Weardale

“ Burn, grain, broc, are allied. The first of these may be said to be as pure Weardale as Saxon. Whilst the Norse beck crowds the banks of Teesdale, it does not exist in Weardale. Burn spreads from this dale northward through Durham, Northumberland, and Scotland. Beck is as foreign to Weardale as the Danish test-word by and the Norwegian thwaite, though all the three names crowd{93} around, close to the very hills on the south and west of the dale of the Wear. Within the bounds of Stanhope parish the Wear is fed by several tributary burns. ”

“ In Weardale, situated in the western and mountainous part of the county of Durham, and surrounded by brown and heath-clad fells, the ancient Briton lived in the limestone caves, and hunted in the oaken forests. In the Wear Valley, near Hamsterley, and about seven miles east of Stanhope, there is a remarkable relic of the ancient Britons. This ancient fortification—like many other works constructed by the Britons of old, such as the Dene Holes of Essex and the Cliff Castles—has its name, and is called The Castles. ”

“ Wolsingham—the Saxon metropolis of Weardale, for its ancient manor included the whole of the Wear valley westward—is the ham or home of the sons or descendants of a family of Franks, represented in Kemble’s English settlement names in Wælsingas, and in the German Walasingas, a family who probably{84} settled in the South of England and sent their sons to the North, for Durham, according to Taylor, contained no original Anglo-Saxon settlements. ”

“ By the Irthing at Wardrew, and abundant in the upper part of Allendale, Derwentdale, Weardale, and especially of Teesdale, ascending to 400 yards in Irishope, 500 yards near Allenheads, and 550 on the limestone scars in Harwood Dale with aurita. The common forms with us are Weigeliana, nitens, and Croweana, and a plant from Prestwick Carr is called radicans by Smith in Winch's collection. ”

“ When the veins in Weardale point east and west, they hade towards the south; but in Allendale and in the Aldstone moor country they generally hade towards the north: the strata are universally elevated on the side towards which the veins dip.
Veins, that are otherwise favourably circumstanced for producing ore, are more particularly so if the throw or alteration in the level of the beds of limestone, occasioned by the vein, does not exceed 1 or 2 fathoms; for then both cheeks of the vein correspond in their nature, and limestone does not become opposed to shale or other barren stratum. ”

“ Anglo-Saxon hæft, from the having a holding or place. The Norse hop is a place of shelter or refuge. An inquiry into the Bishop’s possessions of game in Weardale, nearly three hundred years ago, particularly mentioned forests, parks, hopes and pastures. The place-name hope is common throughout the hilly parts of Durham, Northumberland, Yorkshire, and Derbyshire. In the neighbouring parish of Wolsingham there are Harehope, Ouselhope, and Thornhope ”

“ Gray, in the opening lines of his beautiful "Elegy," sings—
"The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea."
This terminal occurs in over twenty names of places in Boldon Buke. In Weardale there are five names of places having this suffix which are very important, as they give names to extensive stretches of land, and very probably the adjectival components may all be derived from personal names. These are Frosterley, Bishopley, Rogerley, Horsley, and Brotherlee.
On the hill north of Eastgate is situated Bewley, where once a cross existed, and in former days a watch for invaders was kept here. ”

“ This crosses the upper part of Irishope, bending due north across the lower part of Burnhope and the united burns of Kilhope and Welhope, turns a little eastward, so as to margin with limestone crags the highest point of the Weardale and Allendale road, and then crosses the county boundary. None of these western hopes show much of the limestone cliff. In Burnhope there is a curious bank of crumbling dark-coloured shale with a natural wood of birch, alder, and stunted willows, in which grow Crepis succisaefolia, Carduus heterophyllus, and Hieracium gothicum and tridentatum. ”

“ Willington, the town of the family of Willing—sons of Will. Other terminations indicate Saxon homes, as ham, worth, stoke, stow, fold, bury. In the Boldon Buke we find the Danish toft; and the universal description of small holdings in Hatfield’s Survey is a toft and a croft. We also find in primitive days the villagers holding dales of land—land divided into long, narrow strips or divisions, each villager knowing his own strip. When Weardale was more under cultivation, it was customary for the inhabitants to take in land from the moors ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the King and the Duke of York at his back, and, in Edinburgh, Sharp, Burnet, and the majority of the Episcopalian clergy, together with all the needy nobles who loved best to fish in troubled waters, Lauderdale could afford, as he thought then, to laugh at all opposition. To assume that his design had been from the first to goad the West into open rebellion affords, indeed, a simple explanation of a policy that in its persistent unwisdom and brutality seems strangely irrational and monstrous, even for such times and men. ”

“ 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! ”

“ He thinks he has made a discovery. You know, part of our land includes the valley they call Branterdale. I expect Mr. Gaunt has told you that all this part of Derbyshire is limestone rock, and it is honeycombed with caves. We did not know we had any on our land, but the other day—that is, I should say, last season—when we were huntin', the fox ran across the river, and disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him. It was a narrow bit of the stream, between rocks, the bit that the guide-books tell you is like Dovedale in miniature. ”

“ There was some lawlessness in Lustleigh even after Edward I. John de Moeles, the owner of Wreyland, had a brother Roger, born in 1296 and married in 1316 to Alice le Pruz, who was ten years older than himself. And on 26 July 1317 the King issued a commission:—On complaint by Roger de Moeles it appears that John Daumarle and certain other malefactors and perturbers of the peace have seized Alice, the wife of this same Roger, by force of arms at Lustleigh, and have carried her off together with goods and chattels and certain charters and muniments of his, etc. ”

“ I wish we could fence off a district of Mr Torr’s Devonshire, and preserve it and its population as an exhibit.... I wish quite passionately that the inhabitants of Wreyland as a type could be preserved. It is a rest to pause and contemplate them. ”

“ Wreyland is land by the Wrey, a little stream in Devonshire. The Wrey flows into the Bovey, and the Bovey into the Teign, and the Teign flows out into the sea at Teignmouth. The land is on the east side of the Wrey, just opposite the village of Lustleigh. It forms a manor, and gives its name to a hamlet of six houses, of which this as one.
Secondly, about my writing all these things,
Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear people lamenting that so much local knowledge has died with them, and saying that they should have written things down. ”

“ In the context it is not intended to enter into a description of the different plants or of the localities in which they may most commonly be found, but merely to enumerate some of the more important ones; and in the following list all those inhabitants of the district, which are likely to interest the student of Botany or lover of Nature, are arranged in their various groups or orders:—
The River Wyre rises in the hills of Wyersdale and Bleasdale ”

“ Cleverdale is a flourishing village of about eight thousand inhabitants. Enjoying transportation facilities both by rail and canal, it contains several large factories, which in turn enable a bank to do a great deal of business and cause money to circulate freely. Churches and schools, not excepting a young ladies' finishing school, abound, and there is no lack of the rum-shops that in towns so large are always demanded by one class of inhabitants. ”

“ It is, I think, to this Paradise that good birds go when they die, where the ruthless small boy's raiding hand is kept in check, and every bird may find ideal nesting place.
The district is most famous in ballad, song and story, Leaderdale, being apparently equivalent to Lauderdale, giving a title to the Earl of Lauderdale, the chief of the Maitlands. "They call it Leader town," says the enigmatic ballad of Auld Maitland, speaking of the stronghold of a Maitland of the days of Wallace, a shadowy figure still well remembered in the folk lore of the reign of Mary Stuart. ”

“ The children at Lustleigh school—boys and girls—elect one of the girls as Queen, and her name is carved upon a rock on the hill behind this house. Then on May-day the Queen walks in procession under a canopy of flowers carried by four of the boys, her crown and sceptre being carried by two others; then come her maids of honour; and then all the other children of the school, most of them carrying flowers in garlands or on staves. The procession winds along through Lustleigh and through Wreyland, halting at certain places to sing the customary songs, and at last ascends the hill behind here. ”

“ Two or three boys, who had been sent out as scouts, came in with news that there was a strong watch set on the Ridgeway, that the paths through the forest were guarded, that bodies of armed men were arriving in the neighboring villages, and that soldiers had been demanded--or so it was said--from Warwick and Worcester, and even from a place as far away as Oxford. Probably it was only the sheriff's prudence which had postponed the crisis ”

“ Glendale is like a dozen other small {91} towns in the Harpeth Valley; they are all drowsy princesses who have just waked up enough to be wondering what did it. The tentative kiss has not yet disclosed the presence of the Prince of Revolution, and they are likely to doze for another century or two. I think I had better go back into the wide world and let them sleep on. One live member is likely to irritate the repose of the whole body. ”

“ Ribblesdale, Wenningdale, Wharfedale, and half a score of other dales named after their respective rivulets, are undermined and tunnelled for miles by the hand of Nature, and beneath their surfaces flow ‘sunless streams,’ no one knows whither, and measureless to man. Often, in wandering over the mountains there, we hear voices and gurglings from torrents which never find their way at all to the upper world, and from out one cavernous mouth in the hill Whernside flows a stream which in flood-time washes out periodically old silver coins of the reign of Edward I., from some long-lost treasury. ”

“ Whilst the blood of unfortunate victims to imaginary plots was flowing in England, in Scotland the same ruthless persecution bad continued against the covenanters. Lauderdale had married the counters of Dysart, a most extravagant and rapacious woman, who acquired complete influence over him; and to find resources for her expense, be levied fines on the nonconformists with such rigour and avidity, that it was believed that be really sought to drive the people to rebellion, in order to have a plea for plundering them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here ‘tithing’ means the bits of Hennock and Bovey Tracey parishes that lie in Wreyland manor, and ‘village’ means Wreyland hamlet, Lustleigh village being called the ‘town.’ Thus in old notes here I find:—“All the children in the village and Lustleigh town”—“Sent over to town to buy stamps”—and so on. And again:—“Poor old ***** from yonder town dropt down in the town-place in a seizure.” The yonder town is the group of houses near the Baptist chapel, and the town-place is the open space outside the church-yard—at Moreton it is the King’s-acre outside and God’s-acre within. ”

“ All my enormous hatred of his class had flared up at the sight of his costume, at the fancied challenge of his words. I knew him. He was Edward Verrall, son of the man who owned not only this great estate but more than half of Rawdon's pot-bank, and who had interests and possessions, collieries and rents, all over the district of the Four Towns. He was a gallant youngster, people said, and very clever. Young as he was there was talk of parliament for him ”