Part 4
As we drive away up Wensleydale we look back again and again at the fortress, which dominates the valley far more conspicuously than its position on the green hillside seems to warrant. The scenery grows wilder and the slopes nearer before a steep descent with a bad surface takes us into Askrigg. Here, in a little open space beside the church, is a picturesque Jacobean house of grey stone, bearing an inscription and the date MDCLXXVIII. Its projecting bays are joined by a wooden gallery, which was designed, it is said, to give a good view of the bull-baiting that took place before it. There, hidden in the grass, is the iron ring to which the bull was tied; and close beside it stands the restored village-cross--a strange conjunction of symbols! In the fifteenth-century church there are some pillars which are thought to have been transported from Fors, the original dwelling, about a mile from here, of the brothers of Jervaulx--the little band of monks from Savigny, who came to this valley under the leadership of Peter de Quincy, the Leech, in the reign of Stephen. They found this place too wild even for their Cistercian ideals, too cold and foggy for the ripening of crops, too frequently beset by wolves; and so, though the optimistic Peter was "very certain we shall be able to raise a competent supply of ale, cheese, bread, and butter," the community moved nearer to civilisation, leaving behind them nothing for us to see except a window in a barn and these pillars in Askrigg Church.
As the road becomes narrower and rougher the scenery every moment grows more beautiful. Hawes lies on the other side of the valley at the foot of the blue hills, in a lovely position beside the Ure; and when we have reached a point exactly opposite to it we turn sharply up a steep pitch on the right, with a splendid panoramic view of mountains on the left as we climb.
This is the beginning of the Buttertubs Pass. From this point onwards, till the road plunges down into Swaledale, the surface is composed more or less of loose stones. The stiffest upward gradients we shall have to encounter are within a mile or two of this spot, for the wild part of the pass--the real moorland--is comparatively level, and by the time we reach the actual Buttertubs we are already running down. This is the climax--this point where the downward gradient begins--for here suddenly the solid earth seems to fall away from us: here suddenly the rough and narrow road is no longer lying across the far-stretching moorland, but is hanging high upon the hillside, clinging upon the extremest edge of a gulf which drops dizzily into a blue sea of shadows. Thus it clings for miles. Beyond the chasm the bare hillside rises again above our heads in magnificent curves, glowing with colour, and cleft here and there into purple gorges. Slightly above the road on the left are the Buttertubs, strange crater-like hollows of unplumbed depth, appearing at intervals beside us, with sharp rocks bristling through the grass at their mouths. As we slowly descend, the hills of Swaledale rise before us like a wall blocking the defile; and presently a gate across the road shows that we are near the world again.
Truly this is one of the runs that are unforgettable. To be among these savage heights and depths, these heaving waves of desolate moor, to have these solitudes above us and these blue shadows so far below us, is to know something of "the strong foundations of the earth." It is with a feeling of anti-climax that we close the gate behind us, and, on a precipitous gradient and no surface worth mentioning, steer slowly down into Swaledale.
As we cautiously make our way over the stones of this very trying lane, we are confronted with rather a startling notice board: "No Road." It seems a little late to tell us that now: they might have mentioned it before we crossed the pass! Then it dawns upon us that the amateur hand that traced the letters has sloped the board in the wrong direction. It is really meant to face down the valley, for the discouragement of those who might stray up from Swaledale, ignorant of the pass.
Swaledale, I think, is the most beautiful of all the dales. Of course beauty varies with the weather, and distant Muker in the hollow of the hills cannot be the same on a colourless, grey day as when it lies in a pool of sunshine. But on any day Swaledale must seem, to one who is fresh from the elemental dignity of the pass, to hold a wonderful variety of lovely things: opal hills and soft woods, patches of heather and slopes of fern, fir-trees and feathery birches and clumps of scarlet rowans. There are individual pictures that one remembers as types of the whole. At Gunnerside, for instance, where the road crosses the Swale, cliffs rise from the stony river-bed, and are crowned with overhanging trees, the banks are smothered in masses of burdock leaves, and the whole scene is encircled by the hills. The road is not very good, and there are some steep pitches between Gunnerside and Reeth; but it matters little, for who would care to hurry through such a land as this?
It was on the road near Low Row that John Wesley began his preaching in this part of the world, standing on a table by the wayside. A little further on is Helaugh, once a gayer place than it is at present. The hills above it have echoed many a time to the winding of the horn, when John of Gaunt was lord here and went out to chase the boar. Later on these lands belonged to that strange Duke of Wharton, "the scorn and wonder" of Pope's day, who was a Whig when it was unfashionable and a Jacobite when it became dangerous, who fought against his country and died a monk.
"Ask you why Wharton broke through every rule? 'Twas all for fear the Knaves should call him Fool."
At Reeth, a fascinating place built on a slope at the mouth of Arkengarth Dale, we cross the river again, and find a much better road on the other side.
Between Reeth and Richmond the Swale, flowing softly past its richly wooded banks, is as beautiful as the lower Wye. On the further side of it we see the Norman tower of Marrick Priory, where once twelve blackrobed nuns lived only a mile away from their "white-clothid" sisters of Ellerton. The nuns of Marrick were fortunate, for though they were so few they won a short respite for some unknown reason, and were allowed to stay in their beautiful retreat till the dissolution of the larger monasteries. There are few places in England, I think, that would be easier to love and harder to leave than Swaledale.
Richmond, on its hill, guards the mouth of the valley. This first view of it from Swaledale, with the tower of the castle rising slowly into sight, gives no idea at all of the beauty and strength that have made it famous. We only know how Richmond has won its name when we see it from below, with the buttressed bridge in the foreground, and the bright waters of the Swale reflecting the houses that are clustered at their brink, and the sun-flecked path under the trees, and the roofs, tier above tier, climbing the steep hillside, and above them all--foe of their foes and shelter of their friends--the long curtain-wall and towering keep of the castle. This view of Richmond has been praised so much that one fears disappointment. Yet one is not disappointed. Richmond is not only beautiful: it has that other quality--so much more important than beauty in woman or town--the quality of charm. Richmond is lovable.
It was the Normans who first took advantage of this fine position for a fortress: the Saxon owners of the place were the Earls of Mercia, and had no castle here, for Gilling, their headquarters in the north, was only a few miles away. We may dream, if we like, that Ethelfled, the soldierly daughter of Alfred the Great, and Godiva, the Lady of Coventry, visited this place when their husbands were minded to chase the wolf or the boar in this part of their lands. It is possible that they did so: but there is no authentic history of Richmond before the time when Alan the Breton received from his kinsman, William the Conqueror, "at the siege before York," a grant of "all the towns and lands which lately belonged to Earl Edwin in Yorkshire." It was this Alan who began to build the castle. We may not enter it without permission, for it is now used as barracks; but we can walk up to the gateway at the foot of the great keep and see its buttresses and turrets towering above us; and we can follow the path that surrounds the walls and look at the view that George IV. admired so much. This view of the river from the castle is very pretty, but is by no means comparable to the view of the castle from the river. Possibly George IV. fixed his eyes upon the Culloden Tower among the trees to the right, and was biassed by association.
Three times this castle wall behind us has imprisoned a king. When five English knights and their men-at-arms made their dashing march to Alnwick and captured William the Lion of Scotland, it was to Richmond they brought him; and David Bruce, another Scottish king, was here nearly two hundred years later; and the third was Charles I. Legend, indeed, tells us of a fourth king still imprisoned here; for this castle rock is one of the many places wherein King Arthur lies asleep with all his knights, awaiting the magic blast upon the horn that shall some day wake him. The Breton folk say he waits beneath the island of Agalon; the Welsh look for him to come forth from among the mountains of Glamorganshire.
Soon after Bruce's imprisonment the castle seems to have fallen into disrepair; and this, I suppose, was the reason that John of Gaunt, who was Lord of Richmond, made his hunting expeditions from Helaugh rather than from here. Harry of Richmond, when he became Henry VII., gave this castle of his to his mother, and finding that the "mantill wall" was "in decay of maisone wark," and "all the doyers, wyndoys, and other necessaries," with much beside, were also in decay, he gave orders that the whole should "be new refresshede."
Though this attractive town possesses much, it has also lost much. Once it had a wall--built to keep the Scots out--and several gates; but all are gone now, except the postern in Friar's Wynd, and the old pointed arch of Bargate, which we may see from the foot of Carnforth Hill. Gone, too, is the elaborate cross, which, according to all accounts, was an object of beauty in the paved market-place. This is more than can be said for the strange obelisk that has supplanted it. But in this same market-square still stands Holy Trinity Chapel--not beautiful, but very ancient, being that "chapel in Richemont toune" which, Leland says, had "straung figures in the waulles of it. The people there dreme," he goes on, "that it was ons a temple of idoles." Some even dream that this chapel was founded by Paulinus, the seventh-century saint, in memory of an occasion when he baptized an enormous number of converts in the Swale; but, as Bede says the ceremony took place in the river because it was impossible to build oratories "in those parts," this dream is not very credible. It is no dream, I believe, but a fact, that the chapel stands on the site of a Danish temple. In its walls there are now no strange figures of "idoles," but some very strange _annexes_ for a chapel. A butcher's shop is wedged between the tower and the nave, and several other shops are built into its side.
One of the most notable things here is the Grey Friars' Tower, which we passed on entering the town from Swaledale: a peculiarly slender and graceful piece of Perpendicular work. Like the campanile at Evesham, it stands alone because the building of the church connected with it was suddenly brought to an end by the Dissolution. The Franciscans who had their friary here were mostly put to death or imprisoned for life--yet not for long--because they thought it their duty to obey St. Francis rather than Henry VIII.
There are remains of another religious house quite close to Richmond. Very little is left at Easby of the abbey church of St. Agatha, but the position of the ruins beside the river is full of quiet charm. Those who dwelt here were Premonstratensian Canons, whose rather confusing order was founded by the German visionary St. Norbert, and whose white garments were chosen for them by the Virgin herself. They passed to their dormitory through the Norman archway with the ornamented mouldings, the last remaining fragment of the original twelfth-century building raised by Roald, the Constable of Richmond. Until lately a very decorative tree grew up through this archway and figured in every picture of Easby, but it threatened to break down the masonry, and so was sacrificed. It is a sad loss to artists. But the last memorial of Roald would have been a loss still sadder, for, even as it is, Roald is often forgotten in favour of the Scropes, who practically rebuilt St. Agatha's. Their shield is still over the porch of the parish church, a hundred yards away; their dust lies under the rough sods to the west of the north transept. At Wensley we saw the carved sides of what was once their parclose.
We finally leave the town by the same road that leads to Easby, turning off to the left to join the great Roman highway beyond Gilling. It was just here, where the roads fork, that the Lass of Richmond Hill lived in the eighteenth century, till she married the writer of the song; and hither, too, to the same Hill House, came later songs, greater than MacNally's--songs from Byron to his future wife, Miss Milbank. Our last view of Richmond, from _Maison Dieu_, is worthy of remembrance. The town is spread before us with all its towers; the slender Grey Friars' Tower, the church, the soaring keep; and in the background of hills is the green gap that means so much to those who have lost their hearts to Swaledale. That is behind us now; and on the right is stretched the great green plain of central Yorkshire--the plain that divides the western moors from the moors of Clevedon and Hambledon. Somewhere in that plain is the Great North Road.
Soon after passing Lord Zetland's place, Aske Hall, we drive through the wide street of Gilling, the little village of gardens, where there is nothing left, except a few Saxon stones, to remind us that the great Earls of Mercia made it one of their capitals till Alan of Brittany laid it waste. A little way beyond it we turn a sharp corner and are on the Roman road. After speeding along this for some minutes it is interesting to look back and see the amazing straightness of the white streak that stretches away behind the car and disappears over the crest of the hill. The scenery is dull at first; but presently a new line of moors and dales appears on the horizon, and the roadway itself is shaded with trees and fringed with grass and flowers. Meantime the surface is enough in itself to make a motorist happy.
The car glides up the slope of a little bridge; we pass a screen of trees; and the extreme beauty of the Greta is revealed with a suddenness that is almost startling. This bridge with the stone parapet is the famous Greta Bridge; this is the stream painted by Turner and sung by Scott; there by the roadside are the gates of Rokeby.
"Oh, Brignall banks are fresh and fair, And Greta woods are green!"
Brignall banks are not in sight, but here are Greta woods--intensely green--flinging their branches across the river till they meet and interlace in an archway over the clear water and the yellow stones.
At the northern limit of Rokeby Park we must leave the highway. There is a road here that is not marked on Bartholomew's map--a road that turns to the right and leads to Mortham Tower, and the Dairy Bridge, and the meeting of the Greta and the Tees. The "battled tower" of Mortham is now inhabited; we may not see the bloodstains on the stairs; but from a little distance the fifteenth-century peel and the Tudor buildings that surround it make a pretty group. Below the grassy knoll on which it stands the Greta dashes down between its overshadowing banks and veiling foliage to join the quieter, statelier Tees.
The beauty of this place is really haunting. Sir Walter Scott has described every inch of it in "Rokeby," with complete accuracy if with no great inspiration. For the wild sweetness of this spot is not such as can be put into words. It is a place of enchantment, where the spell-bound poet can only stammer helplessly, and the plain man for a moment feels himself a poet.
Returning to the main road, we follow the wooded Tees to Barnard Castle. For miles the river is as we saw it at the meeting of the waters, darkly shadowed by trees and bound by rocky banks; more beautiful in itself than Wharfe or Swale, though flowing through a valley that cannot be compared to the other dales except at its head: but there, I think, excelling them all. Through the greater part of Teesdale the beauty of the river is so closely confined to its banks that we only catch a glimpse of it now and then, when actually crossing the stream. One of these glimpses we have from the toll-bridge just below Eggleston Abbey, where we cross for a few minutes into the county of Durham. The ruins of the abbey are visible through the trees, standing on a grassy hill upon the Yorkshire bank of the river.
At Barnard Castle--which is not a very attractive town at first sight, and is sorely disfigured by its portentous museum--we again cross the Tees into Yorkshire, near the point where the familiar towers of the Baliols' ruined fortress stand high above the river on their cliff. This commanding position was granted to the Norman Guy de Baliol by Rufus, and Guy's son Bernard raised on it the castle that was forfeited by his descendant. This Bernard was no friend to the throne on which the later Baliol sat, for he was the most zealous of the five knights who captured William of Scotland and took him to Richmond Castle. When the enterprise seemed about to fail, it was Bernard who cried: "If you should all turn back, I would go on alone!" A little more than a hundred years later John Baliol, King of Scotland, was rashly refusing to be at the beck and call of the English king. "Has the fool done this folly?" asked Edward. "If he will not come to us we will come to him!" So John lost his crown, and Barnard Castle saw the Baliols no more. It was given to the Nevilles, and so with many other things fell into the capacious hands of Richard III., who actually lived here for a time, and has left his symbol, the wild boar, upon the oriel window.
There is one gracious memory that makes these towers sacred. The ruined halls are haunted by the presence of that gentle and sad lady who was the widow of one John Baliol and the mother of another--Devorgilla, daughter of kings, foundress of Baliol College, and in her endless sorrow the builder of Dulce Cor. When her husband died she "had his dear heart embalmed and enshrined in a coffer of ivory, enamelled and bound with silver bright, which was placed before her daily in her hall as her sweet, silent companion." It was here at Bernard Castle that she chiefly lived with that silent companion, until the noble shrine of stone was ready to receive the ivory coffer; it was here she lived on alone, till she too died and was carried out to be buried in Sweetheart Abbey, with John Baliol's "dear heart" upon her breast.
Of the two roads to Middleton-in-Teesdale the one on the Durham side is the best as regards both surface and scenery; but the greater number of those who drive up Teesdale will return to Barnard Castle before going on their way to the north or crossing Yorkshire to the coast, and will probably prefer to drive up the valley by one road and come down it again on the other. On the Yorkshire side there is nothing very striking. Lartington is pretty, and gay with flowers; Cotherstone still has a fragment of the FitzHughs' castle in a field above the river; Romaldkirk has an interesting church. Beyond Mickleton we cross the Lune, which is a miniature copy of the Tees, with the same rocky bed and the same close screen of overarching boughs. A few minutes later we cross the Tees itself and are in Middleton.
The road from Middleton to High Force is surprisingly populous. Here among the hills, where the fields are yielding to moorland, and the river flows under bare crags, one expects a certain amount of loneliness; yet here is a broad and civilised highway, with all the character of a road near some large town. The scenery, however, is wild enough; and more beautiful than anything we have seen. Beyond the river--open now to the sky, no longer veiled by trees--rise the moors, piled high, fold upon fold, grand in outline and glorious in colour, green and purple and crimson. A wood by the wayside blots out river and hills for a moment; then suddenly through a gap we see High Force.
Looking down from the road we see it as a picture framed in trees: the solid wall of rock, the leap of the foaming waters, the cloud of spray, the fir-trees with their spires against the sky, the crimson moors beyond. That white torrent is the boundary of the county, the crown and climax of the beauty of Yorkshire, and our last and most perfect memory of the dales.
THE COAST
SUMMARY OF TOUR ALONG THE COAST
DISTANCES.
Yarm Saltburn 21 miles Whitby 21 " Scarborough 25 " Total 67 miles
ROADS
Hills very steep and frequent near coast. Surface usually good.
II
THE COAST
When one is approaching the coast of Yorkshire from the north, the important thing is to avoid the manufacturing towns of Stockton and Middlesbrough. This can be done by crossing the Tees at Yarm, and joining the splendid road that runs so straightly from this point to the sea. Those who have come from the dales will notice at once, even in Yarm, how greatly the houses here differ from the houses of the west. In that fair land the buildings, both small and great, have the character common to moorland buildings: they are stern and sturdy and grey; made not to please the eye, but to endure the buffetings of wind and rain. But these houses of the plain, it seems, do their best to provide the beauty that is lacking in scenery. They are warm and picturesque, red and tiled and gabled, a feature in the landscape. The wide street of Yarm, with its trees and grass and pretty buildings, has almost a foreign air. Beyond it is the straight road with the magnificent surface.
The views from this road, to right and left, are rather striking, each in its own way. On the left the scene is not beautiful, yet not without romance--the romance that is hidden under so much that is ugly. That long, long line of tall chimneys and distant masts, that cloud of smoke that darkens all the sky, are symbols of the spirit of adventure, of the love of enterprise, of untiring progress, of belief in the future; for surely the history of our commerce has included all these things. It was from Stockton that the first railway in the world ran to Darlington; and in Middlesbrough many of our merchant ships are built. Eighty years ago about a hundred people lived there: to-day there are a hundred thousand under that black pall.