churches, happened, and the wooden spire of the tower crashed down and destroyed the roof of the Choir. This so alarmed the authorities that they removed the spires which then stood upon the two western towers. I must not linger over the details of a cathedral here; but, in accordance with an inclination throughout these pages, to say what little space admits to be said of the less written of, and less hackneyed subjects that confront us, I may pause to note that the West Front of Ripon, with its severe but compact Early English windows, doorways, and arcading, is the chief pride of the Cathedral. Archbishop Roger’s Norman Nave was supplanted by the present one in the Perpendicular period, but some of his work, in the shape of three bays, may still be seen on the north side of the Choir, which portion was not ruined by the fall of the central tower after the Scottish burning. The rest of the Choir is Perpendicular and Decorated, suggestive of the period following the fiercest blaze of Anglo-Scottish hostility. Thus, as in most of our northern churches, the varied styles do not merely proclaim the procession—one must not say the progress—of the builder’s art but tell the story of domestic strife. The Chapter-house and Vestry supported by a Crypt, however, are mainly Norman, and supposed to be of anterior date even to Archbishop Roger’s Church. Below the Nave is the most singular thing in the whole church—a small Crypt of probably seventh-century work, resembling that one beneath Wilfrid’s other church at Hexham, except that the latter is obviously made of stone taken from Roman buildings. In both places they were probably used for the exhibition of relics. Ripon is one of the smaller cathedrals, and also rather encompassed by buildings, but being slightly elevated it makes a fine picture from any point in the country round, standing well up above the rest of the peaceful little town—particularly when the foreground is occupied by the rapid streams of the Ure which are here of no mean breadth.
Though not actually on the Ure but on its little tributary the Skell, whose waters have been made to contribute so vastly to its adornment, stands the most magnificent ecclesiastical ruin in England. If the Abbey Church of Fountains, still roof high and the length of Ripon Cathedral, with the mass of monastic buildings which in various stages of arrested decay still surround it, has rivals, its beautiful environment and the unique approach to it would dispose, I think, of their claims. Studley Royal, the Marquis of Ripon’s seat, is two miles from Ripon, and it is through a couple more of park, laid out in the eighteenth century in lavish arrangement of lake, lawn, walk, and woodland, that the visitor, who for a shilling is free of practically the whole, approaches the glorious remains of the great Cistercian house. There is not here, to be sure, the wild natural beauty of Bolton, or Tintern; but it is landscape gardening on such a prodigious scale, and so cunningly contrived, that the picture of the vast and glorious fabric to which it leads bursts on the visitor without warning in such fashion as to convey an irresistible impression, whatever one’s experiences may have been, that there is nothing equal to it in England. This indeed is, I believe, the generally accepted verdict.
For many miles above Ripon, the lower part in fact of the famous Wensley dale, the Ure, sparkling often over broad shingly flats, runs through but a slightly depressed fertile valley—the back-lying moors not as yet pressing into prominent notice. Some half-dozen miles up the dale the old Church and ruined Tower of Tanfield stand by the river bank. The Tower and Gate House represent what is left of the ancient seat of the Marmions, and the Church contains many of their tombs. Scott has thrown such a halo round the name that, though we know out of his own mouth that the grim and haughty warrior who fell at Flodden was the creation purely of his own brain, I could tell of a true Marmion who, under a vow to carry a fair lady’s guerdon where danger was thickest, rode alone and in cold blood beneath the walls of Norham Castle against a whole squadron of Scottish horse, and was rescued alive by sheer good luck. Three miles higher up is the extremely picturesque little town of Masham, its old stone houses standing since times remote around the four sides of a great square, and flanked by a fine church in which are the monuments of Danby’s former lords, and an extremely fine recumbent alabaster effigy of Sir Thomas Wyvern, whose mother was a Scrope, which historic family also once owned the manor. In the churchyard my eye fell accidentally on two adjoining headstones. The one was “To the memory of Christopher Craggs of Gilling-by-the-foot,” the other to that of “Robert Ayscough of Grimes Hall,” and both ear and instinct seemed to provoke the irrepressible reflection that nowhere outside Yorkshire could such a sturdy harsh collection of names appear in combination. Four miles from Masham, too, is another famous abbey, that
THE URE, AYSGARTH FORCE, YORKSHIRE
of Jervaulx, to whose monks at one time this church and town belonged.
Wensley dale drags its beauteous length for many a long mile upward, noted for its cheeses, its cobby horses, and its peculiar breed of sheep; while, as only natural, so great a dairy country takes infinite pride in its cattle. The grass land is of the finest quality, the farms trim-looking, prosperous and well cared for. Middleham with its castle sits upon the stream. Bolton Castle is near by, where Mary, Queen of Scots, spent the first and pleasantest period of her confinement after leaving Carlisle, and made every young gallant in the neighbourhood her slave for life. At Bolton, too, a great square pile, the Scropes had flourished since the days of that Archbishop who shook the throne of the fourth Henry, and lost his head for it. Aysgarth Force—the latter word of Norse origin and the equivalent in North Yorkshire and Durham for waterfall—is the most conspicuous physical feature of the Ure, and with its peaty waters is most happily portrayed on these pages by Mr. Sutton Palmer. Far away in the high moors the Ure rises in a deep crevice of a bog appropriately named Hell gill. Camden alludes to its source as in “a dreary waste and horrid silent wilderness where goats, deer, and stags of extraordinary size find a secure retreat.” Nor has the region altered much since Camden wrote save in the nature of its feræ. If England has changed generally to such an extent that a mediæval monk of agricultural bent would not recognise it in those moors and mountains at least which we so rejoice in, and that the men of old not reared in them so hated, we may still see the landscape almost as they saw it in every detail.
It is worth noting that the traveller journeying by train from Leeds to Darlington crosses all of the rivers that water four out of the six West Yorkshire dales, and at almost equal interludes, namely, the Wharfe, the Nidd, the Ure, and the Swale; while the main line of the Great Northern and North Eastern only crosses the Ouse, which is bearing, however, the combined waters of all these tributary rivers seaward. Of these the last and the most northerly, the Swale, is claimed by those who live upon it to be the most consistently rapid. As the pace of all these Yorkshire rivers is sufficient to give them all the qualities and the beauty of mountain-born streams, such hair-splitting is of small interest. But the Swale can claim, at any rate, the most romantically situated and most picturesque old