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Hen's Hole in Cheviot. By Miss Russell. 



A CLEARER description than I have seen elsewhere of Hen's 

 Hole, the waterless, or nearly waterless, valley on the top 

 of High Cheviot, in Northumberland, where the snow always 

 remains till July, is given in an account of a fox-hunt in the 

 Cheviot, by Sir George Douglas, in the Scotsman ; and it 

 bears out an idea I had formed of a curious jumble of history 

 on the eastern border. 



Hen's Hole is the name this conspicuous natural feature 

 is usually known by ; it seems to be sometimes called Hell's 

 Hole, and sometimes Helen's Hole. And I believe these are 

 all real names, and in their way equally correct. Though it 

 seems that Helen's Hole is properly a small cave, or at least 

 a cave with a narrow entrance, in one side of the ravine. 



It had struck me as possible, from the form the name 

 takes in well-known dedications like Ellesmere, that St. 

 Helena, the mother of Constantine, who is a very favourite 

 patron saint in England, and in the north-east seems to me 

 to have been especially Edwin's, may have acquired some 

 of the heathen honours of Fratt Holle, who is certainly the 

 same person as Berchta, the great nature goddess of the 

 Germans. The Christianity of Edwin's converts must have 

 been of the most perfunctory kind. 



The names both mean the Bright Lady ; and circumstances 

 which struck me in Sir Arthur Mitchell's paper on Fire 

 Ceremonies at Mid-winter pointed to their meaning the same 

 deity, worshipped by different German tribes under different 

 names. There is, or was, a ceremony in Swabia called 

 burning Frau Holle on Berchta's night, which meant running 

 about with torches on the evening of the 6th of January, 



