"Bueth's Castle" is the grimmest old ruin I ever saw, with bare walls standing up in forbidding sternness.
The church is said to date back to the Conquest. There are four holes in the wall, through which the dwellers in the castle used to keep watch against their enemies. It had till lately shown the beautiful grey stone inside, but when we were there it had just been distempered buff colour all over—stone walls, stone columns, font, and all! Fortunately they had omitted to distemper the curiously carved eighteenth-century tombstones in the churchyard, and the Runic Cross!
This last is a magnificent example of early Christian art amongst the Anglo-Saxons, with a runic inscription which has been translated thus:
"This slender sign of victory set up
Hwaetred, Wothgaer, Olw-wolthu,
to Alcfrith, a king and son of
Oswy. Pray for ..."
There are figures of Jesus Christ and of St. John the Baptist; and also of King Alcfrith, whom it commemorates, holding a hawk. He is said to have died of the yellow plague in 664 A.D.
There is very beautiful ornamental work on the other three sides; vines, with birds and squirrels in amongst the leaves, and elaborate interlacing fret.
Three of us walked back from Bewcastle by the Maiden Way; we kept losing the way and finding it again; but we struck all the landmarks, and it finally brought us out, "according to plan," just above Birdoswald. We passed Side Fell, the highest point hereabouts, and came to the Beacon, where the ruins of what was formerly supposed to be a Roman watch-tower are quite unmistakable. In Dr. Bruce's third edition there is a lovely picture of it, with, prominently in the foreground, "a very human incident," as the newspapers love to say. A brave, top-hatted cavalier, with umbrella raised high above his head, is defending a clinging companion in crinoline skirts from three meek-looking cows, whose tails are curved like fish-hooks over their backs! What a romance lies hidden there! When I saw it, I felt how much I had failed in not peopling the solitudes of the Wall in my pictures! But then, to me, the loneliness is half the charm, and three-quarters of the character. We crossed Spadeadam Waste—such a fascinating name, which takes us back to the very gates of Eden!—and we came to Spadeadam farm-house, where an adamantine old lady in a sunbonnet refused our appeal for milk or tea. Haymaking was in full swing, and she really had more than she could do already, I am sure. Then we crossed the King Water, by stepping-stones, and over the top of the next hill Gilsland came into view.