show the stranger, save one object of very high antiquity indeed, before
whose hoary age even Norman and Early English architecture is
comparatively a thing of yesterday. This is the Bulmer Stone, a huge
boulder of granite, brought by glacial action in some far-away ice-age
from the heights of Shap Fell in distant Westmoreland to the spot on
which it has ever since rested. Darlington has meanwhile risen out of
the void and lonely countryside; history has passed by, from the remote
times of the blue-stained Britons, down to the present era of the
blue-habited police; and that old stone remains beside the road to the
North. Modern pavements encircle it, and gas-lamps shame with their
modernity its inconceivable age, but not with too illuminating a ray, and
the stranger roaming Darlington after nightfall has barked his shins
against the unexpected bulk of the Bulmer Stone, just as effectually as
countless generations before him have done.
The long rise of Harrowgate Hill conducts out of Darlington and leads on
to Coatham Mundeville, a tiny hamlet on the crest of a hill, with an
eighteenth-century house, a row of cottages, and an inn, making together
an imposing figure against the sky-line, although when reached they are
commonplace enough. The village of Aycliffe lies beyond, on its height,
overlooking a scene of quarrying and coal-mining; an outlook which until
Cromwell’s time was one of dense oak-woods. He it was who caused those
woods to be felled to mend the road on to Durham and make it firm enough
for his ordnance to pass. Whether the name of Aycliffe derives (as some
would have it) from “oak hill,” or whether it was originally “High
Cliffe,” or obtains its name from some forgotten _haia_, or enclosure on
this eminence, let us leave for others to fight over: it is an equally
unprofitable and insoluble discussion. As well might one hope to obtain
a verbatim report of one or other of the two Synods held here in 782 and
789, of which two battered Saxon crosses in the churchyard are thought to
be relics, as to determine this question.
For the rest, Aycliffe is quite unremarkable. Leaving it, and coming
downhill over an arched crossing over a marsh, dignified by the name of
Howden Bridge, we reach Traveller’s Rest and its two inns, the “Bay
Horse” and “Gretna Green Wedding Inn.” An indescribable air of romance
dignifies these two solitary inns that confront one another across the
highway, and form all there is of Traveller’s Rest. The “Wedding Inn,”
the more modern of the two, has for its sign the picture of a marriage
ceremony in that famous Border smithy. The “Bay Horse” is the original
Traveller’s Rest. Dating back far into the old coaching and posting
times, its stables of that era still remain; but what renders the old
house particularly notable is its sign, the odd figure of a horse within
an oval, seen on its wall, with the word “Liberty” in company with the
name of “Traveller’s Rest” and the less romantic than commercial
announcement of “Spirituous Liquors.” Once, perhaps, painted the correct
tint of a “bay” horse, the elements have reduced it to an unobtrusive
brown that bids fair to modestly fade into the obscurity of a neutral
tint, unless the landlord presently fulfils his intention, expressed to
the present historian, of having it repainted, to render it “more
viewly”; which appears to be the North-country phrase for making a thing
“more presentable.” To this old sign belongs the legend of a prisoner
being escorted to Durham Gaol and escaping through the horse ridden by
his mounted guard throwing its rider near here. Hence the word
“Liberty.”
[Picture: Traveller’s Rest]
Woodham, a mile distant down the road, bears a name recalling the times
when it was in fact a hamlet in those oak woods of which we spoke at
Aycliffe. It is now just a group of two or three cottages and a humble
inn, the “Stag,” in a dip of the way. Beyond it comes Rushyford Bridge,
a pretty scene, where a little tributary of the Skerne prattles over its
stony bed and disappears under the road beside that old-time
posting-house and inn, the “Wheatsheaf.” The old house still stands and
faces down the road; but it has long since ceased to be an inn, and,
remodelled in recent taste, is now a private residence. The old drive up
to the house is now converted into lawns and flower-beds. Groups of that
graceful tree, the black poplar, overhang the scene and shade the little
hamlet that straggles down a lane to the left hand. The old “Wheatsheaf”
has its memories. It was a favourite resort of Lord Eldon’s. Holt, the
landlord, was a boon companion of his. The great lawyer’s vacations were
for many years spent here, and he established a cellar of his own in the
house, stocked chiefly with “Carbonell’s Fine Old Military Blackstrap
Newcastle Port,” of which, although they were decidedly not military, he
and his host used to drink seven bottles a day between them, valiant
topers that they were. On Saturdays—we have it on the authority of
Sydney Smith—they drank eight bottles; the extra one being to fortify
themselves against the Sunday morning’s service. Lord Eldon invariably
attended church at Rushyford, and compelled his unwilling host to go with
him. In London he rarely went, remarking when reproached that he, a
buttress of the church, should fail in his devotions, that he was “only
an outside buttress.”
[Picture: Rushyford Bridge]
Lord Eldon was a mean man. It is a defect to be noticed in many others
who, like him, have acquired wealth by great personal efforts; with him,
however, it reached a height and quality not frequently met. He was not
merely “stingy,” but mean in the American sense of the word.
Contemporary with Fox, Pitt, Sheridan, and other valiant “four-bottle
men” of a century ago, and with an almost unlimited capacity for other
persons’ port, his brother, Lord Stowell, aptly said of him that “he
would take any _given_ quantity.”
With these memories to beguile the way we come to Ferryhill, a mining
village crowning a ridge looking over Spennymoor and the valley of the
Wear. To Ferryhill came in 1634 three soldiers—a captain, a lieutenant,
and an ensign—from Norwich on a tour and in search of adventure. These
were early days for tours; days, too, when adventures were not far to
seek. However, risky though their trip may have been, they returned in
safety, as may be judged from the lieutenant having afterwards published
an account of their wanderings through twenty-six English counties. Clad
in Lincoln green, like young foresters, they sped the miles with jest and
observations on the country they passed through. Of Ferryhill they
remark that “such as know it knows it overtops and commands a great part
of the country.” On this Pisgah, then, they unpacked their travelling
plate and “borrowed a cup of refreshing health from a sweet and most
pleasant spring”; by which it seems that there were teetotallers in those
days also. Those were the days before coal-mines and blast-furnaces cut
up the country, and before Spennymoor, away on the left, was converted
from a moorland into a township; a sufficiently startling change.
[Picture: Ferryhill: The Abandoned Road-Works]
Seen from down the road looking southwards, Ferryhill forms an impressive
coronet to the long ridge of hill on which it stands; its rough,
stone-built cottages—merely commonplace to a nearer view—taking an
unwarranted importance from the bold serrated outlines they present
against the sky, and looking like the bastioned outworks of some Giant
Blunderbore’s ogreish stronghold. The traveller from the south, passing
through Ferryhill and looking backwards from the depths of the valley
road, is cheated of a part of this romantic impression; he has explored
the arid and commonplace village and has lost all possibility of
illusion. Let us, therefore, envy the pilgrims from the north. It is,
indeed, a highly interesting view, looking back upon Ferryhill, and one
touched with romance of both the gentle and the terrifying sort. In the
first place, to that tall embankment seen in the accompanying drawing of
the scene belongs a story. You perceive that earthwork to be unfinished.
It sets out from the cutting seen in the distant hillside, and, crossing
the road which comes in a breakneck curve downhill, pursues a straight
and level course for the corresponding rise on the hither side, stopping,
incomplete, somewhat short of it. “An abandoned railway,” thinks the
stranger, and so it looks to be; but it is, in fact, a derelict
enterprise embarked upon at the close of the coaching era by a local
Highway Board for the purpose of giving a flat and straight road across
the valley. It begins with a long cutting on the southern side of the
hill on which the village stands, and, going behind the back of the
houses, emerges as seen in the picture. The tolls authorised would have
made the undertaking a paying one, only road travel ceased before the
work was finished. Railways came to put an end to the project and to
inflict upon the projectors a ruinous loss.
A more darkling romance, however, broods upon the scene. Away on the
western sky-line stands the conspicuous tower of Merrington church, and
near it the farmhouse where, on January 28, 1685, Andrew Mills, a servant
of the Brass family, who then farmed the adjacent land, murdered the
three children in the absence of their parents. It is a story of whose
shuddering horror nothing is lost in contemporary accounts, but we will
leave it to the imagination. It is sufficient to say that the assassin,
a lad of eighteen years of age, seems to have been half-witted, speaking
of having been instigated to the deed by a demon who enjoined him to
“Kill—kill.” To be more or less mad was no surety against punishment in
those times, and so Andrew Mills was found guilty and hanged. Justice
seems to have been devilish then, for he was cut down and hanged in
chains, after the fashion of the time, beside the road. The peculiar
devilry of the deed appears in the fact that he was not quite dead, and
survived in his iron cage on the gibbet for days. His sweetheart brought
him food, but he could not eat, for every movement of his jaw caused it
to be pierced with an iron spike. So she brought milk instead, and so
sustained the wretched creature for some time. Legends still recount how
he lingered here in agony, his cries by day and night scaring the
neighbouring cottagers from their homes, until the shrieks and groans at
length ceased, and death came to put an end to his sufferings. The site
of the gibbet was by the Thinford inn, near the head of the embankment.
The gibbet-post lasted long. Known as “Andrew Mills’ Stob,” its wood was
reputed of marvellous efficacy for toothache, rheumatism, heartburn, and
indeed as wide a range of ailments as are cured by any one of the modern
quack medicines that fill the advertisement columns of our newspapers in
this enlightened age. It was a sad day for Ferryhill and the
neighbourhood when the last splinter of Andrew Mills’ gibbet was used up,
and what the warty, scrofulous, ulcerous, and rheumaticky inhabitants did
then the imagination refuses to consider.
[Picture: Merrington Church]
XX
THE surrounding districts anciently possessed a prime horror (which has
lost nothing in the accumulated legends of centuries) in the “Brawn of
Brancepeth.” This terror of the countryside, resolved into plain matter
of fact, seems to have been a wild boar. Boars were “brawns” in those
days, and the adjacent “Brancepeth” is just “brawn’s path,” as Brandon is
supposed to have been “brawn den.” This, to modern ideas, not very
terrible wild animal, seems to have thoroughly alarmed half a county:—
He feared not ye loute with hys staffe,
Nor yet for ye knyghte in hys mayle,
He cared no more for ye monke with hys boke,
Than the fyendis in depe Croix Dale.
It will be seen by the last line in this verse that the author was
evidently prepared to back the devil and all his works against anything
the Church could do. But that is a detail. The wild boar was eventually
slain by Hodge of the Ferry, who ended him by the not very heroic process
of digging a deep pit in the course of his usual path, and when the
animal fell in, cutting his head off, doubtless from a safe point of
vantage above. Divested of legendary trappings, we can readily picture
the facts: the redoubtable Hodge hiding in the nearest and tallest tree
until the wild boar came along and fell into the hole, when the champion
descended and despatched him in safety. The traditional scene of this
exploit is half a mile to the east of Ferryhill, at a farmstead called
Cleve’s Cross.
Croixdale, or, as modern times have vulgarised its name, Croxdale, lies
on our way to Durham, past the hills of High and Low Butcher Race. Now a
shabby roadside village, with a railway station of that name on the main
line of the North Eastern Railway, this neighbourhood has also had its
romance. The road descends steeply to the river Wear, and in the
vicinity is the dark hollow which mediæval superstition peopled with evil
spirits, the “fyendis” who, as the ballad says, cared nothing for the
monk with his book. To evict these hardy sprites a cross was erected,
hence “Croixdale”; but with what result is not stated.
[Picture: Road, Rail, and River: Sunderland Bridge]
The cross roads here, too, have their story, for Andrew Tate, a
highwayman, convicted of murdering and robbing seven persons near
Sunderland Bridge, was hanged where they branch off, in 1602, and
afterwards buried beneath the gallows. Now that no devils or highwaymen
haunt the lovely woodland borders of the Wear at this spot, it is safe to
linger by Sunderland Bridge, just below Croxdale, where the exceedingly
picturesque old stone bridge of four arches carries the road over the
river. Perhaps the distant railway viaduct may spoil the sylvan solitude
of the place, but, on the other hand, it may help to emphasise it.
Across that viaduct rush and roar the expresses to and from London and
the North; while the fisherman plys his contemplative craft from the
sandy beaches below the bridge. Many a wearied coach passenger, passing
this spot in the old days on summer evenings, must have longingly drunk
in the beauty of the scene. Other passengers by coach had a terrible
experience here in 1822, when the mail was overturned on the bridge and
two passengers killed.
Thoresby, in his _Diary_, under date of May 1703, describes one of his
journeys with his usual inaccuracy as to the incidence of places, and
mentions Sunderland Bridge, together with another, close by. This would
be Browney Bridge, to which we come in a quarter of a mile nearer Durham;
only Thoresby places it the other way, where, on the hillside, such a
bridge would be impossible. He mentions seeing the legend, “Sockeld’s
Leap, 1692,” inscribed on one of the coping-stones, and tells how two
horsemen, racing on this road, jumped on the bridge together with such
force that one of them, breaking down the battlements of the bridge, fell
into the stream below, neither he nor his horse having any injury.
Ascending the steep rise beyond Browney Bridge, Farewell Hall on the left
is passed, the place taking its name, according to the commonly received
story, from the Earl of Derwentwater bidding farewell to his friends here
when on his way, a captured rebel, to London and the scaffold, in 1715.
Climbing one more ridge, the first view of Durham Cathedral is gained on
coming down the corresponding descent, a long straight run into the
outskirts of the city. Durham Cathedral appears, majestic against the
sky, long before any sign of the city itself is noted; a huge bulk
dominating the scene and dwarfing the church of St. Oswald at the foot of
the hill, itself no inconsiderable building. To the right hand rises
Nine Tree Hill, with the nine trees that stand sponsors to it still
weirdly conspicuous on its crest, and down beneath it spread the grimy
and unkempt works of the Old Elvet Colliery.
[Picture: Entrance to Durham]
XXI
THE traveller pursuing his northward way comes into Durham by the back
door, as it were, for the suburb of Old Elvet through which the Great
North Road conducts to the ancient city is one of the least prepossessing
of entrances, and, besides being dirty and shabby, is endowed with a
cobble-stoned road which, as if its native unevenness were not
sufficient, may generally be found strewed with fragments of hoop-iron,
clinkers, and other puncturing substances calculated to give tragical
pauses to the exploring cyclist who essays to follow the route whose
story is set forth in these pages. Old Elvet is in no sense a
prepossessing suburb of Durham, but its steep and stony street is a true
exemplar of the city’s other highways and byways, which are nothing if
not breakneck and badly paved, as well as being badly kept. But facing
Old Elvet’s long street is still to be found the “Three Tuns,” where
coach passengers in the closing years of that era delighted to stay, and
where, although the well-remembered hostess of the inn has been gathered
to Abraham’s bosom, the guest on entering is still served in his bedroom
with the welcoming glass of cherry-brandy which it has for the best part
of a century been the pleasing custom of the house to present. No other
such ambrosial cup as this, rare in itself and hallowed by old memories,
greets the wayfarer along the roads nowadays.
From here, or other headquarters, let us set forth to explore the city,
planted on a craggy site looking down upon the encompassing Wear that
flows deep down between rocky banks clothed thickly with woods. To enter
the city proper from “Old Elvet,” one must needs cross Elvet Bridge,
still narrow, although the subject of a widening by which its width was
doubled in 1805. How the earlier coaches crossed it is therefore
something of a problem.
It has often been claimed for Durham that it is “the most picturesque
city in England,” and if by that contention we are to understand the site
of it to be meant, the claim must be allowed. Cities are not so many
that there is much difficulty in estimating their comparative charms; and
were it even a question of towns, few might be found to have footholds of
such beauty.
The Wear and that rocky bluff which it renders all but an island, seemed
to the distracted monks of Lindisfarne, worn out with a century’s
wandering over the north of England in search of safety from the
marauding heathen Danes who had laid waste the coast and their island
cathedral, an ideal spot; and so to the harsh necessities of over nine
hundred years ago we owe both this selection of a site and the building
upon it of a cathedral which should be an outpost for the Lord in the
turbulent North and a castle for the protection of his servants. It was
in the year 995 that, after a hundred and twenty years of constant
wandering, the successors of those monks who had fled from Lindisfarne
with the body of their revered bishop, the famous Saint Cuthbert, came
here, still bearing his hallowed remains. Their last journey had been
from Ripon. Coming near this spot, the Saint, who though by this time
dead for over three hundred years, was as masterful as he had been in
life, manifested his approval of the neighbourhood by refusing to be
carried any further. When the peripatetic bishop and monks found that
his coffin remained immovable they fasted and prayed for three days,
after which disciplinary exercise, one of their number had a vision
wherein it was revealed to him that the Saint should be carried to
Dunholme, where he was to be received into a place of rest. So, setting
forth again, distressed in mind by not knowing where Dunholme lay, but
hoping for a supernatural guidance, they came presently to “a place
surrounded with rocks, where there was a river of rapid waves and fishes
of various kinds mingling with the floods. Great forests grew there, and
in deep valleys were wild animals of many sorts, and deer innumerable.”
It was when they were come to this romantic place that they heard a
milkmaid calling to her companion, and asking where her cow was. The
answer, that “she was in Dunholme” was “an happy and heavenly sound to
the distressed monks, who thereby had intelligence that their journey’s
end was at hand, and the Saint’s body near its resting-place.” Pressing
onward, they found the cow in Dunholme, and here, on the site of the
present Cathedral, they raised their first “little Church of Wands and
Branches.” The Cathedral and the Castle that they and their immediate
successors raised have long since been replaced; but the great Norman
piles of rugged fame and stern battlemented and loopholed fortress
crowning the same rocky heights prove that those who kept the Church
anchored here had need to watch as well as pray, to fight secular battles
as well as wage war against the devil and all his works. It was this
double necessity that made the bishops of Durham until our own time
bishops-palatine; princes of the State as well as of the Church, and in
the old days men of the sword as well as of the pastoral staff; and their
cathedral shadows forth these conditions of their being in no uncertain
way. There is no finer pile of Norman masonry in this country than this
great edifice, whose central tower and east end are practically the only
portions not in that style, and of these that grand and massive tower,
although of the Perpendicular period, is akin to the earlier parts in
feeling; nor is there another quite so impressive a tower in England as
this, either for itself or in its situation, with the sole exception of
“Boston Stump,” that beacon raised against the sky for many miles across
the Lincolnshire levels.
[Picture: Durham Cathedral, from Prebend’s Bridge]
Woods and river still surround the Cathedral, as Turner shows in his
exquisite view from the Prebend’s Bridge, one among many other glorious
and unexpected glimpses which the rugged nature of Durham’s site provides
from all points, but incomparably the best of all. It is here that, most
appropriately, there has been placed a decorative tablet, carved in oak,
and bearing the quotation from Sir Walter Scott, beginning—
Half House of God, half Castle; ’gainst the Scot;
a quotation that gains additional point from the circumstance of the
battle of Neville’s Cross having been fought against the invading Scots,
October 17th, 1346, within sight from the Cathedral roofs. This view is
one of Turner’s infrequent topographically accurate works. Perhaps even
he felt the impossibility of improving upon the beauty of the scene.
Still, annually, after evensong on May 29th, the lay clerks and
choristers of the Cathedral ascend to the roof of the great central
tower, in their cassocks and surplices, and sing anthems. The first,
Farrant’s “Lord, for Thy tender mercies’ sake,” is a reference to the
national crime of the execution of Charles the First, and is sung facing
south. The second, “Therefore with angels and archangels,” by V.
Novello, expressing the pious sentiment that the martyred king shall rest
in Paradise, in company with those bright beings, is sung facing east;
and the third, “Give Peace in our time, O Lord,” by W. H. Callcott,
facing north.
The origin of this observance was the thanksgiving for the victory of
Neville’s Cross, a famous and a complete success, when fifteen thousand
Scots were slain and David the Second, the Scottish king and many of his
nobles, captured. It was to the special intervention of St. Cuthbert,
whose sacred banner was carried by Prior John Fossor to Maiden Bower, a
spot overlooking the battlefield, that this signal destruction of the
enemy was ascribed. The Prior prayed beside it, but his monks are said
to have offered up their petitions from the more distant, and safer,
vantage-point of the Cathedral towers. Perhaps they had a turn of
agnosticism in their minds; but, at any rate, they took no risks.
The original tower-top _Te Deum_ afterwards sung on the anniversary seems
to have been discontinued at the Reformation. The revival came after the
King’s Restoration in 1660, when the day was altered to May 29th, to give
the celebration the character of a rejoicing at the return of Charles the
Second. This revival itself fell into disuse in the eighteenth century,
being again restored in 1828, and continued ever since.