But we are bound for Seal Bark. To get hither, the road must be quitted near the “Moorcock,” and a way found through the fir–wood to the bottom of the valley, then re–ascending by the borders of the stream. A water so wild and beautiful it would be difficult to find nearer than Scotland or Carnarvonshire. Sliding, gliding, tumbling, in every conceivable mode, now it hurries along a smooth and limpid current; now it plays with the boulders, and changes to little cascades; now it fills little bays and recesses with reposing foam as white as snow, or that are alive with circular processions of untiring bubbles that swim awhile delicately, round and round, then, like the dancers in Sir Roger de Coverley, when they bend beneath the arch of lifted arms, rejoin their first partners and away down the middle, away and away, as swift as thought. Great defiles open on the right and left, Rimmon Clough and Birchen Clough, at the foot of which stands the one solitary tree of this grand wilderness—a mountain–ash, the tree of all others accustomed to loneliness. Above, at a vast height, is Ravenstone Brow, so named from the number of birds that once nested thereabouts, and where cuckoos still come. When at length we arrive at Seal Bark, who shall mistake it? All the waste and broken rock of a kingdom seems to have been pitched over the brow, and let fall and roll or stop just where it liked. The probability is that at some remote period the torrent undermined one side of the gorge, the ruins toppling over much in the same way as those of the ancient Clevedon shore, where it is plain that the fragments owe their present position to the remorseless beating of the sea.
For those who care to run on through the great Standedge tunnel, three miles and sixty–four yards long, thus getting to Marsden, there is an extremely fine mountain–pass called Wessenden Clough, the heights on either hand not less than a thousand feet, and once again a rushing torrent. There is a path back to Greenfield over the moors, but the way is rather long, except for the practised. The great tunnel at Woodhead, upon the Sheffield line, often thought to exceed the Standedge, is, we may here remark, twenty yards shorter.
CHAPTER XIII.
BAMFORD WOOD.
So rich a shade, so green a sod,
Our English fairies never trod;
Yet who in Indian bower has stood,
But thought on England’s “good green wood?”
And bless’d, beneath the palmy shade,
Her hazel and her hawthorn glade,
And breath’d a prayer (how oft in vain!)
To gaze upon her oaks again?