AT FELTON.
From Rothbury the Coquet takes a long sweep through the fields and then plunges into the woods of Brinkburn. There are here, one reads, great and dangerous holes in the river bed; but so there are at many places on the Coquet, and not at Brinkburn more remarkably or permanently than elsewhere. Such holes are made by the swirling water of the floods, and may change their situation with every spate. Their more particular association with Brinkburn may arise from the fact that the bells of the priory are believed to have been cast into a hole in the river, from which whosoever recovers them, says the tradition, will come into possession of treasures galore. Brinkburn was one of the earliest religious settlements on the disturbed and lawless English side of the Border. Exceedingly courageous must have been those monks who decided to accept the rough chances of life at Brinkburn Priory. They had the protection of the deep woods, indeed. Even now one may pass by Brinkburn without suspecting what rich memorials of a past age and a venerable faith are hid within its leafy coverts. It is not merely embosomed, but buried, in trees. So, too, it must have been when the monks were here, for the story goes that a party of marauding Scots had already passed the priory, and was well on its way toward places under less saintly protection, when the monks too soon set the bells a-ringing for joy at its departure, with the evil result of revealing their hiding-place, so that the Scots, returning, fell upon the black canons of Brinkburn while they were assembled to offer up prayers of gratitude for their deliverance from danger.
This priory of Brinkburn was founded in the reign of Henry I. by a certain Sir William de Bertram, Baron of Mitford, by Morpeth, who endowed it liberally from his extensive lands. Its monks were of the order of St. Augustine. Of their history little is known, but it must have been troublous enough, and there is reason to think that they were more than once under the necessity of flight. Having resolved to build a church, the Lord of Mitford determined that it should be such a one as would do honour to his name. The present extensive remains still speak eloquently of the original beauty of the edifice. Of the church, partially restored in 1858 by the present owners of the estate, the Cadogan family, it has been remarked that, “the richest Norman work is here inextricably blended with the purest Early English, and the fabric must be regarded as one of the most fascinating specimens of the transition from one to the other that there is in the country.” Out of the ruins of the monastery, and above the cellars in which the monks may have hidden themselves in times of trouble, the present manor house of Brinkburn has been built. It stands not far from the banks of the Coquet, which are here somewhat narrow and steep, with rocky projections, and with no route for the angler except in the bed of the stream, or amid an almost impenetrable confusion of shrubs and brambles and trees. At one point the piers of a Roman bridge may be discerned when the water is low; there is a quaint old watermill by the side of the stream; at a spot but a short distance away, it is averred by a pleasant tradition, the Northumbrian fairies were buried, and there they sleep, like King Arthur under the castle of Sewingshields, until faith shall return to the earth.
The most widely known of all the villages below Rothbury is Weldon Bridge, at which one arrives when the Coquet has left Brinkburn Woods. It is the main resort of those anglers who love quiet fishing, and are not adventurous enough to make their way into the hills. Much has it been besung by the poets of the craft. “At Weldon Bridge,” says one—
“... there’s wale o’ wine,
If ye hae coin in pocket;
If ye can throw a heckle fine,
There’s wale o’ trout in Coquet.”
It is but a little place, this Weldon Bridge, with a large inn, before whose doors the river flows in gentle music. For the last two or three miles the stream has been characterised by the most capricious bendings, and henceforth, but with rather larger sweeps, it preserves the same wilful habit until it reaches the sea. There are pleasant walks along its banks down to Felton, sometimes diverging into low-lying woods, sometimes climbing the hillsides among farms, and occasionally leading to some ancient ford. At Felton itself the hills close in more narrowly, and the pleasant little village stands on a declivity amongst trees, whilst the river streams through a rocky pass. There is a dam at Felton which furnished material for rather a feeble joke to the late Frank Buckland. He found the fish falling back exhausted from vain attempts to leap the weir, and he posted up a “notice to salmon and bull trout,” telling them to go down the river and take the first turn to the right, when they would find good travelling water up stream, and assuring them of the good will of the Duke of Northumberland, who meant to make a ladder for them by-and-bye. The fact that an inspector of fisheries, like Buckland, should have believed that salmon went up the Coquet with the bull trout is a curious illustration of the indeterminate ideas which have until lately prevailed on the subject of the varieties of fish by which this river is frequented.