Beside the road are the few remaining stones of St. Leonard’s Chapel, and, a short distance beyond, on the right, in a grove of trees, Malcolm’s Cross, marking the spot where Malcolm Caenmore, king of Scotland, was slain in 1093. It replaces a more ancient cross, and was erected by the first Duchess of Northumberland in 1774. It was on his seventh foray into Northumberland, besieging Alnwick Castle, that Malcolm was killed, in an ambush carefully prepared for him. The legend, which tells how he was treacherously slain by a thrust of a spear in the eye by one of the Percies, who was pretending to deliver up the castle keys on the spear’s point, is untrue, as of course is the popular derivation of the family name from “pierce eye.” Moreover, the Percies, as we have seen, did not own Alnwick until more than two hundred years afterwards.
Heiferlaw, as befits so commanding a hill-top so close to the Border, has its watch-tower, looking across the marches, whence the outlying defenders of Alnwick, ever watchful against Scottish raids, could give timely warning to the garrison. It stands to-day a picturesque ruin, in cultivated fields that in those fierce old times, when men had no leisure for peaceful arts and industries, formed a portion of the wild moorland. “Blawweary,” they call one of these fields, and the title is as descriptive of this exposed situation as anything in the whole range of nomenclature. Beyond this point the road descends to a level stretch of country leading to North Charlton, where a few farmsteads alone stand for a village, together with a prominent hillock covered with trees and looking as though it had, or ought to have, a story to it; a story which research fails to unearth. Opposite, meadows called locally “Comby Fields,” presumably from a series of ridges seen in them, seem to point to some forgotten history. Brownyside, adjoining, is an expanse of moorland, covered with bracken, followed by Warenford, a pretty hamlet in a hollow by a tiny stream, with Twizel Park on the left. At Belford, a large wide-streeted village with a nowadays all too roomy coaching inn, the “Blue Bell,” and an old cross with gas-lamps fitted to it by some vandal or other, the road draws near the coast; that storied Northumbrian sea-shore where Bambrough Castle on its islanded rock, many miles of yellow quicksands, and the Farne and Holy Islands are threaded out in succession before the gaze. Bambrough, the apex of its pyramidical form, just glimpsed above an intervening headland, looks in the distance like another St. Michael’s Mount, and Holy Island, ahead, is a miniature fellow to it. The ruined cathedral of Holy Island, the ancient Lindisfarne, the spot whence the missionary Aidan from Iona began the conversion of Northumbria in 634, and where he was succeeded by that most famous of all northern bishops and saints, the woman-hating St. Cuthbert, is the mother-church of the north, and became possessed in later times of great areas of land through which the road now passes. Buckton, Goswick, Swinhoe, Fenwick, Cheswick, were all “possessions” of the monastery; and the old ecclesiastical parish of Holy Island, once including all these places on the mainland, and constituting then an outlying wedge of Durham in the county of Northumberland, although now a thing of the past, still goes by the local name of Islandshire. Buckton, now a few scattered cottages by the roadside, held a place in the old rhyme which incidentally shows that the monks of Lindisfarne adopted that comforting doctrine:
Who lives a good life is sure to live well.
Their farms and granges yielded them all that the appreciative stomachs of these religious recluses could desire, save indeed when the Scots swooped over the Tweed and took their produce away. It is a rhyme of good living:—
From Goswick we’ve geese, from Cheswick we’ve cheese;
From Buckton we’ve venison in store;
From Swinhoe we’ve bacon, but the Scots it have taken,
And the Prior is longing for more.
The yellow sands that occupy the levels and reach out at low tide to Holy Island are treacherous. With the exquisite colouring of sea and sky on a summer day blending with them, they look at this distance like the shores of fairyland; but the grim little churchyard of Holy Island has many memorials presenting another picture—a picture of winter storm and shipwreck, for which this wild coast has ever been memorable. Off Bambrough, where the Farne Islands are scattered in the sea, the scene is still recalled of the wreck of the Forfarshire and Grace Darling’s heroism; and the monument of that famous girl stands in Bambrough churchyard to render the summer pilgrim mindful of the danger of this coast. Dangerous not only to those on the waters, but also to travellers who formerly took the short cut from Berwick across the sands, instead of going by the hilly road. The way, clearly marked in daylight by a line of poles, has often been mistaken at night; sudden storms, arising when travellers have reached midway, have swept them out to sea; or fogs have entangled the footsteps even of those who knew the uncharted flats best. Whatever the cause, to be lost here was death. The classic instance, still narrated, is that of the postboy carrying the mails from Edinburgh on the 20th of November, 1725. Neither he nor the mail-bags was ever heard of again after leaving Berwick, and it was naturally concluded that he was lost on the quicksands in a sea-fog.
Away on the west of the road rise the Kyloe hills, like ramparts, and on their tallest ridge the church tower of Kyloe, conspicuous for long distances, and greatly appreciated by sailors as a landmark. The village is not perhaps famous, but certainly notable for a former vicar, who apparently aspired to writing a personal history of his parish as well as keeping a merely formal set of registers. Scattered through his official records are some very curious notes, among them: “1696. Buried, Dec. 7, Henry, the son of Henry Watson of Fenwick, who lived to the age of 36 years, and was so great a fool that he could never put on his own close, nor never went a ¼ mile off ye house in all this space.”
The road at this point was the scene of Grizel Cochrane’s famous exploit, in 1685, when at night-fall, disguised as a man, and mounted on horseback, she waylaid the mail rider, and, holding a pistol to his head, robbed him of the warrant he was carrying for the execution of her father, Sir John Cochrane, taken in rebellion against James the Second. By this means she obtained a fortnight’s respite, a delay which was used by his friends to secure his pardon. Grizel Cochrane has, of course, been ever since the heroine of Border song. A clump of trees on a hillock, surrounded by a wall, to the right of the road, long bore the name of “Grizzy’s Clump,” but it has recently been felled and so much of the landmark destroyed. The country folk, possessed of the most invincible ignorance of the subject, know the place only as “Bambrough Hill,” a title they have given it because from the summit an excellent view of Bambrough Castle is gained.
The plantations of Haggerston Castle now begin to cover the land sloping down toward the sea, and, after passing a deserted building on the left, once a coaching inn, the park surrounding the odd-looking modern castellated residence is reached. Here, by the entrance to the house, the road goes off at an acute angle to the left, and, continuing thus for a quarter of a mile, turns as sharply to the right. An old manorial pigeon-house, still with a vane bearing the initials C.L.H., stands by the way, and bears witness to the ownership of the estate in other times by the old Haggerston family. It was to Sir Carnaby Haggerston that those initials belonged, the late eighteenth-century squire, who destroyed the old Border tower of Haggerston Castle, and built a new mansion in its stead, just as so many of his contemporaries did.