Felton is one of those villages at which it is pleasant to spend a night. Its bridge is almost as beautifully situated as that of Bettws-y-Coed. One stands upon it in the evening, and leans one’s arms on the parapet, and looks towards the hills which environ it, and the comfortable village inn, and the quiet cottages, and feels how glorious a land is this England in which we live. There is nothing else to do or to enjoy, unless the river is low, as Frank Buckland saw it, and the fish are crowding up the stream; and then the sight is one that is for the existing moment very exciting and is afterwards difficult to forget.
Felton is an ancient place. The old religion lingers there. The Protestant Reformation scarcely penetrated to north Northumberland, and many of the chief families of the district are still attached to the more ancient forms of faith. Attached to Felton Park is the Roman Catholic chapel of St. Mary. There are remains of a more antique edifice of the same faith about two miles away, the Church of St. Wilfred of Gysnes, given to the canons of Alnwick in the twelfth century. Felton is on the old Northern Coach Road, and is not now far away from the rail. Whosoever desires to make acquaintance with the whole of the Coquet should alight at the neighbouring station of Acklington. He may then go downward to Warkworth, to Amble, and the sea; or he may go upward to Brinkburn, to Rothbury, and the moors.
MORWICK MILL, ACKLINGTON.
WARKWORTH CASTLE. / THE VILLAGE OF WARKWORTH.
From Felton until Warkworth is in sight there is little over which one need linger. The country is level more or less, and the river seems to flow in a deep trench, with a fringe of trees on either side of it. At one place it comes through a deep break in the solid rock, which seems as if it must originally have been quarried. One speculates in vain as to the mighty force of the water by which such passages must have been hewn. These clefts for rivers are not uncommon, but they are incomprehensible. The water, one is compelled to feel, was but a minor element in their formation. A mile and a half from Warkworth there is another weir, a great straight wall of cement, with a passage for fish on either side. Yet though the fish may go up to left or right, as they may choose, there is what persons addicted to sport might call “an even chance” in connection with their coming down. If they take the ladder to the right they will get off to sea, but if they come down to the left they will fall into a trap, and will, in all probability, be eaten on French dinner tables as salmon. For, at Warkworth, or within a short distance of it, is the great fishery of Mr. Pape, who has not only the weir to assist his operations, but has the right—acquired by paying a rent to the Duke of Northumberland—to stop up one of the fish passes at the extremities of the weir, which privilege he exercises so ingeniously that every fish that chooses the left side of the river for its downward passage gets into his trap, from which it may be lifted out at will.
Can Edmund Spenser ever have been at Warkworth? If not, how does he come by this description?—
“A little lowly hermitage it was,
Down in a dale, hard by a forest’s side;