lakeland every summer concern
themselves little with its early history. The English pour into that
blessed circuit of hills as into a great playground, coaching,
walking, cycling, climbing, boating, keenly alive to the beauty of the
scenery and eagerly drinking in the exhilaration of the air. They love
to tread the loftiest crests, many of which are crowned with cairns
raised by these holiday climbers, each adding his own stone. But it is
the shepherd who is in the confidence of the mountains, he who has
"been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him, and left him, on the heights."
Wordsworth first learned to love humanity in the person of the
shepherd
"descried in distant sky,
A solitary object and sublime."
Sheep, too, are often seen against the sky-line, and even the
cow--that homelike beast who favours you in her innocent rudeness,
from the gap of a hawthorn hedge, with that same prolonged, rustic,
curious stare that has taxed your modesty in Vermont or Ohio--will
forsake the shade of "the honied sycamore" in the valley for summits
"sharp and bare,
Where oft the venturous heifer drinks the noontide breeze."
There have been fatal accidents upon the more precipitous peaks. Scott
and Wordsworth have sung the fate of that "young lover of Nature,"
Charles Gough, who, one hundred years ago, fell from the Striding Edge
of Helvellyn and was watched over in death for no less than three
months by his little yellow-haired terrier, there on the lonely banks
of Red Tarn, where her persistent barking at last brought shepherds to
the body. In the Patterdale churchyard, whose famous great yew is now
no more, we noticed a stone commemorating a more recent victim of
Helvellyn, a Manchester botanist, who had come summer by summer to
climb the mountain, and who, a few years since, on his last essay, a
man of seventy-three, had died from exhaustion during the ascent. The
brow of Helvellyn, now soft and silvery as a melting dream, now a dark
mass banded by broad rainbows, overlooks his grave.
I remember that Nathan's story of the rich man who "had no pity," but
took for a guest's dinner the "one little ewe lamb" of his poor
neighbour, was read in the Patterdale church that evensong, and it was
strange to see how intently those sturdy mountain-lads, their
alert-eyed sheep dogs waiting about the door, listened to the parable.
Not only does the Scripture imagery--"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall
not want"--but the phrasing of the prayerbook--"We have erred and
strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep"--come with enhanced
significance in a pastoral region.
Lakeland in the tourist season is not at its best in point of flowers.
The daffodils that in Gowbarrow Park--recently acquired and opened as
a national preserve--rejoiced the poet as they danced beside the
dancing waves of Ullswater, fade before July, and the patches of ling
and heather upon the mountain-sides lack the abundance that purples
the Scottish hills, but the delicate harebell nods blithely to the
wayfarer from up among the rocks, and the foxglove grows so tall,
especially in the higher passes, as to overtop those massive
boundaries into which the "wallers" pack away all the loose stone they
can.
Birds, too, are not, in midsummer, numerous or varied. Where are
Wordsworth's cuckoo and skylark and green linnet? The eagles have been
dislodged from their eyries on Eagle Crag. A heavily flapping raven,
a congregation of rooks, a few swallows and redbreasts, with perhaps a
shy wagtail, may be the only winged wanderers you will salute in an
hour's stroll, unless this, as is most likely, has brought you where
"plots of sparkling water tremble bright
With thousand thousand twinkling points of light."
There you will be all but sure to see your Atlantic friends, the
seagulls, circling slowly within the mountain barriers like prisoners
of the air and adding their floating shadows to the reflections in the
lake below. For, as Wordsworth notes,--what did Wordsworth fail to
note?--the water of these mountain meres is crystal clear and renders
back with singular exactitude the "many-coloured images imprest" upon
it.
But the life of the Cumbrian hills is the life of grazing flocks, of
leaping waterfalls and hidden streams with their "voice of
unpretending harmony,"--the life of sun and shadow. Sometimes the sky
is of a faint, sweet blue with white clouds wandering in it,--the old
Greek myth of Apollo's flocks in violet meadows; sometimes the keenest
radiance silvers the upper crest of _cumuli_ that copy in form the
massy summits below; sometimes the mellow sunset gold is poured into
the valleys as into thirsty cups; but most often curling mists wreathe
the mountain-tops and move in plumed procession along their naked
sides.