Few things are more remarkable than the speed with which railways were constructed through the length and breadth of the country, but it was long before through communication between London and Edinburgh was established. It was a coach-guard on this road who, just before the last coach was run off it by the locomotive, sadly remarked that “railways were making a gridiron of England.” They were; but it was not until 1846 and 1848, twenty-one and twenty-three years after the initial success of the Stockton and Darlington line, that by the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway, and the building of the railway bridge across the Tweed, the last links of the railway journey between the two capitals were completed. Even now, it requires the united efforts of three entirely distinct and independent railway companies to convey the through traffic of under four hundred miles between the two capitals. The Great Northern territory ends at Shaftholme, near Doncaster, whence the North-Eastern’s system conducts to the Border at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the remaining fifty miles belonging to the North British Railway.
De Quincey, in his rhapsody on the “English Mail Coach,” says: “The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York, four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind, insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostrils, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.”
But, in truth, railways and coaches have each their especial variety of the romance of speed. De Quincey missed the quickening rush and contact of the air quite as much as any other of the sights, sounds, and sensations he speaks of when travelling by railway; a method of progression which does not admit of outside passengers. Nothing in its special way can be more exhilarating than travelling by coach as an “outside”; few things so unsatisfactory as the position of an “inside”; and if a well-groomed coach is a thing of beauty, there is also a beautiful majesty in a locomotive engine that has been equally well looked after. One of the deep-chested Great Northern expresses puffing its irresistible way past the green eyes of the dropped semaphores of some busy junction at night-time, or coming as with the rush and certainty of Fate along the level stretches of line that characterise the route of the iron road to the North, is a sight calculated to rouse enthusiasm quite as much as a coach. Nor are railways always hideous objects. It is true that in and around the great centres of population where railway lines converge and run in filthy tunnels and along smoke-begrimed viaducts they sound the last note of squalor, but in the country it is a different matter. The embankments are in spring often covered with a myriad wild flowers; the viaducts give a human interest to coombe and gully. Lovers of the country can certainly point to places which, once remote and solitary, have been populated and spoiled by the readiness of railway access; but the locomotive has rendered more holidays possible, and has kept the roads in a decent solitude for the cyclist. Imagine, if you please, the Great North Road nowadays without the railway. A hundred coaches, more or less, raced along it in the last years of the coaching age, at all hours of the day and night. How many would suffice for the needs of the travelling public to-day? and what chance would be left to the tourist, afoot or awheel?
XIX
Beyond its grand old church, Darlington has nothing of great antiquity to show the stranger, save one object of very high antiquity indeed, before whose hoary age even Norman and Early English architecture is comparatively a thing of yesterday. This is the Bulmer Stone, a huge boulder of granite, brought by glacial action in some far-away ice-age from the heights of Shap Fell in distant Westmoreland to the spot on which it has ever since rested. Darlington has meanwhile risen out of the void and lonely countryside; history has passed by, from the remote times of the blue-stained Britons, down to the present era of the blue-habited police; and that old stone remains beside the road to the North. Modern pavements encircle it, and gas-lamps shame with their modernity its inconceivable age, but not with too illuminating a ray, and the stranger roaming Darlington after nightfall has barked his shins against the unexpected bulk of the Bulmer Stone, just as effectually as countless generations before him have done.
The long rise of Harrowgate Hill conducts out of Darlington and leads on to Coatham Mundeville, a tiny hamlet on the crest of a hill, with an eighteenth-century house, a row of cottages, and an inn, making together an imposing figure against the sky-line, although when reached they are commonplace enough. The village of Aycliffe lies beyond, on its height, overlooking a scene of quarrying and coal-mining; an outlook which until Cromwell’s time was one of dense oak-woods. He it was who caused those woods to be felled to mend the road on to Durham and make it firm enough for his ordnance to pass. Whether the name of Aycliffe derives (as some would have it) from “oak hill,” or whether it was originally “High Cliffe,” or obtains its name from some forgotten haia, or enclosure on this eminence, let us leave for others to fight over: it is an equally unprofitable and insoluble discussion. As well might one hope to obtain a verbatim report of one or other of the two Synods held here in 782 and 789, of which two battered Saxon crosses in the churchyard are thought to be relics, as to determine this question.
For the rest, Aycliffe is quite unremarkable. Leaving it, and coming downhill over an arched crossing over a marsh, dignified by the name of Howden Bridge, we reach Traveller’s Rest and its two inns, the “Bay Horse” and “Gretna Green Wedding Inn.” An indescribable air of romance dignifies these two solitary inns that confront one another across the highway, and form all there is of Traveller’s Rest. The “Wedding Inn,” the more modern of the two, has for its sign the picture of a marriage ceremony in that famous Border smithy. The “Bay Horse” is the original Traveller’s Rest. Dating back far into the old coaching and posting times, its stables of that era still remain; but what renders the old house particularly notable is its sign, the odd figure of a horse within an oval, seen on its wall, with the word “Liberty” in company with the name of “Traveller’s Rest” and the less romantic than commercial announcement of “Spirituous Liquors.” Once, perhaps, painted the correct tint of a “bay” horse, the elements have reduced it to an unobtrusive brown that bids fair to modestly fade into the obscurity of a neutral tint, unless the landlord presently fulfils his intention, expressed to the present historian, of having it repainted, to render it “more viewly”; which appears to be the North-country phrase for making a thing “more presentable.” To this old sign belongs the legend of a prisoner being escorted to Durham Gaol and escaping through the horse ridden by his mounted guard throwing its rider near here. Hence the word “Liberty.”
