The Rivers and Streams of England

by A. G. Bradley

THE COQUET, AND WARKWORTH CASTLE, NORTHUMBERLAND

wealthy townsmen and partly to an ignorance of the whole subject on the part of many new landowners, have been enormously curtailed for the humbler sportsman. But the instinct is an inheritance of all classes in those counties where hills mount high and streams run fast. The North Tyne is a good salmon and sea-trout river and a splendid trout stream. It is a little remote, and withal, of late years, somewhat exclusive; but the Coquet is naturally as good. It has always been, and even still is, more accessible to the Northumbrian angler. The salmon, the bull trout, the sea trout, and the brown trout thrive in its clear mountain waters.

Now the laymen, even such as are in the highest degree susceptible to the charms of Nature and scenery, cannot easily realise the hold that streams of this type and their localities acquire over the affections and imaginations of anglers; not all, of course, for the fraternity includes every kind of temperament. But to a considerable proportion, and by no means of necessity only those whom education and culture make susceptible to such emotion, the appeal of the river, quite apart from the mere act of killing fish, is overmastering. It is no figure of speech but a mere simple statement of fact that, compared to the trout fisherman’s familiarity with a stream, the relationship of the rest of the world to it is a mere nodding acquaintance. Long days are spent in the closest intimacy with its ever-changing surface and the ever-changing melodies it plays. Miles of water, much of it buried in woody dingles from every eye but the fisherman’s, its only visitor, are traversed by him on the bank edge, or in the stream itself, over and over again, till every eddy and pool, every rock and pendent bough, becomes printed in the mind, and hung, so to speak, in its picture gallery. Weeks or months of days, from youth to age, on many streams gives the properly constituted disciple of old Izaak a feeling towards them that can have no counterpart outside the craft, and at the best could be but vaguely realised.

A man would be a dull dog to be continuously exposed, in what are, primâ facie, among the happiest hours of his life, to surroundings that are the most perfect of all Nature’s efforts and not grow to associate them with something more than a mere love of killing things; and there are fewer dull dogs among trout fishermen, one may fairly hazard the statement, than in the ranks of any other sport or pastime. There is a poetry in all field-sports. But in most others there are also accessories which attract the crowd, which conduce to vanity, or popularity, or give a leg up to the social climber. There is usually an audience of some sort, the applause of a circle or a multitude. The fisherman, in this respect at least, is beyond suspicion. He is at any rate genuine and the real thing. Very often, indeed, he is a poet, generally of course an inarticulate one, and unconscious of any such label. But his gratification belongs in part to the higher senses: the romance of the river is strong within him, and it would be strange indeed, seeing the sort of scenes among which he spends his hours, if it were otherwise. The fishermen of the Coquet, however, are not all inarticulate. The river has invoked a good deal of verse on the part of its frequenters, which, if not Swinburnian, is melodious and from the heart, and reveals the love of the Northumbrian angler for its winsome streams. Heaven forbid I should suggest that only an angler can appreciate the glories of a mountain stream; I have but attempted to indicate the more intimate affection for it that men must have, and do have, whose happiest hours are associated with its inmost haunts and with its thousand moods, and whose very ears sing in the evening of long days with its unending melodies.

In the northern counties, as in Wales, the rivers play a greater part in local lore and in the affections of the people generally than in the south. They are intertwined with their legends and their folklore, their ordinary interests. They stimulate the local imagination by their capricious moods, their fury in flood-time, their tempestuous qualities. Even the untutored rustic, one may think, feels insensibly the influence of the cataract, or the charm of the summer shallows where as an urchin he paddled or tickled trout. They riot beside his village street, and their little tributaries plunge beside his cottage door. The southern or midland river is apt to steal noiselessly through interdicted water-meadows, and seems to feel neither storm nor drought till one day, perchance, the valley gradually fills with gently oozing water that recedes with unexciting deliberation.

The considerable remains of Brinkburn Priory, an Augustinian house, stand near the banks of the Coquet, while at Felton Bridge, a village of some note in Northumbrian story, it has been forced to cut a channel through hard ledges of rock, which results in some fine grouping of foam and foliage. Our illustration, however, represents the final stage of the river, where in its more peaceful mood it winds beneath the renowned Castle of Warkworth towards the sea. Though abandoned for centuries as a residence, its great Keep, built in the third Edward’s stirring days by a Percy in star-shape fashion, with eight lofty clustered towers, is practically intact and eminently imposing, while some of the outer walls and other buildings still survive around the great outer bailly. Originally a fortress and manor of the Claverings, it was granted by the same Edward to Henry Percy in payment for his expenses as Warden of the March, and also as a recognition of his share in the defeat of the invading Scots at Neville’s Cross, while the King and his army were fighting the campaign of Crecy. It was their chief seat, rather than Alnwick, for some generations, including that of Hotspur. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, here lays the scene in which that fiery soul is planning his intended revolt against Henry the Fourth which ended on the fatal field of Shrewsbury, and repels his curious wife’s persistent sallies anent his moody ways and broken, restless nights. The second part of the same play also opens here at Warkworth, where the old Earl awaits the news from Shrewsbury, and receives the messenger announcing the rout of his friends and Hotspur’s death.

Warkworth, like Alnwick, fell into decay during the long absence of the Percys from the north, a compulsory absence but little broken for generations, and wholly due to the fear of them felt by the Tudors, who were strong enough to coerce those they feared. When in the person of the first Duke they returned during the eighteenth century to a permanent residence in Northumberland, it was a mooted question whether Alnwick or Warkworth should be restored, the former, as we know, being selected. And if the Alne, winsome little river though it be, cannot compare with the Coquet, it has some compensation in the miles of beautiful and diversified park it waters, and in the honour of laving the feet of the proudest and greatest castle in all England. On arriving beneath the high-perched towers of Warkworth, the Coquet has relapsed into a smooth gliding stream, and in a red sandstone cliff abutting on its banks, just above the castle, is a quite remarkable cell or hermitage, like those on the Severn near Bewdley. But this one is more elaborate by far, and uncanny to a high degree. A flight of steps hewn in the rock mounts up from the river bank to a cave, entered by an ecclesiastically-fashioned porch. The interior itself was cunningly wrought some six centuries ago into the form of a chapel of Gothic design, some twenty feet by seven, with a two-light window, an altar, and a vaulted roof with central bosses supported by short circular columns, all being hewn out of the solid rock. To the south of this altar, under the window, is the rather gruesome explanation of these pious labours. For here lies the rude and greatly worn figure of a female, with a man seated at her feet resting his head upon his hand, and though much worn by time still eloquently indicating an attitude of remorse and despair. Over the outside of the door is carved a Latin inscription signifying, “My tears have been my meat day and night,” while within is another chamber of a ruder kind.

The story runs thus, that the man is a Bertram of Bothal and the lady a Widdrington, his intended bride, whom he killed by mistake, and then, fashioning this hermitage, mourned her here in seclusion for the remainder of his life. How the mistake arose and the tragedy came about is too long a tale for these pages. Hotspur’s son, when an exile in Scotland, after his father’s death and attainder, is supposed to have contracted a stealthy marriage with a daughter of the rival Marcher house of Neville, whom he afterwards publicly espoused, in this same hermitage. Just beneath the cliff is a small ruinous building on the river bank, built of hewn rock in the fifteenth century; concerning this, however, there is no mystery though some interest, as the cell of a priest attached to the Percy family under ordinary conditions, which are still preserved in writing. The inevitably sombre, but in a sense rather picturesque little town of Warkworth, with its market cross, straggles up from the fifteenth-century bridge, guarded by an old turreted gateway, to the castle in most suggestively feudal fashion. So soon after this does the Coquet join the sea that Warkworth considers itself something of a watering-place, though no disturbing evidences of anything of the kind mar the bygone flavour of dominant castle and tributary townlet which it still so pleasantly retains. Passengers to and from Scotland on the main line must assuredly be familiar with these proud towers standing out above the bare fields, a mile or two eastward against the sea. Not so obvious is a beautiful glimpse of the Coquet which must be snatched at precisely the proper moment. But as the train crosses the river some four miles from its mouth, it may be seen for a few brief seconds down a long straight half-mile trail of glancing light between luxuriant walls of woodland.

The Till, though not one of the artist’s subjects on these pages, must have a brief word, if only because it is quite unlike any other river on the Border, and is, moreover, the only English stream that feeds the Tweed. Rising, like the Alne, and not far from it, in the Cheviots about half-way down their course, it fails to achieve the other’s feat and break through that isolated central block of North Northumbrian moors between the Cheviots and the sea. Thus baffled and turning away to the north quite in its infancy, it runs along the eastern base of the Cheviots to the Tweed. Passing Chillingham and thence to Wooler, the Till winds with extraordinary contortions through broad level meadows, the great humpy masses of the Northern Cheviots, reaching here the height of 2700 feet, towering majestically above it. Rippling gently over gravelly shallows of singularly lustrous colouring and many hues, it lingers long and constantly, so slight is the fall, in sullen deeps, into which the high crumbling red sandstone banks are continually toppling. In actual appearance the Till is almost a replica of those famous Hereford grayling rivers the Teme and the Lugg, and, as is but natural, that useful and handsome fish, which was only introduced here fifteen years ago, now swarms in its streams somewhat to the ousting of the trout, its natural denizens, and no doubt to the disgust of its autumn visitors, the salmon and the sea-trout. These, however, pass on for the most part up the brawling tributaries which the grayling do not face, and it is an interesting sight to watch the “sea-fish,” as inland Northumbrians call the salmon tribe, leaping the dam on the Wooler burn in a half flood.