Nor ever wind blows loudly.”
Avilion is Glastonbury, it is said; but all about this ruder country there is store of Arthurian legend, mostly of that coarser sort to which belongs the story of the “bag pudding” which “the Queen next morning fried.” The King and Queen Guinevere, the King’s hounds, and the lords and ladies of his court, lie all together in an enchanted sleep in a great hall beneath the Castle of Sewingshields, near to the Roman wall; or so the legends say.
And now we are once more approaching Warden Mill. To the North and South Tyne we must henceforth bid adieu. From this point they will flow together in the same bed. One has come down from the Scottish borders, a holiday stream, for forty-three miles; the other, not without doing its share of work by the way, has hurried over thirty-nine miles from the Cumberland fells. Thirty-six miles more, over half of which extent the Tyne is a great labouring, work-a-day river, and we shall meet the breezes and the billows of the northern sea.
HEXHAM ABBEY.
THE TYNE.
CHAPTER III.
FROM HEXHAM TO NEWCASTLE.
Hexham and the Abbey Church—Dilston Hall—The Derwentwater Rising—Corbridge—Bywell Woods—Prudhoe and Ovingham—Stephenson’s Birthplace—Ryton and Newburn—The Approach to Newcastle.