The narrow streak of gleaming water which made a silvery line across Deadwater Bog has now taken toll of wide lands—
“The struggling rill insensibly has grown
Into a brook of loud and stately march,
Crossed ever and anon by plank and arch.”
Far more than this it has done, indeed, for no longer would any plank be capable of spanning its waters. The North Tyne, which, with all its winding, keeps a much straighter course than the Rede, is now beyond all doubt a river, and such a river as, being liable to sudden and mighty floods, called “freshes” or “spates” in these parts, is of a width altogether out of proportion to the ordinary depth of its waters. Very pleasant and cool and shady are the banks of the North Tyne on hot summer days, and of such varying beauty, withal, that the angler whose thoughts are not too intently fixed on his creel, and on those stories of extraordinary luck with which he purposes hereafter to entertain his friends, may lose all sense of his occupation in that “peace and patience and calm content” which, says Izaak Walton, seized upon Sir Henry Wotton, “as he sat quietly on a summer’s evening, on a bank, a-fishing.” He is a fortunate angler who can take “a contemplative man’s recreation” on such a river as the North Tyne, where he may camp out for a month together, well assured of sport; but where he need not feel lonely unless he wills, for a moderate walk will generally suffice to bring him to a village and an inn.
Among the oldest of these villages is Wark, some five miles below Reedsmouth. In course of centuries of change it has fallen from its high estate, for it was once the capital of North Tynedale, and a session of the Scottish Courts was held on its Moot Hill when Alexander III. was King of Scotland, great part of Northumberland being also under his rule. Wark is a very unpretending village now, with a modern church, and a school founded by a philanthropic pedlar, and nothing about it half so interesting as its history. A mile away stands Chipchase Castle, which looks bright and new as it is seen from the railway, and yet is one of the most ancient and famous strongholds on the Borders. Not all of it is equally ancient, however, for in the time of James I. the present noble manor-house was added to the “keep” of earlier days by a descendant of that Sir George Heron who was slain in “The Raid of the Reidswire,” and who is called in the ballad which celebrates that event, “Sir George Vearonne, of Schipsyde House.” Ballad-writers were clearly not particular in the matter of proper names, for Sir George’s patronymic was known well enough to the Scots, seeing that after his death they made presents of falcons to their prisoners, grimly observing that the said prisoners were nobly treated, since they got “live hawks for dead herons.”
There was a village of Chipchase in Saxon times, and there are remains of a fort much older than the keep which has been incorporated with the existing mansion. Peter de Insula, a retainer of the Umfravilles of Prudhoe, which is further down the Tyne, lived here in the thirteenth century. The Herons, who followed him, were of the same family as the stout baron who is celebrated by Sir Walter Scott:—
“That noble lord
Sir Hugh the Heron bold,
Baron of Twisell and of Ford,