THE TYNE.

FEATHERSTONE CASTLE. / FEATHERSTONE BRIDGE.FEATHERSTONE CASTLE. / FEATHERSTONE BRIDGE.

FEATHERSTONE CASTLE. / FEATHERSTONE BRIDGE.

White Alston, with the wild brown moors beyond it, stands between the broad, open desolateness of the mountain region and a lovely district in which the South Tyne laughs under the threading branches of ancient woods, or broadens out by sunny haughs, as if to rest itself between strife and strife.

Just below Alston we once more set foot on Northumbrian soil. The Ayleburn and the Gildersdale waters flow from opposite directions along the county boundaries, the one from high moorlands, by the old manor-house of Randalholme, the other from the peaty morass where once flourished the great forest of Gildersdale. Henceforth the country assumes a more gentle aspect. The lead-mines have been left far behind; the river lies broad in the sunlight, or darkens under the shadow of trees; there are gentler undulations in the hills, and

“Long fields of barley and of ryeThat clothe the wold and meet the sky.”

“Long fields of barley and of rye

That clothe the wold and meet the sky.”

The remains of Whitley Castle, which is the modern and inappropriate name of a Roman station, are to be seen shortly after the Gildersdale Burn has joined the Tyne, and here, also, one comes upon an ancient Roman road, the Maiden Way, along which it may have been that “a woman might walk scatheless in Eadwine’s day.” Hereabouts the river is pleasantly fringed, and cool, and full of shadows and deep reflections. At brief intervals it is joined by some new tributary, pouring noisily out of a little valley of its own. Of these one of the most interesting is the Knar, which comes down in a boisterous and scurrying manner from a region of wilderness and lofty fell, where the red deer lingered latest in these parts, and where the remains of ancient forests may be discovered in the soft and treacherous moss.

Very rich in interest and beauty are some of the glens through which these mountain rivulets flow, with sudden precipices, and narrow defiles, and rock-strewn gorges, and the charm of moss and fern and overhanging tree. Knaresdale Hall, which is no more than a farmhouse in these days, is some distance lower down the South Tyne than the spot at which the Knar Burn brings its contribution to the constantly broadening stream. It dates back to rough seventeenth century times, and was as strongly built as became the home of the doughty lairds of Knaresdale. But the noblest of South Tyne castles is that of Featherstone, or Featherstonehaugh. It stands in a fine park opposite to where the river is joined by Hartley Burn. When Lord Marmion was feasting full and high at the castle of Norham, on Tweedside—

“A northern harper rudeChanted a rhyme of deadly feud;How the fierce Thirlwalls, and Ridleys all,Stout Willimondswick,And Hardriding Dick,And Hughie of Hawdon, and Will o’ the WallHave set on Sir Albany Featherstonhaugh,And taken his life at the Deadman’s Shaw.”

“A northern harper rude

Chanted a rhyme of deadly feud;

How the fierce Thirlwalls, and Ridleys all,

Stout Willimondswick,

And Hardriding Dick,

And Hughie of Hawdon, and Will o’ the Wall

Have set on Sir Albany Featherstonhaugh,

And taken his life at the Deadman’s Shaw.”

For “the rest of this old ballad” the notes to “Marmion” refer us to “The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.” But the ballad has not an old line in it. It is simply one of those sham antiques which it amused Surtees, of Mainsforth, to pass off upon one who trusted to his good faith and his familiarity with Border legend and story. The incident which it records is probably as imaginary as the old woman from whose recitation the words are declared to have been taken down.

Featherstone Castle is not built upon elevated ground, as is the case with most of the strong places of the Borders. It stands in a quiet vale amid wooded heights. The Featherstones claimed to have lived there for many centuries, the first of the family, according to tradition, being a Saxon chief of the eighth century. No pedigree can be safely and certainly traced back so far; yet, undoubtedly, the Featherstones were a very ancient race, and maintained their footing here through all the long troubles of the Borders. The nucleus around which thecastle has grown was a square peel, of more elaborate ornamentation than was common. It has been declared, indeed, to be “the loveliest tower in the county.” At this day it forms but one feature of a splendid group of castellated buildings, with many of the walls overgrown with ivy, and with a Gothic chapel as one of its main features. Near by is the lovely little glen of Pynkinscleugh, concerning which Mother Shipton predicted strange things, as yet unrealised. In Pynkinscleugh it was that Ridley of Hardriding endeavoured to carry off the daughter of the Lord of Featherstonehaugh on her wedding-day, and caused her death thereby, for she ran between the combatants’ swords; and this she did so hastily and impetuously that she was slain.

The “Willimondswick” mentioned in the ballad of Surtees was one of the very numerous Ridleys of this district. Willimontswick disputes with Unthank Hall the honour of being the birthplace of Bishop Ridley the martyr. He was, in all probability, the only peaceful man of his family, for these Ridleys were through many generations a hard fighting, hard-riding, and turbulent race. From the record of scarcely any deed of violence on the Borders is the name of a Ridley absent. The ballads tell how—

“But an’ John Ridley thrust his spearRight through Sim o’ the Cuthill’s wame;”

“But an’ John Ridley thrust his spear

Right through Sim o’ the Cuthill’s wame;”

and how—

“Alec Ridley he let fleeA clothyard shaft ahint the wa';And struck Wat Armstrong in the ee.”

“Alec Ridley he let flee

A clothyard shaft ahint the wa';

And struck Wat Armstrong in the ee.”

To such men as these the good Bishop Ridley, about to yield his body to the flames, wrote that, “as God hath set you in our stock and kindred, not for any respect to your person, but of His abundant grace and goodness, to be, as it were, the bell-wether to order and conduct the rest, so, I pray you, continue and increase in the maintenance of truth, honesty, and all true godliness.” Bell-wethers they were, indeed, these Ridleys, and to some rough purpose, too.

Unthank Hall, to the tenants of which the martyr also wrote letters of farewell, is a recently rebuilt mansion, the near neighbour of Willimontswick, and on the opposite side of the Tyne to the quiet little country town of Haltwhistle. We are here again within a brief distance of the Roman wall. Haltwhistle may have been garrisoned by some of the assailants of that stupendous rampart. There are ancient earthworks on the site of what is known as the Castle Hill, one side of which is defended by an artificial breastwork of precipitous appearance. The former “Castle of Hautwysill” is now no more than a tall barn-like building, with a loop-holed turret resting on corbels. The chancel of the church is a survival from the old rough-riding days, and dates back to the thirteenth century; but there was too much fighting in the little town for much that was ancient in it to have survived into the present century. Haltwhistle has now a growing population of 1,600, and is as sweetly situated as heart could desire.

HALTWHISTLE. / HAYDON BRIDGE.HALTWHISTLE. / HAYDON BRIDGE.

HALTWHISTLE. / HAYDON BRIDGE.

This little town is made attractive not only by its neighbourhood to the Tyne, but through the wild and fantastic beauty of Haltwhistle Burn, which flows down from the desolate, dreary, and cruel-looking Northumberland lakes, where the winds that ruffle the surface of these forlorn waters

“Wither drearily on barren moors.”

Yet there are fine sights enough above the ravine through which Haltwhistle Burn has ravaged and torn its way—wide views of fir-clad slopes, and wide-stretching farm-lands, and rolling moors, and dark precipices, and the ever-pleasant valley of the Tyne. Such another sight there is, with even a more extensive prospect, from the heights above the little hamlet of Bardon Mill. Southward lie Willimontswick, and the ancient chapel of Beltingham, and Ridley Hall, and the confluence of the Allen and the Tyne, and the grey, bright-looking village of Haydon Bridge; northward may be seen the important Roman stations of Vindolana and Borcovicus, and the far-reaching, dipping, and bending line of the Roman wall. Backwards, over the ground which we have traversed from Cross Fell, Saddleback and Skiddaw are in sight, and half the peaks, fells, and ridges of the great Cumbrian group.

A little below Bardon Mill the River Allen joins the South Tyne. What theRede is to the northern, the Allen is to the southern branch of the river—the largest and longest of its affluents. It is formed by the joining of two streams which rise on the extreme southern borders of Northumberland, and which flow some three or four miles apart until they are within about five miles of their confluence with the Tyne. The Allen is one of the loveliest and most retired of streams, flowing between picturesque rocks, and sheltered and darkened by hanging woods. There are here

“Steep and lofty cliffs,That on a wild secluded scene impressThoughts of more deep seclusion.”

“Steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion.”

Of all northern rivers this is the one which is most praised for the wild and yet tranquil variety of its scenery, for the charms which the quiet angler finds in the turns and windings of its rocky pass, and for the beauty and diversity of the foliage which clothes its steeply ascending vale.

At Haydon Bridge, when the water is low, there lies a great expanse of shingle, polished into whiteness by the floods. White are the houses also, with roofs of bluish stone; and there is an aspect of great quaintness about the little village, which seems to have been founded in Saxon times, and to have borrowed much of its older building material from the Roman wall. Of its former state there are still some small remainders in the chancel of an old chapel, and a cottage here and there on the height. It was at Haydon Bridge that John Martin, the painter of “The Last Judgment,” and “The Plains of Heaven,” and “Belshazzar’s Feast,” was born, and here, up to his twelfth birthday, he evoked the wonder of the simple folk with his rough drawings, a number of which, with the family eccentricity, he once exhibited upon his father’s housetop.

From here it would be easy to make an excursion into King Arthur’s country. Not, indeed, to

“The island-valley of Avilion,Where falls not hail, nor rain, nor any snow,Nor ever wind blows loudly.”

“The island-valley of Avilion,

Where falls not hail, nor rain, nor any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly.”

Avilion is Glastonbury, it is said; but all about this ruder country there is store of Arthurian legend, mostly of that coarser sort to which belongs the story of the “bag pudding” which “the Queen next morning fried.” The King and Queen Guinevere, the King’s hounds, and the lords and ladies of his court, lie all together in an enchanted sleep in a great hall beneath the Castle of Sewingshields, near to the Roman wall; or so the legends say.

And now we are once more approaching Warden Mill. To the North and South Tyne we must henceforth bid adieu. From this point they will flow together in the same bed. One has come down from the Scottish borders, a holiday stream, for forty-three miles; the other, not without doing its share of work by the way, has hurried over thirty-nine miles from the Cumberland fells. Thirty-six miles more, over half of which extent the Tyne is a great labouring, work-a-day river, and we shall meet the breezes and the billows of the northern sea.

HEXHAM ABBEY.HEXHAM ABBEY.

HEXHAM ABBEY.

Hexham and the Abbey Church—Dilston Hall—The Derwentwater Rising—Corbridge—Bywell Woods—Prudhoe and Ovingham—Stephenson’s Birthplace—Ryton and Newburn—The Approach to Newcastle.

Untilit becomes a tidal river, which does not happen till the huge pillar of smoke that announces Newcastle comes in sight, the Tyne in ordinary seasons is a broad and shallow stream, with occasional deep and quiet pools dreaming in shadowy places. Below Warden its banks are open on either side to the far-away hills, and it has but a bare, starved look among these level and almost naked shores. Yet it is a rich, fertile, and famous country, through which now flows this “water of Tyne.” Hexham, renowned for its market-gardens, is close at hand. Its roofs peer out of a wide circle of trees, and above them all, massive and conspicuous, stands sentinel the broad square tower of the Abbey Church.

“The heart of all England” is a designation which was long ago claimed fortheir town by the Hexham folk. Just as Boston is held to be the hub of the universe, so Hexham was declared to be the centre of our right little, tight little island. Hence radiated such Gospel light and such imperfect learning as illumined these wild northern parts in Saxon times. Mr. Green has said of St. Wilfred, whom he calls Wilfrith of York, that his life was made up of flights to Rome and returns to England, which is but a churlish description of a great career; for St. Wilfred, the most magnificent and wealthy ecclesiastic of his period, not only restored York and built the church at Ripon, but erected here at Hexham an abbey and a cathedral of which Richard, the Prior, who assisted to restore it from its ruins, wrote:—“It surpassed in the excellence of its architecture all the buildings of England; and, in truth, there was nothing like it at that time to be found on this side of the Alps.” The time to which Prior Richard refers was the latter portion of the seventh century. Wilfred, who was trained at Lindisfarne, visited France and Italy in his youth, and came back full of great architectural ideas. There were then, it is probable, no stone churches in England. At any rate, the first five churches of stone were York, Lincoln, Ripon, Withern, and Hexham; of which Wilfred certainly built three. Never had bishop a vaster diocese. Wilfred, Archbishop of York and Bishop of Hexham, had supreme ecclesiastical control over a district which—during his lifetime, and when he was in misfortune—was divided by Theodore of Tarsus into the four bishoprics of York, Hexham, Withern, and Lindisfarne. Of Wilfred’s cathedral of Hexham nothing remains but the underground oratory, built about 674. The church was fired by incursive Danes in 875. Three centuries later the canons of Hexham piously went to work to rebuild and restore; but then the unruly Scots made a raid into England, taking Hexham on their way, and not only destroyed the restored buildings, but slaughtered the townsfolk, and burned to death two hundred children whom they found at school.

Hexham was once, says Prior Richard, “very large and stately.” However, it diminished in importance under the influence of successive battles, tumults, incursions, and changes. Hexham ceased to be the seat of a bishopric at an early period of its history; and though the monks donned armour and girded swords to their sides when Henry VIII.’s commissioners came, declaring that, “we be twenty free men in this house, and will die all or that you shall enter here,” their bravery nothing availed them, and the dissolution of the monastery still further depressed Hexham in the list of English towns. There is a story that the last Superior was hanged at the priory gates, and several of his monks along with him. The beautiful Abbey Church was restored, greatly to its detriment, in 1858. But even the restorers could not spoil it utterly, and it still gives an air of grandeur and stateliness to the quiet town which it adorns.

It is all an old battlefield, the land around Hexham. “Wallace wight,” who is frequently heard of on Tyneside, generally to his disadvantage, and part of whose body was hung up on the bridge at Newcastle when he was executed, came here and slaughtered the people in 1297. One of the decisive battles of the Wars ofthe Roses was fought close by Hexham in 1464, on which occasion, as one of the most romantic stories in our history narrates, Queen Margaret and her son found shelter and hiding in a robbers’ cave. “Hexham,” writes Defoe, “is famous, or rather infamous, for having the first blood drawn at it in the war against their Prince by the Scots in King Charles’s time.” A good deal of the blood of the families of these parts was shed for the Stuart cause, then and long afterwards. Three miles below Hexham, and near to the scene of the Yorkist and Lancastrian battle, Devil’s Water flows into the Tyne, past the grey old tower which is all that remains to attest the former splendour of the Earls of Derwentwater. This Devil’s Water—which was Dyvelle’s Water in bygone days, so called from an ancient family of these parts—tears its way swiftly between high and verdurous walls of rock—

“It’s eddying foam-balls prettily distrestBy ever-changing shape and want of rest.”

“It’s eddying foam-balls prettily distrest

By ever-changing shape and want of rest.”

The hillsides of Dilston are clothed in magnificent woods. The scene is such as those which the old-fashioned writers were wont to describe as “beautifully sylvan.” There are wild wood-paths and beds of fern, the green tangle of underwood, and the varied shade and brightness of interlacing boughs. And hence, with hesitation and a doubtful mind, the last Earl of Derwentwater set out on that rash and unlucky expedition which caused him the loss of his head.

PRUDHOE CASTLE.PRUDHOE CASTLE.

PRUDHOE CASTLE.

CORBRIDGE.CORBRIDGE.

CORBRIDGE.

The ancient village of Corbridge—the quietest of country villages now, withextensive 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 abandonedthe 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.BYWELL CASTLE.

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 toplunge 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.NEWBURN.

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 wereoccasional 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.”

A little below this place the Tyne is joined by a muddy little brook, known as Hedwin Streams. Here, as it is contended, the jurisdiction of Newcastle begins. From time immemorial—legally defined, I believe, as a period which came to an end with King Richard’s return from Palestine—the mayor and citizens of Newcastle have claimed a property in the bed of the river Tyne from Spar Hawk, within the Tyne Piers, to Hedwin Streams here at Newburn, and the claim is still asserted once in five years; when, on what is known as “barge day,” the Newcastle Corporation proceeds up and down the river in a series of gaily decorated steamboats, on board which high revel is held. And near Newburn, indeed, Newcastle may be said really to begin. It is five miles to where the city is blackening the atmosphere and dimming the sky with its smoke, but here are clearly discernible the fringes of its dusky robe. To our right, as we pass downward, lies the village of Blaydon. Prosaic Scotswood is on the left, and beyond it are the vast, mile-long works of Armstrong, Leslie, and Co. Where these works are was once one of the pleasantest of valleys. Now the furnaces vomit forth their flames, and the air is filled with smoke and the mighty clang of labour.

OVINGHAM.OVINGHAM.

OVINGHAM.

THE HIGH-LEVEL BRIDGE AND GATESHEAD.THE HIGH-LEVEL BRIDGE AND GATESHEAD.

THE HIGH-LEVEL BRIDGE AND GATESHEAD.

The Growth of Tyneside—“The Coaly Tyne”—Newcastle Bridges—Local Industries—Poetical Eulogies—Tyneside Landscapes—Sandgate and the Keelmen—Wallsend—Jarrow and the Venerable Bede—The Docks—Shields Harbour—North and South Shields—The Tyne Commission—Tynemouth Priory—The Open Sea.

FromNewcastle to the sea, twelve miles by water, the Tyne is a vast tidal dock. It stands second among the rivers of the kingdom for the extent of its commerce. The Thames takes precedence in the number of vessels which enter and leave, and the Mersey stands before it in respect of the total tonnage of the ships by which it is frequented; but the Tyne ranks second to the Thames in the number of vessels which enter the port, and second to the Mersey in the bulk of its trade. But more remarkable even than the commerce of the river are its great industries. From Gateshead to the sea on the one hand, and from Newcastle to the sea on the other, there is a constant succession of shipyards, chemical factories, engineering establishments, glass-works, docks, and coal-shoots. Newcastle, it has beenremarked, owes its rise to war, its maintenance to piety, and its increase to trade. A very neat and true saying. But trade has done more for the Tyne than for Newcastle. It has, since the beginning of the century, increased the population of the chief Northumbrian town from 30,000 to 160,000; but it has increased the population of Tyneside to half a million or more.

Milton did the river a huge injustice when he called this the “coaly Tyne.” His intention was innocent enough, no doubt, since he meant only to acknowledge its celebrity in connection with coal. But it is the fate of these indecisively descriptive phrases to be misunderstood. The Tyne is a brighter and clearer stream than the Mersey, is immeasurably purer than the Thames, is only occasionally muddied like the Humber, and is at no time discoloured by coal. When there are floods in the upper reaches, so much brown soil is carried down by the impetuous water that the current of the river can be traced far out to sea; but at ordinary seasons the local colour of the Tyne approaches that of the sea itself, and is, in fact, a deep, clear olive-green. What is insufficiently understood, however, is that the local colour of a stream is that which is most seldom disclosed. Water takes its hue from the sky above it, and from the light which plays about its face. Hence Spenser’s beautiful and much assailed phrase, “the silver-streaming Thames.” Hence, also, the Tyneside poet’s eulogy of his native stream:—

“Of all the rivers, north or south,There’s none like coaly Tyne.”

“Of all the rivers, north or south,

There’s none like coaly Tyne.”

The Romans threw three bridges across the river. There was one which crossed with the wall at Chollerford; and there was one which crossed with the Watling Street at Corbridge; and there was a third, earlier and far more important than the other two, which linked together what were afterwards to be named the counties of Durham and Northumberland. The bridge at Newcastle, built by Hadrian on his first visit to these northern parts of Roman Britain, was deemed of so much importance that at Rome a medal was struck to commemorate its erection. Also it gave its name to the Roman station which stood on the heights above. Newcastle first became known to history as Pons Ælii, in honour alike of Hadrian’s bridge and of Hadrian’s family. And ever since that day the town has been famous for its bridges. There was one which resembled London Bridge in having shops almost from end to end. It endured, says an eloquent local historian, “from the times of the Plantagenets, and through the Wars of the Roses, past Bosworth and Flodden Fields and the Armada, down to the encounter of the King and Parliament, to the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Revolution; and beyond the rebellions of 1715 and 1745 it kept its accustomed place across the stream, surviving the daily pressure of the tide, the rage of inundations, the bumping of barges and keels, the shocks of civil war, the negligent inattentions of peace.” But at length large portions of it were swept away by the great flood of 1771, one of its houses being carried whole as far as Jarrow Slake, some miles farther down the Tyne.

On the bridge of Hadrian two lofty hills looked down. The Tyne has here at some remote period scourged its way through a deep ravine, and Newcastle, and its opposite neighbour, Gateshead, are built partly around the feet of commanding eminences, and still more extensively on the summits of these hills. Old Newcastle was a town of stairs. Communication between its upper and its lower portions was, with the exception of one narrow and steep street leading from the bridge, maintained by means of long flights of stone steps, which still exist, and are up to this day extensively used. All the succeeding bridges were built on the site of that of Hadrian. “The Low Bridge” was the name given to the last of these from the time when the High Level was built. It is the Swing Bridge which now crosses the Tyne at the point selected so many centuries ago, this swing bridge being a gigantic iron structure, with a great central span that is moved by hydraulic power, and leaves two openings of such extent that theVictoria, the largest vessel in Her Majesty’s Navy, has been able to pass through without grazing either of the piers. But notable as is the Swing Bridge as a work of engineering, it is inferior even in this respect to the High Level Bridge, and very far inferior in grace and beauty. The High Level does for the higher portions of Newcastle and Gateshead what all the bridges from Hadrian’s time have done for the lower portions. It is a foot and carriage way between the neighbouring towns; but it is also more than this, for at a height of twenty-seven feet above the roadway, under which a full-rigged ship can sail, there is a railway viaduct along which passes the main line to Scotland. One of the most wonderful of the world’s bridges, the High Level is also one of the most handsome and well proportioned, so that it has probably been painted more frequently than any bridges but those of Cumberland and Wales. It is an appropriate thing that in the Swing Bridge and the High Level Bridge, which are likely enough to last for centuries to come, Newcastle should have memorials of its two greatest engineers, the High Level having been built by Robert Stephenson, and the Swing Bridge by Lord Armstrong.

Gateshead has been disparagingly described as “a dirty lane leading to Newcastle;” but this was in the days that are no more. It is now a great congeries of lanes, streets, roads, and alleys, dirty and otherwise. But for a large town thus intervening, we might see how rapidly the land slopes upward from the riverside to the two-miles-distant crown of Sheriff Hill, which is on the road southward to Durham, to York, and through the fair English shires to London. It was on the summit of Sheriff’s Hill that the Sheriffs of Newcastle—a place which boasted of such officers because it was a county as well as a town—received the King’s Judges when coming on Circuit. Thus far they advanced to meet them into the county of Durham. There was a splendid procession through Gateshead, over the Low Bridge, up the steep “Side,” into Newcastle, and to the Assize Courts. Gorgeous trumpeters made proclamation; the gilded and hammerclothed carriages of the Mayor and Sheriffs were guarded by halberdiers; a tall official walked in front, with a great fur cap of maintenance and a most amazing sword. When the judges,sated with hospitality, and with the gaol-delivery completed, set off on horseback towards Carlisle, they were presented with money to buy each of them a dagger, to guard themselves against robbers and evil men.

COAL TRIMMERS. / A COAL STAITHE.COAL TRIMMERS. / A COAL STAITHE.

COAL TRIMMERS. / A COAL STAITHE.

Gateshead was the site of a Saxon monastery that was certainly in existence in 653. It does not seem to have done much in the way of civilising the people, for when Walcher of Lorraine was made Bishop of Durham by the Conqueror, the Gateshead folk murdered him on the threshold of their church. This was not the present church of St. Mary, which is the most prominent object in Gateshead when the spectator stands on Newcastle Quay, but it probably occupied the same site. Gateshead was a domain of the Bishops Palatine of Durham, except for a short period during which it was annexed to Newcastle, and they built a palace there, no portion of which building now remains.

NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.

NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.

Between the two great Tyneside towns the river is narrower than at almost any point of its course from Hexham to the sea. Formerly it washed on either side over a shelving beach, and was but a shallow, inconsequential stream. There is a drawing of Carmichael’s, made about the end of the first quarter of the century, in which some boats are unloading in the centre of the Tyne. Carts are drawn up beside them, and the horses in the shafts are not standing in water to the depth of their knees. The shores have been partly built upon and partlydredged away since those days, and there is now a depth of twenty-five feet at low water at Newcastle Quay. The High Level Bridge strides across the river to a point which must have been just outside the walls that Rufus built around his castle. The great well-preserved Norman keep is only a few yards away. On the same eminence, and a little nearer to the river, stands the Moot Hall, or Assize Courts, which—all the rest of Newcastle being a county in itself—is still a part of the county of Northumberland. Here it must have been that the station of Pons Ælii was built, in a position admirable alike for watch and for defence. Much the greater portion of old Newcastle clustered around this elevated spot for many centuries. At a distance of not much more than a hundred yards is the ancient church of St. Nicholas, with its famous lanterned steeple, of which a local poet has sung that

“If on St. Nicholas ye once cast an e’e,Ye’ll crack on’t as lang as ye’re leevin’.”

“If on St. Nicholas ye once cast an e’e,

Ye’ll crack on’t as lang as ye’re leevin’.”

The Quayside at Newcastle has a long line of handsome stone buildings, intersected here and there by narrow “chares” that lead into the old district of Pandon, where the Saxon Kings of Northumberland are said to have had a palace in the olden time. The quay on the Newcastle side of the river is broad and spacious, but there is no quay space to speak of at Gateshead, where dreary and half-ruinous buildings cluster to the edge of the quay wall. Many of the ancient branches of local trade have died, or are dying, out. From the Tyne much wool was formerly shipped for the Netherlands; to Tyneside came the glass-blowers who were driven out of Lorraine by the persecutions, and here they settled once for all, soon exporting more glass from the Tyne than was made in the whole of France. The first window-glass was manufactured at Newcastle, and used in the windows of the church at Jarrow. There is a Tyneside glass industry still, but it no longer maintains its former eminence amongst local trades. Coal export, iron shipbuilding, chemical manufacture, engineering—these are the employments by which all others have been dwarfed on the banks of the Tyne.

In the whole of England, so far as my experience goes, there is only one town that is grimier, murkier, or more appalling in appearance than the towns on the lower Tyne as they are seen from the railways which run along either bank of the river. Bilston in Staffordshire is of more fearful aspect than either Hebburn, or Walker, or Felling, or Jarrow. On Tyneside, too, one may look away to the bright open country, to where there are low sunlighted hills on the horizon; but at Bilston an eye which searches over a landscape of blackened and withered grass only beholds more forges. In these northern latitudes, again, the skies are very cloudy and wonderful; and in the Black Country one never becomes aware that Nature can work miracles with her clouds and skies. From the river itself the blackness, the squalor, the apparent dilapidation, of these Tyneside towns are not so conspicuous. The Tyne is like a bending shaft of sunlight, making darkness not only visible but sublime. There is a quaint variety and picturesqueness aboutthe wharves and “staithes” and factories which line its banks. The chemical works are like belated castles, about which hives of Cyclopean industry have grown up, for they thrust tall wooden towers into the air, round which there goes a platform that seems to be intended for sentries on the watch. From Newcastle Quay downwards, ships of all sizes and varieties are anchored at either side of the stream. Some are loading, some are discharging their cargoes, some are waiting to load. There are others which glitter in all the glory of new paint, having but lately been released from the stocks on which they were built. Shipyards, where new vessels are being constructed, may be found here and there between the chemical factories and the engineering works; and just now there is in every berth of every yard a new vessel in some stage of its construction. Out of these heterogeneous materials the sun sometimes builds up magnificent effects on the Tyne. Doubtless, on dull days, as Mr. William Senior has mournfully observed, “the smoke hangs like a funeral pall over the grimy docks and dingy river-banks, and the pervading gloom penetrates one’s inner being;” but there are seasons when this grimy stream becomes a painter’s river, indescribably striking and grand.

QUAY AT NEWCASTLE.QUAY AT NEWCASTLE.

QUAY AT NEWCASTLE.

Below Newcastle Quay, at Sandgate and its neighbourhood, was the sailors’ and the keelmen’s quarter. Tyne sailors were the best that our country produced; and so it happened that the visits of the press-gang were frequent at the Sandgate shore. Many a fight there was before the captured men were carried off. All the folks of the neighbourhood, save such as had gone into hiding, would assemble for battle. The dialect of the place and the manner of these fights may both be surmised from these lines of the local muse:—

“Like harrin’, man, they cam’ i’ showls,Wi’ buzzum shanks an’ aud bed-powls—Styens flew like shot throo Sandgeyt.Then tongs went up, bed-powls got smashed,An’ heeds wes cracked, an’ windors crashed.Then brave keel laddies took thor turn,Wi’ smiths an’ potters frae the Burn;They cut the Whiteboys doon like corn,An’ lyed them law i’ Sandgeyt.”

“Like harrin’, man, they cam’ i’ showls,Wi’ buzzum shanks an’ aud bed-powls—Styens flew like shot throo Sandgeyt.

“Like harrin’, man, they cam’ i’ showls,

Wi’ buzzum shanks an’ aud bed-powls—

Styens flew like shot throo Sandgeyt.

Then tongs went up, bed-powls got smashed,An’ heeds wes cracked, an’ windors crashed.Then brave keel laddies took thor turn,Wi’ smiths an’ potters frae the Burn;They cut the Whiteboys doon like corn,An’ lyed them law i’ Sandgeyt.”

Then tongs went up, bed-powls got smashed,

An’ heeds wes cracked, an’ windors crashed.

Then brave keel laddies took thor turn,

Wi’ smiths an’ potters frae the Burn;

They cut the Whiteboys doon like corn,

An’ lyed them law i’ Sandgeyt.”

The Roman Segendunum, which covered about three acres and a half of land, stood near to the river where it comes once more into a straight course after having taken a great bend southward shortly after leaving Newcastle. The wall thus enclosed a great bight of land between Pons Ælii and its eastern extremity, probably made useful in the landing of troops. From Segendunum it would be possible to signal to the important Roman stations at the mouth of the Tyne. But of Roman rule there is now nothing to remind us except after long search. The fame of Wallsend has been carried over the world by its coal, though, curiously enough, no coal is ever brought to bank at this place now.

Rather more than half-way from Newcastle to the sea, and over the river from Wallsend, the flames of the Jarrow furnaces leap into the air. At two widely separated periods of our history, Jarrow—the Saxon Gyrwy—has reached a distinction and importance altogether out of proportion to its size and the advantages of its situation. Here, as Mr. Green has beautifully observed, “the quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, dawned for Englishmen in the story of Bede.” And of late years Jarrow has become the seat of an immense industry, whose results are to be met with in all parts of the world and on every sea. The first screw collier, theJohn Bowes, was built at Jarrow. It revolutionised the coal trade, and has made an almost inconceivable change in the commerce of the Tyne. Esteemed a large vessel in its day, it may occasionally be seen in Shields Harbour—for it still carries coals to London—dwarfed into insignificance by the passing to and fro of its gigantic successors. It is probable that the smallest steamer now built in the Jarrow shipyards is larger than theJohn Bowes. The place which gave the little steamer birth has grown into a considerable town, with a mayor and corporation, and some expectation of a member of Parliament by-and-bye. In all England, so far as I know, there is no sight which gives so powerful and weird an idea of a great industry as do the Jarrow furnaces when the flames are leaping from their lofty mouths on a murky night. The fire plays and burns and glows on voluminous clouds of smoke and steam; the Tyne is illumined by blazing pillars and rippling sheets of flame; everything shorewards is gigantic and undefined and awful, “’twixt upper, nether, and surrounding fires.”

SHIELDS HARBOUR: THE HIGH LIGHTS.SHIELDS HARBOUR: THE HIGH LIGHTS.

SHIELDS HARBOUR: THE HIGH LIGHTS.

How different was the quiet Gyrwy on which Bede first opened his eyes! Beyond the furnaces and the shipyards the river broadens out suddenly over a space which is like a great bay. At low water this is nothing more than a huge acreage of mud, with quicksands beneath. To the right, Jarrow Church and Monastery stand on a lonely eminence; to the left, the little river Don flows sluggishly into the Tyne. After the landing of Hengist, says Gibbon, “an ample space of wood and morass was resigned to the vague dominion of Nature, and the modern bishopric of Durham, the whole territory from the Tyne to the Tees, had returned to its primitive state of a savage and solitary forest.” All round Jarrow there was morass only—so much we should know from its ancient name, which means “marsh” or “fen,” if there did not now remain something of the ancient appearance ofthings. The one piece of irredeemable land is this Jarrow “Slake.” The river Don must have scoured out a wider estuary in Bede’s day and before, for twice at least it was used as a haven—once by the Romans, who anchored their vessels at its mouth, and once by King Egfrid, who found shelter in it for the whole of his fleet. Of Bede’s monastery—he was born at Monkton, close by—only a few broken walls remain, but they are attached to a large and interesting church, which has a good example of a restored Saxon tower. Ruin swept over the monastery again and again in its early days. In less than a century after Bede’s death, the Danes were spreading themselves over England; the Cross went down before the hammer of Thor; and one mournful illustration of the reasserted supremacy of heathenism was to be found in the ruined monastery of St. Paul at Jarrow. When the monks of Lindisfarne, bearing with them the body of their saint, turned round to look upon Jarrow on their way to Chester-le-Street, they saw quick tongues of flame shooting upwards, and the wild, active figures of marauding Danes visible in the midnight glare. That same year a great battle was fought near the monastery, and the Vikings were overcome; whereat the monks crept back to their former quarters, rebuilt dormitories there, and enjoyed eighty years of peace; but in 867 a fleet of Baltic pirates sailed up the Tyne, and so plundered and burnt Jarrow Monastery that “it remained desolate and a desert for two centuries, nothing being left but the naked walls.”

In the whole course of the river there is no finer sweep of water than that which stretches from Jarrow Slake into the harbour of Shields. On the north side we have passed the Northumberland Docks, which have a water-space of fifty-five acres, and are entirely devoted to the lading of coals. On the south side are the Tyne Docks of the North-Eastern Railway Company, which have a water space of fifty acres, and are employed equally for coals and general merchandise. The one is the main outlet of the great Northumberland coalfield, the other of the still more productive coalfield of North Durham. With the Albert Edward Dock, constructed more recently than either of these, and fit for ships of heavier draught, this is the whole dock accommodation of the Tyne; for, as I have had occasion previously to remark, the river itself, from the sea to two miles above Newcastle, is a huge tidal dock, which is available in all weathers, and in all states of the tide, for the largest vessels that float. What this phrase means may be seen to the full in Shields Harbour, where, on either side of the broad stream, vessels lie chained to the buoys in tier beyond tier, leaving a wide passage in mid-river along which great steamers are for ever passing to and fro.

The story of how the Tyne has been developed from a shallow and perilous stream into one of the noblest rivers of the kingdom makes a curious history, much too long to relate in this place. All the more extensive changes have been effected since the middle of the present century. The Tyne had a foreign as well as a domestic coal trade so early, at least, as the year 1325; but so little had at any time been done for its accommodation that there are many now living who remember how a small vessel might be stranded on sandbanks some five or six times in the course of its passage from Newcastle to Shields. Indeed, the reckless emptying of ballast into the bed of the river, and the utter neglect of means for keeping a navigable passage—things which seem altogether incredible in these days—at length brought matters to such a pass that the small passenger steamers often stuck fast at some portion of their journey, wherefore there was always a fiddler on board, to keep the passengers entertained till the rising of the next tide. It was whilst the Newcastle Corporation still successfully asserted its jurisdiction that such things were, and were growing worse; but as strong young communities grew up along the banks of the Tyne, the oppression and neglect of Newcastle became intolerable, and in 1850 the Tyne Commission was formed, with results that cannot have been foreseen by its founders; for the river has been widened and deepened over an extent of fifteen miles or more. Docks have been made, the Tyne has been straightened where “points” projected dangerously, enormous stone breakwaters have been built out into the sea, and where, in 1851, there were thirty vessels ashore in one confused heap, the British Navy might now safely ride at anchor, even in the teeth of a north-east gale. The transformation of the Tyne from its former dangerous condition into such a harbour of refuge as does not exist elsewhere on our coasts is one of the noblest pieces of engineering that our century has seen, and there is no other great engineering work the fame of which has been so little noised abroad.

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