Chapter IV: From Newcastle to the Sea (1)

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.

From Newcastle 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 been remarked, 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."

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 the _Victoria_, 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.

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.

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 partly dredged 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'."

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 about the 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.

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."

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, the _John 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 the _John 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."

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 of things. 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.

About Shields Harbour the seagulls pursue each other in play. They come all the way from the Farne Islands, and when the sun has gone down, and the western sky is still full of crimson and orange light, they may be seen circling ever higher, and gathering in bands, and finally setting off in a straight line northwards, calling to each other meanwhile with their shrill, baby-like cries. There is a space of a quarter of a mile or so between the twin but rival towns of North and South Shields. They divide, somewhat unevenly, a population of something over a hundred thousand persons between them. South Shields is of more rapid and most recent growth, but both the towns originated in the erection of a few fishermen's sheds, or shielings, which existed so long ago at least as the reign of Edward I. There were then, and for very long afterwards, two mouths to the Tyne, one of which ran parallel with the present main street of South Shields, and made an island of the Roman station which was founded here.

The whole aspect of the land round about has been changed by the deposit of ballast from ships. At many points of the Tyne there are artificial hills and embankments. Some of these are made by the refuse of chemical works; a more numerous and more lofty class are composed entirely of sand and shingle which was brought over-sea as ships' ballast. One of the earlier employments of George Stephenson was the minding of an engine that was employed in building up these huge ballast-heaps, which give a very singular appearance to some of the towns on the banks of the Tyne. South Shields was a spot greatly favoured for the discharging of this refuse, and it therefore happens that what was low and, for the most part, level ground, is now absurdly uneven, some of the streets being built upon the ballast, whilst others are far overtopped by mountains of sand and shingle that it would cost large sums of money to remove.

At North Shields there are terrifying flights of innumerable stairs. The lower quarters, both of North and South Shields--those, that is to say, which are nearest to the river--are incomparable as examples of old maritime towns. Something there is at Greenwich of the same character, and something more at Wapping; but nowhere is there such a salt-sea savour about the whole aspect of things.

The sailors, it should be observed, seem to have exercised their own discretion in the naming of streets. There is "Wapping," and "Holborn," and "Thames Street," and what not. These places are narrow thoroughfares running parallel with the river, and are accessible therefrom by means of wooden stairs and cramped passages between high blocks of buildings. The houses facing the Tyne, more particularly on the north side, seem less to have been built than to have been cobbled together. They are made indifferently of brick and wood and stone; they have platforms standing on wooden piles; they are kept out of the river by stout timbers that the tide washes, and that are green with salt-water moss or white with clustering limpets. There is all manner of variety among them, and nothing could be more quaint, ramshackle, or interesting as a reminiscence of an older world. It is the sailors' quarter now, as formerly, this odd assemblage of narrow streets and strange houses. Now, as in freer days,

"Up to the wooden bridge and back,
To the Low Light shore down in a crack,
Rambling, swaggering, away goes Jack,
When there's liberty for the sailors."

"The Low Lights" is that portion of North Shields which is nearest to the sea. A square white lighthouse stands on a wooden fish-quay, which projects far into the river; another similar lighthouse--"The High Lights"--occupies the top of a neighbouring hill. A ship making the river must have both of these lights in line, as if they were occupying different heights of the same tower. Lighthouses swarm about the mouth of the Tyne. There is a flash-light at the end of "The Groin," a reef which runs into the river from the South Shields side, thus assisting to make a beautiful sheltering bay between this point and the South Pier. There is a gleaming red light on the promontory at Tynemouth, and a vivid electric light flashes over the sea from Souter Point, two or three miles south of the Tyne. At the Quay by the Low Lights, in the herring season, there is a perfect forest of bare poles, and a great acreage of decks, on which brown fishermen are at work hoisting their catch, or mending their nets, or scouring their boats, as the case may be. The lettering of these craft indicates that they come from Kirkcaldy, from the Berwickshire coast, from Yarmouth, from Lowestoft, and from the Isle of Man. There are from two to three hundred of them in the season, and the river has no finer sight than the departure of these herring boats to sea when the wind is fresh enough to fill their sails. Should the evening be calm, they are towed outward in groups of five or six by a steam tug; and a pleasant voyage it is to the herring grounds; whence, when the sun has not long risen, the boats may be seen racing back again to get the best of the market at the Low Lights Quay. There are steam trawlers also at this busy mart in the early morning. It is all fish that comes to their nets, and some of it very queer fish too. A singularly odd mixture of scaly creatures may be seen lying about in heaps on the Quay--ling, skate, plaice, soles, cuttlefish, cat and dog fish, and cod, the biggest of which find their way to the London market; turbot, suggestive of aldermanic banquets; and a host of small fry too numerous to mention. The burly fishermen stride about in their oilskin coats, plentifully besprinkled with silvery scales, and glittering in the morning sunlight. The fishwives keep up a constant clatter of talk, in voices made shrill by their daily cry of "Fe-esh, caller fe-esh!" The auctioneers are very clamorous over their business, and for three hours all is hurry and shouting, and competition and confused haggling as to prices and sales.

On the north side of the Tyne the rocky promontory of Tynemouth shoots out into the sea. It is the termination of a high chain of banks extending from North Shields to the coast. On these stands the brigade house of the first of the volunteer life brigades; by which one is reminded that if South Shields invented the lifeboat, North Shields has a kindred claim to distinction in the origination of those brave bands of volunteers that watch our coasts in seasons of storm. Between the brigade house and Tynemouth Light, overlooking the entrance to the harbour, stands a colossal statue of Lord Collingwood, a Tyne seaman, mounted on a massive stone pedestal, and guarded by four of the guns of Collingwood's ship, the _Royal Sovereign_. A little further seaward, "their very ruins ruined," surrounded by British, by Roman, and by English graves, are the beautiful remains of Tynemouth Priory, which was built so sturdily, despite a certain apparently fragile character of style, that these ancient walls seem likely to bid defiance to storms for almost as many centuries to come as have already passed them by. A small chapel, built of wood, and dedicated to St. Mary, was the primitive and humble beginning from which sprung the great and powerful monastery of Tynemouth. One of the Kings of Northumberland (Edwin) erected this early in the seventh century, at the instigation of his daughter, who took the veil here. Tynemouth soon gained a reputation for sanctity, and grew so much in public favour that the chapel had to be rebuilt of stone ere long. Many were its vicissitudes during the subsequent warlike years. The priory at the mouth of the Tyne suffered even more frequently from fire and foray than the monastery at Jarrow. But the monks, as attached and devoted in the one case as in the other, returned after each fresh assault; until, in the reign of Henry III., they reared a monastic pile fit to be compared with Whitby for beauty and fame. After the dissolution, unfortunately, it became the prey of whosoever chose to make use of it for building materials; and it was not till the present century that the folk at the mouth of the Tyne began to understand that they are responsible for its preservation. In its rich and prosperous days the walls enclosed the whole of the promontory on which the Priory ruins stand; but now there remain only a small lady-chapel, a few scattered walls, a portion of a groined roof, a fine Norman gateway, and a magnificent remnant of the church. In the grounds where the monks formerly took their exercise red-coated soldiers may now be seen at drill. Pyramids of cannon-balls are piled amid the ruins; there is a large powder-magazine beside what may have been the entrance to the church. It is now fortified and garrisoned, in fact, this promontory where the godly men of old looked away over the wild North Sea. The Tynemouth cliffs have thus, it may be presumed, been brought back to their earliest uses, for the Romans had a station here, and before the Romans came the Britons must have had a camp on the spot, since recent excavations have revealed the existence of British graves.

Shooting outward from the Tynemouth shore, the mighty rampart of the North Pier makes division between the river and the sea. Such another pier comes outward from South Shields; and between them these two great works of engineering make a comparatively narrow channel for ships where there was formerly a wide and most dangerous estuary. Terrible indeed are the storms which sometimes rage over them and assail them with the battery of their waves. In a north-east gale the white water leaps above the summit of the Tynemouth cliffs. Outside the piers and beyond the bar the waves seem to be miles long, and when they narrow themselves to enter the river they rise to a height so appalling that the topmasts of a sailing-ship running for shelter may, with every dip the vessel makes, be lost to the view of those on shore. "The next instant," says Mr. Clark Russell, of a ship which he had been watching from Tynemouth when a storm was raging, "she had disappeared, and before another minute had passed I was straining my eyes against the whirling snow and looking into a blackness as empty as fog, amid which the pouring of the hurricane against the cliffs, and the pounding of the ponderous surges a long distance down, sounded with fearful distinctness. For three-quarters of an hour I lingered, peering to right and left of the beach at my feet, as far as the smother of flying flakes would let me look. But I saw no more of the brig." Such incidents were mournfully common before the piers were carried out to their present length. The Tyne was notorious for the number of its wrecks. No more than nine or ten years ago, indeed, I saw fourteen ships ashore in or near the mouth of the river, the spoils of a single night of storm. But this was the last occasion of so much calamity. For some years past now the Tyne has, most happily, almost been free from all disaster but collision.

As we round the Tynemouth cliffs the fishing village of Cullercoats comes into sight, rather over a mile away, with the dim, far-projecting Newbiggin Point a few miles beyond. On bright days a flash of light may reveal the white lighthouse at Coquet Island, by Warkworth town. Round the rocky promontory close at hand there is a little bay, a projecting point of rock, and then a long stretch of yellow sand, broken almost at its centre by a brown, weedy reef of rocks, among which the pools linger when the tide goes down. This is "Tynemouth Sands." Here the pleasure-seekers come in crowds the summer through, rejoicing in the fine weather, and yet desiring a storm, a sight which, once beheld, would leave its memory within them their whole lives through.

"Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea,"

runs the touching sailors' hymn, and to those who live about the mouth of a river like the Tyne it has a deep meaning and thrilling pathos, such as those who have never heard it sung when the tempest was blowing outside cannot fathom or understand. For storms only those who live inland have any longing, for though these have heard of the wildness, they do not know the terror of the sea.

AARON WATSON.

THE WEAR.

William of Malmesbury on the Wear--Its Associations--Upper
Weardale and its Inhabitants--Stanhope--Hunting the
Scots--Wolsingham--Bollihope Fell and the "Lang
Man's Grave"--Hamsterley--Witton-le-Wear--Bishop
Auckland--Binchester--Brancepeth Castle--The View from
Merrington Church Tower--Wardenlaw--Durham--St. Cuthbert--His
Movements during Life and Afterwards--The Growth of his
Patrimony--Bishop Carilepho and his Successors--The Battle of
Neville's Cross--The Bishopric in Later Times--The Cathedral,
Without and Within--The Conventual Buildings--The Castle--Bear
Park--Ushaw--Finchale--Chester-le-Street--Lumley and Lambton
Castles--Biddick--Hylton--Sunderland and the Wearmouths--The North
Sea.

"Britain," says William of Malmesbury, "contains in its remotest parts a place on the borders of Scotland where Bede was born and educated. The whole country was formerly studded with monasteries, and with beautiful cities, founded therein by the Romans; but now, owing to the devastations of the Danes and Normans, it has nothing to allure the senses. Through it runs the Wear, a river of no mean width and tolerable rapidity. It flows into the sea, and receives ships, which are driven thither by the wind, into its tranquil bosom." With the mending of a few phrases, almost the whole of this description by the twelfth-century chronicler could be transferred to the Wear, and to the Durham and Sunderland, of our own day. The Scots have earned the right to be classed with the Danes and Normans as the pillagers of the fanes and castles of this centre of the ecclesiastical and political power of ancient Northumbria. Their modern successors, as destroyers of objects that "allure the senses," are the mine-owner and the mill-owner, the railway and the blast-furnace, the chemical works and the dockyard. The march of modern industry has taken the place of the foray of the Borderers in the valley of the Wear, as on the neighbour streams of the Tyne and Tees; and, like the fires of Tophet, the smoke of its burning goes up day and night. Yet there are compensations. The Wear does not quarrel with the good fortune that has clouded its once pure air, muddied its whilom clear stream, and disturbed its "tranquil bosom" with keels that no longer depend upon the wind for their coming and going. The wealth that has come to it with peace and the development of its mineral resources and shipping trade is not despised, although it be soiled with honest coal-dust.

Besides, those who are acquainted with the Wear know that it has higher boasts than its importance as a channel of navigation and outlet of trade. Even in its busiest parts--from Sunderland and Monkwearmouth to Chester-le-Street and Lambton--venerable associations with feudal and monkish times struggle for notice with the evidences of modern prosperity and enterprise. At Durham decisive victory is won by the memories of the past over the grimy allurements of the present. From the Cathedral City we carry away impressions of the picturesque grouping of its old houses and bridges, of the ruins of its strong Norman keep built by the Conqueror to repress the turbulent townsmen, and of the magnificent fane which covers the bones of St. Cuthbert and of the Venerable Bede, rather than feelings of respect for its manufacturing industry, or even for its distinction as the seat of a Northern University. We remember the former glories of the County Palatine, the semi-regal power and pomp of its Prince-Bishops, the odour of miracle that drew throngs of pilgrims to its saintly shrine, and the treasures that had an equally potent attraction for grasping kings and barons and for marauding Borderers, in preference to statistical and other testimony of the growth of its trade and population. All up the valley of the Wear, to Bishop Auckland and Witton, and to Wolsingham and Stanhope, commerce has pushed its way, and the very sources of the stream have been probed by the lead-mining prospector. But beauty is there also, and in possession--the beauty of stately woods, embowering princely piles, like Brancepeth Castle, the very stones of which are part of the national history; of clear reaches of the river, sweeping under fragments of religious houses, such as Finchale Priory, gently draped by time with moss, lichen, and ivy; of old bridges and mills and quaint bright villages and wide stretches of fertile land. Beyond all these comes a wilder and barer district, where the hills draw closer to the river, and cultivation and population become more rare, and where at length, over the massive and rounded outlines of the fells, as we rise towards the great "dorsal ridge" of England, we catch glimpses of the Cumberland Mountains and of the Cheviots.

To trace the Wear upwards or downwards is like ascending or descending the stream of English history; from the busy present we move back into the feudal age, and at length into the quietude of primitive Nature. Primitive Nature holds her ground staunchly on Kilhope Law and the "Deadstones," and over other great bare tracks of rolling upland, near the meeting-point of the shires of Cumberland, Northumberland, and Durham, whence the Welhope, the Burnhope, the Rookhope, and a host of lesser moorland streamlets, bring down their waters to feed the infant Wear. In spite of the mining prospector and the railway projector, many of these fells and dales are more lonely to-day than they were three, or even ten centuries ago. Of the great tangle of lines that cover like a cobweb the lower valleys of the Tyne and Wear, only one or two outer filaments find their way into the neighbourhood of Upper Weardale, and all of them fail by many miles to reach the solitudes of Kilhope Moor.

_Walker & Boutall sc._

THE COURSE OF THE WEAR.]

The smoke of one of the great "workshops of England" may hang darkly upon the eastern horizon, but it is still too distant to pollute the pure air of the hills. Roads, indeed, cross these wildernesses of "ling" and peat-moss--west and east from Alston and Nenthead into Weardale; north and south, from the valleys of the Allen and Derwent to the Tees--through tracts that, in the early part of the century, were traversed only by bridle and footpaths; but these serve in a measure to concentrate any passing traffic, and to leave the open moors more lonely than before. The travelling chapman with his pack, the drover, and the gipsy, promise to become as extinct, as wanderers of the fells, as is the moss-trooper from the Debateable Land, or the pilgrim on the way to St. Cuthbert's shrine. Their occupants are the wild creatures of the hills and the flocks of black-faced sheep; with a sprinkling of shepherds, who preserve in their dialect and customs many relics of what Durham and the Wear were before the Coal Age. There are mining communities scattered up the valleys and along the hill-slopes; and at Burtreeford, a little above the bridge at Wearhead--the old rendezvous for the wrestling and other sports of Weardale Forest--is what is reported to be the richest vein of lead-ore in England. The lead-miners, like the other dalesmen, are in some ways a race apart, rough and unsophisticated, like the features of the district they occupy, but hearty, sincere, and full of sturdy independence of thought, and free from many of the vices which mark their class elsewhere. It is true now, as it was at the time of the "Raid of Rookhope," when the Tynedale reivers were seen pricking over the moss by Dryrig and Rookhope-head to harry the lands of the Bishopric, that

"The Weardale men they have good hearts,
And they are stiff as any tree."

The Middlehope and the Rookhope flow into the Wear from the north, below St. John's Chapel in Weardale, through some of the wildest country in the Forest; and still farther down, upon the same hand, Stanhope burn meets the parent stream at Stanhope. This ground was the favourite hunting-field of the old Bishops of Durham, and in Stanhope Park they had their lodge, where, at stated seasons, they came with a great crowd of retainers to chase the buck and roe. These gatherings are not yet wholly forgotten in the legends of the district. It was the duty of the Auckland vassals of the See to erect the necessary buildings for the housing of the Bishop and his joyous company, including a temporary chapel, where, it may be supposed, the rites of the Church had, on a good hunting day, rather perfunctory performance. The turners of Wolsingham provided the three thousand trenchers for the feeding in the open air; and the Stanhope villeins had the task of carrying the provisions and conveying the surplus venison and game to the palaces at Bishop Auckland and Durham. Often there was more serious sport afoot in Weardale Forest--for instance, when Edward III. hunted the nimble host of Scots whom Lord Moray and the Douglas brought across the Border in 1327 to pillage the Palatinate. The invaders were mounted on hardy little horses, and with their bags of oatmeal at their backs, were themselves as well prepared as their steeds to rough it and pick up their living on the moors. After having been frightened from the neighbourhood of Durham by Edward's approach, they led him a fine wild-goose chase over the hilly country between the Tyne and the Wear. At last the English van, under Rokesby, descried the Scots encamped upon a strong height south of the Wear. To the challenge to come down and fight upon the level, the enemy prudently replied that they were on English ground, and "if this displeased the King, he might come and amend it;" they would tarry for him. There were skirmishing and great noise and bonfires kept up all night; but next morning the King, surveying the ground from Stanhope Park, found that the Scots had shifted to another hill. On the twenty-fourth day of the chase, the English passed the river and climbed the mountain, but found only three hundred cauldrons and a thousand spits, with meat all ready for cooking; also ten thousand pairs of old boots and shoes of untanned hide. The invaders had cleverly outwitted their pursuers, and were already leagues off on their homeward way over Yadsmoss and the western extremity of the county, carrying with them hurdles they had made for crossing the marshy ground where the English could not follow.

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.