Following the Wear northward towards its mouth, at a short distance
below Durham it passes the site of the Roman city of Conderum, which had
been the resting-place of St. Cuthbert's bones until the Danish invasion
drove them away, and it is now known as Chester-le-Street. Here, in the
old church of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert, is the rude effigy of the saint
which once surmounted his tomb, and here also is the "Aisle of Tombs," a
chain of fourteen monumental effigies of the Lumleys, dating from Queen
Elizabeth's reign. Lumley Castle, now the Earl of Scarborough's seat
(for he too is a Lumley), is a short distance outside the town, on an
eminence overlooking the Wear. It dates from the time of Edward I., but
has been much modernized, the chief apartment in the interior being the
Great Hall, sixty by thirty feet, with the Minstrel Gallery at the
western end. Here on the wall is a life-size statue of the great
ancestor of the Lumleys, Liulph the Saxon, seated on a red horse. North
of this castle, across the Wear, is the Earl of Durham's seat, Lambton
Castle, a Gothic and Tudor structure recently restored.
[Illustration: SOUTH-EAST VIEW OF LUMLEY CASTLE.]
[Illustration: GATEWAY, LUMLEY CASTLE, FROM THE WALK.]
Still journeying northward, we cross the hills between the Wear and the
Tyne, and come to the New Castle which gives its name to
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the great coal shipping port. This is a
strange-looking town, with red-tiled roofs, narrow, dingy, crooked
streets, and myriads of chimneys belching forth smoke from the many
iron-works. These mills and furnaces are numerous also in the
surrounding country, while the neighborhood is a network of railways
carrying coal from the various lines to the shipping-piers. But this
famous city is not all smoke and coal-dust: its New Castle is an ancient
structure, rather dilapidated now, coming down from the reign of Henry
II., approached by steep stairways up the rock on which the keep is
perched. It has a fine hall, which is used as a museum of Roman relics,
and from the roof is a grand view along the Tyne. This castle has a well
ninety-three feet deep bored in the rock. Newcastle in its newer parts
has some fine buildings. Grey Street, containing the theatre and
Exchange, for a space of about four hundred yards is claimed to be the
finest street in the kingdom. In Low Friars Street is the old chapel of
the Black Friars monastery, where Baliol did homage to Edward III. for
the Scottish throne. Sir William Armstrong lives at Jesmond, just
outside Newcastle, and at Elswick, west of the city, are the extensive
workshops where are made the Armstrong guns. The great High Level bridge
across the Tyne Valley, built by Stephenson, with a railway on top of a
roadway, and one thousand three hundred and thirty-seven feet long, is
one of the chief engineering works at Newcastle. George Stephenson was
born in 1781 at High Street House, Wylam, near Newcastle, while at
Frudhoe Castle is a seat of the Duke of Northumberland. At Wallsend,
three miles east of Newcastle, begins the celebrated Roman wall that
crossed Britain, and was defended by their legions against incursions by
the Scots. Its stone-and-turf walls, with the ditch on the north side,
can be distinctly traced across the island.