NORTHUMBERLAND 



curlews, wildfowl, and black-faced sheep are the only 

 other occupants of the waste, while colonies of small 

 black-headed gulls breed by its little tarns, and the 

 larger non-gregarious species, hated of the grouse pre- 

 server, haunts its spaces and works havoc by the way on 

 burns and spawning beds. This was in fact the wild 

 waste over which the Roman sentinels looked north- 

 ward for some three centuries. And as you stand on 

 that great natural barrier to-day, on the broad top of 

 the remnant of the wall which continuously caps it, 

 and look out towards the North Tyne, you might well 

 fancy for the all-pervading desolation that the centuries 

 had stood still. 



Upon the other side of the river high moors and 

 sheepwalks heave away to the parallel valley of the 

 Rede, where Hotspur and Douglas met in the im- 

 mortal fight of Otterburn, and a hundred other for- 

 gotten heroes fought and bled. I remember how 

 gloriously on the eve of these warm days the sun used 

 to sink below the distant mountain rampart which 

 divides the kingdoms once so bitterly hostile, and how 

 quickly on its steps the harvest moon later on rekindled 

 this great, silent, mysterious country with a pale reful- 

 gence of the day. There are no tourists here. You 

 are as far perhaps from the madding crowd as you 

 can betake yourself anywhere in England, by rail at 

 any rate, though trains are so few that they really 

 amount to nothing as a disturbing factor. I doubt, 

 too, if motorists much fancy the road which leads over 

 Kielder into Liddesdale. A favourite route, however 

 indeed one of the main arteries into Scotland lies up 

 Redesdale, and over the Carter Fell, passing the great 



3" 



