FROM THE HEART OF THE WOLDS. 



brick-work. The artist and the searcher for beauty must look 

 in more favoured shires for nature's wildings. Here all is 

 commonplace and wind-swept ; more suggestive of the newest 

 colony than of old Mother England. We sigh, and the very 

 name of the hamlet, Kirmond-le-Mire,* accords well with our 

 saddened thoughts, with earth's carking cares, and the char- 

 acter of the locality. Bully Hill, too, above us, sounds aggres- 

 sive, minacious, repulsive. But even here sentiment is not 

 wholly strangled. Along the High Street, above Adam's 

 Head, runs a long detached mound, called the Giant's Grave. 

 After lying for generations in neglect, a neighbouring farmer 

 ploughed and sowed wheat upon it ; but nothing came up. Not 

 to be beaten, he next year planted potatoes on it ; not one ever 

 grew. In despair it is now abandoned to the grass and moss 

 with which it has for centuries been clothed by boon nature. 



Passing by an old peat bog (from which a little searching 

 disinters the leg bone of a red deer), the beck, which is now 

 a respectable stream with fish in it, runs through a magnificent 

 stretch of meadows from the rampart like banks near Thorpe. 

 Abruptly turning near Stainton-le-hole, it passes by a covert and 

 then a rookery, with every here and there on the hills above its 

 course a deserted quarry filled with stunted larches and an 

 undergrowth of ivy ; and so, having now attained, as it were, 

 its majority, it reaches the meadows on which stood the religious 

 house known as Irford. The trout7~which, togelHer^witrTtEe 

 retired situation, must have first tempted the founder to build 

 here, dart under the bank as we draw near to the heaps and 

 mounds over which lambs and their mothers are now peacefully 

 grazing, and which show where the priory stood close by the 

 stream. The chapel, with the basis of pillar forming side aisles 

 may be traced under the turf which covers their slight elevation. 

 So little is known about this secluded abode of faith that it is 

 even disputed whether it was a Benedictine or a Praemon- 

 * Prob. O. N. myrr, our ' ' moor. " 



