Bradley Arthur Granville
The Rivers and Streams of England
For many miles above Ripon, the lower part in fact of the famous Wensley dale, the Ure, sparkling often over broad shingly flats, runs through but a slightly depressed fertile valley – the back-lying moors not as yet pressing into prominent notice. Some half-dozen miles up the dale the old Church and ruined Tower of Tanfield stand by the river bank. The Tower and Gate House represent what is left of the ancient seat of the Marmions, and the Church contains many of their tombs. Scott has thrown such a halo round the name that, though we know out of his own mouth that the grim and haughty warrior who fell at Flodden was the creation purely of his own brain, I could tell of a true Marmion who, under a vow to carry a fair lady’s guerdon where danger was thickest, rode alone and in cold blood beneath the walls of Norham Castle against a whole squadron of Scottish horse, and was rescued alive by sheer good luck. Three miles higher up is the extremely picturesque little town of Masham, its old stone houses standing since times remote around the four sides of a great square, and flanked by a fine church in which are the monuments of Danby’s former lords, and an extremely fine recumbent alabaster effigy of Sir Thomas Wyvern, whose mother was a Scrope, which historic family also once owned the manor. In the churchyard my eye fell accidentally on two adjoining headstones. The one was “To the memory of Christopher Craggs of Gilling-by-the-foot,” the other to that of “Robert Ayscough of Grimes Hall,” and both ear and instinct seemed to provoke the irrepressible reflection that nowhere outside Yorkshire could such a sturdy harsh collection of names appear in combination. Four miles from Masham, too, is another famous abbey, that
of Jervaulx, to whose monks at one time this church and town belonged.
Wensley dale drags its beauteous length for many a long mile upward, noted for its cheeses, its cobby horses, and its peculiar breed of sheep; while, as only natural, so great a dairy country takes infinite pride in its cattle. The grass land is of the finest quality, the farms trim-looking, prosperous and well cared for. Middleham with its castle sits upon the stream. Bolton Castle is near by, where Mary, Queen of Scots, spent the first and pleasantest period of her confinement after leaving Carlisle, and made every young gallant in the neighbourhood her slave for life. At Bolton, too, a great square pile, the Scropes had flourished since the days of that Archbishop who shook the throne of the fourth Henry, and lost his head for it. Aysgarth Force – the latter word of Norse origin and the equivalent in North Yorkshire and Durham for waterfall – is the most conspicuous physical feature of the Ure, and with its peaty waters is most happily portrayed on these pages by Mr. Sutton Palmer. Far away in the high moors the Ure rises in a deep crevice of a bog appropriately named Hell gill. Camden alludes to its source as in “a dreary waste and horrid silent wilderness where goats, deer, and stags of extraordinary size find a secure retreat.” Nor has the region altered much since Camden wrote save in the nature of its feræ. If England has changed generally to such an extent that a mediæval monk of agricultural bent would not recognise it in those moors and mountains at least which we so rejoice in, and that the men of old not reared in them so hated, we may still see the landscape almost as they saw it in every detail.
It is worth noting that the traveller journeying by train from Leeds to Darlington crosses all of the rivers that water four out of the six West Yorkshire dales, and at almost equal interludes, namely, the Wharfe, the Nidd, the Ure, and the Swale; while the main line of the Great Northern and North Eastern only crosses the Ouse, which is bearing, however, the combined waters of all these tributary rivers seaward. Of these the last and the most northerly, the Swale, is claimed by those who live upon it to be the most consistently rapid. As the pace of all these Yorkshire rivers is sufficient to give them all the qualities and the beauty of mountain-born streams, such hair-splitting is of small interest. But the Swale can claim, at any rate, the most romantically situated and most picturesque old
town in Yorkshire, for Richmond might fairly be called a glorified Knaresborough. It stands just within the hill country looking westward over a sea of waving moorland interspersed with the contrasting luxuriance of old abiding places. The town climbs up a long slope crowned in turn by the massive Norman keep of the castle whose precincts cover a broad plateau, while its curtain walls hang over the brink of a rocky precipice, beneath which the Swale urges its clear impetuous streams round a partial circuit of the town. Richmond is the centre of an ancient district, once known and still often referred to as “Richmondshire,” a division of Northumbria, later on, with its two hundred manors, termed “The Honour of Richmond.” A marked historical peculiarity of this district is that from the Norman Conquest till the time of Henry VII. it was a fief of the Dukes of Brittany, who included the Earldom of Richmond in their titles. On this account Richmond became occasionally a fief of the King of France, not breaking with this curious foreign ownership till the Tudor period, when France and Brittany were united. This overlordship, however, so far as the life of the district was concerned, is a matter of purely academic interest. Many people will no doubt be surprised to learn that the nowadays more conspicuous Richmond on the Thames took its name while a hamlet from the Yorkshire town. While to turn to comparative but familiar trifles the well-known eighteenth-century song, “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” does not refer to a suburban maiden but to Frances l’Anson, the daughter of a rich London solicitor who had estates in Yorkshire and for a country residence “Hill House,” still standing on high ground above the town. The author was a barrister, one Leonard Mac Nally, who subsequently in 1787 married the subject of his impassioned ode, and the song was first sung at Vauxhall. It is worth noting too, perhaps, that Byron’s wife, Miss Milbanke, a yet more famous beauty, came also from the Hill House at Richmond.
The town is the centre of a great agricultural and pastoral district. Market-day in its spacious, old-fashioned market-place, on the high slope of the town, is an animated spectacle. Purveyors from the manufacturing districts, which, though left now a long way behind us in actual distance, are comparatively near by rail, throng here to purchase supplies. It is a country of small and moderate-sized farmers, all of whom, however, are of sufficient substance to
keep a trap of some kind, and in no market-town in any part of England within my experience, which is pretty considerable, have I ever seen such long arrays of unhorsed vehicles awaiting the termination of their owner’s business transaction or his social obligations. This is the most characteristic and spacious part of Richmond, and the stone houses of commerce which border it have an unmistakable flavour of antiquity in spite of the touching up and re-fronting which is inevitable to even a rural market-town not prepared to accept commercial and physical decay. On one side of the market-place is the ancient Church of the Trinity, between the tower and body of which an entire house and shop intervene, while the Gallery which adorns the interior rests upon more shops. The Curfew Bell is rung in this, which was probably the old parish church, both morning and evening, the situation of the house of the town-crier being so conveniently situated that he is said to be able to ring the morning bell from his bed, an advantage of incalculable significance. The parish church, however, stands near the foot of the hill, restored beyond the bounds of any great surviving interest. There is an old grammar school, too, with some new buildings erected in honour of a famous headmaster who flourished near a century ago, Dr. Tate, Canon of St. Paul’s, whose scholarship and personality made his name and his school famous throughout the north, and keeps his memory yet green. Most interesting of Richmond’s ecclesiastical monuments, however, is the fine Perpendicular tower that alone remains of its monastery of the Grey Friars. It was only just finished at the Dissolution, and is pathetically suggestive of the Litchfield tower at Evesham, and one or two other unconsciously expiring efforts of pious Abbots.
But the castle is, of course, the most interesting spot in Richmond, to a stranger at any rate, for the beautiful views, above all from the top of the keep over 100 feet high, which it affords of this moorland country on the one side and the fatter central vale of Mowbray on the other; and again away beyond this to the Cleveland Hills, and the high country on the north-east of the county, while on a clear day the towers of York Minster are distinctly visible. Up the valley of the Swale down which the surging waters of the river, after stormy weather, gleam in their green meadowy trough beneath the folding hills, the outlook hence is indeed a very memorable one. The high castle-yard
covers five acres, and though in partial use by the depôt of the Yorkshire regiment as sergeants’ quarters, is quiet and spacious enough and partly surrounded by the remains, in various stages of ruin, of ward rooms, chapels, state rooms, kitchens, and the curtain-walls of this once great and proudly placed fortress. Here again the artist will give a better notion of the distinction of Richmond, its fine pose above the river with the old bridge as a foreground, than any amount of description. But there are many old tortuous by-streets and wynds on the steep slopes of Richmond well worth exploring. And as “Brave Pudsay” made a famous leap from the top of a cliff into or over the Ribble, so here one Williance has likewise immortalised himself and given his name to a height above the Swale outside the town. This leap was almost contemporary with that of Pudsay, and some special providence indeed must have watched over these redoubtable Elizabethans. But Williance’s performance was not prompted by the pursuing peril of a sheriff’s posse, but by a runaway horse at a hunting party. The hero himself was a successful trader of Ripon, and, as indicated above, his horse bolted in a fog and leaped from the top of Whitecliff scaur, falling on a ledge 100 feet below and thence toppling over another precipice of similar height. The horse was killed, but the rider, marvellous to relate, escaped with a broken leg. Getting out his hunting-knife he ripped open the dead animal’s belly and put the injured limb inside it to keep the cold out till help arrived. This hardy and resourceful person saved his life at any rate, but not his leg, which was amputated. In gratitude for his miraculous escape he set up three stones upon the spot, inscribing them with his thanks to the Almighty. He buried his leg in the churchyard, and ten years later was himself laid beside it as Alderman of Richmond, a man of note and substance, as his will shows; and a piece of plate bequeathed to the Corporation is still in their possession.
Nothing need be said, or rather nothing can be said, here of the upper course of the Swale growing wilder as it approaches its romantic source upon the borders of Westmoreland in the clefts of the Pennine range above Kirby Stephen. A mile or more down the river from Richmond, set upon the edge of the stream, whose amber waters here as everywhere fret and foam beside them, stand the still ample ruins of Easby Abbey. Founded in 1152, it was richly endowed by the Scropes, many
of whom lie here in untraceable graves. It was occupied by Canons of the Præmonstratentian Order. The entrance gateway is still practically perfect, and throughout the buildings there are evidences of considerable magnificence: fine window tracery, groined arches, and the walls of one room of the monastery over 100 feet long, still in good preservation. Large portions of the Guesting hall, the Frater house, and the Chapter-house are standing. The mass, as a whole, makes a most imposing picture in this scene of quiet peace beside the babbling river.
To say that one Yorkshire dale is like another would be a poor way of expressing the fact that all are beautiful to those over whom moorlands and solitude cast their spell – the present writer, as no doubt will have been gathered from these pages, belonging very much to that particular following. So with the reader’s leave we will conclude this chapter on Yorkshire rivers with a few words about the most northerly, and in some ways the most distinguished of all of them, to wit, the Tees. However much moderns may carp at Sir Walter Scott’s free-flowing verse, he struck the note that flings the glamour of action and romance over natural scenery in a way that no other British poet of recent times has approached. Comparison, though, is of course absurd. It is easy enough to pick to pieces, under the canons of poetic art, Scott’s simple stirring rhyme and his pages of sustained cadence. Swinburne was undoubtedly a greater poet. Swinburne, too, was a Northumbrian of Northumbrians by birth, and has written several much-admired poems on the Borderland of his fathers, but the poet lived for choice in Putney. Genius though Swinburne was, it is not in the least likely that his verse will in any way contribute to the greater glory of Rede or Tyne – nor in his case because it lacks lucidity, cadence, or vigour, or is in the least obscure. Perhaps as a rough basis for deductions that we are not concerned with, and which, after all, are dependent on varying temperaments, one may remark that it is impossible to conceive Walter Scott living in a London suburb! The personality of the man is so absolutely in harmony with the atmosphere through which his stirring verses move. That atmosphere is essentially of the North – not the North of an August holiday as interpreted by some minor poet of “precious” utterance, who probably despises Scott, but a rugged all-the-year-round North, rejoiced in by a son of the soil with a mind imaginative,
robust, and racy. Here was a genius that baffles all the latter-day critics who, with easy logic, pulverise the hopelessly lucid and deplorably musical measures of Marmion or the Lady of the Lake. They have much within them, no doubt, but not the root of the matter to which Scott appeals, and it is their misfortune. They could not see the Tweed, the Tees, or a northern dale through the glasses in which Scott beheld them to save their lives. The sense is denied them, withered possibly in the attenuated atmosphere of a hot-house civilization. Whether the appeal of Scott can be called popular in the ordinary meaning, I doubt; but there are thousands of persons even yet to whom the sense is not denied, and to whom a landscape or a noble sweep of river valley is not merely a subject for a painter’s brush or for a sonnet, but something infinitely more. A sense of the past would inadequately perhaps represent the quality of the missing ingredient, and one, much more often implanted than cultivated in the human breast, which those denied it cannot distinguish from what appears to them a merely tiresome taste for history or archæology, but is in fact a deep emotion. Scott, of course, had it prodigiously, and his appeal is made to those who, without his gifts, share in this particular his temperament. To such at least he is infinitely and always stimulating. He is absolutely the right man in the right place. If his verse has the demerit of being lucid and musical, he is not assuming to interpret Nature, to suggest problems, or to pronounce conundrums. Your mood wants none of the two last, and may have its own conceptions of the first. But Scott is playing, as it were, a fine melody in harmony with the streams, the mountains, and the woods, and you feel that the musician is a master of his subject. The music may not be classical, but somehow it makes every subject that it touches classic. The Upper Tees has been thus illumined. Rokeby, to be sure, is not so inspiring a lay as Marmion, nor so familiar. But it has at least made the Tees classic ground. The songs, no doubt, are forgotten. Two or three generations have passed away since young ladies sang in drawing-rooms of how “Brignall woods were fresh and fair and Greta woods were green,” and that they would “rather rove with Edmund there than reign an English Queen,” and were succeeded at the piano by young gentlemen with melting tenors who replied with:
O Lady, twine no wreath for me,
Or twine it of the Cypress tree.
These were but the culled flowers of the lay which in six cantos achieved a wide popularity and took Scott sixteen months to write. For myself, I turn to the Tees with a touch of personal sentiment that in my case the other Yorkshire streams do not arouse – for the simple but sufficient reason that it was my privilege in youth, and with the glamour of Rokeby fresher, alas! than now, to follow the river more than once to its fountain-head, and to spend more than one night in rough quarters amid the dalesmen within sound of the thunder of Cauldron Snout.
The Tees rises under Crossfell, that monarch of the Pennine range whose rounded summit contrasts so painfully with the rugged crests of the Lake mountains, whose altitude it emulates beyond the Eden. But for the whole 10 miles of its course, before it makes the fine though broken plunge of 200 feet at Cauldron Snout, its surroundings are wild indeed – a waste of rolling moors and of black bogs carrying great stocks of grouse; while below Cauldron, in the partially tamed treeless valley spreading downwards to High Force, are specks of whitewashed houses flecking here and there the bare stone-wall country. As the Tees approaches the cliff at the Cauldron, it lingers for a long distance in a most unnaturally sluggish deep, black and gloomy in appearance from the peaty water and known as the Weald, or Wheale. Great trout, in contrast to the little fellows in the rapid streams below the falls, were supposed to lurk here, and expectancy, when a wind curled its surly surface, accompanied the alighting cast – with but slight justification, if memory serves me right. Some of the highest fells in Yorkshire are about us here, Micklefell reaching the altitude of 2600 feet. Below the falls the Maze beck runs in, of importance merely as dividing the counties of Westmoreland and Yorkshire, and, as the east bank of the Tees is in Durham, creating a point where three counties meet. An extremely probable incident used to be told of a sportsman who had flushed some grouse or partridges in Durham, having dropped his right bird in Westmoreland and his left in Yorkshire.
From Cauldron Snout to the great falls of the Tees at High Force is about 6 miles, and the bed of the river is thickly obstructed for much of the way by the roundest and most slippery boulders I have ever encountered in any mountain river, the brown water slipping in a thousand obscure runlets between them.
The whitewash which has always marked the Duke of Cleveland’s buildings is distinctly effective on the wide treeless waste, while some fine crags known as Falcon Clints follow its course and overlook the Tees on the Yorkshire side. High Force is fortunately depicted on these pages more effectively than words could serve such a purpose. Cauldron Snout is, I think, the highest cataract in England with any volume of water, and High Force is certainly the finest one on a good-sized river, no slight vaunt for a single stream within the space of half a dozen miles. A good deal has been done in the way of ornamental planting around High Force, while a hotel, once a shooting-box of the Duke of Cleveland, has stood here ever since I can remember.
One is now getting into the Rokeby country, for a few miles down is Middleton, a large village and the chief centre of Upper Teesdale. Looming on the west are the wild highlands of Lune and Stainmore forests. To the east are more wilds that lead over to the Wear valley at St. John’s and Stanhope, while near Middleton comes in the “silver Lune from Stainmore wild.” The Tees grows apace in volume, and at Barnard Castle both the famous fortress and the fast-swelling river contribute to the measure and quality of the striking picture they together make. The castle stands on the Durham bank of the Tees and derives its name from its Scottish founder, Barnard Balliol. Like every other northern fortress, particularly as one on the wrong side of the river, it had its troubles in the long Scottish wars and raids. The county of Durham, the fat palatinate of an always mighty bishop, was struck at by every generation of Scottish raiders that broke through the Northumbrian marches. Like many other castles in this country, too, it was brought to Richard III. by his wife Anne Neville. The visitor may still climb the tower with Scott’s Warder and survey the beauteous scene with, no doubt, a far greater measure of appreciation than any felt by that romantic figure.
Where Tees full many a fathom low
Wears with his rage no common foe,
Nor pebbly bank, nor sand-bed here,
Nor clay mound checks his fierce career.
Condemned to mine a channell’d way
O’er solid sheets of marble grey.
This applies to the course of the river a little below Barnard Castle, where the hard limestone is freely mixed with marble and gives a fine blend of colouring to the bed of the river.
From this same castle tower, too, in the words of Scott:
Nor Tees alone in dawning bright
Shall rush upon the ravished sight,
But many a tributary stream
Each from its own dark dell shall gleam.
But the Greta, on whose banks Rokeby, as well as the fortified manor-house of Mortham, still in good repair, are situated, comes in just below Barnard Castle; a lovely stream roaring between rocky terraces, sweeping the base of limestone cliffs and burrowing in the dark shadow of luxuriant woods. The beautiful grounds of Rokeby which include the Greta are much, I think, as they were when Scott stayed here with his friend Mr. Morritt the owner.
There has always seemed to me a suggestion of bathos in associating the scene of Rokeby and Greta banks with Nicholas Nickleby and the hideous but world-famous picture of Dotheboys Hall. But the great old bare posting-house at Greta Bridge, where Dickens stayed, is still standing and much furbished up as the “Morritt Arms.” There seems no doubt that this Arcadian corner of Yorkshire had a justifiably evil reputation for institutions of the kind. In a letter written from here by Dickens to his wife but eight years after Rokeby was published, he describes with some humour having actually travelled up on the coach with the proprietress of one of them who gradually drank herself into a state of happy insensibility. One would fain, I think, associate the Tees with the flavour of Rokeby rather than of Dotheboys Hall, with Bertram rather than with Squeers! A spot more profoundly out of touch with a Dickens atmosphere it would be difficult to find in all England. The ruins of Eggleston Abbey are here too on the banks of Tees, and the remains of a Roman station at Greta Bridge. These upper reaches by no means exhaust either the beauty or the interest of the Tees, but henceforth the scenery becomes lower and less inspiring, and the high romance fades as the river pursues a more conventional course towards the busy town of Darlington.
