And solemnly unto his service sealed.
And then Paulinus lifted up his hands,
And blessed them and the people.”
No less than three thousand Northumbrians are said to have received the sacrament of baptism at this place, a statement which will seem the less incredible if we consider that Northumbria was then the most powerful and populous of the Saxon kingdoms. The famous well lies by the junction of two Roman ways, in a little grove of fir-trees, where the water still bubbles up actively through the sand and gravel. There is above it a stone cross with this inscription: “In this place Paulinus the Bishop baptised 3,000 Northumbrians, Easter, DCXXVII.”
Under the brow of Simonside, which is a huge shoulder of mountain thrusting itself up suddenly from the ascending land, there are a few cottages, and one great house, and a mill where are manufactured the Cheviot tweeds. This is the village of Tosson. Hence one looks away across the Coquet to the long range of the Cheviot hills, which seem surprisingly near, and yet are separated from Coquetside by many a mile of rich and pleasant pasture land. The ancient village of Rothbury is close at hand, with its one long street dipping down from the moorside to the Coquet banks, with its picturesque “Thrum Mill,” its ancient church tower, and its great expanse of furze-bestrewn moors, amid the nearest of which Cragside, the residence of Lord Armstrong, is set. “An Act of Parliament is out of breath before it reaches Rothbury,” say the people of the place. It is a saying which has survived from the pre-railroad days, when this portion of the wild Border land seemed as much cut off from the rest of England as if it had been islanded by the sea. Nor, indeed, is the sea so far away. On clear days one may behold it from the top of Simonside, a thin grey streak, scarcely distinguishable from the greyness of the sky.
A turbulent little town was Rothbury in its earlier days. It was here that Bernard Gilpin took down from the church door a glove which had been hung up as a challenge to all and sundry, and then preached a powerful sermon on the wickedness of private war. In the same church many years ago an old man who was listening to a condemnation of robbery rose up and said, “Then the de’il I give my sall to, bot we are all thieves.” Happily that broad statement no longer applies. The people of Rothbury and the region beyond are honest, stalwart, hard-working, prosperous folk, given to no pursuit more lawless than the occasional poaching of bull trout.
And of bull trout, which easily passes for salmon with the unwary, it is well that a word should be said. The salmo eriox has long established its title to the Coquet as its own exclusive stream. “On the Coquet it goes by the name of salmon,” says a writer on angling, “there being no true salmon in that river. Bull trout very rarely takes fly or bait of any kind, except when it is in the kelt state, when it is ravenous. It reaches fifteen and twenty pounds in weight.” A noble fish, it will be remarked; but why should it have laid exclusive claim to the Coquet, with that river lying, as it does, between such salmon-haunted streams as the Tyne and the Tweed? This is a puzzle which the scientific mind finds itself incapable of solving to this day. A generation since it was maintained that the bull trout devoured the young of salmon, and it was decided, therefore, that the salmo eriox should itself be destroyed. By the connivance of the local landowner every specimen of the bull trout was killed as it entered the river from the sea. Breeding ponds for salmon were then established at Rothbury, and 17,000 young fish were turned into the Coquet in a single year. Many of these were branded for future identification, but, so far as was known, not a single fish of the whole 17,000 ever came back to the stream in which it was bred. Some were caught in the Tyne, and some in the Tweed, and some in more distant rivers, but never did the bite of a true salmon reward the patient angler by Coquetside. Worse than all, too, the common trout deteriorated, for they had fed on the spawn of the salmo eriox. These things becoming apparent, as much anxiety was shown to get the bull trout back to the river as there had been eagerness for its destruction. The bull trout is now, in fact, strictly preserved under the salmon laws. There is a Coquet Fish Conservancy Board; and the catching of bull trout in Coquet, alike by nets and by more artificial expedients, is now a considerable industry, much of the so-called salmon exported to France and Spain being no more than the salmo eriox of the English Border. There are those who will not even yet believe that the Coquet cannot be made a salmon river. Now and then some angler confidently announces that he has caught a true salmon in this delightful and prolific stream. Such tales are listened to with interest, but are not believed. Even experienced fishermen are capable of confounding the bull trout with its nobler brother of the streams.
ON THE COQUET, BRINKBURN.
At the foot of the long street of Rothbury, and just on the lower outskirt of the village, is the Thrum Mill, the name of which is explained by the fact that the river here strains through a narrow chasm, or thrum, in a piled-up bed of freestone rock. The mill is an object of the conventionally picturesque description, with a moss-grown waterwheel, and with a tumbling torrent for foreground. A bridge here crosses the Coquet, and to the left, half-way up the steep side of a heathery hill, rises the mixed Gothic and Elizabethan mansion of Lord Armstrong. The site has clearly been chosen for the wildness of its surroundings, for whatever changes may be wrought by cultivation, and however the growth of plantations may soften the harsh brown and softer purple of the heather, untamed Nature will still assert itself here, like Hereward’s wife at Ely, as “captive but unconquered.” At Cragside there is one of the noblest of English picture galleries, the contents of which have been brought together by an exceedingly catholic taste, and by a liberality of expenditure only possible to “wealthy men who care not how they give.” Here are Linnell’s “Thunderstorm in Autumn,” Millais’ “Chill October,” David Cox’s “Ulverstone Sands,” Leslie’s “Cowslip Gatherers,” Wilkie’s “Rabbit on the Wall,” Rossetti’s “Margaret and her Jewels,” and some of the finest works of Turner, Landseer, Phillip, Müller, and, coming down to living artists, Sir Frederick Leighton.