[Original Size]

In many places the traveller, especially if aided by some competent guide, may discern the whole outline of the structure. It consisted of seven parts, viz., the Roman Wall proper, comprising ditch on the extreme northern side; (1) the military road; then the earthwork, consisting of (2) a wall; then (3) a space more or less wide from thirty feet to half-a-mile, middle of vallum, along of (4) a mound, or rampart, the largest of three; (5) a second ditch; (6) another mound, the smallest; and (7) yet another mound. The following section exhibits all in one view. Nor is this all, at every three or four miles we have fortified camps of several acres each, at every mile a castle, and between the castles watch-towers. Moreover, there are roads and bridges, traces of villas, gardens, and burial-places, making almost every inch from Thirlmoor, on the verge of the Cheviots, at the foot of heathery hills and through richly wooded vales, to Rothbury—already a famous place of resort from the district, and evidently destined to become more frequented from its surpassing beauty of situation, encircled by romantic hills, with the bright river running swiftly between.

[Original Size]

Thence the Coquet descends in many a winding by scenes of the richest sylvan loveliness to Warkworth, renowned for its hermitage, which is still, as the old Percy ballad describes it, "deep hewn within a craggy cliff, and overhung with wood." And so we reach the sea, where Coquet Island, with its lighthouse, lies amid the gleaming waters, scarcely suggesting, as we gaze upon it in the fair sunshine, how terribly the storm sometimes there rages, or how those dark rocks are chafed by the angry billows!

But for the full splendour of cliff and ocean scenery we journey still a little northward, and come to Dunstanborough Castle. Here a dark ridge of basalt rises in pillared form sheer from the sea, and in the words of Alarmion, "the whitening breakers," surging with ceaseless thunder into the caves which pierce the cliffs, "sound near,"

"As boiling through the rocks they roar
On Dunstanborough's caverned shore."