MONKWEARMOUTH CHURCH.
Chester-le-Street and Lumley and Lambton Castles are the next places of note by the Wear. Something already we know about Chester, and how narrowly it escaped being the civil and ecclesiastical capital of the County Palatine, and the custodian of the bones of St. Cuthbert. Its business is now mainly with coal and ironstone; but it grumbles a little still over the golden chance it missed, and the baser minerals it has to put up with:—
“Durham lads hae gowd and silver,
Chester lads hae nowt but brass.”
It is supposed to have been a Roman station; but at all events its importance was considerable in Saxon times. The Church of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert is six hundred years old; and the most remarkable of its features is perhaps the “Aisle of Tombs,” a row of fourteen recumbent effigies supposed to represent the ancestors of the Lumley family, who have lived or had possessions hard by since before the Norman Conquest, and whose pedigree is so long that James I., compelled to listen to its recital, conjectured that “Adam’s name was Lumley.” Camden has it, however, that a Lord Lumley of Queen Elizabeth’s time, who brought this collection of monuments together, “either picked them out of demolished monasteries or made them anew.” The family are now represented by the Earl of Scarbrough whose seat, Lumley Castle, overlooks the Wear and the deep wooded valley through which, coming from Houghton-le-Spring and Hetton-le-Hole, runs the Lumley Beck. It is a goodly and in parts an ancient pile, but since the collieries have crowded around it, Lumley sees little of its owners, and has to be content with the range of old family portraits in the Grand Hall, a companion set to the stone effigies in the church.
LOOKING UP THE RIVER, SUNDERLAND.
Lambton Castle is not only surrounded but undermined by pit workings to such an extent that the ground and the fine semi-Norman, semi-Tudor building upon it—the home for many centuries of the Lambtons, now Earls of Durham—threatened to collapse, and are partly supported by the solid brickwork with which the old mines were filled. Lambton belonged of old to the D’Arcys; but, according to the legend, it was after it came into the hands of the present family that the famous fight between the heir of the estate and the “Worm” took place. The county, as would appear from its traditions, once swarmed with loathly “worms” or dragons; and this one took up its station by coiling itself around the “Worm Hill,” and also frequented the “Worm Well.” The heir of Lambton encountered it in armour “set about with razor blades,” and the monster cut itself to pieces, the penalty of victory, however, being that no chief of Lambton was to die in his bed for nine generations. The most eminent name in the Lambton pedigree is that of John, first Earl of Durham, the champion of Reform, and the Greek temple that crowns the summit of Penshaw Hill, on the opposite or south side of the Wear, is erected to his memory.
At Biddick the great Victoria Railway Bridge crosses the Wear by a series of large spans at a height of 156 feet above the stream. The “Biddickers,” now good, bad, and indifferent, like other “keelmen” of their class, were a wild set last century, and among them the Jacobite Earl of Perth found refuge after Culloden. The banks of the stream, crowded with busy and grimy colliery rows and coal staithes, the lines of rail and tramway that run up and athwart the inclines, and the fleets of coal-barges ascending and descending, help to announce the close neighbourhood of Sunderland. Before we reach the seaport of the Wear, however, Hylton Ferry is passed. In spite of the increasing sounds and sights of shipping industry and manufacture, a little bit of superstition and romance continues to linger about dilapidated Hylton Castle, for a fabulous number of centuries the home of the fighting race of Hyltons, now extinct as county landlords: the countryside has not quite forgotten the family goblin or brownie—the “Cauld Lad”—the eccentric ghost of a stable-boy who was killed in a fit of anger by a former lord of Hylton; though it remembers and points out with more pride Ford Hall, where the Havelocks, a martial race of later date and purer fame, were born and bred.
It is not easy in these days to associate the three townships comprehended within the municipal and parliamentary bounds of Sunderland with cloistral seclusion or warlike events, or with romance or mystery in any form—more especially when the place is approached by road, rail, or river from the colliery districts that hem it in on the land side. Yet busy, smoky, and in some spots ugly and squalid as it is, Sunderland hardly deserves the censure that has been heaped upon it as a town where “earth and water are alike black and filthy,” through whose murky atmosphere the blue sky seldom shows itself, and whose architectural features are utterly contemptible. Sunderland has a number of fine buildings and handsome thoroughfares, and a large part of the town is lifted clear of the dingy streets by the wharves and river-bank. The animation on water and shore, the passing stream of coasting and river craft, and the other signs of shipping, shipbuilding, and manufacturing trade, spanned by the huge arch of the Cast Iron Bridge; the larger vessels—evidences of an ocean-going commerce—in and around the docks on either hand; even the smoke and shadows, and the dirt itself in the streets and lanes, might have been reckoned fine pictorial elements of interest in a foreign seaport.