And overhung with wood.”
Never did hermit choose a lovelier spot for his orisons; but this hermit of Warkworth was a man of industry and taste. He used the hammer and the chisel well. He made for himself a chapel, a confessional, and a dormitory, and none of these did he leave without ornament. There is a groined roof, and there is a rood above the doorway, and there is the recumbent figure of a lady with upraised hands. Whosoever chooses to weave legends about the hermitage of Warkworth is at liberty to do so, for nothing is certainly known of the hermit. The received tradition is to be found in Percy’s “Reliques,” where a member of the family of Bertram by mistake slays his sweetheart and his brother, and expiates his double crime by isolating himself from his kind. The Coquet is very beautiful here, with a mile walk through woods and meadow lands. After the Hermitage a sweet bend of the river brings Warkworth Castle in sight. It stands high up on the summit of grassy slopes, which have a few shrubs scattered about them. Here it was that, according to Shakespeare’s narrative of events, Henry Hotspur read the letter of “a pagan rascal—an infidel,” who would not join him in his designs against the Crown. The next scene is in the Boar’s Head Tavern, Eastcheap, with Poins and Prince Hal. Shakespeare was so far adherent to fact that Hotspur actually lived at Warkworth Castle. Edward III. had conferred it on the second Lord Percy, and until the middle of the fifteenth century the Percies preferred Warkworth to Alnwick. The Castle is one of the most beautiful and perfect ruins in England. It is not only finely situated, but is unique in design, suggesting less of strength than of taste in constructing a palace which must also be a stronghold. A living novelist, the best of our story tellers, has made Warkworth the starting-point of one of his Christmas tales, and has most admirably conveyed to the reader the feeling of the place. Whom should I mean but Mr. Walter Besant? The church where his hero did penance, and where his heroine bravely stood beside her lover, is at the foot of the village street, which slopes upward to the height on which the Castle stands. Just beyond the church is the great stone archway through which the town must be entered, standing at the inner side of the bridge over the Coquet stream. Altogether, the village does not amount to much. It has a few good inns, and a few old-fashioned cottages. But it is as sweet a place as is to be found in all the countryside, and is therefore much in favour with persons in search of a brief, quiet holiday.
In Warkworth, small as it is, one feels everywhere the influence of the past. History seems to keep guard over it as an important part of its story. In 737 it was conferred by King Ceowulph on the monastery of Lindisfarne. The town was burnt in 1174 by the army of William the Lion, who was something of a poltroon. King John visited the place in the thirteenth century, and did much mischief farther up the river. General Forster and his Jacobites were here in 1715. That very Mr. Patten who is a principal figure in Mr. Besant’s “Dorothy Forster” writes:—“It may be observed that this was the first place where the Pretender was so avowedly pray’d for and proclaimed as King of these realmes.”
From the turrets of Warkworth Castle one looks over a wide expanse of land and sea. The coast line is visible for great distances, beyond Alnmouth and Dunstanborough on the one hand, and almost to Tynemouth on the other. The great towers of Alnwick are in sight, and mile on mile of the most fertile land in Northumberland, and mile on mile of rabbit-haunted sandhills by the sea. Just beyond the Castle the land slopes downward, past a cottage or two, and a little wood, and a great clump of whin-bushes, to the Coquetside, and then the river flows through flat marsh-land until the small seaport town of Amble is reached. I have never seen those Essex salt marshes in which Mr. Baring-Gould lays the scene of his powerful “Mehalah,” but whenever I read the book I am reminded of the country from Warkworth to the sea. Amble has grown up on a steep above the river; but there are flat spaces all round about it, and the river seems to stagnate where barges and schooners lie grounded in the mud, and beyond the harbour there are great level fields between “the bents” and the sea. Not a cheery place, by any means. Amble is one of the smaller outlets of the Northumberland coal trade. In very early days the Romans had some sort of encampment here, and in the Middle Ages Amble had its Benedictine monastery. It is now an exceedingly prosaic little town, with a harbour quite out of proportion to its size, and with an evident intention of “getting on.”
HUNTING ON COQUETSIDE.
(From the Picture by Colonel Lutyens, by Permission of Major Browne, Doxford Hall, Northumberland.)
“The bents” are the grass-covered sandhills which time and the winds have piled up between the ancient landmarks and the present limits of the tide. They rise to very considerable heights, and stretch, in great undulations, along many a mile of shore. The Coquet flows down between them to a wide waste of sand when the sea is out, and one may trace its waters, should they be discoloured by flood, on either side of the Coquet Island, which the river must have worn from the mainland very long ago. The island is a low, level strip, containing some sixteen acres of ground. It has a peculiar history of its own. There was a monastery upon it in the seventh century, and here the Abbess of Whitby is said to have met St. Cuthbert, who, for this occasion, had overcome his generally invincible dislike to women. St. Cuthbert’s own island is in sight from the Coquet, and if the Farnes were not in the way one’s range of vision might extend to Lindisfarne. In later times than those in which Cuthbert taught religion to a rude people the hermit of Warkworth had a rival hermit in the recluse of Coquet Isle; a far more dismal place to reside in, for all around it rage the terrible winter storms of the North Sea. Persons interested in the art of “smashing” may be interested to hear that Coquet Island was resorted to by the makers of false coins—“hard hedds” they were called in those days—so early as 1567. The place was taken by the Scots during the Civil Wars, and there its history ends, except so far as it is continued by shipwreck and disaster at sea. On Coquet Island a lighthouse now stands, tall and white, so that its walls may be seen far away over the sea in the daytime, and its lamps for many a rood at night. Gulls and terns and puffins and guillemots play around it and make their nests amid its sandy turf; and there comes “the dunter,” as the fishermen call it, the porpoise as it is called in more ordinary speech, to devour the bull trout as it is making towards the comparative safety of the Coquet waters. All this may be changed a few years hence, for Amble is developing its trade, and hereafter masts of assembled shipping, and a black prospect of “coal-shoots,” may be the characteristic features of Coquet mouth.
Aaron Watson.