Dewy and fresh, till showers again shall fall”
Deepdale Burn winds away across Yorkshire, over Bowes Moor, and to the borders of Westmorland, through one of the most lovely valleys in the whole of the north country.
“Barnard Castle standeth stately upon Tees,” says Leland. Stately it is to this day, though it is no more than a group of ruined towers and crumbling walls, and though where the Tees must have flowed deep and wide from below the castle rock there is now at ordinary seasons only a thin stream, threading its way through what might very well be mistaken for a stone-yard. Before the castle is reached we have, in fact, come to the first salmon weir, which, besides its other purpose, is employed to divert the river to the service of industry.
From Barnard Castle these weirs become very frequent, and are, in all cases but this, an addition to the attractions of the stream. It was the weir just below Barnard Castle that supplied Creswick with a subject for one of his most famous and successful pictures. The artist visited the town very frequently, and stayed there for weeks on end; wherefore he is still well remembered by some of the older inhabitants, not always with that kindliness which one would have been glad to associate with his name.
Barnard Castle is one of the oddest and most interesting towns in the North. There is a wholly individual character in its buildings, as if its architects had devised a style of their own. Few of the houses are older than the period of Elizabeth, but they are almost all of them of respectable age. The building material is stone in all cases, and the houses are unusually high and substantial, often of four and sometimes of five stories. On either bank below the castle they are built down into the bed of the river, and as, in Scott’s words, the Tees here “flows in a deep trench of solid rock,” the houses by the riverside descend as much below the level of the street as they rise above it. Yet despite the stoutness and the elaboration of these buildings, the riverside streets present that appearance of misery and squalor which seems inevitable in every manufacturing town, however limited may be the field of its industry. Dwellings which were clearly built for persons of wealth and position are let as tenements, and, there is, consequently, an odd contrast between their stateliness and the dress and appearance of those who lounge about their doors. However, the wide central street of Barnard Castle, sloping down from the Market Place to the river, still preserves an air of old-time respectability, and has the sleepy aspect of a country town, as if it had dozed away a century or two without activity or change. There is in this street a remarkable old Elizabethan house, in which Oliver Cromwell is said to have lodged himself for a while.
BARNARD CASTLE: THE TOWN.
The Castle, which enclosed a circuit of six acres or more, was built by Bernard Baliol, a son of that Guy Baliol whom I have had occasion to mention in connection with Bywell-on-Tyne. A descendant of Bernard climbed to the Scottish Throne, doing homage for the Crown at Newcastle to the first Edward. Edward Baliol did like homage to Edward III. for the crown and kingdom of Scotland. It was a short and unfortunate dynasty which the Baliols founded, brought to an end by the battle of Bannockburn. John Baliol presumed too much on his independence as a king, wherefore his patron, Edward I., seized upon his castle and his English estates, and the stately building on the banks of the Tees was given to the Beauchamps of Warwick. Thence it passed by marriage into the hands of the Nevilles, and was part of the dower of Anne Neville, the daughter of the King-maker, when she married the scheming politician who was to become Richard III. Gloucester not only dwelt here for some time, but left decided marks of his tenancy, the latest portions of the building being held by antiquarians to have been erected under his superintendence. Since 1592 Barnard Castle has been a ruin, the survey of that year exhibiting it as tenantless, mouldering, and weather-worn, “the doors without locks, the windows without glass.”
Below Barnard Castle there is an open space of greensward extending over a few acres, and then the river, after falling over Creswick’s salmon pass, plunges once more into the woods. Between this point and the village of Wycliffe lies the most lovely scenery of the Tees. At about a mile from Barnard Castle, on the Yorkshire side, Thor’s Gill flows into the river through a deep ravine, and out of the neighbouring trees rise the impressive ruins of Egliston Abbey. Tired indeed of the world must have been those who came to this wild and lonely place for service and prayer. With Thor’s Gill beside them, and the Tees far down below, in the front of their dwelling, they would look in all other directions over miles of barren moor, now subdued and cultivated by the plough. In time of flood the noise of waters must have drowned the intoning of their psalms, for at this section of its course the river is confined between rocky precipices, and ploughs its way over an amazing bed of that marble for which Barnard Castle formerly had a sort of fame.
There is a fine stone bridge below the Abbey, of one enormous span, with the river flowing a hundred feet beneath,