Mr Hardy on Langleyford Vale and the Cheviots. 357 



witness the snow-blasts warring remote on the hills, and the 

 streaming drifts and showers, here and there silvered by the 

 sun, wheeling round the ridges, fed by the lowering muddy 

 clouds that retain a fixed station there for many a long day. 



Bringing the eye downwards, there opens before us, be- 

 tween two ridges, a winding inlet, with bold capes and 

 sinuous bays, stretching away up into the very bosom of the 

 hills. The haze that veils the promontories adds to the 

 similitude of a narrow sea-frith. This is the vale of Lang- 

 leyford, whither we are bound. We are now skirting one of 

 its reaches, where the Wooler water works its uncertain way 

 among congeries of ancient gravels and rolled masses, often 

 disturbing and ploughing them up, but adding nothing to 

 the spoils brought thither and distributed by earlier and more 

 intensified agencies, that scooped the channel for the present 

 diminished stream. I have called it Wooler water ; but its 

 oldest name, and one still used, is the Caldgate burn. In 

 the sixth year of Edward VI., "At Cadgate mouth (i. e., 

 where it joins the Till), two fords " were " to be watched 

 with four men nightly of the inhabitors of Dodington." 

 Farther up, the Ordnance surveyors have named it Harthope 

 burn. Small crowds of alders, varied by lighter tufts of 

 birch, thorn, and hazel, or scattered mountain ashes, with 

 a fine but limited oaken bank, intervene on the steep be- 

 tween its banks, and the moory and ferny grounds back- 

 wards. 



The ground above, on the Middleton side, is permanently 

 stamped with the twisted ridges and long reaching balks of 

 the old British cultivators, who had here, although hitherto 

 almost unnoted, numerous strong fortlets, and at intervals 

 camps of greater compass ; showing that it was reckoned of 

 great importance by the aborigines. The soil itself is 

 thin and full of small stones, and they must have had a hard 

 time of it to make a living, proportionate to the numbers, as 

 indicated by the multitude of huts, that required support. 

 Strange that they should have preferred, as a sort of outlaws, 

 to live, in a great measure, at the outskirts of fertility. It 

 supports the view, that they were chiefly a pastoral race. 



There are some names of places here worth noting, some of 

 them rather whimsical. Shining Pool, Skirl-naked, and 

 Switcher-down, are old shepherds' or farm sites. The waters 

 here bifurcate; that whose bridge we cross is called Care burn, 



2z 



