Part 9

In the farm-house the buxom farmer's wife showed us an ancient arch in the wall of the passage, under which lay a collection of curiosities found from time to time about the camp,--a beautiful stone figure with flowing drapery, small stone altars, such as the soldiers used in their private devotions, and so forth. Outside, pinks, lilies, and roses were filling the air with their perfume, as we made our way through the little garden to the green field where stood the camp. We wandered about round the low stone walls, through the gate-way, where we saw the actual marks of the chariot-wheels on the pavement,--two ruts in the stone. We looked into the remains of the guard-house, where the sweet thyme and delicate clover now creep over stones against which Dacian warriors rested their heavy heads. We tried to trace out the course of streets, temples, and barracks among the grass-grown heaps in front of the farm-garden; and then I went out to the brow of the hill to see what was there.

What a surprise! The green field fell away abruptly in a great cliff, and down below the Irthing foamed over its stony bed, twisting and winding in sinuous curves of silver along the narrow valley, among wooded slopes and rocky crags. Green ridge and brown fell in endless succession led the eye away into the far distance, where Skiddaw loomed up in the south.

The late Lord Carlisle, in his "Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters," compares this view to the first sight of Troy after crossing the tame low plain of the Troad. It was certainly a grand point of vantage which, with their usual wisdom, the Romans pitched upon. The one thing one does not see at first is, where they got their water; and this was always one of the first points they considered in choosing a site. The river is too far off, and no spring now appears inside the camp. Last year my friends showed Birdoswald to the learned head-master of one of our most famous public schools. The absence of water puzzled the wise man not a little, and he asked one of the farm maidens who was showing the party round if she knew where the spring had been. She professed entire ignorance; but another lassie standing by reminded her in broad Cumbrian, "It's where t' goose laid her eggs last soummer." We soon found it out to our cost, as, thanks to the rainy season, the ancient Roman well had formed a little quagmire hidden in long grass, into which we plunged unwittingly and came out with wet boots.

The Roman Wall adapts itself to the northern rampart of the camp, or fort, and runs close to the road for some five hundred yards westward from the farm-house. This wall--seventy-five miles long--has been the subject of many antiquarian discussions, with which we need not meddle. Those, however, who have gone most thoroughly into the subject now agree that it was erected by the renowned emperor Hadrian, when he came to Britain, in the year 119. The inscribed slabs and altars found at the stations and castles on the line of the wall are undoubtedly of his reign; so are most of the coins that are found with them; and from this fact it appears that the Roman legions received their pay at the wall in his reign.

The conception of this stupendous barrier is singularly simple and effective. The wall, though varying a little in width, according to the nature of the ground it traversed, was about eight feet broad and fourteen feet high. The north side was further crowned by a parapet of four feet, making the total height eighteen feet. The outside stones were regularly-shaped and well-dressed freestone, fifteen to twenty inches long, ten inches broad, and eight inches thick. So well were they cut that one can detect them in an instant in any cottage-wall, from their smooth, finely-chiselled face as compared with the coarser dressing of modern stones. Most of them have a wedge shape, tapering towards the end which is set into the wall. Dr. Bruce thinks that stones of this shape would have been conveniently carried on the backs of "the poor enslaved Britons." The present dwellers along the wall say that they were all brought in an old woman's apron and the wall built in one night. Mr. Jenkinson, on the contrary, in his charming and learned guide-book to Carlisle and the Roman Wall, thinks "both these modes of conveyance are too romantic for the practical Romans, who were not unacquainted with horses and carts."

The inside part of the wall consists of rubble-stone, like that found in the massive walls of Caesar's Tower at Kenilworth and many other old castles. The stones, evidently picked up on the spot, while the dressed stone for the wall was brought in many instances from a great distance, were cemented together as hard as a rock by pouring fresh lime mixed with sand and gravel upon them.

Every four miles along the wall there was a fortified camp or station, like that at Birdoswald, each capable of containing from six hundred to one thousand foot- or horse-soldiers, as the case might be. "They were generally," says Mr. Jenkinson, "close to the wall, on the southern side, and appear from the remains existing to have formed almost a square, containing three to six acres, surrounded by high thick walls, provided with four gate-ways, and laid out in streets, barracks, temples, baths, etc., some of the buildings having massive and occasionally beautifully-sculptured stones. Outside these stations are heaps of grass-grown rubbish, from which it is inferred that there also existed suburbs, where dwelt natives and camp-followers."

Between the stations were _castella_, or mile-castles, about a mile apart. These were sixty feet square, built also on the south side, of solid masonry, about the same height and thickness as the wall itself. In each of these were stationed a company of some twenty men, who were yet further distributed singly in stone turrets, or watch-towers, used as sentry-boxes, of which there were four between each mile-castle, about three hundred and fifty yards apart. The sentries, being within call of each other, could thus keep up a complete system of communication along the line, and, as soon as danger threatened, troops could be concentrated at once on any spot from the stations or camps. Unluckily, none of these turrets remain, though Hodgson says that he saw one opened so lately as 1833, about three hundred yards west of Birdoswald.

Along the northern face of the wall the Romans still further strengthened it by making a ditch below, thirty-six feet wide and fifteen feet deep. It was evidently a dry ditch, as it follows the line of the wall up hill and down dale. In some places the solid rock has been excavated to make it, and occasionally the earth dug from it has been thrown up into a bank on its farther side, thus making a third line of defence. To the south of the stone wall, at a distance perpetually varying from a few yards to half a mile, runs the vallum, or earthwork, consisting, where most perfect, of three ramparts and a fosse. The origin and use of the _vallum_ has also been a moot point among antiquaries. But now there seems little doubt that the vallum was the ancient Roman road running inside the wall. Pavements have been found upon it in various places. At Gilsland, exactly on the spot where the vallum would have to cross the Poltross Burn, the abutment of a Roman bridge has been lately discovered; and the highest authorities are now agreed, from these and many other indications, that this dispute may at last be laid to rest.

Climbing once more into our "heaven chariot," we bade farewell to Birdoswald and its many memories and drove due west along the line of the wall. For five hundred yards it ran close beside us on the left, about seven feet high and seven feet broad,--the stones in some places untouched since the day the Roman legions laid them one on another, clear cut as when they came out of the quarry. The short turf had clothed the top of the ancient barrier with a fragrant carpet, and in crevices where the cement had weathered away, the honeysuckle found root-hold; a tall purple foxglove reared its proud head as if it were acting sentry to the Border, and the fresh green lady-fern brushed the rugged stones lightly with waving plumes.

After a time the wall grew lower, and finally disappeared. Our road, which had been running straight as a bee-line, rose and swerved a few feet to the left, and we found that we were actually driving along the top of the wall. For nearly five miles we followed it. There it ran as straight as an arrow over every obstacle, with the great green ditch to our right and the great earth-bank beyond it, a type of the resistless determination of the great people who made it. High moorland pastures, reclaimed from the Waste, lay on either side. In some, the sweet hay was being cut, and the buzz of an American mowing-machine brought our wits with a sudden shock out of the by-gone ages where they had been wandering. In others, herds of polled Galloways, the sleek black cattle of the Border, were grazing peacefully, without fear of moss-troopers or cattle-thieves. Here stood a mile-castle,--four rude grass-grown banks marking its outline,--its stones being used to build a little cottage crouching in one corner. There an old lime-kiln, like some troll's dwelling, broke the endless swell of green and brown. The few cottages at the hamlet of Banks Head looked forlorn and dreary, as if they had been dropped by mistake on the desolate wild. They are all built of stone from the wall, which has proved an invaluable quarry to the whole neighborhood, and, in consequence, has been ruthlessly destroyed. A hideous fashion prevails about here. Most of the houses are whitewashed, the stones round the doors and windows are painted black, and, with their cold gray slate roofs or dilapidated thatch, they but add to the dreary look of this district. It is a dismal land up there on the Waste,--a sad, hard country, with its stone walls and boggy uplands, that must have bred a sad, hard race, one would think. But if one looks beyond the dreariness close at hand, what a wondrous view stretches away all round! East, are the greenish swells and conical crests of the Northumberland Fells; south, lie Tindale, Talkin, and Castle Carrock Fells across the valley of the Irthing, which is marked by a line of wood, and beyond them rise the noble group of Lake mountains. Helvellyn and the two giants Saddleback and Skiddaw, looming up veiled in mystery and golden haze; northward, the line of the Cheviot Hills shows that we are looking right into Scotland; westward, across the fertile plain, where park and pasture, river and forest, are bathed in sunshine, Criffel rears his head above Melrose Abbey; and there, right under the western sun, gleams a line of silver in the flat, extremest distance,--the Solway Firth.

It was with the feeling of parting from a friend that we bade adieu to the Roman Wall and turned downward from the bleak moorland into the rich vegetation of the valley. The glamour of the Roman period had laid hold upon us. We longed to follow up the course of this great barrier, to know more of its builders, of their lives, their works, their history, than we had ever done before. This monument of their almost superhuman power must awaken some kind of enthusiasm in the dullest mind, and one can echo Sir Walter Scott's words in "Guy Mannering:" "And this, then, is the Roman Wall. What a people, whose labors even at this extremity of their empire comprehended such space, and were executed upon a scale of such grandeur! In future ages, when the science of war shall have changed, how few traces will exist of the labors of Vauban and Coehorn, while this wonderful people's remains will even then continue to interest and astonish posterity! Their fortifications, their aqueducts, their theatres, their fountains, all their public works, bear the grave, solid, and majestic character of their language; while our modern labors, like our modern tongues, seem but constructed out of their fragments."

ENGLISH RURAL SCENERY.

SARAH B. WISTER.

[For a country rich in its verdant beauty and perfect in its grooming, England is unsurpassed. While containing little of the grand, it has much of the charming, and is abundantly calculated to rest the eyes of the sight-weary traveller. We append an enthusiastic description of this garden-land from an American visitor.]

When we got into the country we grudged the time we had spent in London. The true English landscape has a great and peculiar charm until the stranger learns its secret and wearies of its sameness. Never shall I forget the journey from Southampton to London on the day we landed. Something must be allowed for the delight of eyes that had been looking over endless ridges of sea-waves to the blank horizon for so long; but what a blushing, smiling land it was that greeted them! The verdure was the first thing that struck us,--very different from ours. There is more blue and less yellow in it, resting and refreshing the eyes with a cooler, deeper tone; the trees are denser in foliage too, and fuller in form; the whole scene had a boskiness and boweriness due to innumerable hedges, orchards, shrubberies, and plantations. Woodland, strictly speaking, there was none,--only here and there little triangular bits, not an acre in extent, for game-covers, or lines of tall feathery elms with bushy heads along the hedgerows, clipped close that they might not shut out the scanty sunshine from the farmer's field. The hawthorn was covered with its pink-and-white blossoms, May as they call it; acres of the gently-rolling country were crimson with Dutch clover; the laburnum, a small, graceful tree, was full of drooping strings of delicate yellow flowers; the banks were ablaze with scarlet poppies and golden broom.

Low-arched stone bridges spanned small brimming streams; quaint old gate-ways opened into shady avenues; thatched cottages, beautiful ancient parish churches with gray towers, pretty, quiet hamlets peeped out from the luxuriant leafiness; comfortable, solid, old-fashioned farmhouses reigned among their outbuildings and orchards; in the distance were grand country-places, scarcely visible in the depths of their stately parks; and, what raised our enthusiasm to the utmost, we passed a beautiful Gothic ruin half hidden in ivy. Everything looked trim and orderly; not an inch of ground wasted; all turned to account for use or beauty; little vegetable-gardens on the slopes of the railway-embankments and along the edges of the track; little flower-gardens on both sides the station-houses, and roses and honeysuckle trained over their porches.

This is the genuine, characteristic English scenery, and it is found in perfection in Warwickshire. About Leamington, thanks to the contiguity of several large estates, parts of the country are heavily wooded, and a deep rural seclusion pervades the whole neighborhood. We were there in July: the earlier flowers were gone, but in the green embowered lanes the banks were rich with purple foxgloves; pale, shadowy bramble-roses were blossoming in the hedges, over which climbed woodbine and a pure white convolvulus; the gaudy poppies still held their own, as they do, though with thinner ranks, to the end of the season; and the splendid gorse spread over the uncultivated hill-sides like yellow flame. Many birds make their home here. We came too late for the nightingales, and it was elsewhere that we heard a cuckoo once or twice in a distant thicket, for it is silent after June; but larks warbled in mid-air, and thrushes filled the lanes with their liquid notes, besides a host of little unknown birds who sang their simple song very sweetly all day.

One of the finest country-seats in the county was originally a Cistercian abbey, founded in the reign of Henry II.: a noble gate-way of that period, half shrouded in ivy, still remains, but nothing more except fragments of the cloisters embedded in the main building, which is partly Elizabethan, but chiefly in Queen Anne's style. Uninteresting and tasteless as the latter is, it produces more effect by its solid mass and unbroken facade than Tudor gables or castellated towers. Within are great lofty square rooms, a fine hall and staircase,--all on a scale which with us would be seen only in a public building,--and a whole series of family portraits, priests, knights, courtiers, and dames, by all the famous painters from Henry VIII.'s time to Queen Victoria's.

The gardens of this place are beautiful, but most artificial-looking, the shorn grass and geometrical flower-beds producing the effect of a worsted pattern; stone steps, balustrades, fountains, statues, urns, vases, and clipped hedges and shrubbery giving them a formal and stately air in keeping with the house itself: not a blade of grass, not a leaf, not a pebble, is out of place. From these one passes into the park, where for miles the undulations of the land form a succession of lovely knolls and dells shaded by magnificent oaks, imperial trees, and groves of lindens and chestnuts hardly less grand, while underfoot all is fern and soft turf. Herds of dappled deer browse beneath these lordly trees or come down to drink at the Avon, a slow little stream which winds through the sylvan glades. Since then I have seen a number of great places, some of them finer than this, but with its legends and associations it is not a bad type of them all. It was the first I saw, and will always be first in my recollection.

Besides the beauty of that region, it is full of interest. There are the romantic ruins of Kenilworth; there are Warwick Castle (partly burnt) and Warwick town, with Leicester's Hospital, and St. Mary's Church, and the Beauchamp Chapel, one of the gems of ecclesiology, with stained-glass windows five hundred years old, and splendid tombs with effigies in brass and alabaster. There is Coventry with all its traditions, from the Lady Godiva to Mary Queen of Scots. The procession of the Lady Godiva still takes place every few years. Last summer there was a celebration: the lady engaged to perform the part of "the woman of a thousand summers old" was not forthcoming in time, and some other eligible female was caught up, clapped on horseback and sent forth: at the same moment the first one arrived, and the consequence was a lawsuit.

Stratford-on-Avon, too, belongs to this part of the country,--a little old-world town, where the bust of Shakespeare looks down upon you from every coign of vantage. Mysterious being! who sprang from impenetrable obscurity in that quiet village to light the beacon of an immortal fame, and sink back into the uncertain shades of his native place until he rests definitely in the beautiful parish church, so still among its trees, with the Avon laving the wall of the church-yard.

Anne Hathaway's cottage remains in good preservation, a picturesque object among the fields; Lucys still live at Charlecote; but too many people have written of these things,--nobody better than Geoffrey Crayon, whose sketch I read over as we waited for luncheon at the Red Horse Inn in the little room called Washington Irving's parlor. Something ought to be said about that luncheon, which, when good, is the best of English meals, dinner as a rule being too heavy and monotonous. On a table-cloth of the traditional whiteness of all napery which is written about, were set out a lordly cold round of beef, a jug of home-brewed ale, a substantial loaf of home-made bread, a smaller one of simple cake, a currant-pie, a rich country cheese, and a pitcher of thick cream. There were three of us: we ate as much as we liked, and paid seven shillings, less than two dollars, but I do not give either the bill of fare or the bill of costs as a sample of ordinary luck.

We saw nothing in England proper prettier than the shady lanes and green foot-paths of Warwickshire. The view from Harrow Hill and the country around Malvern are greatly admired, but they are exceedingly tame, merely an extent of rather flat land seen from an insignificant height, without water, too patchy to have breadth, which is the strong point of flat scenery; there are no stretches of field or forest-land; it is all broken up like a checkerboard by hedgerows and high-roads. We thought the Fen country roads more striking: it has been reclaimed, and is now a fine agricultural district. The eye ranges over wide expanses of cultivation: great plains of pale green bean-vines and yellow grain, alternating with the rich brown of the peat soil, whose pungent odor fills the air, stretch away to the horizon, unbroken save by now and then a row of Lombardy poplars or a line of low willows; the ditches by which the land is drained and divided are marked by long lines of brighter green, and full of graceful waving marsh-grass; and at long intervals a broad, straight, shining path of water takes its way to the sea. Here and there a solitary windmill reminds one of Holland, but it is altogether finer than Holland. With all the teeming fertility there is something which recalls the original desolation: it is very sparsely settled; one seldom sees a house, and then it is not clustered about with outbuildings, but stands up alone against the horizon, and makes one think of Mariana's moated grange. In the midst of these flats rises the majestic tower of Ely, seen for many a mile.

We passed from this into a wild waste in Norfolk, whose sandy hillocks were clad in purple heath and green fern, with an occasional pine wood, dark and mysterious-looking, for in England even the pine is not the scrubby, scraggy tree of our barrens. This country has a picturesque, original character of its own, and is somewhat thinly settled too, but among the heaths and pines we saw more beautiful ruined churches than in any district south of the Tweed. The unfailing ivy is there, but it does not grow with over-luxuriance, as it does elsewhere in England, making a lovely covering for an ugly building or an unsightly stump, but sometimes muffling and hiding the beauties of finer architecture, and disguising delicate Gothic outlines like a thick hood.

[Our traveller follows this description of scenery with an account of what she saw in the great cathedrals of England, including Westminster, Winchester, Worcester, and Gloucester. Her description of these is too extended for our space.]