At Bellingham, where several fairs are still annually held, and which has been, so long as local history goes back, the central market town of this remote district, we find amid the billowy moorlands a sweet pastoral country, set about with well-timbered lands. The village took its name from the De Bellinghams (now extinct), a family which tried to drive out the Charltons of Hesleyside, and came to no good thereby. Under Henry VIII. Sir Alan de Bellingham was the Warden of the Marches. The village is somewhat commonplace, but has a very interesting church and beautiful surroundings. A mile away Hareshaw Lynn comes tumbling down, between seamed cliffs and verdurous precipices.
“’Tween wooded cliffs, fern-fringed it falls,
All broken into spray and foam.”
For two miles there is a succession of beautiful cascades, which sing their wilful tune under a dappled archway of clinging shrubs and bending trees. Bellingham Castle has disappeared, like the family by which it was erected, but the old church, with its strong stone roof, bears witness of how in the days of the Border feuds even the House of God had need to be built so that it might be defended against wary and ruthless foes. The structure is in the early Norman style. The stone roof was probably added after the church had been twice fired by the Scots. The nave seems to have been used for much the same purpose as the peel towers, the narrow windows having obviously been intended as much for defensive purposes as for the admission of light. At Bellingham, as indeed throughout all this wild Border country, one may gather a plentiful store of song and legend—tales of how a man whom Bowrie Charlton had slain was buried at the Charlton pew door, so that his murderer dared not to go to church again whilst he lived; of how St. Cuthbert appeared in the church to a young lady who sought a miracle, and how the said miracle was but half completed because of the fright of the young lady’s mother; of how other miracles were wrought at St. Cuthbert’s Well; and of many another strange event of superstitious times. “The past doth win a glory from its being far,” but Bellingham is a very humdrum village now, with no more exciting occurrences than its fairs.
BELLINGHAM CHURCH.
CHIPCHASE CASTLE.
Shortly after the North Tyne has dreamed leisurely along through Bellingham village, its quiet ways are suddenly disturbed by the inrush of a water which is almost as wide as its own, and greatly more turbulent. The Rede has come down from the wild and bare region which the Watling Street traversed on its way to Jedburgh and beyond. Its springs are in the slopes of the Cheviot range north of Carter Fell. Forcing its way over a rock-strewn bed, it flows under the dark shade of Ellis Crag, and by the battlefield of Otterburn, and, with many a capricious bend or lordly curve, past the ancient Roman station of Habitancum, where, until a splenetic farmer destroyed all but its lower portions, the heroic figure of “Rob of Risingham,” one of the most ancient of English sculptures, might be seen. The Rede is a stream which drains an enormous acreage of moor. A day’s rain will swell it into a broad and boisterous torrent, with wide skirts extending far over the haughs. Famous for salmon-breeding is the Rede, and it is only by constant watching that the men of Redesdale are prevented from taking, out of all due season, what they regard as their own. When there is no “fresh” in the river the fish may be seen lying crowded together in the shallow pools, so that it is possible to wade in and take them without intervention of net, or gaff, or rod. But it is an exasperating circumstance that, plentiful as the salmon are, the season for rod-fishing in Redesdale is short, in spite of the law which permits it to be pursued for most months of the year; for as the fish come up here for the spawning season only, there are not more than some two months during which they may become the angler’s legitimate prey. Doubtless such scenes as that which is depicted by Sir Walter Scott in “Guy Mannering” have been witnessed in Redesdale on many a former day. Salmon-spearing from “trows” was common down to at least the middle of the present century, the “trow” being a sort of double punt, pointed at the bows and joined together by a plank at the stern, and the spear, or “leister,” being a barbed iron fork attached to a long pole. The Tyne has a Salmon Conservancy Board in these more severe times, and if trow or leister were to be seen on the river they would be seized as spoil of war.