THE BORDER RIVERS
Northumberland is a county of generous limits as well as of character
and distinction far above the common. For the entire space of its
greatest length--which runs north and south, speaking freely, or from
the Tweed to the Roman Wall and the South Tyne--a deep belt against its
western frontier, spread the solitudes of Cheviot. Here, as in South
Wales, is a vast watershed, covering a little matter of 700 or 800
square miles of silent mountain and moorland, not to reckon its overlap
into Roxburgh and Cumberland, which, like the other, the outside world
knows absolutely nothing about. Crossing the head waters of the South
Tyne and the Eastern Derwent, which last divides Durham and
Northumberland, the Cheviot range (not locally thus designated for the
whole distance) merges at length into the Durham moors on the one hand
and the Pennines on the other. A fine block of mountain solitude this,
and, judged by our English standards, of really vast extent, as well as
of worthy altitude; for the "Great Cheviot" on the north is 2700 feet,
and Cross Fell on the Pennines, a range familiar in the distance, at any
rate, to Lake tourists, is higher still. Humped up between the Irish
Channel and the North Sea these highlands pour their waters copiously to
the right and left through the intervening low country into either
ocean. Eastward go the North and South Tyne, the Allen, the Wandsbeck,
the Aln, the Coquet, and the Till, the last alone swerving northward,
and, as every one who knows their Scott will remember, flowing by
Flodden Field into the Tweed. Most of its farther waters flow westward
into Scotland, save the Eden and the Irthling, while the Liddel at any
rate touches Cumbrian soil. One may remember, too, that Northumberland
owns the right bank of Tweed for its last 20 miles, and both banks at
its mouth. But one turns to the Tyne instinctively--though Durham has
claims upon one shore in its final uproarious stages--as the typical, as
it is much the greatest, of Northumbrian rivers.
One shrinks, however, amid such an atmosphere
[Illustration: THE TYNE, HEXHAM, NORTHUMBERLAND]
[Illustration]
as lies between the covers of this book, with something of dismay from
the smoke, the uproar, and the resounding clamour through which the Tyne
moves from Newcastle to the sea, with its busy shipyards, its
coal-mines, its foundries. But from another point of view it is well
worth the voyage down by one of the little steamers that ply continually
to Tweedmouth, in which brief hour or two the very heart and vitals of
the industrial North reveal themselves at close quarters; for the Tyne,
though full of the largest ships, is comparatively narrow to its mouth
both on the Durham and Northumbrian shores, each resounding with human
energy in its noisiest and most strenuous forms. A striking feature of
the Tyne, too, is the alacrity with which at the last moment it shakes
all this off, and flows out under the ruinous Abbey of Tynemouth and
over the narrow bar, between yellow sands and woody cliffs, into the
fresh blue sea, as if the murky pandemonium had been but a hideous
dream.
Almost every one knows the look of Newcastle, seeing how imposing is the
view of town and river from the lofty railroad bridge on the highway to
Scotland. Nor from that point is it easy to realise that, 12 or 15 miles
above, this same river is brawling wide over a stony bed, with trout and
samlets leaping in its clear streams. The "Tynesider" is the product of
this lower and industrial stretch of the river, and not by any means a
person who lives anywhere upon its banks. He is a type unto himself, and
speaks a vernacular all his own, and the most unintelligible to the
stranger of all North-country dialects. His ancestors were, for the most
part, ordinary rural Northumbrians, dalesmen or otherwise. But the
atmosphere of the coal trade, carried on quite actively since the Tudor
period, has formed a type of man blunt of manner and raucous of speech,
into which all who come are absorbed. Such is the Tynesider in the true
meaning of the term. As a matter of fact, the colliery district of
Northumberland is extremely small, and mainly confined to the
south-eastern corner of the county, the rest of which is as sweet as
Westmoreland. Twenty miles up the river, and half-a-dozen beyond the
limits of the smirched country, the finely situated uplifted town of
Hexham, crowned with its exquisite Abbey church, stands near the parting
of the streams. If the Tyne is relatively narrow at Newcastle for the
navies it floats, it is extremely wide at Hexham for a river of its
boisterous quality. The sober interludes in which both Wye and Severn
indulge between their shallows are brief and rare upon the Tynes.
Severally and in their final partnership they remain gigantic mountain
brooks almost to the end, and this is why they have punished Newcastle
so fearfully in former days. In the eighteenth century the main bridge,
covered then with dwellings, and full at the time of sleeping inmates,
was swept into space and darkness in a few seconds. Few of the bridges
on either Tyne have failed to succumb at one time or another to its
fury. That at Hexham has seven arches, which will indicate the breadth
of the river. Even when parted just above, each branch forms a salmon
river of the first class as regards size, while the North Tyne is so in
the more literal sense. The South Tyne, rather the smaller, and though
always imposing and often beautiful the least so of the two, comes up
from the very south-east corner of the county.
Rising just over the Cumbrian border at Alston, tapping the gorges of
the wild, shapely, mountainous hills which girdle that racy and romantic
little market-town, the river brawls northward through a deep and
tortuous vale to Haltwhistle. Gathering _becks_ from the Cumbrian
fringes and further _burns_ as it descends--for the change from a
Scandinavian to a Saxon etymology is here well defined--the South Tyne
now turns sharply eastward, and runs along the foot of the ridge bearing
towards Hexham. Here too it meets the Carlisle and Newcastle railroad,
which follows its valley the whole way to the sea. Receiving the Allen
at the mouth of Allendale, the South Tyne becomes a fair-sized river,
and Haydon Bridge, which in the old raiding days was the only one on the
South Tyne, and was "chained" in periods of alarm, rests upon six
arches, through all of which the clear impetuous currents shoot even in
low water. It is a formidable thing for any one on tolerably intimate
terms not merely with their banks but with their traditions and
literature, to be confronted by the Tynes and but a few pages at
disposal. It is the Severn and the Wye over again--the Border atmosphere
surcharged with memories and traditions and many things beguiling to a
discursiveness that must be at all costs resisted.
But here we have all the physical sternness of the north, above all of
the north-east. The bed of a salmon river or a rocky trout stream
whether in Breconshire or Northumberland differs nowise. The swirling
pools, the gliding shallows, the angry rock-fretted rapids, the mossy
crags and fringing woods or fern-clad banks, are approximately the same
on Tyne or Wye, on Dove or Dart, and of a kind that has never yet bred
satiety in those whose ways have lain much beside them. The same music,
in all its infinite variety of tone and chord, is played by the Coquet,
the Monnow, or the Wharfe; the same familiar flies, the drakes and duns,
the alders and march-browns, dance to the familiar harmonies, while the
white-breasted ousel and his summer visitor the sandpiper are as
inevitably in evidence on the Tyne as on the Tamar. It is outside the
immediate fringe of such a river that local character and features
assert themselves. The South Tyne, from Haltwhistle to Hexham, sweeps
bravely down a valley of grass farms, with here and there a village of
stern uncompromising stone and slate set on its banks. There is no charm
of village architecture in Northumberland, or scarcely any. Nor on the
lofty slopes of Tynedale does the rose-embowered, orchard-girdled,
thatched-roof cot that Wordsworth saw on the high terraces of the Wye,
and sang of, send up its smoke wreaths.
The Northumbrian is practical and rectangular in his handling of the
landscape. In other words, he is an advanced farmer and generally a big
one, only surpassed by the Scotsman in those merits which are fatal to
picturesque detail in landscape so far as it can be controlled. The
Northumbrian dalesman was a picturesque cattle-lifter, or constant
fighter of cattle-lifters, long after the rest of England had settled
down to humdrum respectability, and even the Welsh Border had for two
centuries buried the hatchet. But when he reformed he did so to some
purpose, and has for some generations been very far ahead of the others
in eliminating all those luxuriant irregularities of Nature that in the
South make for artistic foregrounds. But Northumberland is in many vital
respects altogether too much for him. He can trace big rectangles with
stone dykes or bridled hedgerows, and lay out well-drained fields in the
broader valleys, and erect square, comfortable, unlovely homesteads of
whinstone that would stand a siege; but the spirit of the country in its
uplifted hills, its wild moors, remains untouched in spite of him. If
the modern dwelling by the Tyne, scattered enough in any case, is
deplorable from the artist's point of view, the nearer hills to the
southward trend upwards gradually in mile-long sweeps to wild and lonely
moors, from which come, winding down to the main valley, beautiful glens
like those of the two Allens or the Devil's Water, even still more
exquisite. It was in the dense woods of Dipton Dene, upon the latter
stream, that Queen Margaret, abandoned after the second battle of Hexham
in the Wars of the Roses, threw herself and infant son on the mercy of
the bandit, and, as we all know, was safely harboured by him. At its
mouth, too, on the Tyne, and just below Hexham, are the ruined towers of
Dilston, home of the ill-fated Derwentwater, who was lord of all this
country till the Jacobite rising of the "Fifteen" cost him his head and
his heirs their vast estates. If there are no half-timbered cottages or
few Tudor homesteads upon the Tyne, the valley still abounds in the
remains of peel-towers and bastel houses, redolent of the raiding days;
while here and there a great castle suggestive of some dominant name,
some Warden of the March or Keeper of the dale, broods over the stream
with its four grey towers and lofty curtains, and strikes a fine stern
note against the waving background of the moorish hills of Hexhamshire.
Dilston, as related, is below Hexham, and so is Prudhoe, the whilom
fortress of Umfravilles and Percies, whose massive walls are yet more
proudly perched. This South Tyne valley was thick with Ridleys and
Featherstonhaughs, a very cradle of many families of which these were
the chief. Men did not wander about the country and set up houses
anywhere and everywhere in the old Border days. They were wanted at
home, and by no means in demand in other dales, the stamping ground of
other and probably unfriendly stocks, though some of them were badly
enough wanted in another sense. Clans or "greynes" had to stick together
both for purposes of offence and defence, and fighting men were
valuable. Constant raids of Elliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, and Scotts from
beyond Cheviot and the necessity for retaliation kept both long dales of
Tyne on the alert.
Nowadays so thinly peopled, in the time of the Tudors and the early
Stuarts they contained more of these wild and lawless people than the
country could legitimately support. "Honest men all, but who did a
little shifting for their living," as a contemporary play puts it with
some humour; the despair alike, together with their Scottish equivalents
across the Cheviots, of English and Scottish Kings, of Parliaments and
officials. Williemoteswyke, a chief stronghold of the Ridleys, whence
came the celebrated martyr Bishop, still survives by the South Tyne, a
later farm-house built into the ancient towers. But all along the line
of the river, from Haltwhistle eastwards, within two or three miles for
the most part, and cresting the second ridge to the northward for the
entire distance, is a monument much older than the peel-towers of
Ridleys or Featherstonhaughs. The Roman Wall, as perhaps needs no
telling, ran here from sea to sea. Much of it was destroyed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Half the farm-houses, cottages,
and barns to the north of the river are built of its stones, quarried
and squared at the expense of Imperial Rome in the second century. But
parallel with this stretch of the South Tyne, for many miles the Wall
still pursues with an average height of 6 to 8 feet its direct and
lonely course along a wild and rugged skyline. Edging the face of the
rock escarpments, plunging into deep ravines, dividing the comb of lofty
whinstone ridges, this old northern barrier of the Roman Empire forges
always onward, regardless of obstacles, in its undeviating pursuit of
the highest points in an uplifted and lonely land. To the south of the
Wall, in the green troughs and broken ridges that divide it from the
South Tyne, lie the scattered homesteads of small sheep-farms, built at
the expense of its diminished stature, for even in the time of Elizabeth
it still retained its original height of some 18 or 20 feet.
To the northward the Roman soldier, whether bred in Spain or Gaul or on
the Rhine, looked down over what is even to-day an unpeopled wilderness
stretching far away over bog and heather and moor grass, to dim and
distant hills that mark the windings of the North Tyne. No reminders of
the Roman occupation in all England, no excavated towns, no dug-up villa
foundations among the haunts of men, are comparable in dramatic
significance with this persistent pile of masonry, punctuated with the
remnants of its walled camps and watch towers, in which Rome traced,
through this remote and wild land, the limit for three centuries of her
Imperial rule. About 12,000 men lay here perpetually along the 60 miles
between Carlisle and Newcastle. We know precisely, too, from the Roman
army list and the corroborating testimony carved upon scores of tablets
and altars, what regiments they were: which were the cavalry and which
the infantry stations. We know also the names of numbers of their
officers, for memorial tablets to the dead and inscriptions of honour to
the living are abundant. We see the officers' quarters, the men's
barracks, the baths, the market-houses; the narrow double gateways,
their stone lintels deeply rutted with the waggon wheels of this
mysterious and remote age. An amphitheatre here, a shrine there,
confronts one with rows of altars to forgotten gods, gathered upon the
walls of local museums. Here again is a milestone, elaborately inscribed
to the glory of emperors and pro-consuls, and ending like any county
council finger-post with the mileage to the nearest camp. But we know
nothing more of this wonderful and exasperatingly dark period, of three
long centuries at least, when England was mute, peaceful, and the sharer
in an advanced exotic civilization. One certainty amid the darkness we
are sure of, namely, that this perilous and war-like frontier above the
Tyne, now so lonely, was, by virtue not merely of its permanent garrison
but of the tributary communities which ministered to their service and
support, one of the most populous parts of England.
Hexham, standing at the forks of Tyne, was the ancient entrance to the
raiding dales. Beyond it the stranger would have most assuredly needed
the very best of introductions, while over the altars of its Abbey
church the heady champions of Tynedale hung their gloves for him to
pluck who held himself a sufficiently stout man to take the
consequences. Scott remembered this in _Rokeby_--
Edmund, thy years were scarcely mine,
When, challenging the Clans of Tyne,
To bring their best my brand to prove,
O'er Hexham's altar hung my glove;
But Tynedale, nor in tower nor town,
Held champion meet to take it down.
The seventeenth-century evangelist, Dr. Gilpin, on his first appearance
in Hexham Church, says a well-known story, terrified the more peaceful
souls around him by plucking one of these profane gauges of battle from
the sacred wall. Only his piety, eloquence, and undaunted front saved
the doctor from rough treatment at the hands of those sons of war who
had gathered from the dales to hear such an arraignment of their wild
ways as they were not accustomed to. Founded late in the seventh century
by St. Wilfrid, then Bishop of York, the crypt, largely fashioned of
Roman stones from the great station at Corbridge, still remains of the
original Abbey, ultimately destroyed by the Danes. Endowed by Queen
Etheldreda with her own dowry, the lands, still comprised in the three
large upland parishes south of the Tyne, and known as _Hexhamshire_,
remained with the monastery till the Dissolution. Rebuilt in 1112 by
another Prelate of York, the church was again practically destroyed by
the Scots. But what we now see used as the parish church is a choir,
tower, and transepts of beautiful Early English work throughout, save
for a recently and badly restored east end. Whether the original nave
was ever completed or not is a matter of contention. A new one at any
rate is being now built--a proceeding which provokes a good deal of
reasonable dissension from archæologists. The wide, square market-place
of Hexham was quite recently the most picturesque in the North. Modern
innovations have much damaged its reputation; but it still possesses,
fronting the Abbey, the Edwardian Moot Hall with its Gothic archway
surmounted by towers, warlike of aspect in their corbels and
machicolations, and yet another tower behind of equal age and imposing
look. Our artist's admirable and suggestive sketch of Hexham leaves us
little to add regarding its felicitous pose and charm of site and
outlook.
If, like the salmon, we prefer the North to the South Tyne, it is after
all but a selection between good things; for the valley of the former,
winding for 30 miles to its source just over the Scottish frontier, is,
together with its tributary the Rede, the absolute embodiment, the
quintessence, not merely of Border and Cheviot scenery, but of that
stirring past which gives the Anglo-Scottish Border an atmosphere all
its own. The Welsh Marches are instinct with the same spirit. The
difference in their detail for those to whom both have made their appeal
furnish an interesting and instructive contrast with which we have no
business here. But rivers after all play such a conspicuous and romantic
part in both. The streams of Wye and Dee, of Usk, Severn, and Towy on
the one hand, of Tyne and Coquet and Till and Tweed on the other, blend
their music with the harp of the bard or the voice of the minstrel, and
their names bite deep into every page of the moving chronicle. The one
has upon the whole a note of a pathos, something of the wail of a
conquered race, not as the Saxon was conquered, but of a small people
contending long and heroically against hopeless odds to a climax that in
the long run brought little to regret. The other, robust and racy of
retrospect with the consciousness of equal struggle. The one Celtic to
the core, clad in a tongue unknown to the conquerors, who in their turn
celebrated, so far as I know, no single triumph in ode or ballad, and
accompanied two centuries of mortal strife with no single verse. In the
other we have two communities, bone of the same bone, flesh of the same
flesh, furnished with almost the same racy variety of the same rich
tongue, who flung ballads across the Border as they shot arrows or
crossed spears. But above all, they left off quits, and amid a hundred
fights have always a Flodden for a Bannockburn, and a Homildon Hill for
an Otterburn. "I never hear," wrote Sir Philip Sidney, "the old song of
Percy and Douglas that I find not my heart more moved than by a
trumpet." One luminous and sufficiently accurate fact may be remembered
in this connection, namely, that the end of one long struggle was the
beginning of the other; that the same iron hand which, speaking broadly,
crushed the last gleam of Welsh independence, permanently alienated by
efforts of similar intent the hitherto not unfriendly northern kingdom.
For till the Scottish wars of Edward the First and the days of Bruce and
Wallace, Border feuds in the full meaning of the term had little
significance. The very Border line upon the North Tyne and Rede was
vague. Scotland and England fought occasionally and vigorously, but
there was no rancour nor unfriendliness when the game was over.
Redesdale and Liddesdale cut each other's throats and lifted each
other's cattle no doubt, as did other dales, promiscuously, but not as
Scot and Southern and as bitter hereditary foes.
Nowhere in its whole course is the North Tyne more striking in its
actual bed than for the last mile before its confluence at Hexham, when
its amber peat-stained waters fret amid a huge litter of limestone crags
and ledges between the woods of Warden. It is curious, too, in time of
spate to watch the powerful rivers rushing into one another's arms at
the meeting of the waters; the one a yellowy-brown, the other a rich
mahogany-black, as if no fallowed field or muddy lane had cast a stain
upon it. A few miles up, in a stretch of park land on the very banks of
the river, is Chesters, one of the principal Roman stations on the wall,
which last here leaped the stream. Much skilful excavation has been
done, laying bare the foundations and the lower walls of a large cavalry
station, for all to see on the day of the week when those in possession,
who have performed this admirable labour of years, admit the public.
Here too, in a normal state of the water, you can yet see the remains of
the Roman bridge which have defied the floods of Tyne for all these
centuries. As one travels up the river, pursuing its narrow and for a
time much-wooded vale, places of ancient fame or the scene of Border
ballads hold one at every mile. Houghton Castle, long restored and
inhabited, but still plain and grim, with much of the old fabric and its
ten-foot walls, stands proudly upon a woody steep above the wide
churning stream. Built in the thirteenth century by a Swinburne when
North Tynedale was Scottish ground, it was occupied by his descendants
through much of the turbulent period; for when the Border was shifted it
became the nearest castle of importance to the Scottish raiding valleys,
and many a moss-trooper has languished in its dungeons. A space farther
up on the other bank is Chipchase Castle, the ancient seat of the
Herons, where is still the original peel-tower, bearing a roof of
six-foot flagstones with battlements corbelled and machicolated,
circular corner towers, and the wooden fragments of a portcullis still
embedded in its pointed archway. Annexed to this is a beautiful Late
Tudor house of 1621, the first, no doubt, of its kind on this wild
frontier. In the sixteenth century Chipchase was the headquarters of a
corps of light horsemen, stationed here for the policing of Tynedale
under the command of its "Keeper," who was generally a Swinburne or a
Heron, subject in turn to the orders of the Warden of the Middle March,
very often a Dacre. But the little village of Wark, where a modern
bridge crosses the river, still some 50 or 60 yards wide, was in older
times than this the capital of North Tynedale. Here law was administered
and the visiting Scottish judges sat, before the embittered Border feuds
began to make any law other than that of the sword almost a farce. Above
Wark the valley grows wilder and more open, the river losing nothing,
however, of its size, and still proceeding, in a succession of rapids
and splendid salmon pools, between woods of birch and larch and ash.
Dark burns come splashing down anon from the high moors through bosky
denes, and an innocent-looking stream, not much bigger, pipes quietly in
on the east bank, and gives the name of Reedsmouth to a trifling hamlet.
This is the far-famed Rede, and this the mouth of Redesdale, that dark
and bloody ground, that inmost artery of Border feud. For over 20 miles
the little river goes winding away amid the moors and sheep-farms of the
Cheviots, with a village here and a hamlet there, till at the Reidseweir
by Carter Fell, scene of a famous Border fight, it finds its source in
the watershed and the Scottish Border. The main road that in a stretch
of 50 miles climbs the Cheviots into Scotland now runs up Redesdale, and
the frequent motor traffic along it seems something of a jarring note
amid the solitude of the great hills and the wide sweeping moors. It is
an old main highway nevertheless, and the world hurrying through it in
flying fragments at intervals seems incongruous in method rather than in
act; for Redesdale was not only a favourite pass for Border raiders, but
for large Scottish and English armies. The valley forms a V with that of
the North Tyne, both leading up to a pass over the spine of the
Cheviots. Though the Rede carries, as always, the highway, the Tyne,
with but a rough route for wheel traffic, has now a little railroad,
which at long intervals awakes its echoes. Redesdale, like Tynedale,
from its mouth to its source is a string of landmarks that tell of
doughty deeds, of triumph and defeat, of valour and treachery. At
Otterburn by the Rede, as every one knows, took place that most famous
of all true Border fights, when Hotspur and Douglas, with a great force
of Borderers behind either, maintained the most ferocious struggle known
even to Froissart, through most of a moonlight night, to the death of
Douglas, the capture and worsting of the Percies. Between Rede and Tyne
is a pathless solitude of moor and fell. Between North Tyne and the
Roman Wall, as already related, is just such another. The not
unpicturesque village of Bellingham, effectively poised on a high bank
above the river, is now the capital of the dale and the rendezvous of
its widespread sheep industry. The descendants of the men who formed the
greynes or clans of Tyne, soldiers, moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, the
terror of the low countries, are all here in absolute possession--Charltons,
Robsons, Hedleys, Dodds, Halls and Milburnes--great sheep-farmers many,
landowners still some of them. But tempting as it is to pursue this wild
and beautiful valley to the springs of Tyne on the Scottish watershed,
with its still surviving peel-towers, its wealth of tradition and
legend, it is necessary to forbear, for I have already somewhat exceeded
the limits of my space.
"Coquet" and Northumbrians, like the Scots, it may be noted, are
addicted to dropping the article in alluding to their larger rivers,
which conveys a pleasant suggestion of greater intimacy and
affection,--Coquet, then, rises also in the Cheviots, and, not far from
Rede, pursues her way through the same class of scenery, and boasts
more or less the same stirring story as the Tynes. A fine, lusty,
peat-tinged stream after a long pilgrimage through fern and heath-clad
uplands, amid which Scott laid the opening chapters of _Rob Roy_, the
river finally parts company with the Cheviots at the pleasant town of
Rothbury, that nestles beneath their outer ramparts, at this point of
considerable height and more than common shapeliness. Thence for 15
miles the river urges its streams over a clean rocky bottom, through the
undulating lowlands of Northumbria to the sea. Coquet holds the
affections of Northumbrians, I think, above all their rivers. There is
an obvious feeling in the county that it is their typical representative
stream, partly perhaps because it flows right through the centre of it,
and is more generally familiar than the remoter dales of Tyne. The North
Tyne, as a river, has a greater volume of water, and is more imposing.
Both have a stormy and dramatic past, but that of Tyne and Rede, since
they were notable passes into Scotland, is on a more imposing scale,
though the raider was in no way bound to beaten routes. But Coquet is a
fascinating and delightful river, and one understands the point of view
which makes it the darling of its county and the subject of much local
verse, racy and vigorous or sentimental, within the last century.
Northumberland, Yorkshire, Wales, and other regions of like character
are the true land of the angler. Wiltshire, Hampshire, and their
prototypes have great reputations. But the native to any extent worth
mentioning is not a trout fisherman. He neither knows nor cares aught
about it, nor has any opportunity for contracting the habit or love of
trouting. The conditions are all against him. The fat trout of these
"dry-fly" countries, to put the matter in technical but concrete
fashion, are the quarry of a few individuals: groups of men mainly
strangers, or, in any case of necessity, persons of means or the friends
of such. It is like pheasant-shooting. The farmer and the well-to-do
tradesmen, much less the labourer or mechanic of these counties, have
scarcely more instinct for fly-fishing than if they lived in the fens.
But in counties like Northumberland and many others dealt with in this
book, the rivers are objects of popular affection or at least of general
understanding. Every third man can throw a fly in some sort of fashion,
or cast a worm for trout in clear water. Opportunities in recent years,
owing partly to the increase of fishing among
[Illustration: THE COQUET, AND WARKWORTH CASTLE, NORTHUMBERLAND]
[Illustration]
wealthy townsmen and partly to an ignorance of the whole subject on the
part of many new landowners, have been enormously curtailed for the
humbler sportsman. But the instinct is an inheritance of all classes in
those counties where hills mount high and streams run fast. The North
Tyne is a good salmon and sea-trout river and a splendid trout stream.
It is a little remote, and withal, of late years, somewhat exclusive;
but the Coquet is naturally as good. It has always been, and even still
is, more accessible to the Northumbrian angler. The salmon, the bull
trout, the sea trout, and the brown trout thrive in its clear mountain
waters.
Now the laymen, even such as are in the highest degree susceptible to
the charms of Nature and scenery, cannot easily realise the hold that
streams of this type and their localities acquire over the affections
and imaginations of anglers; not all, of course, for the fraternity
includes every kind of temperament. But to a considerable proportion,
and by no means of necessity only those whom education and culture make
susceptible to such emotion, the appeal of the river, quite apart from
the mere act of killing fish, is overmastering. It is no figure of
speech but a mere simple statement of fact that, compared to the trout
fisherman's familiarity with a stream, the relationship of the rest of
the world to it is a mere nodding acquaintance. Long days are spent in
the closest intimacy with its ever-changing surface and the
ever-changing melodies it plays. Miles of water, much of it buried in
woody dingles from every eye but the fisherman's, its only visitor, are
traversed by him on the bank edge, or in the stream itself, over and
over again, till every eddy and pool, every rock and pendent bough,
becomes printed in the mind, and hung, so to speak, in its picture
gallery. Weeks or months of days, from youth to age, on many streams
gives the properly constituted disciple of old Izaak a feeling towards
them that can have no counterpart outside the craft, and at the best
could be but vaguely realised.
A man would be a dull dog to be continuously exposed, in what are,
_primâ facie_, among the happiest hours of his life, to surroundings
that are the most perfect of all Nature's efforts and not grow to
associate them with something more than a mere love of killing things;
and there are fewer dull dogs among trout fishermen, one may fairly
hazard the statement, than in the ranks of any other sport or pastime.
There is a poetry in all field-sports. But in most others there are
also accessories which attract the crowd, which conduce to vanity, or
popularity, or give a leg up to the social climber. There is usually an
audience of some sort, the applause of a circle or a multitude. The
fisherman, in this respect at least, is beyond suspicion. He is at any
rate genuine and the real thing. Very often, indeed, he is a poet,
generally of course an inarticulate one, and unconscious of any such
label. But his gratification belongs in part to the higher senses: the
romance of the river is strong within him, and it would be strange
indeed, seeing the sort of scenes among which he spends his hours, if it
were otherwise. The fishermen of the Coquet, however, are not all
inarticulate. The river has invoked a good deal of verse on the part of
its frequenters, which, if not Swinburnian, is melodious and from the
heart, and reveals the love of the Northumbrian angler for its winsome
streams. Heaven forbid I should suggest that only an angler can
appreciate the glories of a mountain stream; I have but attempted to
indicate the more intimate affection for it that men must have, and do
have, whose happiest hours are associated with its inmost haunts and
with its thousand moods, and whose very ears sing in the evening of
long days with its unending melodies.
In the northern counties, as in Wales, the rivers play a greater part in
local lore and in the affections of the people generally than in the
south. They are intertwined with their legends and their folklore, their
ordinary interests. They stimulate the local imagination by their
capricious moods, their fury in flood-time, their tempestuous qualities.
Even the untutored rustic, one may think, feels insensibly the influence
of the cataract, or the charm of the summer shallows where as an urchin
he paddled or tickled trout. They riot beside his village street, and
their little tributaries plunge beside his cottage door. The southern or
midland river is apt to steal noiselessly through interdicted
water-meadows, and seems to feel neither storm nor drought till one day,
perchance, the valley gradually fills with gently oozing water that
recedes with unexciting deliberation.
The considerable remains of Brinkburn Priory, an Augustinian house,
stand near the banks of the Coquet, while at Felton Bridge, a village of
some note in Northumbrian story, it has been forced to cut a channel
through hard ledges of rock, which results in some fine grouping of
foam and foliage. Our illustration, however, represents the final stage
of the river, where in its more peaceful mood it winds beneath the
renowned Castle of Warkworth towards the sea. Though abandoned for
centuries as a residence, its great Keep, built in the third Edward's
stirring days by a Percy in star-shape fashion, with eight lofty
clustered towers, is practically intact and eminently imposing, while
some of the outer walls and other buildings still survive around the
great outer bailly. Originally a fortress and manor of the Claverings,
it was granted by the same Edward to Henry Percy in payment for his
expenses as Warden of the March, and also as a recognition of his share
in the defeat of the invading Scots at Neville's Cross, while the King
and his army were fighting the campaign of Crecy. It was their chief
seat, rather than Alnwick, for some generations, including that of
Hotspur. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, here lays the scene in
which that fiery soul is planning his intended revolt against Henry the
Fourth which ended on the fatal field of Shrewsbury, and repels his
curious wife's persistent sallies anent his moody ways and broken,
restless nights. The second part of the same play also opens here at
Warkworth, where the old Earl awaits the news from Shrewsbury, and
receives the messenger announcing the rout of his friends and Hotspur's
death.
Warkworth, like Alnwick, fell into decay during the long absence of the
Percys from the north, a compulsory absence but little broken for
generations, and wholly due to the fear of them felt by the Tudors, who
were strong enough to coerce those they feared. When in the person of
the first Duke they returned during the eighteenth century to a
permanent residence in Northumberland, it was a mooted question whether
Alnwick or Warkworth should be restored, the former, as we know, being
selected. And if the Alne, winsome little river though it be, cannot
compare with the Coquet, it has some compensation in the miles of
beautiful and diversified park it waters, and in the honour of laving
the feet of the proudest and greatest castle in all England. On arriving
beneath the high-perched towers of Warkworth, the Coquet has relapsed
into a smooth gliding stream, and in a red sandstone cliff abutting on
its banks, just above the castle, is a quite remarkable cell or
hermitage, like those on the Severn near Bewdley. But this one is more
elaborate by far, and uncanny to a high degree. A flight of steps hewn
in the rock mounts up from the river bank to a cave, entered by an
ecclesiastically-fashioned porch. The interior itself was cunningly
wrought some six centuries ago into the form of a chapel of Gothic
design, some twenty feet by seven, with a two-light window, an altar,
and a vaulted roof with central bosses supported by short circular
columns, all being hewn out of the solid rock. To the south of this
altar, under the window, is the rather gruesome explanation of these
pious labours. For here lies the rude and greatly worn figure of a
female, with a man seated at her feet resting his head upon his hand,
and though much worn by time still eloquently indicating an attitude of
remorse and despair. Over the outside of the door is carved a Latin
inscription signifying, "My tears have been my meat day and night,"
while within is another chamber of a ruder kind.
The story runs thus, that the man is a Bertram of Bothal and the lady a
Widdrington, his intended bride, whom he killed by mistake, and then,
fashioning this hermitage, mourned her here in seclusion for the
remainder of his life. How the mistake arose and the tragedy came about
is too long a tale for these pages. Hotspur's son, when an exile in
Scotland, after his father's death and attainder, is supposed to have
contracted a stealthy marriage with a daughter of the rival Marcher
house of Neville, whom he afterwards publicly espoused, in this same
hermitage. Just beneath the cliff is a small ruinous building on the
river bank, built of hewn rock in the fifteenth century; concerning
this, however, there is no mystery though some interest, as the cell of
a priest attached to the Percy family under ordinary conditions, which
are still preserved in writing. The inevitably sombre, but in a sense
rather picturesque little town of Warkworth, with its market cross,
straggles up from the fifteenth-century bridge, guarded by an old
turreted gateway, to the castle in most suggestively feudal fashion. So
soon after this does the Coquet join the sea that Warkworth considers
itself something of a watering-place, though no disturbing evidences of
anything of the kind mar the bygone flavour of dominant castle and
tributary townlet which it still so pleasantly retains. Passengers to
and from Scotland on the main line must assuredly be familiar with these
proud towers standing out above the bare fields, a mile or two eastward
against the sea. Not so obvious is a beautiful glimpse of the Coquet
which must be snatched at precisely the proper moment. But as the train
crosses the river some four miles from its mouth, it may be seen for a
few brief seconds down a long straight half-mile trail of glancing light
between luxuriant walls of woodland.
The Till, though not one of the artist's subjects on these pages, must
have a brief word, if only because it is quite unlike any other river on
the Border, and is, moreover, the only English stream that feeds the
Tweed. Rising, like the Alne, and not far from it, in the Cheviots about
half-way down their course, it fails to achieve the other's feat and
break through that isolated central block of North Northumbrian moors
between the Cheviots and the sea. Thus baffled and turning away to the
north quite in its infancy, it runs along the eastern base of the
Cheviots to the Tweed. Passing Chillingham and thence to Wooler, the
Till winds with extraordinary contortions through broad level meadows,
the great humpy masses of the Northern Cheviots, reaching here the
height of 2700 feet, towering majestically above it. Rippling gently
over gravelly shallows of singularly lustrous colouring and many hues,
it lingers long and constantly, so slight is the fall, in sullen deeps,
into which the high crumbling red sandstone banks are continually
toppling. In actual appearance the Till is almost a replica of those
famous Hereford grayling rivers the Teme and the Lugg, and, as is but
natural, that useful and handsome fish, which was only introduced here
fifteen years ago, now swarms in its streams somewhat to the ousting of
the trout, its natural denizens, and no doubt to the disgust of its
autumn visitors, the salmon and the sea-trout. These, however, pass on
for the most part up the brawling tributaries which the grayling do not
face, and it is an interesting sight to watch the "sea-fish," as inland
Northumbrians call the salmon tribe, leaping the dam on the Wooler burn
in a half flood.
Mild as it looks and gently as it murmurs, the Till is formidable in
flood for the wide grazing lands it submerges at short notice, when the
fountains of the Cheviots are loosed. Beautiful burns hurry down from
the not very distant heart of this narrow but lofty northern point of
the range, into the Till, babbling through deep glens, clad like the
hills above with bracken, sprinkled in fine confusion with birch and
alder, and littered with fragments of grey rock. The stone bridge over
which Surrey led the English army as he marched down its valley to
Flodden, whose high green ridge confronts you everywhere, still spans
the Till. Above it, abrupt and bare, like a lower buttress to the
Cheviot range, rises Homildon Hill, where Hotspur defeated ten thousand
Scots under another Douglas with fearful slaughter by archers alone, and
no great force of them, without moving a single horseman from his
ranks--the only instance of the kind known, according to experts, in
mediæval warfare; a battle by no means after Hotspur's heart,
extraordinary triumph though it was, and more particularly as most of
these triumphant archers were Welsh mercenaries. But the Till, opening
straight to Scotland and to the Tweed, is literally steeped in such
doings, and lest I find myself drifting into the tale of Flodden Field,
in which the "Sullen Till" played so notable a part, it will be prudent
to cross the watershed at once without further delay or palaver. Anent
the leisurely habits of the Till, however, they are commemorated on the
Border by the time-honoured jibe with which Tweed greets the appearance
of its only English tributary, and the latter's effective rejoinder:--
Said Tweed to Till
What gars ye rin sae still?
Said Till to Tweed
Though ye rin wi' speed
And I rin slaw,
Whar ye droon ae man
I droon twa.
It is in those central highlands south of the Tyne, made up of portions
of the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Westmoreland, and Cumberland,
that the Tees, with its tributaries the Greta and Lune, also the Swale
and Lancashire Lune, and last, but not least, the Eden, all find their
source, not merely in this wild upland, but actually within the confines
of west Westmoreland. The Eden, though nowhere touching that famous
district known as Lakeland which the two counties mostly share, is by
far the foremost river in Westmoreland or Cumberland. The very fact of
its propinquity to the Lake District makes for its isolation as regards
the stranger in search of the picturesque, just as the Pennines, which
at Crossfell almost touch 3000 feet, are obscured by the near
neighbourhood of the Lake mountains, whose shapes, like those of Wales,
as much as their heights, exalt them beyond comparison with the most
inspiring and the wildest of round-capped moorlands. Between the
Pennines and the Lakeland mountains, always with a north-westward
course, the Eden urges its quickly gathering waters through
Westmoreland, with a swish and swirl and ripple rather than any great
show of agitation, traversing the pleasant pastoral and agricultural
[Illustration: THE EDEN, SAMSON'S CHAMBER, NEAR CARLISLE]
[Illustration]
valley amid which Appleby, the little capital of Westmoreland, lies
astride the stream. To the east of the Eden for practically its whole
journey to Carlisle, spreads an unbroken wilderness of moor and fell.
Upon the west, from Kirkby Stephen, above which it rises, through
Appleby to near Penrith, and reaching to the edge of the Lake country,
lies a picturesque, broken region of small valleys, secluded villages,
and farms. From the Pennines and its eastern fringes, numerous becks
hurry to the Eden, and from the west, by long courses with the grain of
the country, many little rivers eventually reach the generous shingly
bed of the same hospitable stream. From Penrith, on the edge of
Cumberland and but four miles to the west, comes down the beautiful
river Eamont, which is the outlet of Ulswater, just as the Lowther,
another arrival at the same moment, brings the burden of Haweswater.
This Westmoreland Eden has also a particular interest as the open valley
of the West Marches and the natural channel for such Scottish raids as
broke past Penrith and its surrounding group of fortified houses. This
whole corner, indeed, between the Eden and the latter town and just
around it still proclaims to the observant wanderer what a vital spot it
was. The fortified granges of Yanwath and Blencowe, the perfect little
fortalice of Dacre, the numerous peel-towers such as Clifton, and those
embodied in the later mansions of Brougham, Newbiggin, or Hutton John,
and the fine old red ruins of Brougham Castle itself, with many others
that recur to memory, lend an abiding interest to this particular
neighbourhood. A broad gap was this between the rugged chaos of
Lakeland, which offered the Scots nothing to the south but a possible
ambush of hardy mountaineers, and the Pennine wilderness upon the inner
side. Over the levels of central Cumberland horsemen could travel
anywhere once Carlisle was evaded or disposed of. The narrow streets of
Penrith again, all converging into open spaces for the better
safe-guarding of herds of cattle and other valuables, are significant
enough of the perilous days of old for the few to whom such things
appeal, whilst up on the crest of the ridge above the town there is
still the iron cage in which flared the beacon light of war, when all
heights to the northward twinkled with the ominous news that the Scots
had crossed the Solway.
In broad and surging current the Eden now courses between more
precipitous steeps with greater commotion and of more inspiring
character than marked the pleasant but gentler murmurs of its previous
wanderings. At Kirkoswald, Crossfell displays its smooth but lofty brow,
the virtual peer of Skiddaw and Helvellyn in all but the little matter
of quality and distinction, in something like intimacy with the river,
and spreads its skirts almost to its eastern shore. At Kirkoswald, too,
is an ancient monastery, developed at the Dissolution into a manor house
acquired by the Featherstonhaughs, who still possess it, and on the hill
slope are the scant remnants of "one of the fairest castles," says an
Elizabethan writer, "that ever eyes beheld." Won by a Dacre, who raiding
south on a certain occasion instead of north, carried off its heiress
from Warwick Castle, it gathers some added interest from having been the
fortress whence the Dacre of Flodden fame marched to that immortal field
with his thousand Cumbrian horse, the only cavalry on the English side.
A detached church belfry, standing high and alone near the castle site,
gives pause to the ecclesiologist as an almost unique spectacle in the
north, and from its summit presents a delightful view to such chance
visitors as might light upon Kirkoswald of the Eden valley and the
Pennines. The river has already swept past Salkeld, with its red
embattled church tower and traditions of Dick Whittington and the first
Lord Ellenborough, who were both born here. Nearly opposite Kirkoswald
is Lazonby, on whose high banks our artist, it will be seen, has set up
his easel. Below Kirkoswald is the nunnery, an ancient manor house
celebrated for its walks and woods and waterfalls upon the banks of the
river. Farther on towards Carlisle is Ormathwaite, where for a time the
Eden ceases from troubling and is overhung by crags and woods and the
ancient castle of the Skeltons. Just before reaching Carlisle the
Irthling, a mountain river of some length and volume, comes down from
the wildest portion of the old Middle March, just north of the Upper
Tyne beyond Gilsland and about Bewcastle, whose moss-troopers and
cattle-lifters were perhaps the most incorrigible of all English
Borderers. It is a common saying among old men, with probably a half
truth in it, that the King's writ within their memory did not run in
Bewcastle. And at Carlisle, too, comes in the Petteril, which has run
northward from near Penrith through the vanished forest of Inglewood, a
parallel course to the Eden and quite near to it. Here the Calder
arrives almost at the same moment from the far back of Skiddaw Forest,
[Illustration: THE EDEN, NEAR LAZONBY, CUMBERLAND]
[Illustration]
watering in its infancy the hill village of Caldbeck, which John Peel
has made famous, and murmuring by the churchyard where that hero lies
beneath a tombstone decorated with the emblems of the chase. The Eden
then, it will have been gathered, is a great and important river, as our
English standards go, watering a broad region of singular beauty and
romantic interest, and drawing tribute both from the Lake country, the
Pennines, and the lower Cheviots.
The city of Carlisle, which rises on its sandstone ridge above the Eden,
steeped in the stirring deeds of centuries, must for that very reason be
passed lightly by. The river, however, it should be noted, had its share
in the Roman wall of Hadrian, which crossed it here upon a bridge and
finished at Stanwix, just below Carlisle, where stood the Roman station
of Lugubalium. Roman Carlisle with its camps, roads, and garrisons, was
of extreme importance, but the later Carlisle, from the time when it
ceased to be Scottish ground in the thirteenth century till the
rebellion of 1745, when so many things happened here, is altogether too
racy and stirring a subject to mock at with a page or paragraph. In
connection, however, with this last leisurely progress of the Eden to
the Solway estuary, it is worthy of note that the seven or eight miles
of country through which it winds, the corner lying between Carlisle and
Scotland, that is to say, is a dead level; a melancholy expanse of
reclaimed moss, as the prevalent fir-woods significantly proclaim, while
peat hags even yet show here and there between the grey fallows and pale
pastures. It was along here, too, just to the east of the Eden, that
runaway couples in former days galloped hot foot before their pursuers
to Gretna Green, which lies at the farther end of it. But as a matter of
fact this belt of level country, over which the castle walls of Carlisle
look so proudly to the Scottish hills across the Solway, strikes a
perfect note in this romantic and significant Border topography. The
Eden could not possibly contrive a more harmonious finish than in this
complete change of scene and demeanour, this silent progress through
unadorned, infertile, almost uncared-for looking levels, that for this
very reason seem to keep a firmer hold of the grim spirit of the past; a
tramping ground of hostile armies, a cockpit of lawless clan warfare, a
treacherous galloping ground of the moss-trooper with the rope dangling
for him on Carlisle Castle, each in their day and generation. This even
still rather thinly peopled
[Illustration: THE DERWENT, GRANGE, BORROWDALE]
[Illustration]
region terminates near the mouth of Esk, where Solway Moss of old
renown, bristling with scrub pine-trees and waist deep in spongy
heather, still spreads a quaking bog for many a level mile, while the
once threatening dales of Esk and Liddel open significantly in whole or
part for any traveller with a soul within him who pursues the shaking
highway across the moss. But these levels of the Eden and the Solway
mouth are even in a mere physical sense a fitting complement to this
wide prospect of the Western March. For away in their rear, where
Carlisle springs at its southern edge, and away again behind the low
indefinite undulations of agricultural as opposed to mountainous
Cumberland, the pale cone of Skiddaw with its lesser satellites leaps
high into the southern sky. On the north the dark Dumfriesshire moors
fill a long horizon with their billowy forms, and all about the mouth of
the Eden are the wide-spreading yellow sands of the Solway estuary,
white with sea-fowl and blended with blue waters just flaked, as they
come back to me, with the snowy caps of a breezy June morning. Here,
perhaps, under other conditions, the more sombre memories of Redgauntlet
would be uppermost, or on the bridge of Esk the shadows of Dandie
Dinmont and Guy Mannering might displace the sterner realities of the
Grahams of Netherby--those watch-dogs of the Western March--of
Musgraves, Armstrongs, or Scotts of Buccleuch. The Eden, being a clean,
unpolluted river, is naturally the haunt in season of the salmon and
sea-trout. But above all it is a trouting stream of the very highest
class, often ranked by those well qualified to judge as the best of its
kind in the whole north of England, yielding to the expert hand heavy
creels of fish, which average two to the pound, a standard which the
_habitué_ in rapid waters knows well is more often a paper than an
actual one.
And now what is one to say about those beautiful but short-lived streams
that in Lakeland link lake to lake, and which all the world after a
fashion knows so well? Their identity is in a sense lost, absorbed and
merged in the famous and familiar region, to whose well-nigh matchless
beauties, however, they so materially contribute. Hitherto we have been
for the most part beside rivers of great individuality, but by
comparison with these others unknown, save by name, to the outer world;
rivers steeped in history and tradition, and that have themselves helped
much in the making of both. Here, on the other hand, we are in a
little
[Illustration: SKELWITH FORCE, NEAR AMBLESIDE, WESTMORELAND]
[Illustration]
enchanted land that, speaking relatively, has no history. A democracy in
the past of yeomen or peasant owners, with little story but their own
extremely racy and domestic one, they owed nothing to landlord, chief,
or king but the service of military tenure by which they held their
farms, and which they rendered when called upon by the Warden of the
Western March, but offering small temptation to the predatory instincts
of the Scottish raider. The Lakelanders were neither raiders nor Border
fighters in the same sense as the men of the Tyne and Eden, or only
incidentally so. They led comparatively humdrum lives. Their ancient
condition is one of no little economic and social interest, but not of
the kind to stir the blood of the stranger as does that which existed on
the Solway, the Irthling, the Tynes, the Coquet, and the Tweed. The
modern literary associations of Lakeland have absolutely obscured any
ancient story it might have to tell, while the temperament of neither
Wordsworth, Southey, the Coleridges, nor de Quincey turned in any
appreciable degree to the past of the country that so closely held their
affections. Others have done so, if not in very popular or accessible
fashion, for those to whom such things appeal. If Wordsworth, however,
did not sing much of the past, he sang of his native streams to such
effect that it seems likely they will play accompaniments to his verse
in the ears of such visitors as have got any so long as time lasts. The
Rothay into which the Brathay runs might seem, perhaps, to have the
greatest claim on Wordsworth or he on it, since it plunged beneath his
very gate on its journey from Rydal to Windermere. But Wordsworth was
everywhere. He did not stay indoors all day like the industrious
Southey, who must, nevertheless, have accomplished most of his life's
work with the song of the Keswick Greta in his ears. Wordsworth lived in
the open, was possessed of a stout pair of legs as well as an unrivalled
imagination, and looked like a country farmer, little enough as he
resembled one. His outward man fitted his environment as a grey mossy
rock blends with a mountain stream; and one likes to have it so, for the
Nature poet is sometimes in habit and person rather painfully at odds
with the scenes of which he sings.
One is now among beauteous short-lived rivers and becks innumerable that
almost everybody--for who has not been in Lakeland?--is more or less
familiar with. Since crossing the Pennines, too, we have been in a
country where Scandinavian
[Illustration: THE DERWENT, BORROWDALE, CUMBERLAND]
[Illustration]
blood and etymology is everywhere in striking evidence; whereas on the
east of them the Saxon is held to be almost untouched with Norse blood.
We there walked by "burns" and "forces" and beneath "laws." Of "becks"
and "ghylls" there were none, nor scarcely any "fells," till the spine
of the dividing range was almost reached. Many of the Lakeland streams
run under their original name to the sea; the Kent, rising behind
Mardale and flowing by Kendal to Morecambe Bay; the Leven, carrying the
waters of Windermere under Newby bridge by a short course to the same
destination; the Esk, rising under Scafell and pursuing its own
delightful dale to Ravenglass on the coast of Cumberland. The Irt bears
the burden of Wastwater to the same destination, while the Ehen carries
the waters of Ennerdale to the coast upon its own account. The Duddon,
which Wordsworth invoked so freely, rising near Langdale Pikes, runs a
long course, dividing Cumberland from Lancashire to Broughton-in-Furness
and its own well-known estuary. But these streams themselves, save while
nameless becks, are not so familiar to Lakers--to use an obsolete
term--as the Derwent, which, gathering size above Rossthwaite within a
very short space, races down Borrowdale into Derwentwater, a beautiful
and lusty river. Indeed, the head of the Lake knows Derwent well: when
raging down in flood from the rainiest watershed in England, to lift its
surface over field and roadway. Every one, too, knows the Derwent during
its three-mile run through the meadows by Portinscale into
Bassenthwaite. Thence it leaves the rather circumscribed bounds of the
Lake tourist, and, running a rapid picturesque course to Cockermouth,
where the Cocker brings down to it the waters of Buttermere and
Crummock, soon afterwards passes into the sea at Workington amid much
signs of coal smoke, of which there was little enough when Mary Queen of
Scots made the landing here which sealed her fate. But amid such a maze
of spouting rivers, a score of which will leap to the memory of those
who know and love this glorious bit of England, it will be seen at once
how futile it would be to single out any one or two of them merely to
dwell in ineffective prose upon their natural charms.