WEST TEES DISTRICT, 141 



Down his deep woods the course of Tees, 

 And tracks his wanderings by the steam 

 Of summer vapours from the stream. 



* * * * 



Nor Tees alone, in dawning bright, 

 Shall rush upon his ravish'd sight, 

 But many a tributary stieam 

 Each from its own dark dell shall gleam ; 

 Staindrop, who from her sylvan bowers 

 Salutes proud Raby's battl'd towers. 

 The rural brook of Egglestone, 

 And Balder, nam'd from Odin's son, 

 And Greta, to whose banks ere long 

 We lead the lovers of the song. 

 And silver Lune, from Stainmoor wild, 

 And fairy Thorsgill's murmuring child, 

 And last and least but loveliest still 

 Romantic Deepdale's slender rill.' 



Next conies Thorsgill, a small wooded glen on the very edge 

 of the gritstone, with the ruins of Egglestone Abbey upon the 

 edge of it very near the junction of the stream with the Tees. 

 Scott's description of this glen and that of the last half mile of 

 the course of the Greta have already been quoted (see page 55). 

 The Greta is the last of the branches of the Tees which have 

 their rise amongst the moorlands. From the lowest point of 

 the Pennine escarpment there is a rise of 700 feet to the summit 

 of drainage on the south, and from the four miles of moorland 

 during which this rise takes place the numerous branches of the 

 stream are supplied. The total length of Gretadale is about 

 fifteen miles and the course of the stream is due east. From 

 Water Crag and Mirk Fell we look northward over a broadly 

 undulated hollow with Kcltcn Fell and Mickle Fell in the back- 

 ground, so wild and dreary that the passing trains look strangely 

 out of place, and the two ' Spitals ' at the upper part of Greta- 

 dale shine out like green oases in a desert of brown moor. 

 Below Sleightholme the southern fork of the Greta forms a fine 

 waterfall over the Main Limestone, in the neighbourhood of 

 which grow Ranunculus cocnosus^ Draba niuralis, Seduvi villosum, 

 Foa nemomlis and Gyntnostomum rupestie. Two miles above 



August 1888. 



