Returning to the main road, we follow the wooded Tees to Barnard Castle. For miles the river is as we saw it at the meeting of the waters, darkly shadowed by trees and bound by rocky banks; more beautiful in itself than Wharfe or Swale, though flowing through a valley that cannot be compared to the other dales except at its head: but there, I think, excelling them all. Through the greater part of Teesdale the beauty of the river is so closely confined to its banks that we only catch a glimpse of it now and then, when actually crossing the stream. One of these glimpses we have from the toll-bridge just below Eggleston Abbey, where we cross for a few minutes into the county of Durham. The ruins of the abbey are visible through the trees, standing on a grassy hill upon the Yorkshire bank of the river.
THE DAIRY BRIDGE.
At Barnard Castle—which is not a very attractive town at first sight, and is sorely disfigured by its portentous museum—we again cross the Tees into Yorkshire, near the point where the familiar towers of the Baliols' ruined fortress stand high above the river on their cliff. This commanding position was granted to the Norman Guy de Baliol by Rufus, and Guy's son Bernard raised on it the castle that was forfeited by his descendant. This Bernard was no friend to the throne on which the later Baliol sat, for he was the most zealous of the five knights who captured William of Scotland and took him to Richmond Castle. When the enterprise seemed about to fail, it was Bernard who cried: "If you should all turn back, I would go on alone!" A little more than a hundred years later John Baliol, King of Scotland, was rashly refusing to be at the beck and call of the English king. "Has the fool done this folly?" asked Edward. "If he will not come to us we will come to him!" So John lost his crown, and Barnard Castle saw the Baliols no more. It was given to the Nevilles, and so with many other things fell into the capacious hands of Richard III., who actually lived here for a time, and has left his symbol, the wild boar, upon the oriel window.
There is one gracious memory that makes these towers sacred. The ruined halls are haunted by the presence of that gentle and sad lady who was the widow of one John Baliol and the mother of another—Devorgilla, daughter of kings, foundress of Baliol College, and in her endless sorrow the builder of Dulce Cor. When her husband died she "had his dear heart embalmed and enshrined in a coffer of ivory, enamelled and bound with silver bright, which was placed before her daily in her hall as her sweet, silent companion." It was here at Bernard Castle that she chiefly lived with that silent companion, until the noble shrine of stone was ready to receive the ivory coffer; it was here she lived on alone, till she too died and was carried out to be buried in Sweetheart Abbey, with John Baliol's "dear heart" upon her breast.
Of the two roads to Middleton-in-Teesdale the one on the Durham side is the best as regards both surface and scenery; but the greater number of those who drive up Teesdale will return to Barnard Castle before going on their way to the north or crossing Yorkshire to the coast, and will probably prefer to drive up the valley by one road and come down it again on the other. On the Yorkshire side there is nothing very striking. Lartington is pretty, and gay with flowers; Cotherstone still has a fragment of the FitzHughs' castle in a field above the river; Romaldkirk has an interesting church. Beyond Mickleton we cross the Lune, which is a miniature copy of the Tees, with the same rocky bed and the same close screen of overarching boughs. A few minutes later we cross the Tees itself and are in Middleton.
The road from Middleton to High Force is surprisingly populous. Here among the hills, where the fields are yielding to moorland, and the river flows under bare crags, one expects a certain amount of loneliness; yet here is a broad and civilised highway, with all the character of a road near some large town. The scenery, however, is wild enough; and more beautiful than anything we have seen. Beyond the river—open now to the sky, no longer veiled by trees—rise the moors, piled high, fold upon fold, grand in outline and glorious in colour, green and purple and crimson. A wood by the wayside blots out river and hills for a moment; then suddenly through a gap we see High Force.
Looking down from the road we see it as a picture framed in trees: the solid wall of rock, the leap of the foaming waters, the cloud of spray, the fir-trees with their spires against the sky, the crimson moors beyond. That white torrent is the boundary of the county, the crown and climax of the beauty of Yorkshire, and our last and most perfect memory of the dales.
