CORBRIDGE.
The ancient village of Corbridge—the quietest of country villages now, with extensive market-gardens occupying ground on which the Roman legions may have camped—lies but a short distance away, and it was on Corbridge Common that the army of the Stuart adherents came together when preparing to attack Newcastle. There was a British settlement near the little river Cor, as is made evident by certain camps and tumuli in the neighbourhood. The later Roman station of Corstopitum, believed to have been founded by Agricola, was a little west of the present village. It was on the line of the Watling Street, and had considerable extent and importance. Many of the fragments of it have been worked into existing buildings, for the stations of the Roman wall, and the wall itself, were during many generations so many quarries for those who succeeded the first conquerors of our island. For a few years before and after Wilfred’s time there may have been a period of quiet, during which a monastery, and, it is believed, even a king’s palace, was established; but thenceforward, for long afterwards, Corbridge is mentioned in history only when it is overtaken by some great trouble. When King John arrived here in 1201 he conceived the idea that the place must have been destroyed by an earthquake, so complete and so extensive was the ruin that had been wrought. Yet three times again the town was burnt by the Scots. Even this, however, did not prevent the return of the people, and the founding of a new town of Corbridge, which sent a member to our earliest Parliaments, and only abandoned the privilege when the Corbridge folk became too poor or too indifferent to defray his “proper cost.” The bridge which gives the village its name is the only bridge over the river which was not washed away or broken in the great flood of 1771.
BYWELL CASTLE.
From Corbridge to Bywell the winding course of the Tyne has as various a beauty as heart could desire. There are wide, open reaches, and still, deep, shadowy spaces between overhanging woods, and passages of lively water scourging a rocky bed. Bywell itself is an idyllic place. There are stories of how it was once a bustling town, much liable to attack from moss-troopers and all manner of Border thieves. Old records have it that so late as “the stately days of Great Elizabeth” it was “inhabited with handicraftsmen, whose trade is in all ironwork for the horsemen and borderers of that county, as in making bits, stirrups, buckles, and such others, wherein they are very expert and cunning, and are subject to the incursions of the thieves of Tynedale, and compelled, winter and summer, to bring all their cattle and sheep into the street in the night-season, and watch both ends of the street, and when the enemy approacheth to raise hue and cry, whereupon all the town prepareth for rescue of their goods, which is very populous, by reason of their trade, and stout and hardy by continual practice against the enemy.” A quaintly confused statement this, but sufficiently explicit as to the uncertain conditions under which the artificers of Bywell lived. The place now sleeps quietly under its woods, lulled by the waters of the Tyne as they fall over Bywell Weir, and seems to dream of its past. “The antique age of bow and spear” has left for memorial a ruinous square tower, all mantled over with ivy, and hidden, with the exception of its battlements, in the surrounding trees. This ruin is a portion of a projected castle of the Nevilles, Earls of Westmorland; but the building was never completed, or, indeed, carried far, for the last Earl of Westmorland of the Neville family took part in that “rising of the North” of which Wordsworth’s “White Doe of Rylstone” tells the sorrowful tale.
Any traveller by Tyneside whom night should overtake would be amazed to see fires gleaming out of the hillside about two miles below Bywell. They are unaccounted for by the presence of any town. The river, indeed, is about to plunge through clustering woods, and there is an aspect of solemn quiet all around. Here, nevertheless, in a small and unpretentious way, the industrial career of the river Tyne begins. The fires between the river and the hill are those of coke ovens, and they burn where, in his sturdy boyhood, Thomas Bewick, the great wood-engraver, used to play. Cherryburn House, his birthplace, is close by, and on the other side of the river—that is to say, on its north bank—stands the ancient village of Ovingham, where a tablet against the wall of the church tower announces his grave. The brother of Dora Greenwell was incumbent of the parish for a while, by which means it came about that the poetess spent much of her youth at Ovingham. On the south side of the river, directly facing Ovingham, on a hill which is like a huge mound, stand some fragments of Prudhoe Castle. A ruin it has been for three centuries at least, and it is a very picturesque and interesting ruin still.
NEWBURN.
After a shady passage between high-banked woods, the river emerges to the broad light of day once more in front of the village of Wylam, which is one of the oldest, one of the most dismal and miserable, and one of the most famous, of the colliery villages of Northumberland. Here is George Stephenson’s birthplace, a little two-storeyed cottage, standing solitary by the side of a railway. The Roman wall ran along the high ridge of ground beyond Wylam. Some interesting portions of it still remain at Denton Burn, which is over above Newburn, from two to three miles further down the Tyne. At Denton Hall lived Mrs. Montague, first of blue-stockings. Here Johnson was a visitor, and Reynolds and Garrick were occasional guests. There is a “Johnson’s chamber” and a “Johnson’s walk” to this day.
The village of Newburn lies about half-way up the heights, on the north side of the Tyne. Here was the last spot at which the river could be forded, for though Newburn is seventeen miles from the sea, as the river flows, it is reached twice a day by the tide. Across this ford the Scots troops under Lesley poured in 1640, to overcome the king’s troops on Ryton Willows. The spot is still marked on the maps as a battlefield, and the event is spoken of as “the battle of Newburn.”