KEILDER MOORS (WITH PEEL FELL TO THE RIGHT).
THE TYNE.
CHAPTER I.
THE NORTH TYNE.
Peel Fell—Deadwater Bog—Keilder Castle and the Keilder Moors—The Border Peel—Border Feuds and Friendships—The Charltons—Bellingham—The Reed—Tyne Salmon—The Village of Wark—Chipchase Castle—Haughton Castle and the Swinburnes—Chollerford and the Roman Wall—The Meeting of the Waters.
The clouds which are dragging themselves along the summit of Peel Fell were but lately dappling a bleak English landscape with their shadows, and are now being carried by the indifferent winds beyond that border-line over which, at peril of their lives, mail-clad men in earlier and ruder times were wont “to go to Scotland to get a prey.” The last house in England, a lonely but pleasant homestead, with its wide sheep-walks and its patch of cultivated land, stands under the shelter of a ridge where the brown waste rises into high moorlands; and beyond it, the fell looms very darkly, save where a beam of sunlight traverses its purple slope, with such bright decisiveness as if it were Ithuriel’s spear. Up above Alston, in Cumberland, where the South Tyne comes wandering from the mountain slopes, you may find cottages and farmsteads which were built almost as far back as it is safe to carry a noble pedigree; but here, where the North Tyne oozes out of the fells, we are in a country which was constantly raided from both sides of the Border; and so, for many a mile round about, there is nothing ancient but the castle and the peel tower, the Roman road over the moss, and the Roman wall chaining together the windy ridges of the moors. How could there be, indeed, when the Borderer of former times was accustomed to see his house “all in a low,” and was happy and fortunate if he could but drive his cattle in safety to the nearest peel? If a farmhouse dates back a hundred years or so it seems to belong to a venerable past, and if there is in these parts any more noble residence which does not proclaim to the wanderer that it was built for the purposes of defence, it will belong to a day later than that on which James I. crossed the Border to assume the English crown.
Peel Fell is the westernmost spur of the Cheviot range. Beheld from afar it seems to be a hill of gentle and inviting slope; but is, in fact, more craggy and broken than any of its kindred hills, which, of all the uplands of our country, are, except for the presence of the shepherds and their sheep, the most solitary. On the summit one stands 1,975 feet above the level of the sea. In these days a railway crosses the Border near to Peel Fell. It has kept to the winding course of the river from Newcastle upwards, and now it plunges into that Debateable Land which was for so long a period the excuse of Border feud and foray, and which was not definitely assigned either to the Scots or the English until 1552. Along the very path which this railway keeps there went, on many a memorable day,
“Marching o’er the knowes,