SHAP ABBEY.

Hackthorpe village, with an old hall, now a farmhouse, beside the road, brings us to the neighbourhood of Lowther Castle and its beautiful park, seat of the Earl of Lonsdale. The mansion itself, built by Smirke in 1808, is magnificent, in the sense that it is huge and was costly to build and is princely in its appointments, but it is not a castle nor is it Gothic architecture, although the architect who designed it, and the second Lord Lonsdale, for whom it was designed, fondly imagined it to be so.

THE “BAD LORD LONSDALE”

The wicked Lowther, the “bad Lord Lonsdale,” i.e. the first Earl (1736-1802), once haunted this superstitious countryside, after he had run his earthly course with sinful éclat, and was a dreaded “boggle”—which is Westmoreland and Cumberland for “ghost.” This once notorious character, “this brutal fellow,” as Boswell styled him, was eccentric to a degree, and actually acknowledged himself to be “truly a madman, though too rich to be confined.” One of his eccentricities was the keeping of wild horses, instead of deer, in his park at Lowther. Too rich and powerful to care a rap what was thought of him, he drove about in gloomy, out-of-date majesty in an ancient mildewed carriage drawn by shaggy, unclipped horses. The entry of this equipage into Penrith, where he owned most of the property and, politically speaking, all the inhabitants, was regarded with awful expectation of what he would do next, and was feared almost as much as the coming of some mediæval judge armed with a commission to try rebels.

In life representative of the worst and coarsest feudal barons of the Middle Ages, he was held in still greater terror in his death. The awe-stricken rustics long continued to tell how he was with difficulty buried, and how, while the clergyman was praying over him, his mischievous disembodied spirit very nearly knocked the astonished cleric from his desk. Disturbances at the Hall and noises in the stables followed, and men and horses had no rest. The Hall became almost uninhabitable, and out of doors there was constant danger of meeting the noble but malignant spook, either driving in his ghostly “coach and six,” or walking along the dark roads. In a desperate case of this kind, a Catholic priest was thought to be essential as a spirit-layer. The Established Church would not serve, and as for Dissenters—bah! The priest came and prayed, but Jemmy was obstinate and stood a long siege, and when conjured by all that was holy, was only willing to be banished to the Red Sea—to which troublesome spirits are rusticated, as a sort of spiritual Botany Bay—for a year and a day. This was not considered good enough. The district had experienced too much of him in life, and ardently wished to be shot of his ghost for good and all, and so the priest was urged to pray for all he was worth, which he did, finally overpowering the tyrant. Instead of transporting him to the Red Sea, he was laid under the great rock of Walla Crag, Haweswater, for ever!

PEEL TOWERS

It is at Clifton, just south of Penrith, that the real Borderland begins. We are still thirty-five miles short of the actual border-line, but we have come now within the “sphere of influence” (as international politicians might now phrase it) of the old mosstrooping, cattle-lifting, and plundering and burning rascals from the Scottish side, who ever and again came across the Solway in well-mounted bands that numbered perhaps twenty, or perhaps five hundred, and often swept the countryside clean of stock; returning as swiftly as they had come, and leaving burning homesteads behind them. Those times have left plentiful traces, still plain to see, in the old domestic architecture of mansion and farmstead. Castles we have here, as elsewhere, but this borderland is the country of the peel-tower. In ages when the south of England lived in security, and men no longer built homes that were half fortresses, these oft-raided northern counties still lived in constant and well-founded apprehensions, and every one who had anything to lose had his own stronghold, in the little peel-tower that was, according to circumstances, his entire home, or a considerable part of it. Many of the peel-towers remain, as uninhabited ruins: others form the central portion of houses and mansions since enlarged. At Clifton stands such a one.

It is a fair type of the defences once absolutely necessary. You see the care taken to build strongly, with thick walls that no swiftly moving band of raiders could have leisure to demolish; and you see, too, that it was equally impossible to burn. The ground floor was not only exceptionally solid, but it had no entrance from without, and was reached only by a trap-door in the floor above.

So soon as the farmer or the squireen of those days had taken alarm, he drove his stock into the barmkin, or enclosure, attached to his tower of refuge, and, summoning all his family and securing his valuables, ascended with them by a ladder to the first floor, and, withdrawing the ladder after him, awaited events. For defence he had a store of heavy stones on the leads above the second floor; or from the narrow-slitted windows could shift to shoot arrows, or fling hot water, boiling tar, or domestic sewage upon enemies who came near enough.