XXVIII
The road, leaving Alnwick, plunges down from the castle barbican to the black hollow in which the Aln flows, overhung with interlacing and over-arching trees. The river is crossed here by that bridge shown in Turner’s picture, the “Lion Bridge” as it is called, from the Percy lion, “with tail stretched out as straight as a broom-handle,” standing on the parapet and looking with steadfast gaze to the North. It is an addition since Turner’s picture was painted, and an effective one, too. Also, since that time, the trees have encroached and enshrouded the scene most completely; so that the only satisfactory view is that looking backwards when one has emerged from the black dell. And a most satisfactory view it is, with the i’s and t’s of romance dotted and crossed so emphatically that it looks like some theatrical scene, or the optically realised home of the wicked hero of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. If this were not the beginning of the twentieth century, one might well think twice before venturing down into the inky depths of that over-shaded road; but these are matter-of-fact times, and we know well that only the humdrum burgesses of Alnwick, in their shops, are beyond; with, instead of a mediæval duke in the castle, who would think nothing of hanging a stray wayfarer or so from his battlements, only a very modern peer.
The road onwards is a weariness and an infliction to the cyclist, for it goes on in a heavy three miles’ continuous rise up to the summit of Heiferlaw Bank, whence there is a wide and windy view of uncomfortable looking moorlands to the north, with the craggy Cheviots, perhaps covered with snow, to the north-west. As a literary lady—Mrs. Montagu—wrote in 1789, when on a northern journey, “These moors are not totally uninhabited, but they look unblest.” How true!
The proper antidote to this is the looking back to where, deep down in the vale of Aln, lie town and castle, perhaps lapt in infrequent sunshine, more probably seen through rain, but, in any case, presenting a picture of sheltered content, and seeming to be protected from the rude buffets of the weather by the hill on which we are progressing and by the wooded flanks of Brislaw on the other side. “Seeming,” because those who know Alnwick well could tell a different tale of wintry blasts and inclement seasons that belie the hint of this hillside prospect for three whole quarters round the calendar and a good proportion of the fourth. In this lies a suggestion of why the Percies were so warlike. They and their northern foes fought to keep themselves warm! Nowadays such courses would lead to the police-court, and so football has become a highly-popular game in these latitudes. But the southward glimpse of Alnwick and its surroundings from the long rise of Heiferlaw Bank is, when sunshine prevails, of a quite incommunicable charm. The background of hills, covered with Duke Hugh’s woods and crowned with his tower, recalls in its rich masses of verdure the landscapes of De Wint, and if in the Duke’s inscription on that tower he seems to rank himself in fellowship with the Creator, certainly, now he has been dead and gone these hundred and twenty years, his saplings, grown into forest trees and clothing the formerly barren hillsides, have effected a wonderful change.
Beside the road are the few remaining stones of St. Leonard’s Chapel, and, a short distance beyond, on the right, in a grove of trees, Malcolm’s Cross, marking the spot where Malcolm Caenmore, king of Scotland, was slain in 1093. It replaces a more ancient cross, and was erected by the first Duchess of Northumberland in 1774. It was on his seventh foray into Northumberland, besieging Alnwick Castle, that Malcolm was killed, in an ambush carefully prepared for him. The legend, which tells how he was treacherously slain by a thrust of a spear in the eye by one of the Percies, who was pretending to deliver up the castle keys on the spear’s point, is untrue, as of course is the popular derivation of the family name from “pierce eye.” Moreover, the Percies, as we have seen, did not own Alnwick until more than two hundred years afterwards.
Heiferlaw, as befits so commanding a hill-top so close to the Border, has its watch-tower, looking across the marches, whence the outlying defenders of Alnwick, ever watchful against Scottish raids, could give timely warning to the garrison. It stands to-day a picturesque ruin, in cultivated fields that in those fierce old times, when men had no leisure for peaceful arts and industries, formed a portion of the wild moorland. “Blawweary,” they call one of these fields, and the title is as descriptive of this exposed situation as anything in the whole range of nomenclature. Beyond this point the road descends to a level stretch of country leading to North Charlton, where a few farmsteads alone stand for a village, together with a prominent hillock covered with trees and looking as though it had, or ought to have, a story to it; a story which research fails to unearth. Opposite, meadows called locally “Comby Fields,” presumably from a series of ridges seen in them, seem to point to some forgotten history. Brownyside, adjoining, is an expanse of moorland, covered with bracken, followed by Warenford, a pretty hamlet in a hollow by a tiny stream, with Twizel Park on the left. At Belford, a large wide-streeted village with a nowadays all too roomy coaching inn, the “Blue Bell,” and an old cross with gas-lamps fitted to it by some vandal or other, the road draws near the coast; that storied Northumbrian sea-shore where Bambrough Castle on its islanded rock, many miles of yellow quicksands, and the Farne and Holy Islands are threaded out in succession before the gaze. Bambrough, the apex of its pyramidical form, just glimpsed above an intervening headland, looks in the distance like another St. Michael’s Mount, and Holy Island, ahead, is a miniature fellow to it. The ruined cathedral of Holy Island, the ancient Lindisfarne, the spot whence the missionary Aidan from Iona began the conversion of Northumbria in 634, and where he was succeeded by that most famous of all northern bishops and saints, the woman-hating St. Cuthbert, is the mother-church of the north, and became possessed in later times of great areas of land through which the road now passes. Buckton, Goswick, Swinhoe, Fenwick, Cheswick, were all “possessions” of the monastery; and the old ecclesiastical parish of Holy Island, once including all these places on the mainland, and constituting then an outlying wedge of Durham in the county of Northumberland, although now a thing of the past, still goes by the local name of Islandshire. Buckton, now a few scattered cottages by the roadside, held a place in the old rhyme which incidentally shows that the monks of Lindisfarne adopted that comforting doctrine:
Who lives a good life is sure to live well.
Their farms and granges yielded them all that the appreciative stomachs of these religious recluses could desire, save indeed when the Scots swooped over the Tweed and took their produce away. It is a rhyme of good living:—
From Goswick we’ve geese, from Cheswick we’ve cheese;
From Buckton we’ve venison in store;
From Swinhoe we’ve bacon, but the Scots it have taken,
And the Prior is longing for more.
The yellow sands that occupy the levels and reach out at low tide to Holy Island are treacherous. With the exquisite colouring of sea and sky on a summer day blending with them, they look at this distance like the shores of fairyland; but the grim little churchyard of Holy Island has many memorials presenting another picture—a picture of winter storm and shipwreck, for which this wild coast has ever been memorable. Off Bambrough, where the Farne Islands are scattered in the sea, the scene is still recalled of the wreck of the Forfarshire and Grace Darling’s heroism; and the monument of that famous girl stands in Bambrough churchyard to render the summer pilgrim mindful of the danger of this coast. Dangerous not only to those on the waters, but also to travellers who formerly took the short cut from Berwick across the sands, instead of going by the hilly road. The way, clearly marked in daylight by a line of poles, has often been mistaken at night; sudden storms, arising when travellers have reached midway, have swept them out to sea; or fogs have entangled the footsteps even of those who knew the uncharted flats best. Whatever the cause, to be lost here was death. The classic instance, still narrated, is that of the postboy carrying the mails from Edinburgh on the 20th of November, 1725. Neither he nor the mail-bags was ever heard of again after leaving Berwick, and it was naturally concluded that he was lost on the quicksands in a sea-fog.
Away on the west of the road rise the Kyloe hills, like ramparts, and on their tallest ridge the church tower of Kyloe, conspicuous for long distances, and greatly appreciated by sailors as a landmark. The village is not perhaps famous, but certainly notable for a former vicar, who apparently aspired to writing a personal history of his parish as well as keeping a merely formal set of registers. Scattered through his official records are some very curious notes, among them: “1696. Buried, Dec. 7, Henry, the son of Henry Watson of Fenwick, who lived to the age of 36 years, and was so great a fool that he could never put on his own close, nor never went a ¼ mile off ye house in all this space.”
The road at this point was the scene of Grizel Cochrane’s famous exploit, in 1685, when at night-fall, disguised as a man, and mounted on horseback, she waylaid the mail rider, and, holding a pistol to his head, robbed him of the warrant he was carrying for the execution of her father, Sir John Cochrane, taken in rebellion against James the Second. By this means she obtained a fortnight’s respite, a delay which was used by his friends to secure his pardon. Grizel Cochrane has, of course, been ever since the heroine of Border song. A clump of trees on a hillock, surrounded by a wall, to the right of the road, long bore the name of “Grizzy’s Clump,” but it has recently been felled and so much of the landmark destroyed. The country folk, possessed of the most invincible ignorance of the subject, know the place only as “Bambrough Hill,” a title they have given it because from the summit an excellent view of Bambrough Castle is gained.
The plantations of Haggerston Castle now begin to cover the land sloping down toward the sea, and, after passing a deserted building on the left, once a coaching inn, the park surrounding the odd-looking modern castellated residence is reached. Here, by the entrance to the house, the road goes off at an acute angle to the left, and, continuing thus for a quarter of a mile, turns as sharply to the right. An old manorial pigeon-house, still with a vane bearing the initials C.L.H., stands by the way, and bears witness to the ownership of the estate in other times by the old Haggerston family. It was to Sir Carnaby Haggerston that those initials belonged, the late eighteenth-century squire, who destroyed the old Border tower of Haggerston Castle, and built a new mansion in its stead, just as so many of his contemporaries did.
Sir Carnaby Haggerston does not appear—apart from this vandal act of his—to have been an especially Wicked Squire, although his devastating name launched him upon the world ear-marked for commission of all the crimes practised by the libertine landowners who made so brave a show in a certain class of literature and melodrama once popular. His name strikes the ear even more dramatically than that of Sir Rupert Murgatroyd, the accursed Baronet of Ruddigore in Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s comic opera, but he never lived up to its possibilities. The only things he seems to have had in common with the typical squire of old seem to have been a love of port and whist, and a passion for building houses too large for his needs or means.
The Wicked Squire who unwillingly sat to the novelists who used to write in the pages of Reynolds’ Miscellany and journals of that stamp fifty years ago, as the high-born villain of their gory romances, may be regretted, because without him the pages of the penny novelist are become extremely tame; but his disappearance need not be mourned for any other reasons.
It is to him we owe the many supposedly “classical” mansions that, huge and shapeless, like so many factories, reformatories, or workhouses, affront the green sward, the beautiful gardens, and the noble trees of many English parks. To build vast mansions of this “palatial” character, the squires often pulled down middle-Tudor or Elizabethan, or even earlier manor-houses of exquisite beauty, vying with one another in the size and extravagance of the new buildings, whose original cost and subsequent maintenance have during the past hundred and fifty years kept many county families in straitened circumstances, and do so still. There was a squire who pulled down a whole series of mediæval wayside crosses in his district, and used the materials as building-stones toward the great mansion he was erecting for the purpose of outshining a neighbour. Those transcendent squires, the noblemen of old, had larger opportunities and made the worst use of them. The Duke of Buckingham, for example, bought a property, demolished the Elizabethan hall that stood on it, and built Stowe there in its place; a building of vast range and classic elevation with colonnades and porticoes, and “windows that exclude the light and lead to nothing,” as some one has very happily remarked. Sir Francis Dashwood, that hero of the Hell Fire Club, pulled down West Wycombe church and built the existing building, that looks like a Lancashire cotton-mill, and every one built houses a great deal larger than were wanted or they could afford; which, like the Earl of Leicester’s seat at Holkham were so little like homes that they could neither live in their stately apartments nor sleep in their vast bedrooms. Like the Earl and Countess of Leicester, who were compelled for comfort’s sake to sleep in one of the servants’ bedrooms in the attics, they lived as settlers in corners of their cavernous and uncomfortable palaces.
Pity the poor descendant of the Squires! He cannot afford in these days to keep up his huge house; to pull it down would in itself cost a fortune; and its very size frightens the clients of the house-agent in whose hands he has had it for letting, these years past. All over England this is seen, and the old Yorkshire tale would stand true of any other county and of many other county magnates of that time. The Marquis of Rockingham, according to that story, built a mansion at Wentworth big enough for the Prince of Wales; Sir Rowland Winn built one at Nostel Priory fit for the Marquis of Rockingham; and Mr. Wrightson of Cusworth built a house fit for Sir Rowland Winn. No doubt the farmers carried on the tale of extravagance down to their stratum of society, and so ad infinitum.
But to return to Haggerston Castle, which now belongs to the Leylands. Conspicuous for some distance is the tower built of recent years to at one and the same time resemble a mediæval keep and to serve a practical purpose as a water-tower, engine-room, and look-out. The place, however, is remarkable for quite other things than its mock castle, for in the beautiful park are kept in pens, or roaming about freely, herds of foreign animals which make of it a miniature Zoological Gardens. It is, in a sense, superior indeed to that well-known place, for if the collections do not cover so wide a range, the animals are in a state of nature. Emus, Indian cattle, kangaroos, and many varieties of wild buck roam this “paradise,” together with a thriving herd of American bison. The bison is almost extinct, even in his native country, but here he flourishes exceedingly and perpetuates his kind. A bison bull is a startling object, come upon unawares, and looks like the production of a lunatic artist chosen to illustrate, say, the Jabberwock in Alice in Wonderland. He is all out of drawing, with huge shaggy forelegs, and head and shoulders a size too large for the rest of his body; an eye like a live coal, tufted coat, like a worn-out door-mat, and uncomfortable-looking horns: the kind of creature that inhabits Nightmare Country, popularly supposed to be bred of indigestion and lobster mayonnaise.