Once they made me cut a peat, my first peat, standing by and laughing while I tried my prentice-hand at it.
It looks so easy to cut one of these slices of "chocolate-mould." But it isn't!
The crust of the ground is hard, and one is apt not to exert enough force to start with. Then perhaps one overdoes it, and goes through the crust all of a sudden, and so slithering down through the soft damp peat far more quickly than one intended. But they were kind to me, though they laughed. They said: "She didn't break her first peat; that was champion!"
We would roam on the moors and hear the badgers barking, and sometimes we would see one; and we'd go and watch the sheep-washing down by the "Sike." There is no end to what one can do in the country "out-by"!
The names of some of the houses are very unusual. There is "Seldom Seen," a herd's cottage on the Stanegate; and "Cold Knuckles," an out-by homestead which was burnt down (in its efforts to warm itself, apparently) and has not been rebuilt. A pity that such a name should also perish in the flames!
CHAPTER XIII
PEEL CRAG TO WALLTOWN
On Peel Crag I was quite delighted with the Wall. It stretches for a long distance, eight or nine courses high and 6 feet wide, running along the more or less level summit of the Crag. I learned afterwards that the upper facing-stones on the southern side had been restored in 1909, as nearly as possible in the Roman manner, but that on the northern face they were untouched. One of the men who had helped in this restoration told me he had spent all the winter on Peel Crag, and "cawld wawk it was, with the stones." The south foundation of the Wall in this stretch stands on a higher level than the north.
If the Wall here had not been carefully restored it would have to have been replaced by an ordinary "dry dyke" to keep the sheep from falling down the Crag, which descends steeply to the north.