“We dined at Durhame, and I went to see the cathedrall; it is a prodigious bulky building. It was on Sunday betwixt services, and in the piazzas there were several boys playing at ball. I asked the girl that attended me, if it was the custome for the boys to play at ball on Sunday: she said, ‘they play on other days, as well as on Sundays.’ She called her mother to show me the Church; and I suppose, by my questions, the woman took me for a heathen, as I found she did not know of any other mode of worship but her own; so, that she might not think the Bishop’s chair defiled by my sitting down in it, I told her I was a Christian, though the way of worship in my country differed from hers. In particular, she stared when I asked what the things were that they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.”
They were hassocks: articles apparently then not known to Presbyterians.
And so she continued southward:—
“Next day, the 7th, we dined none, but baited at different places, and betwixt Doncaster and Bautry a man rode about in an odd way, whom we suspected for a highwayman. Upon his coming near, John Rattray pretended to make a quarle with the post boy, and let him know that he keept good powder and ball to keep such folks as him in order; upon which the felow scampered off cross the common.”
The Great North Road leaves Durham over Framwellgate Bridge, built by Bishop Flambard in Norman times. Although altered and repaired in the fifteenth century and later, it is still substantially the same bridge. There was once a fortified gateway on it, but that was taken down in 1760. Bridge, River, Castle, and Cathedral here form a majestic picture.
XXIII
And now to take the open road again. The chief features of the road between Durham and Newcastle are coal-pits, dismal pit villages, and coal-dust. Not at once, however, is the traveller introduced to these, and the ascent out of Durham, through the wooded banks of Dryburn, is very pretty. It is at Framwellgate Moor, a mile and a half from the city, that the presence of coal begins to make itself felt, in the rows of unlovely cottages, and in the odd figures of the pitmen, who may be seen returning from their work, with grimy faces and characteristic miner’s dress. Adjoining this village, and indistinguishable from it by the stranger, is the roadside collection of cottages known as “Pity Me,” taking its name from the hunted fox in the sign of the “Lambton Hounds” inn.
Framwellgate is scarce left behind before there rises up in the far distance, on the summit of one of the many hills to the north-east, a hill-top temple resembling the Athenian Acropolis, and as you go northward it is the constant companion of your journey for some seven or eight miles. This is “Penshaw Monument,” erected on that windy height in 1844, four years after his death, to the memory of John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham. It cost £6,000, and commemorates the championship of the Reform movement in its earlier and precarious days by that statesman. Like many another monument, impressive at a distance, a near approach to it leads to disillusion, for its classic outlines are allied to coarse workmanship, and its eighteen great columns are hollow. Penshaw, deriving its name from Celtic words, signifying a wooded height, still has its woodlands to justify the name given nearly a thousand years ago.
