WOLSINGHAM. / HARPERLEY.
Stanhope is a populous little township on the north side of the Wear, well sheltered by the hills on both banks. Its church and market records go back for five hundred years; and its rectory revenues, mainly drawn from tithes on lead-ore, are among the richest in England. There are rocks and grottoes and beautiful walks along the river margin, as well as around Stanhope Castle, which may stand near the spot where once rose the old forest seat of the bishops. Below Rogerley and Frosterley the valley begins to open; the bare heathy hills withdraw to a more respectful distance; and between them and the river there interpose fine stretches of rich woodland and cultivated fields. For the scarped faces of limestone and marble quarries and the crushing-mill of the lead-mine, one begins to see rising here and there the pit-head machinery of the colliery and the smoke of the iron furnace; from a moorland stream the Wear changes to a lowland river. Wolsingham, which now divides its attention between agriculture and mining, was once on a time the place of hermitage of St. Godric of Finchale, and the villagers held their lands for the service of carrying the Bishop’s hawks and going his errands while attending the Weardale Chase. South of Wolsingham is the long dark ridge of Bollihope Fell, and the spot, marked by a pillar, known as “the Lang Man’s Grave.” Here, says tradition, two huge figures were seen one clear summer evening engaged in mortal strife, until at length one of them fell; and on the place next day was found the dead body of a tall stranger, who was buried where he lay. Below Wolsingham the Wear flows by the grounds of Bradley Hall, an old lordship of the Eures of Witton and afterwards of the family of Bowes; and beyond Harperley the Bedburn Beck comes in, after draining the wild moorland tracts of Eggleston and Hamsterley Commons, and winding through some pretty wooded grounds and pastures. The scattered houses of Hamsterley are on the brow of a hill at the junction of the lead-measures with the great northern coalfield, and for generations its “hoppings,” or rural festivals and sports, have been famous in this part of Durham. Some of the most charming “bits” on the Wear are around Witton-le-Wear. The stream bends and twines under the shade of the high wooded banks upon which the village is placed, and the sides of its tributary brooks are not less richly and picturesquely clothed. The centre of all this beauty is Witton Castle, at the meeting of the Linburn with the Wear. It was long the seat of the valiant race of the Eures, who held it on military service from the Prince-Bishops. It is now a possession of the Chaytors, who have preserved part of the old castellated keep, and restored the rest of the building in something like the original style.
The course of the Wear has now brought us close to Bishop Auckland, and to Bishop Auckland Palace and Park, all that remains to the Bishops of Durham out of the score of manors and castles which they once held. After Durham Castle, however, Bishop Auckland Castle was always their favourite and most princely seat. It is wedged into a nook between the Wear and the Gaunless, and from the high ridge sloping down to the latter stream it commands magnificent prospects of the country around. The town may be said to have grown up under the shadow of the Bishop’s residence, but has in latter days discovered other and more dependable means of support, in manufactures and in the mineral wealth of the district. It is no longer, as in Leland’s day, “a town of no estimation,” either in trade or population. Formerly it had an ill name for insalubrity; but though the steep narrow streets running down to the Wear remain, it has done something to amend its reputation in this respect. Its chief architectural boasts, outside the Castle bounds, are perhaps the great parochial Church of St. Andrews, founded and erected into a collegiate charge by Bishop Bek nearly six centuries ago, and the fine double arch of Newton Bridge, erected by Bishop Skirlaw in 1388, spanning the Wear at one of the most romantic spots in the course of the river. But with the Park and Palace to be seen, the visitor does not linger long outside the Gothic doorway—itself a poor evidence of episcopal taste—that divides the Bishop’s demesne from the Market Place. From the Park and its far-reaching lawns and woodland, the great group of buildings which have been added to and altered by a long line of Bishops of Durham is separated by a battlemented stone screen and arches. Bishop Bek began in earnest the work of beautifying and strengthening the Castle, which had to serve the prelates as a fortified place as well as an episcopal residence. His successors have at intervals zealously, if not always wisely, followed in his footsteps as a builder and renovator. The Bishops dispensed princely hospitality at Auckland; and in Rushall’s time it was thought only “fair utterance” for the household to consume a fat Durham ox per week, and to drink eight tuns of wine in a couple of months; and it was this same Bishop who built “from the ground the whole of the chamber in which dinner is served.”
The place suffered badly, however, in the hands of Pilkington, the first Protestant Bishop, who “built nothing, but plucked down in all places;” and still more deplorable were its fortunes in the storm of the Civil War, when, after having entertained Charles I. as king, the Palace received him as a prisoner, and was afterwards committed to the tender mercies of Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, who pulled down part of the castle and chapel to erect a mansion for himself. Bishop Cosin, on the Restoration, repaired this “ravinous sacrilege” to the best of his ability; and the chapel, as we find it, is largely his work, and fitly covers his tomb. Hazelrigg’s hands also fell heavily on the fine Park, where he left “never a tree or pollard standing.” But this also has been repaired, though one will look in vain now in the leafy coverts by the banks of the Gaunless for the herds of wild cattle that once frequented them. Perhaps the Park is put to better use as the favourite and delightful resort of the townsfolk and visitors of Bishop Auckland.
WITTON-LE-WEAR.
Not far below Newton Bridge and Auckland Park is Binchester, marking the place where the Wear was crossed by the great Roman road of Watling Street, in its straight course across the county from Piercebridge on the Tees to Lanchester on the Browney, and Ebchester on the Derwent. Roman remains, in the form of sculptured stones, of votive altars, and of baths, have been discovered at Binchester, which may be the Binovium of Ptolemy; and here a cross-road from the south joined the old military way, coming past the sites of what are now Raby Castle, Staindrop, Streatham, Barnard Castle, and other scenes in Langleydale and Teesdale and on the banks of the Greta, since immortalised by history and legend. An older seat of the great family of the Nevilles than Raby Hall itself—Brancepeth Castle, beyond Willington—is near at hand. It got into their possession when the grandson of the Neville who “came over with the Conqueror” married the heiress of the Saxon family of Bulmer. From the Bulmers the Nevilles are supposed to have derived their badge of the “Dun Bull;” and one of their race may have been the hero of the legend that accounts for the local nomenclature by telling how “Sir Hodge of Ferryhill” watched the track of the savage boar—the “Brawn’s path”—from Brandon Hill, and dug a pitfall for him at the spot still marked by a stone at Cleve’s Cross, near Merrington. Brancepeth was the rendezvous of the “grave gentry of estate and name” in the North, who came to aid the Northern Earls, Westmorland, and Northumberland, in the unhappy rising in Queen Elizabeth’s time that cost so many of them their heads as well as their lands. It now belongs to Viscount Boyne. In spite of its low situation and the too intrusive neighbourhood of the great Brancepeth Collieries, it is a noble and massive feudal pile, and in its general effect has been pronounced “superior to any other battlemented edifice in the North of England.” In the Baron’s Hall are memorials of the battle of Neville’s Cross; but for the most interesting memorials of the noble family that ruled the Borders from Brancepeth or from Raby, and by turns formed alliances with, and plotted against, the king, one must go to the old church of St. Brandon, and look at the effigies in carved oak or stone of the Nevilles.
