BARNARD CASTLE.
ASMALL market-town on a branch lino of railway is apt to look dull at the best of times, and no one would imagine, from the first view of the long, grass-grown street of Barnard Castle that the town had anything picturesque or inter- esting about it, except its name. However, the present writer had known from early days that Turner had drawn a castle, river, and bridge, and called the view by that name ; he had seen Pictures of it by other men, in later times ; but he expected a pleasure over and above that of seeing a beautiful place, in seeing what liberties a great composer had taken with its representation. The castle is certainly a little difficult to find, and we can imagine our guide tolling us some of the main points of its history while we are on our way to it. The lordship of the Baliols is the chief feature ; it is markedly compact and characteristic. For two cen- turies they reigned here with all the power of petty kings, making their little laws, granting privileges and charters to the burgesses of the town which had grown up at their castle-gates, adding barony to barony, and climbing to one height after another, watil at last they gave a king to Scotland, and then, exactly two hundred years after they had become possessed of Barnard Castle, all their estates were confiscated ; their name occurred no more in history, with the exception of one short effort to retrieve their fall, 11 n d now what is left of their work is a ruin by Tees-side, and a famous college in Oxford.
The castle in which these men lived is almost as hard to find out, amongst gas-works, mills, and modern houses, as it is to disinter from ancient deeds and charters any new fact con- nected with its origin. The usual approach is through a narrow passage leading from the street to the stable-yard of the King's Head inn, and after a few steps further, all the beauty of Barnard. Castle suddenly discloses itself, for we are on the abrupt edge of the bank which dips down into the Tees, and by opening a postern-door, one of the most beautiful views in England can be obtained. A river, with thickly wooded hill-sides, and a distance of faint blue mountain and moorland, from which it flows ; a shattered tower or mass of masonry, with a mingling of angles and cornices and ruined chambers high aloft, looking altogether as if it could not stand against a very strong wind ; a rock base of limestone, quite steep, and with its crannies filled with flower- ing weeds, make a picture which would be perfect, were it not
for some mills on the opposite side of the river, which are too big and too ugly for any poetical feeling to reduce to harmlessness, The fortress was never very large, but the steepness of the rock. which rises one hundred feet above the water, gave it strength ; and where the precipice ended, a broad, deep ditch began. It was strongly walled, and. had two gates, one opening on to the present market-place, and the other on the meadows to the north. The area entered from the market-place had no direct com- munication with the chief stronghold, but was separated from it by a fosse. This area was used as a refuge for the townsfolk and their cattle, in cases of urgent need. The ballad of the "Rising of the North" gives a fair idea of the powers of resist- ance of this portion of the fortifications :— "Sir George Bowes to his castle fled, To Barnard Castle then fled hoc; The uttermost wanes were easy to win,
The lines have won them prevail°.
The uttermost unites were lime and bricks,
But though they won them soono anone, Long ore they wan the innermost walles,
For they wore cut in rock and stone."
In point of fact, these walls turned the tide of rebellion. The Earls (of Northumberland and Westmoreland) never did win them, for Sir George held out for eleven days, until the Queen's army came. Nor is the ballad-maker right in calling the castle Sir George's. It was the Earl of Westmoreland's, and on the first news of his defection Sir George Bowes, of &rest- lam, seized and held it for the Queen. Now, this utter- most wall, which they won so easily, encloses a lovely orchard, and no one interferes with your entrance but a shilling-com- pelling guide, with a key. Little remains of the castle but l3rackenbury's tower, which tells so picturesquely in the view we have already spoken of ; and the keep, now called Baliol's Tower. This last is circular, about forty feet in diameter and fifty feet in height, with a basement, and three upper chambers, reached by stairs cut in the wall, and with a magnificent view, which Scott has described in his grand, panoramic way. It is easy enough to look down on the river
from the castle, but very hard to get a sight of the mile from the river. If you cross the bridge, a huge, unsightly mill fills
up all the ground, and has such numerous dependencies, that you have to go much higher up the stream before you can see the ruin at all; and when at last you have got to this point, you find that the authorities have thought fit to place their hideous gas-works in the very eye of the picture. These works come in even worse in the still finer view on the opposite side, —Turner's view, with Baliol's Tower and the castle-walls and bridge. These works hide the base of the castle, blacken the trees with their smoke, and interpose their tall chimney and vermilion-coloured gasometer at every turn, as leading features in the landscape. Besides this, the refuse they throw out is raising up a great black embankment. Gone is the old pathway under the trees, with its pretty, natural dip into the water, and the streamlet and foot-bridge which Creswick so often painted —wisely, but not too well—all are now covered with ashes. The
river is as lovely as ever. The tawny, bubbling currents still rush and tumble over their rocky bed, or lie in wicked-
looking and treacherously deep pools of the most intense purple-brown. The town, for the most part, consists of two streets; one, which you enter from the railway-station, is wide and irregularly built, and bears the ominous name of Gallowgate. It has obviously set out with the intention of taking you direct to the castle, but just as it is almost under the very walls it darts off at a right angle and by the houses on its own right hand blocks off all approach to that building, except through the aforesaid. stable-yard. Having taken this freakish, but resolute course, the street runs down-hill to the river, and in this short limit you have all the shops and nearly all the inns of the place, Such tiny, unassuming, passive- looking shops—such numbers of inns as there are! We counted five-and-thirty in a very short walk. No one would imagine that there was one point of interest in the whole street, except a very lovely gabled-house, in which Cromwell slept when here. " Nasty, unconvenient place 1" said a woman to whom we ex- pressed our admiration of it, "look how ancient it is !" The street is, however, by no means so barren of interest as might appear ; for instance, on passing the Burns' Head Inn we are reminded of a good story,"which has, we believe, never yet been given in print. The sign is a portrait of the poet, said to be an excellent likeness. At any rate, Mr. Morritt, uncle of the present owner of Rokeby, thought so, and once when he had walked over here from Rokeby with Sir Walter Scott, he pointed it out to him, and praised it as a highly successful bit of portraiture. "How long has it been there?" asked Scott. " Two or three years," was the answer. "Then," said Scott, "take my word for it, it is no like Burns. Robbie Burns would not have stayed so long outside a public 1" Near this inn is a watchmaker's shop, with the name of " Humphrey " and a large clock over the door ; and just opposite to it is the King's Head Inn, where Dickens spent six weeks while studying the Do-the- boys' Hall part of "Nicholas Nickleby." He, from his sitting- room window, daily looked on this tiny shop over the way, and the name Humphrey, clockmaker, fixed itself so fast in his mind, that he gave it to the clockmaker in his next new story, and wrote to tell Master Humphrey, of Barnard Castle, what he had done. With this letter came a copy of "Master Humphrey's Clock," "from the author." Are not these things stored up in the archives of the Humphrey family, and though the clock over the door is changed, is not the remembrance of them green. P Half-way down, and in the very middle of this street, is the market cross. It is cumbrous and. ugly, and popped down with very little regard to convenience; but it be- comes much more interesting when we know that within its walls, in box within box, are safely stored most of the charters obtained so long ago from the Baliols. The Moors on one side and Cross Fell on the other invite us onwards, though it is only at intervals that the curtain of rain and mist is lifted, and to High Force and Rokeby we hope to go.
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