By the roadside runs a stream of alum liquor along the wooden trough, and on rounding the bluff, we discover more alum-works on a broad undercliff, with troughs, diggings, and refuse heaps, extending farther than you can see. You may continue along the broken ground below, or mount to the summit by a rude stair chopped in the face of the cliff. The higher the better, I thought, and scrambled up. It is a strange scene that you look down upon: a few lonely cottages, patches of garden, and a chaos of heaps, some grass-grown, with numerous paths winding among them. And now the view opens towards the west, great slopes of fields heaving up as waves one beyond the other, till they blend with the pale blue hill-range in the distance; and glimpses of Hartlepool and Tynemouth can be seen in the north.
The Earl of Zetland is the great proprietor hereabouts: the alum-works are his, and to him belongs the estate at Lofthouse—a village about two miles inland—once owned by the famous Zachary Moore, whose lavish hospitality, and eminent qualities of mind and heart, made him the theme for tongue and pen when Pitt was minister:
“What sober heads hast thou made ache!
How many hast thou kept from nodding!
How many wise ones for thy sake
Have flown to thee and left off plodding!”
and who, having spent a great fortune, discovered the reverse side of his friends’ characters, accepted an ensign’s commission, and died at Gibraltar in the prime of his manhood.
And it was near Lofthouse that Sir John Conyers won his name of Snake-killer. A sword and coffin, dug up on the site of an old Benedictine priory, were supposed to have once belonged to the brave knight who “slew that monstrous and poysonous vermine or wyverne, an aske or werme which overthrew and devoured many people in fight; for that the scent of that poison was so strong that no person might abyde it.” A gray stone, standing in a field, still marks the haunt of the worm and place of battle.
Tradition tells, moreover, of a valiant youth, who killed a serpent and rescued an earl’s daughter from the reptile’s cave, and married her; in token whereof Scaw Wood still bears his name.
As I went on, past Street Houses, diverging hither and thither, a woman cried, from a small farm-house, “Eh! packman, d’ye carry beuks?” She wanted a new spelder-beuk[A] for one of her children. We had a brief talk together. She had never been out of Yorkshire, except once across the Tees to Stockton, twenty-two miles distant. That was her longest journey, and the largest town she had ever seen. ’Twas a gay sight; but she thought the ladies in the streets wore too many danglements. She couldn’t a-bear such things as them, for she was one of the audfarrand[B] sort, and liked lasty[C] clothes.
[A] Spelling Book.
[B] Old-fashioned.
[C] Lasting.