[Original]
Not a tree was to be seen, except in the neighbourhood of one or two old places, and especially at and around Torwoodlee and Gala House, near the mouth of the river. Everything within sight was green, simple, and bare. Then he contrasts this with the appearance of the valley at date of his writing, when "the whole country is fenced, cultivated, and hedged round. Thriving and extensive plantations appear everywhere."
[Original]
Could he see it, he would find the change even more marked now, with the "thriving plantations" grown and extended, countless trains thundering up and down the line day and night, and above all with his little village of "two thousand two hundred and nine inhabitants" grown into a great and busy town.
In ancient days, this valley through which Gala flows was called Wedale,—the Dale of Woe, the Valley of Weeping, for here says Professor Skene, was fought one of King Arthur's great battles against the Pagans. At what is now the village of Stow—the Stow (old English, "place,") of Wedale—the Bishops of St. Andrews had a palace; and here, by the Lady well at Torsonce, stood in Arthurian days a church famed for its possession of fragments of the True Cross, bestowed, it was said, by King Arthur himself.