The Rivers and Streams of England

Northumberland, Yorkshire, Wales, and other regions of like character are the true land of the angler. Wiltshire, Hampshire, and their prototypes have great reputations. But the native to any extent worth mentioning is not a trout fisherman. He neither knows nor cares aught about it, nor has any opportunity for contracting the habit or love of trouting. The conditions are all against him. The fat trout of these “dry-fly” countries, to put the matter in technical but concrete fashion, are the quarry of a few individuals: groups of men mainly strangers, or, in any case of necessity, persons of means or the friends of such. It is like pheasant-shooting. The farmer and the well-to-do tradesmen, much less the labourer or mechanic of these counties, have scarcely more instinct for fly-fishing than if they lived in the fens. But in counties like Northumberland and many others dealt with in this book, the rivers are objects of popular affection or at least of general understanding. Every third man can throw a fly in some sort of fashion, or cast a worm for trout in clear water. Opportunities in recent years, owing partly to the increase of fishing among

wealthy townsmen and partly to an ignorance of the whole subject on the part of many new landowners, have been enormously curtailed for the humbler sportsman. But the instinct is an inheritance of all classes in those counties where hills mount high and streams run fast. The North Tyne is a good salmon and sea-trout river and a splendid trout stream. It is a little remote, and withal, of late years, somewhat exclusive; but the Coquet is naturally as good. It has always been, and even still is, more accessible to the Northumbrian angler. The salmon, the bull trout, the sea trout, and the brown trout thrive in its clear mountain waters.

Now the laymen, even such as are in the highest degree susceptible to the charms of Nature and scenery, cannot easily realise the hold that streams of this type and their localities acquire over the affections and imaginations of anglers; not all, of course, for the fraternity includes every kind of temperament. But to a considerable proportion, and by no means of necessity only those whom education and culture make susceptible to such emotion, the appeal of the river, quite apart from the mere act of killing fish, is overmastering. It is no figure of speech but a mere simple statement of fact that, compared to the trout fisherman’s familiarity with a stream, the relationship of the rest of the world to it is a mere nodding acquaintance. Long days are spent in the closest intimacy with its ever-changing surface and the ever-changing melodies it plays. Miles of water, much of it buried in woody dingles from every eye but the fisherman’s, its only visitor, are traversed by him on the bank edge, or in the stream itself, over and over again, till every eddy and pool, every rock and pendent bough, becomes printed in the mind, and hung, so to speak, in its picture gallery. Weeks or months of days, from youth to age, on many streams gives the properly constituted disciple of old Izaak a feeling towards them that can have no counterpart outside the craft, and at the best could be but vaguely realised.

A man would be a dull dog to be continuously exposed, in what are, primâ facie, among the happiest hours of his life, to surroundings that are the most perfect of all Nature’s efforts and not grow to associate them with something more than a mere love of killing things; and there are fewer dull dogs among trout fishermen, one may fairly hazard the statement, than in the ranks of any other sport or pastime. There is a poetry in all field-sports. But in most others there are also accessories which attract the crowd, which conduce to vanity, or popularity, or give a leg up to the social climber. There is usually an audience of some sort, the applause of a circle or a multitude. The fisherman, in this respect at least, is beyond suspicion. He is at any rate genuine and the real thing. Very often, indeed, he is a poet, generally of course an inarticulate one, and unconscious of any such label. But his gratification belongs in part to the higher senses: the romance of the river is strong within him, and it would be strange indeed, seeing the sort of scenes among which he spends his hours, if it were otherwise. The fishermen of the Coquet, however, are not all inarticulate. The river has invoked a good deal of verse on the part of its frequenters, which, if not Swinburnian, is melodious and from the heart, and reveals the love of the Northumbrian angler for its winsome streams. Heaven forbid I should suggest that only an angler can appreciate the glories of a mountain stream; I have but attempted to indicate the more intimate affection for it that men must have, and do have, whose happiest hours are associated with its inmost haunts and with its thousand moods, and whose very ears sing in the evening of long days with its unending melodies.

In the northern counties, as in Wales, the rivers play a greater part in local lore and in the affections of the people generally than in the south. They are intertwined with their legends and their folklore, their ordinary interests. They stimulate the local imagination by their capricious moods, their fury in flood-time, their tempestuous qualities. Even the untutored rustic, one may think, feels insensibly the influence of the cataract, or the charm of the summer shallows where as an urchin he paddled or tickled trout. They riot beside his village street, and their little tributaries plunge beside his cottage door. The southern or midland river is apt to steal noiselessly through interdicted water-meadows, and seems to feel neither storm nor drought till one day, perchance, the valley gradually fills with gently oozing water that recedes with unexciting deliberation.

The considerable remains of Brinkburn Priory, an Augustinian house, stand near the banks of the Coquet, while at Felton Bridge, a village of some note in Northumbrian story, it has been forced to cut a channel through hard ledges of rock, which results in some fine grouping of foam and foliage. Our illustration, however, represents the final stage of the river, where in its more peaceful mood it winds beneath the renowned Castle of Warkworth towards the sea. Though abandoned for centuries as a residence, its great Keep, built in the third Edward’s stirring days by a Percy in star-shape fashion, with eight lofty clustered towers, is practically intact and eminently imposing, while some of the outer walls and other buildings still survive around the great outer bailly. Originally a fortress and manor of the Claverings, it was granted by the same Edward to Henry Percy in payment for his expenses as Warden of the March, and also as a recognition of his share in the defeat of the invading Scots at Neville’s Cross, while the King and his army were fighting the campaign of Crecy. It was their chief seat, rather than Alnwick, for some generations, including that of Hotspur. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, here lays the scene in which that fiery soul is planning his intended revolt against Henry the Fourth which ended on the fatal field of Shrewsbury, and repels his curious wife’s persistent sallies anent his moody ways and broken, restless nights. The second part of the same play also opens here at Warkworth, where the old Earl awaits the news from Shrewsbury, and receives the messenger announcing the rout of his friends and Hotspur’s death.

Warkworth, like Alnwick, fell into decay during the long absence of the Percys from the north, a compulsory absence but little broken for generations, and wholly due to the fear of them felt by the Tudors, who were strong enough to coerce those they feared. When in the person of the first Duke they returned during the eighteenth century to a permanent residence in Northumberland, it was a mooted question whether Alnwick or Warkworth should be restored, the former, as we know, being selected. And if the Alne, winsome little river though it be, cannot compare with the Coquet, it has some compensation in the miles of beautiful and diversified park it waters, and in the honour of laving the feet of the proudest and greatest castle in all England. On arriving beneath the high-perched towers of Warkworth, the Coquet has relapsed into a smooth gliding stream, and in a red sandstone cliff abutting on its banks, just above the castle, is a quite remarkable cell or hermitage, like those on the Severn near Bewdley. But this one is more elaborate by far, and uncanny to a high degree. A flight of steps hewn in the rock mounts up from the river bank to a cave, entered by an ecclesiastically-fashioned porch. The interior itself was cunningly wrought some six centuries ago into the form of a chapel of Gothic design, some twenty feet by seven, with a two-light window, an altar, and a vaulted roof with central bosses supported by short circular columns, all being hewn out of the solid rock. To the south of this altar, under the window, is the rather gruesome explanation of these pious labours. For here lies the rude and greatly worn figure of a female, with a man seated at her feet resting his head upon his hand, and though much worn by time still eloquently indicating an attitude of remorse and despair. Over the outside of the door is carved a Latin inscription signifying, “My tears have been my meat day and night,” while within is another chamber of a ruder kind.

The story runs thus, that the man is a Bertram of Bothal and the lady a Widdrington, his intended bride, whom he killed by mistake, and then, fashioning this hermitage, mourned her here in seclusion for the remainder of his life. How the mistake arose and the tragedy came about is too long a tale for these pages. Hotspur’s son, when an exile in Scotland, after his father’s death and attainder, is supposed to have contracted a stealthy marriage with a daughter of the rival Marcher house of Neville, whom he afterwards publicly espoused, in this same hermitage. Just beneath the cliff is a small ruinous building on the river bank, built of hewn rock in the fifteenth century; concerning this, however, there is no mystery though some interest, as the cell of a priest attached to the Percy family under ordinary conditions, which are still preserved in writing. The inevitably sombre, but in a sense rather picturesque little town of Warkworth, with its market cross, straggles up from the fifteenth-century bridge, guarded by an old turreted gateway, to the castle in most suggestively feudal fashion. So soon after this does the Coquet join the sea that Warkworth considers itself something of a watering-place, though no disturbing evidences of anything of the kind mar the bygone flavour of dominant castle and tributary townlet which it still so pleasantly retains. Passengers to and from Scotland on the main line must assuredly be familiar with these proud towers standing out above the bare fields, a mile or two eastward against the sea. Not so obvious is a beautiful glimpse of the Coquet which must be snatched at precisely the proper moment. But as the train crosses the river some four miles from its mouth, it may be seen for a few brief seconds down a long straight half-mile trail of glancing light between luxuriant walls of woodland.

The Till, though not one of the artist’s subjects on these pages, must have a brief word, if only because it is quite unlike any other river on the Border, and is, moreover, the only English stream that feeds the Tweed. Rising, like the Alne, and not far from it, in the Cheviots about half-way down their course, it fails to achieve the other’s feat and break through that isolated central block of North Northumbrian moors between the Cheviots and the sea. Thus baffled and turning away to the north quite in its infancy, it runs along the eastern base of the Cheviots to the Tweed. Passing Chillingham and thence to Wooler, the Till winds with extraordinary contortions through broad level meadows, the great humpy masses of the Northern Cheviots, reaching here the height of 2700 feet, towering majestically above it. Rippling gently over gravelly shallows of singularly lustrous colouring and many hues, it lingers long and constantly, so slight is the fall, in sullen deeps, into which the high crumbling red sandstone banks are continually toppling. In actual appearance the Till is almost a replica of those famous Hereford grayling rivers the Teme and the Lugg, and, as is but natural, that useful and handsome fish, which was only introduced here fifteen years ago, now swarms in its streams somewhat to the ousting of the trout, its natural denizens, and no doubt to the disgust of its autumn visitors, the salmon and the sea-trout. These, however, pass on for the most part up the brawling tributaries which the grayling do not face, and it is an interesting sight to watch the “sea-fish,” as inland Northumbrians call the salmon tribe, leaping the dam on the Wooler burn in a half flood.

Mild as it looks and gently as it murmurs, the Till is formidable in flood for the wide grazing lands it submerges at short notice, when the fountains of the Cheviots are loosed. Beautiful burns hurry down from the not very distant heart of this narrow but lofty northern point of the range, into the Till, babbling through deep glens, clad like the hills above with bracken, sprinkled in fine confusion with birch and alder, and littered with fragments of grey rock. The stone bridge over which Surrey led the English army as he marched down its valley to Flodden, whose high green ridge confronts you everywhere, still spans the Till. Above it, abrupt and bare, like a lower buttress to the Cheviot range, rises Homildon Hill, where Hotspur defeated ten thousand Scots under another Douglas with fearful slaughter by archers alone, and no great force of them, without moving a single horseman from his ranks – the only instance of the kind known, according to experts, in mediæval warfare; a battle by no means after Hotspur’s heart, extraordinary triumph though it was, and more particularly as most of these triumphant archers were Welsh mercenaries. But the Till, opening straight to Scotland and to the Tweed, is literally steeped in such doings, and lest I find myself drifting into the tale of Flodden Field, in which the “Sullen Till” played so notable a part, it will be prudent to cross the watershed at once without further delay or palaver. Anent the leisurely habits of the Till, however, they are commemorated on the Border by the time-honoured jibe with which Tweed greets the appearance of its only English tributary, and the latter’s effective rejoinder: —

Said Tweed to TillWhat gars ye rin sae still?Said Till to TweedThough ye rin wi’ speedAnd I rin slaw,Whar ye droon ae manI droon twa.

It is in those central highlands south of the Tyne, made up of portions of the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Westmoreland, and Cumberland, that the Tees, with its tributaries the Greta and Lune, also the Swale and Lancashire Lune, and last, but not least, the Eden, all find their source, not merely in this wild upland, but actually within the confines of west Westmoreland. The Eden, though nowhere touching that famous district known as Lakeland which the two counties mostly share, is by far the foremost river in Westmoreland or Cumberland. The very fact of its propinquity to the Lake District makes for its isolation as regards the stranger in search of the picturesque, just as the Pennines, which at Crossfell almost touch 3000 feet, are obscured by the near neighbourhood of the Lake mountains, whose shapes, like those of Wales, as much as their heights, exalt them beyond comparison with the most inspiring and the wildest of round-capped moorlands. Between the Pennines and the Lakeland mountains, always with a north-westward course, the Eden urges its quickly gathering waters through Westmoreland, with a swish and swirl and ripple rather than any great show of agitation, traversing the pleasant pastoral and agricultural

valley amid which Appleby, the little capital of Westmoreland, lies astride the stream. To the east of the Eden for practically its whole journey to Carlisle, spreads an unbroken wilderness of moor and fell. Upon the west, from Kirkby Stephen, above which it rises, through Appleby to near Penrith, and reaching to the edge of the Lake country, lies a picturesque, broken region of small valleys, secluded villages, and farms. From the Pennines and its eastern fringes, numerous becks hurry to the Eden, and from the west, by long courses with the grain of the country, many little rivers eventually reach the generous shingly bed of the same hospitable stream. From Penrith, on the edge of Cumberland and but four miles to the west, comes down the beautiful river Eamont, which is the outlet of Ulswater, just as the Lowther, another arrival at the same moment, brings the burden of Haweswater. This Westmoreland Eden has also a particular interest as the open valley of the West Marches and the natural channel for such Scottish raids as broke past Penrith and its surrounding group of fortified houses. This whole corner, indeed, between the Eden and the latter town and just around it still proclaims to the observant wanderer what a vital spot it was. The fortified granges of Yanwath and Blencowe, the perfect little fortalice of Dacre, the numerous peel-towers such as Clifton, and those embodied in the later mansions of Brougham, Newbiggin, or Hutton John, and the fine old red ruins of Brougham Castle itself, with many others that recur to memory, lend an abiding interest to this particular neighbourhood. A broad gap was this between the rugged chaos of Lakeland, which offered the Scots nothing to the south but a possible ambush of hardy mountaineers, and the Pennine wilderness upon the inner side. Over the levels of central Cumberland horsemen could travel anywhere once Carlisle was evaded or disposed of. The narrow streets of Penrith again, all converging into open spaces for the better safe-guarding of herds of cattle and other valuables, are significant enough of the perilous days of old for the few to whom such things appeal, whilst up on the crest of the ridge above the town there is still the iron cage in which flared the beacon light of war, when all heights to the northward twinkled with the ominous news that the Scots had crossed the Solway.

In broad and surging current the Eden now courses between more precipitous steeps with greater commotion and of more inspiring character than marked the pleasant but gentler murmurs of its previous wanderings. At Kirkoswald, Crossfell displays its smooth but lofty brow, the virtual peer of Skiddaw and Helvellyn in all but the little matter of quality and distinction, in something like intimacy with the river, and spreads its skirts almost to its eastern shore. At Kirkoswald, too, is an ancient monastery, developed at the Dissolution into a manor house acquired by the Featherstonhaughs, who still possess it, and on the hill slope are the scant remnants of “one of the fairest castles,” says an Elizabethan writer, “that ever eyes beheld.” Won by a Dacre, who raiding south on a certain occasion instead of north, carried off its heiress from Warwick Castle, it gathers some added interest from having been the fortress whence the Dacre of Flodden fame marched to that immortal field with his thousand Cumbrian horse, the only cavalry on the English side. A detached church belfry, standing high and alone near the castle site, gives pause to the ecclesiologist as an almost unique spectacle in the north, and from its summit presents a delightful view to such chance visitors as might light upon Kirkoswald of the Eden valley and the Pennines. The river has already swept past Salkeld, with its red embattled church tower and traditions of Dick Whittington and the first Lord Ellenborough, who were both born here. Nearly opposite Kirkoswald is Lazonby, on whose high banks our artist, it will be seen, has set up his easel. Below Kirkoswald is the nunnery, an ancient manor house celebrated for its walks and woods and waterfalls upon the banks of the river. Farther on towards Carlisle is Ormathwaite, where for a time the Eden ceases from troubling and is overhung by crags and woods and the ancient castle of the Skeltons. Just before reaching Carlisle the Irthling, a mountain river of some length and volume, comes down from the wildest portion of the old Middle March, just north of the Upper Tyne beyond Gilsland and about Bewcastle, whose moss-troopers and cattle-lifters were perhaps the most incorrigible of all English Borderers. It is a common saying among old men, with probably a half truth in it, that the King’s writ within their memory did not run in Bewcastle. And at Carlisle, too, comes in the Petteril, which has run northward from near Penrith through the vanished forest of Inglewood, a parallel course to the Eden and quite near to it. Here the Calder arrives almost at the same moment from the far back of Skiddaw Forest,

watering in its infancy the hill village of Caldbeck, which John Peel has made famous, and murmuring by the churchyard where that hero lies beneath a tombstone decorated with the emblems of the chase. The Eden then, it will have been gathered, is a great and important river, as our English standards go, watering a broad region of singular beauty and romantic interest, and drawing tribute both from the Lake country, the Pennines, and the lower Cheviots.

The city of Carlisle, which rises on its sandstone ridge above the Eden, steeped in the stirring deeds of centuries, must for that very reason be passed lightly by. The river, however, it should be noted, had its share in the Roman wall of Hadrian, which crossed it here upon a bridge and finished at Stanwix, just below Carlisle, where stood the Roman station of Lugubalium. Roman Carlisle with its camps, roads, and garrisons, was of extreme importance, but the later Carlisle, from the time when it ceased to be Scottish ground in the thirteenth century till the rebellion of 1745, when so many things happened here, is altogether too racy and stirring a subject to mock at with a page or paragraph. In connection, however, with this last leisurely progress of the Eden to the Solway estuary, it is worthy of note that the seven or eight miles of country through which it winds, the corner lying between Carlisle and Scotland, that is to say, is a dead level; a melancholy expanse of reclaimed moss, as the prevalent fir-woods significantly proclaim, while peat hags even yet show here and there between the grey fallows and pale pastures. It was along here, too, just to the east of the Eden, that runaway couples in former days galloped hot foot before their pursuers to Gretna Green, which lies at the farther end of it. But as a matter of fact this belt of level country, over which the castle walls of Carlisle look so proudly to the Scottish hills across the Solway, strikes a perfect note in this romantic and significant Border topography. The Eden could not possibly contrive a more harmonious finish than in this complete change of scene and demeanour, this silent progress through unadorned, infertile, almost uncared-for looking levels, that for this very reason seem to keep a firmer hold of the grim spirit of the past; a tramping ground of hostile armies, a cockpit of lawless clan warfare, a treacherous galloping ground of the moss-trooper with the rope dangling for him on Carlisle Castle, each in their day and generation. This even still rather thinly peopled

region terminates near the mouth of Esk, where Solway Moss of old renown, bristling with scrub pine-trees and waist deep in spongy heather, still spreads a quaking bog for many a level mile, while the once threatening dales of Esk and Liddel open significantly in whole or part for any traveller with a soul within him who pursues the shaking highway across the moss. But these levels of the Eden and the Solway mouth are even in a mere physical sense a fitting complement to this wide prospect of the Western March. For away in their rear, where Carlisle springs at its southern edge, and away again behind the low indefinite undulations of agricultural as opposed to mountainous Cumberland, the pale cone of Skiddaw with its lesser satellites leaps high into the southern sky. On the north the dark Dumfriesshire moors fill a long horizon with their billowy forms, and all about the mouth of the Eden are the wide-spreading yellow sands of the Solway estuary, white with sea-fowl and blended with blue waters just flaked, as they come back to me, with the snowy caps of a breezy June morning. Here, perhaps, under other conditions, the more sombre memories of Redgauntlet would be uppermost, or on the bridge of Esk the shadows of Dandie Dinmont and Guy Mannering might displace the sterner realities of the Grahams of Netherby – those watch-dogs of the Western March – of Musgraves, Armstrongs, or Scotts of Buccleuch. The Eden, being a clean, unpolluted river, is naturally the haunt in season of the salmon and sea-trout. But above all it is a trouting stream of the very highest class, often ranked by those well qualified to judge as the best of its kind in the whole north of England, yielding to the expert hand heavy creels of fish, which average two to the pound, a standard which the habitué in rapid waters knows well is more often a paper than an actual one.