In Unfamiliar England / A Record of a Seven Thousand Mile Tour by Motor of the Unfrequented Nooks and Corners, and the Shrines of Especial Interest, in England; With Incursions into Scotland and Ireland.

by Thos. D. Murphy

The direct route across the moor to Thirsk is impassable—the heavy rain has made it a trail of deep mud, and we dare not attempt its precipitous “bank” under such conditions. A detour of many miles by way of Easingwold is necessary, but once on the North Road there is ample opportunity to make up for delay. Country constables will hardly be abroad in the driving rain and the motor purrs quite as contentedly and drives the car quite as swiftly as in the sunniest weather.

We splash through the streets of Thirsk with a glance at its church tower, the one redeeming feature of the town. The rain soon ceases, but a gray mist half hides the outlines of the Cleveland Hills on our right and hangs heavily over the fertile valley to our left. It is of little consequence, for there are few stretches of main road in England that have less to detain the wayfarer than the forty-eight miles from York to Stockton-on-Tees. Yarm is a sleepy town overshadowed by its majestic church tower, which again impresses us how the church alone often relieves the squalidness and gives a touch of sentiment to many an uninteresting English village. At Yarm we enter the broad vale of the Tees and again traverse the wide, unattractive street of Stockton. Twenty miles farther Durham’s stately towers loom in dim outline against the gray sky; we cautiously wend our way through the crooked streets of the cathedral town and plunge into the fog that hangs heavily over the Newcastle road.

We come into Newcastle about lamplighting time, weary and somewhat bedraggled from our long flight over the rain-soaked roads. And Newcastle-on-Tyne, at the close of a rainy day, is about the last place to cheer one’s drooping spirits. The lamps glimmer dimly through the fog as we splash along the bumpy streets to the Station Hotel—and few hostelries were more genuinely welcome during all our long wanderings. Nor is Newcastle less dingy and unattractive on the following morning—the rain is still falling and black clouds of sooty smoke hang over the place. London is bad enough under such conditions, but the Tyne city is worse and our first anxiety is to get on the open road again, although it chanced we were doomed to disappointment for much of the day.

Amidst all the evidences of modern industry—the coal-mining and ship-building that have made Newcastle famous—there still linger many relics of the ancient order, memorials of the day when all was rural and quiet along the Tyne. In the very midst of the factories and shipyards at Jarrow, a suburb a few miles down the river, still stands the abbey church where some thirteen hundred years ago the Venerable Bede wrote those chronicles which form the basis of ancient English history. Thither we resolved to go and found the way with no small difficulty to the bald, half-ruined structure on the bank of a small stream whose waters reeked with chemicals from a neighboring factory. Though much restored, the walls and tower of the church are the same that sheltered the monastic brotherhood in the time of Bede, about the seventh century. The present monastic ruins, however, are of Norman origin, the older Saxon foundation having quite disappeared. Several relics of Bede are preserved in the church, among them the rude, uncomfortable chair he is said to have used. Altogether, this shrine of the Father of English History is full of interest and when musing within its precincts one will not fail to recall the story of Bede’s death. For tradition has it that “He was translating St. John’s Gospel into English when he was attacked by a sudden illness and felt he was dying. He kept on with his task, however, and continued dictating to his scribe, bidding him write quickly. When he was told that the book was finished, he said, ‘You speak truth, all is finished now,’ and after singing ‘Glory to God,’ he quietly passed away.”

The Tyne valley road to Carlisle on the south side of the river by the way of Hexham looks very well on the map, but the run would be a wearisome one under favorable conditions; in the face of a continual rain it is even more of a task, and no one motoring for pleasure should take this route. It is rough and hilly and runs through a succession of mining and manufacturing towns. The road follows the edge of the moorland hills to the southward, and in many places the hillsides afford wide views over the Tyne valley, but the gray rain obscured the prospect for us and only an occasional lull gave some hint of the broad vale and the purple Northumbrian Hills beyond.

Hexham is beautifully situated a mile or two below the juncture of the northern and southern branches of the Tyne, lying in a nook of the wooded hills, while the broad river sweeps past beneath. The low square tower of its abbey church looms up over the town from the commanding hill. It is one of the most important in the North Country, rivaling the cathedrals in proportions, and has only recently been restored.

Here we crossed to the northern side of the river to reach the most stupendous relic of the Roman occupation of Britain—the wall which Hadrian built as a protection against the incursions of the wild northern tribes. This wall was seventy miles in length—from Tynemouth to the Solway—of an average thickness of eight feet and probably not less than eighteen feet in height. It surmounted the chain of hills overlooking the valley between Newcastle and Carlisle and was well supplied with military defenses in the shape of forts and battlemented towers. We closely followed the line of the wall from Chollerford to Greenhead, a distance of about fifteen miles. In places it is still wonderfully perfect, being built of hewn stone, well fitted and carefully laid, as it must have been to stand the storms of eighteen hundred years; but most of the distance the course of the wall is now marked only by an earthen ridge.

We had seen many relics of the Roman rule in England at Bath, at York, and also the remarkable remains of Uriconium near Shrewsbury, but nothing so impressed us with the completeness of the Roman occupation as this great wall of Hadrian. And it also testifies mutely to the great difficulty the Roman legions must have experienced in controlling the light-armed bandits from across the border, in a day when the means of communication were so few and so slow. This situation continued until several hundred years later, the country along the Tyne, the narrow neck of land connecting England and Scotland, being the scene of constant turmoil and bloody strife. The wild tribes of the northern hills would sweep down into the valley, leaving a strip of burned and plundered country, and before soldiers could be gotten into the field the marauders would retreat to their native fastnesses. One might not telephone to Carlisle that the Campbells or McGregors were raiding the country, and troops could not be hurried by railroad to the scene of trouble. Before the horseback messenger could reach the authorities, the marauders would have disappeared. This condition of things the Romans sought to overcome by building the great wall and one can hardly doubt that they chose the best means at their command; but the history of those times is hazy at best and we can learn little of what was really accomplished by this stupendous undertaking.