ee 
79 
further northward there is scarce a house or tree to be seen all the 
way—the valley by the river side is very good land with some 
shadow of nature’s beautiful face left, but everywhere else about 
us is the most melancholy dreary view I ever beheld, and as the 
backdoor of creation: here and there a castellated house by the 
river, whither at night the cattle are driven for security from the 
borderers : as for the houses of the cottagers they are mean beyond 
imagination, made of mud and thatched with turf, without windows, 
only one story, the people almost naked. We returned through 
Longtown, whose streets are entirely composed of such structures.” 
Well, wherever you may have arrived to-day, I hope you will not 
feel inclined to say that you have reached “the backdoor of 
creation,” and that you will be more complimentary to us in the 
name of Literature and Science than Dr. Stukely was. The 
learned doctor would have been somewhat astonished had he been 
asked to lecture. 
Longtown, if it has had the distinction, has also had the 
disadvantages which, perhaps, are more easily discerned, of being 
a frontier or outpost town. It is uncomfortably described by one 
of the old chroniclers as a certain region lying between England 
and Scotland. It does not need a very lively imagination to picture 
what that meant at certain periods of our history. For years it was 
claimed by both countries, and the prey of either in its turn. It 
was for centuries the scene of continuous fights and forays, which 
we all feel, in spite of the glamour of romance that is flung around 
them in the old Border ballads, or in the magic pages of Sir Walter 
Scott, must have inflicted terrible sorrow and suffering on all 
engaged in them. It was an outpost when first we hear of it in 
history in the days of the Roman occupation, when first we find 
ourselves on the firm ground of recorded facts. There is no doubt 
that at Netherby there was a station of very considerable size and 
importance. It was possibly one of those selected by Agricola 
himself when in the course of his British campaigns about the year 
80 A.D., having subdued those tribes of the Brigantes who dwelt 
in the modern counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, he advanced 
by two routes, an eastern and a western, against the more northern 
