20 
Land & Water 
May 9, 1918 
View of Durham from the North-east 
From an 
of gloom and glow — oven, furnace, mine, where the chimneys 
and pit-heads silhouette every sky-Hne, and the pit-heads 
smoulder and smoke like scoria of a v-olcanic eruption ; 
where the shambles of abandoned pit-rows stand naked to 
the elements. A land of devastated denes and dells, blighted 
woods and poisoned streams. 
Durham, the ancient palatinate county of sacerdotal 
splendour, and of the immortal legends, which' yet conceals 
within its crowding hills nooks of historic interest and sylvan 
charm ; whose city, with its cathedral towers, clambering 
castles, and clustering woods and hills, crowned and crowding 
upon the winding river and whispering weirs, never fails to 
impress deeply pilgrim and stranger. 
Not unmeet that its early chroniclers should have called 
Durham the English Jerusalem, the veritable "city of our 
solemnities," Drayton's "stately seated town" ; or that the 
late Lieutenant Noel Hodgson, in the face of death at the 
Somme, should have penned such subUme poems in its praise. 
Over the pastoral beauty of present-day Northumberland 
a poet might enthuse, a prophet lament. But over the 
blasted and blackened sylvan beauties of its neighbouring 
shire, what can the heart of poet and prophet ahke feel but 
the flame and ire of revolt ? Windy Hill, Barlow, Pontop, 
Penshaw, and Wreckenton, have been my mounts of vision 
and peaks of prophecy. Think of Consett, with its inferno 
of fires and cumulus slag, set upon the orchestral hills ; 
Kerryhill, of foetid and fungus growth, the "fairy hill" of 
Robert Surtees, Durham's faithful historian ; of Seaham, 
for which John. Dobson, with ideahstic mind, designed such 
a noble sea front, now disgraced by its degenerate evolution ; 
of Jarrow, domicile of Bede, which even in Carmichael's 
picture of eighty years ago evinces such atmosphere and charm, 
now sunk into dis- ►' 
honorable squalor, 
dreariest of the dreary 
industrial towns of the 
north ; Bede's Well 
nearly effaced by the 
daily deposited dumj) 
from the furnaces ; 
Monkton alone, Bede's 
reputed birthplace, by 
some miraculous dis- 
pensation, preserving 
its rural entity. 
.Monkton was my 
mother's earliest 
home ; round its hum- 
ble roofs twine the 
tendrils of sentiment 
and devotion. Like a 
voice of reproach 
seems to steal upon 
the car the lament of 
the northern hvmn : 
Jarrow on the Tyne 
Behold^ thy shrines are desolate — 
I-o ! Durham, Jarrow, Wearmouth mourn, 
Build up the altars now laid waste. 
Bid peace and faith again return. 
What a medley of images crowd and mingle in the mirage of 
the past ! Sunday in Saltwell Park twenty years since — the 
spring sunshine, the birds," the budding trees, the lake's 
metallic glare ; the band playing "Tannhauser," the moving 
maze of the circling crowd. The lights of Swalwell Hopping 
dancing in the June dusk ; the zigzag street of faces, the 
stalls, the swaying swings and caracoling merry-go-rounds : 
the organs, the drums, the cymbals, the hullabaloo and 
noise ; the churring calls and noiseless nocturnal .evolutions 
of the nightjars on Tinkler Fell. The vision through Causey 
Woods, the baleful sunset, the fury of the snowstorms, and 
earth emerging under starlight in the stole of peace. A 
summer's day in Brancepeth Park ; its glorious deer-dappled 
greensward ! Twilight on Prebend's Bridge ; meetings and 
partings at Neville's Cross ! Mainsforth, ivy-mantled home 
of Durham's great historian, as I first saw it on its hill-crest, 
with the March sun smiling on its soughing trees and cawing 
rooks ! Crowds converging by rail and road on that unfor- 
gettable Sunday of the burial service of the victims of the 
Stanley Pit disaster. The Horden Colliery strike, with its 
incendiary fire scarring the northern sky. Then came the 
thunderbolt of August, 1914 ; war's alarums and excursions ; 
forebodings .of invasion at Old Seaham. And now, the 
thrill and glare of the present ; the certitude that truth, 
whatever happens, will emerge triumphant, and God's way 
be justified to man, purged and chastened. I remember 
the (glorious evening of May 25th, 1905, the electric thrill 
of earth and sky, the spirit upUfted : 
The roadway like a 
burnished sword, 
The sun an Angel 
of the Lord ! 
.\nd thought fusing 
like molten metal in 
the furnace of the 
mind ; 
The earth .shall 
quake, the hills 
resound. 
And every field be 
battle-ground. 
And freedom shout 
o'er land and sea. 
So hey, so hey, 
then up go we. 
Lightning along 
the sky shall range, 
The time is ripe for 
coming change. 
The better days for 
you and me. 
So hey, so hey, now 
up go we. 
