At the bottom of the hill, the road crosses Denton Burn, once a pretty stream, but now dry; I saw only a dirty green puddle in which a dirty brown sparrow was trying to bathe. Just before the burn, on the left, a stile leads to the very first piece of Wall which appears above ground. It is only a few paces south of the road, and has been enclosed by a wooden fence, but a mere fraction of the fence was left; the rest had apparently been stolen for firewood. This piece of Wall is 9½ feet wide. When Hutton saw it, it was 36 feet long, and had an apple-tree growing on it. There is much less left now, and even the dead trunk of the apple-tree has gone.
Mounting the opposite hill, I soon came to Denton Hall, a ghost-haunted old house on the right, built of Wall-stones in 1503 by the monks of Tynemouth, as a summer residence. A few sculptured stones from the Wall are to be seen in the hall. Mrs. Elizabeth Montague, "The Queen of the Blue Stocking," lived there from 1760, and entertained many distinguished guests.
Now I felt that I had at last got beyond Newcastle. The fields were golden with buttercups; the may-trees were masses of pearly white; beneath them the cattle stood drowsily in the heat; and away in the distance the hills south of the Tyne lost themselves in a blue haze.
Opposite Denton Hall, the core of the Wall can be seen, and the Vallum, running along the bottom of the meadow.
CHAPTER VI
WALBOTTLE TO EAST WALLHOUSES
The first indication of a mile-castle I noted in a field on the left, just before reaching the lodge of West Denton House. It was just a daisy-covered mound, as I saw it, with cows lying about on it.
I pushed on up the hill towards Walbottle (A.S. botel, an abode; the abode on the Wall), with the Wall-ditch running alongside. At the top there is a beautiful view across the valley of the Tyne. The painter Martin, a native of Haydon Bridge, is said to have made it the basis of his picture, "The Plains of Heaven."
Walbottle is now an unattractive colliery village, whatever it may have been in Saxon times. There were many colliers about, for the strike was on, and I saw women and children searching in the rubbish at the pit-heads for scraps of coal.