22 
Land &. Water 
The Story of Northumberland 
March 21, 1 9 1 8 
By H.R.S. 
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Chillingham Castle, and The Cheviots in the distance 
from an old engraving. 
A WRITER once observed that Northumberland 
in its natural contour and salient features is a 
microcosm of England. He might have added 
that its history is an epitome of the realm's. 
And in nothing more than in the rural decadence 
and depopulation of the last four decades, which to the 
historian will appear as a hiatus in agricultural development. 
The grave unbalance between manufacturing and agricultural 
industry, between town and country life, is now submitted 
to the shock of war, and will be eventually righted. 
While in Northumberland rural depopulation, with its 
concomitants, has been so marked and melancholy a feature 
during the last generation, it is very noticeable how the old 
folk-names survive and persist, though industrial Tyneside 
and the Northumbrian coalfields have been flooded with 
names of, in a sense, alien origin. In their entirety almost 
they are the same humble names that figure so prominentlv 
in the long subscription list that prefaces Mackenzie's wonder- 
ful F»«x; of Northumberland, published in 1811 ; that list 
■which is, as it were, an epitome or index of the trade, craft, 
industry, and husbandry of the rural towns and villages — 
a democratic scroll demonstrative of the spirit of local 
patriotism, so prevalent about that time among the people. 
The enumeration of the most recurrent of these names 
makes evident the truth of this assertion :— Armstrongs, 
Atkinsons ; Bells, Bates ; Carrs, Currys, Charltons ; Dixons, 
Davisons, Dobsons, Dodds ; Elliots ; Grays, Greens ; Halls, 
Hedleys, Heslops, Hutchinsons ; Jamesons ; Lees, Littles! 
Lambs ; Maughans, Milburns ; Nixons, Nicholsons ; Olivers, 
■Ords; Piggs, Potts, Pattersons; Reeds, Ridleys, Robsons, 
Reays ; Steels, Stobbs, Storeys, Scotts ; Tates, Thompsons, 
Telfords, Turnbulls, Todds ; Urwins ; Whites, Winships, 
Wrights, Watsons, and Youngs. 
A few of these names sound sonorously in the old border 
ballads, but mostly when coupled with the patrimonial 
place riames, as "Parcy Reed o' Troughend," and" the "fause 
Ha's o' Girsonfield." As a whole, they have not commended 
themselves to ballad-singers who have favoured more the 
Northumbrian aristocratic patronymics. I remember how 
in my earliest associations with North Tyne the alliance of 
surname with place name— mill, shieling, onstead, or hamlet— 
appealed to me with its musical assonance. These recur to 
ray memory : Willie Smith o' Gunnerton, Stokoe o' the 
Mams, Milburn o' the Wester Ha,' the Tailfords (Telfords) 
o' Humshaugh, Tom Trumble (Turnbull) o' the Boathouse, 
Kirsopp o' the Keeper Shield— all within a tiny and sparsely 
peopled area. 
That was thirty and more years ago. The old mills were 
still grmding corn intermittently. The country airs and 
dances still were favoured at meetings and merrymakings, 
though the feasts and fairs were mainly a memory of the 
past. The accumulated inheritance of country lore^— the 
''glamourie of faws and fairies," holy and wishing wells, ghosts 
and apparitions, haunted lanes and houses, fairy hills, knowes, 
and springs ; charms, spells, tokens ; the marvels of treasure 
trove and money hills, still exercised some of their potent 
sway. The chase had its full quota of foot followers, who 
preserved best its spirit of universal humour and fellowship. 
The mirth of the rural sports still resounded on the village 
green, and on the green haugh amid the amphitheatre of 
woods. Youth had not yet in large numbers felt the lure 
of the large towns and cities. But the time of change had 
come, the tide had begun to set that way. 
Now, and for long past, a strange somnolence has fallen 
like a spell upon rural Northumberland. A primjEval-like 
calm pervades its pastoral valleys and villages. I have been 
a pilgrim on its high roads, old and new, through its lonely 
by-ways and forgotten field-paths, and discovered for 
myself its remote homesteads and hamlets. I have felt the 
uplift of its hills and horizons, and invoked its mountains in 
my muse, loitered by its rivers and burns, where the shy 
dipper disports itself, the genius and naiad of rock and 
waterfall, and where the kingfisher darts past like a flash 
of heavenly flame. I have communed with solitude on its 
heathy wastes, with heart strangely stirred by the curlew's 
mournful call, or the heronseugh's piercing cry at dusk. 
With mind informed of its varied history, I have looked upon 
the memorials of its past — monolith, wall, causey, keep, pele- 
tower, church, abbey, cross, caim, manor-house, inn, mile- 
stone, miO — and felt the inexpressible appeal of its old border 
towns — Wooler, with its clean Scots air, set against the 
green mounded slopes of the Cheviots, Alnwick, grey and 
stern, with rough cobbled streets, lion bridge and kingly 
castle seated in state above the shallow shining Aln ; 
Rothbury, with steep street of , stone descending to the gorge 
of the Coquet, and fronting the huge saddleback of Simonside, 
the rampant of the middle marches'; the Rothbury that 
Thomas Doubleday memorised in such noble prose, and whose 
Coquet he enwreathed with garlands of song. 
Each place, each place-name has its charm — Kirkharle, of 
which alone the church remains, cornless but sylvanly fair, 
where " Capability Brown" first tried his 'prentice hand at 
landscape gardening; Cambo, with its tall church tower and 
chiming clock, overlooking the fair valley of the Wansbeck ; 
Capheaton, anchored in deep sylvan foliage, home of the 
Swinburnes ; the isolated hamlets along the. Watling Street 
(the old drover's road from Scotland to Stagshaw Bank Fair) 
whose names resoimd in the injunction of the old folk-song : 
Sandy, keep on the road; that's the way to Wallington. 
O'er by Bingfield Kame, and the Banks o' HalHngton, 
Thro' by Bavington Ha', and in ye go to Wallington, 
Whether ye gallop or trot, |ye're on the road to Wallington. 
(Continued on page 24.) 
