Nithsdale

“ The sight of a solitary soldier made them desist. As anyone caught would certainly have been hanged, and as anyone who tarried might have been shot, the Jacobite sympathisers cleared away from the hill with remarkable alacrity.
LADY NITHSDALE.
On the evening before the execution a little drama was being performed, the success of which is altogether inexplicable. Lady Nithsdale, accompanied by Mrs. Mills, in whose house she lodged, and by a Mrs. Morgan, alias Hilton, went in a hackney-coach to the Tower. ”

“ Mrs Morgan, when she had come into the prisoner’s room, took off the outer dress she was wearing over her own, and into this Lord Nithsdale was duly introduced. Then Lady Nithsdale asked Mrs Morgan to go out and bring in her maid Evans. “I despatched her safe,” she writes, “and went partly downstairs to meet Mrs Mills, who held her handkerchief to her face, as was natural for a person going to take a last leave of a friend before his execution ”

“ He is a hard worker in the field by dint of necessity, but his strenuous and impetuous mind is set upon other thoughts than the plough, as he drives his share along the Nithsdale uplands. It is exactly the season of the year that he delights in. "There is scarcely any earthly object," he has written, "which gives me more—I do not know if I should call it pleasure, but something that exalts me, something that enraptures me—than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation on a cloudy winter's day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, or raving over the plains.... ”

“ But now it was but a miserable roadside clachan of some few low huts, with fodder for neither man nor beast.
As we rode we looked well around us, for we were in an exceeding dangerous part of our journey. To the right lay Abington and the lower Clyde valley, where my sweet cousin and his men held goodly fellowship. Even now they would be buckling saddle-straps, and in two hours would be in the places through which we were now passing. To the left was the long pass into Nithsdale, where half a score of gentlemen did their best to instil loyalty into the Whigs of the hills. ”

“ By the assembly held at Montrose in March 1599–1600 Welch was again appointed one of the visitors for Nithsdale (Calderwood, vi. 23) , and in August of the same year he was transferred to the parish of Ayr as assistant to John Porterfield, on whose death in 1604 he was chosen to succeed him. Before this the preaching of Welch had begun to attract such crowds that the town council on 26 May 1603 resolved to build a new church. ”

“ His description of Nithsdale, with drawings, &c., was presented to the Society of Antiquaries in 1793; and volume iv. of the ‘Memoirs’ of the Manchester society contains his dissertations on the ancient carved stones in Scotland and on one in Dumfriesshire. Riddell gave much help to Francis Grose [q. v.] , who visited him at Friars Carse in 1789, and he corresponded with Richard Gough [q. v.] John Nichols [q. v.] had a large collection of his letters. Riddell was granted the degree of LL.D. at Edinburgh in 1794 (Nichols, Lit. Anecdotes, vi. 304, viii. 475) . ”

“ Mills, who was ‘in the family way,’ and of the figure as well as height of Lord Nithsdale, wore clothes which she was to give up to the prisoner, dressed in which he was to attempt to make his escape! The tall and slender Morgan wore, under her riding hood, a second hood and other clothes in which Mrs. Mills was to be attired, after giving up her own dress to my lord. ‘The poor guard were not so150 strictly on the watch as they had been,’ wrote the countess, in after years, to her sister. They seem really to have been rather confederates than guards. ”

“ Severe strictures were made on these memoirs by William Beckford of Fonthill. ‘Re-impressions from Thomas Worlidge's Etchings of Antique Gems,’ 1823, 4to, originally published in 1768. ‘A Letter from Winifrid Herbert, Countess of Nithsdale, to her sister, Lady Lucy Herbert, Abbess of English Augustine nuns at Bruges, containing a circumstantial account of the Escape of her Husband, William Maxwell, fifth Earl of Nithsdale, from the Tower of London on the 12th of February, 1716–17,’ London, 1827, dedicated to Mary, marchioness of Chandos. ‘An Ancient Feudal War-song ... ”

“ A Roman Catholic upon the frontiers of Scotland, who headed a very considerable party, a man whose family had always signalized itself by its loyalty to the royal house of Stuart, would," she argued, "become a very agreeable sacrifice to the opposite party. They still," so thought Lady Nithisdale, "remembered the defence of the castle of Carlaverock against the republicans by Lord Nithisdale's grandfather, and were resolved not to let his grandson escape from their power." ”

“ Ennerdale, wild and primitive, its Pillar Rock rising like a pulpit in the midst; Wastdale, plain to the verge of ugliness, even as an unfurnished room is plain, yet full of the sense of the great heights that wall it round; the solitude of upper Eskdale, with its mighty waterfalls and mountain pools; the more sociable Duddon, and the pastoral greenery of Langdale. Surely nowhere else in Great Britain can we stand on a hill-top with seven such valleys at our feet! ”

“ At Threshfield we turn to the left and are in Wharfedale.
The names of all these Yorkshire Dales are very familiar in our ears. Wharfedale, Wensleydale, Swaledale, Teesdale—they are all words with a charm in them. And here, as we glide out of a wood, is Wharfedale spread before us; and we know at last that it is not only in the name that the charm lies.
The river flows below through the wide valley and winds away in shining curves into the far distance, past the bluff outline of Kilnsey Crag, past the dark belt of firs, till it vanishes among the folds of the jewelled hills. ”

“ His escape, according to Lady Nithisdale, both infuriated and alarmed George the First, "who flew into an excessive passion," as she expresses it, on the news transpiring; and exclaimed that he was betrayed, and that it could not have been done without a confederacy. He instantly dispatched messengers to the Tower, to give orders that the prisoners who were still there, might be the more effectually secured. He never forgave Lady Nithisdale ”

“ Tisdale brought the horses around a sand-pit in the road which began to parallel the river, rolling wide and swift and intensely blue, where the rapids ceased, then he glanced at the other shore, where fantastic columns and broken walls of granite rose like a ruined city through a red glory.
"It is worth coming from New York to see, but you have traveled abroad. Do you know, that disappoints me. A true American should see America first." ”

“ It is outside the immediate fringe of such a river that local character and features assert themselves. The South Tyne, from Haltwhistle to Hexham, sweeps bravely down a valley of grass farms, with here and there a village of stern uncompromising stone and slate set on its banks. There is no charm of village architecture in Northumberland, or scarcely any. Nor on the lofty slopes of Tynedale does the rose-embowered, orchard-girdled, thatched-roof cot that Wordsworth saw on the high terraces of the Wye, and sang of, send up its smoke wreaths. ”

“ After a visit to the George Liddells at Durham, I went on to Northumberland.
To my Mother.
“Westgate Street, Newcastle, May 6, 1862.—Yesterday afternoon I came here, to the old square dark red brick house of the Claytons, who are like merchant-princes in Newcastle, so enormous is their wealth, but who still live in the utmost simplicity in the old-fashioned family house in this retired shady street. The family are all remarkable. First comes Mr. John Clayton of Chesters, the well-known antiquary of North Tyne, a grand, sturdy old man, with a head which might be studied for a bust of Jupiter ”

“ But the main glory of Liddesdale is the romance [Pg 126] that hangs over it. There is probably no parish in Scotland—for be it remembered that Liddesdale is virtually one parish—which could show such an extraordinary number of peel-houses to its credit. Their ruins, or where these have disappeared, the sites are pointed out with surprising frequency. A distinctively Border district, this was to be expected, and the like is true of the English side also. ”

“ NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE. “Her dusky hair in many a tangle clings About her, and her looks, though stern and cold, Grow tender with the dreams of by-gone days.” —W.W. Tomlinson.
The outward signs of “by-gone days,” in the Newcastle of to-day, with the one notable exception of the Castle, must be diligently sought out amongst the overwhelming mass of what is often called “rampant modernity,” of which the town to-day chiefly consists. The modernity, however, is not all bad, as this favourite phrase would imply; much of it is doubtless regrettable and a very little of it perhaps inevitable ”

“ For weeks I wandered the streets of the suburb, haunted by the spirit of some part of Nethermere. As I went along the quiet roads where the lamps in yellow loneliness stood among the leafless trees of the night I would feel the feeling of the dark, wet bit of path between the wood meadow and the brooks. The spirit of that wild little slope to the Mill would come upon me, and there in the suburb of London I would walk wrapt in the sense of a small wet place in the valley of Nethermere. ”

“ The South Tyne has journeyed from Cross Fell, where it takes its rise, northward through a corner of Cumberland, past Garrygill and Alston, until it enters Northumberland where the Ayle Burn on the one hand, and the Gilderdale Burn on the other, flow into it. Here is Whitley Castle, where was a small Roman station called Alio, and Kirkhaugh Church, charmingly placed on the bank of the river, which continues its course northward past Slaggyford, Knaresdale, Eals, and Lambley, till it flows past the fine Castle of Featherstone, and the ruins of Bellister, where it turns eastward to Haltwhistle. ”

“ Over all this district, indeed, that seems to have been the case. Chapels were numerous among these hills; in this part of Liddesdale there were no fewer than five, and the Wheel Chapel itself is not more than six miles or 380so, as the crow flies, from Southdean, where it is certain that about the date of the battle of Otterburne the population was much more dense than it is at the present day.
What changes little more than one hundred years have wrought in this countryside. Six years before the Statistical Account of 1798 was penned, there were neither roads nor bridges in Liddesdale ”

“ For a year the great house rising on the summit of Prospect Hill had been an object of interest and observation, and a chief subject for talk to the quiet country neighborhood surrounding it. Hillsdale was an old town—a still, steady-going farming place—where the young men ploughed the unwilling fields, and coaxed reluctant crops out of the hard-hearted New England soil, as fathers and grandfathers had done before them. But in all the generations since the town was settled, no one had ever thought of building on Prospect Hill. ”

“ Our greatness shall appall,
And their topsails straight they'll lower to the lords of the Tyne.
'Twas thus with idle rumours poor gentlemen delighted,
The honest men of North Shields to fancy gave the rein;
Sad proof that when ambition with folly is united,
Astonishing chimeras oft occupy the brain.
But soon their joy was banish'd,
Soon each illusion vanish'd,
For news arriv'd the Butcher the Branch could not obtain.
Deep, deep in the dumps,
(After playing all his trumps)
Just as branchless as he went he was 'toddling hyem' again,
Newcastle, thou dear canny town! ”

“ Before retracing our steps towards Craven Arms, we strike up into the woods above Whettleton, in order to visit Norton Camp, an early British earthwork altered and adapted, as is supposed, by the Romans, which commands both the ancient Watling Street, and the Castle road going into Corve Dale. Its mounds are large and lofty, especially upon the western side, where the hill falls steeply to the plain, and we obtain glimpses through the twinkling foliage of far-away heights, extending fold upon fold to the horizon. ”

“ The set of humanity outward from the City is as a set of prisoners departing from gaol, and dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state-dwelling.
On such an evening, when the city grit gets into the hair and eyes and skin, and when the fallen leaves of the few unhappy city trees grind down in corners under wheels of wind, the schoolmaster and the pupil emerged upon the Leadenhall Street region, spying eastward for Lizzie. ”

“ Further up the valley, where the woods began, you could see the chimneys of the White House where Squire Chelwood lived, and about three miles further on still was Dorminster, a good-sized market-town. But in Wensdale itself there was only a handful of thatched cottages scattered about here and there round the vicarage. Life was so regular and quiet there that you might almost tell the time without looking at the clock. When you heard cling, clang, from the blacksmith’s forge, and quack, quack, from the army of ducks waddling down to the river, it was five o’clock. ”

“ THE THREE SISTERS I North of east, in the bottom, where the road drops from the High Moor, is the village of Garth in Garthdale.
It crouches there with a crook of the dale behind and before it, between half-shut doors of the west and south. Under the mystery and terror of its solitude it crouches, like a beaten thing, cowering from its topmost roof to the bowed back of its stone bridge.
It is the last village up Garthdale; a handful of gray houses, old and small and humble. The high road casts them off and they turn their backs to it in their fear and huddle together, humbly, down by the beck. ”