The Test is of the same quality in all respects as the Itchen, and as large if not larger. As a dry-fly trouting river it stands perhaps at the actual head of the list, and like the Avon is also a salmon river in its lower reaches, which fall into Southampton Water just to the west of the mouth of the Itchen. Travellers on the main line of the South-Western from London to Exeter must be familiar with its infant efforts if they have any sort of eye for a country. For after an hour or so out of London, of monotonous pine and heather region varied by cemeteries, golf links, and jerry-built suburban-like villages, the train bursts over a valley’s head and gives a beautiful breezy glimpse of altogether another kind of country. A limpid chalk stream, obviously near its source, trails down towards an old-world-looking town. The latter is Whitchurch, and the tiny clear stream is the famous Test. We cannot follow it here. No places of high renown stand upon its banks, unless the old abbey of Romsey may retrieve its reputation in this respect. But lovers of the Test do not rest their affections on such things as these. It is enough for them that in their opinion it is the finest trouting river in England for the display of what they regard as the quintessence of scientific fly-fishing. In this sense it is known throughout the English-speaking world much as the Pytchley and the Quorn hunts are known. In short, like the Itchen, it is classic ground, and there we will leave it.
Though it is not our business here to catalogue the streams of England, one cannot dismiss the chalk streams without a word of reference to the Colne and the Gade, whose clear buoyant waters strike such a pleasant and even unexpected note within 20 or 30 miles of London, in the fat and formal luxuriance of Hertfordshire. Born in the chalk ridges of the Chilterns, they show in their quite considerable span of existence many a delightful vista of fresh glancing waters amid opulent forest or park scenery, flowing as they do through a county that for generations has, more perhaps than any other, been associated with the country-seat of the city magnate.
CHAPTER IV
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
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.