Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/88

From the inn at Chollerford Bridge, where the North Tyne sweeps majestically under its over-shadowing trees, we start on a breezy July day—the 24th of this month in the year 1890—one of the few summer days of the season. Our equipage is a one-horse trap, and our course is along the Military Way, between the Roman Wall and the Vallum. Our designation is Sewingshields, nine miles onwards. “Ben” (a collie) and “Spot” (a fox-hound) career in joy when the active mare begins its trot. They are out for a holiday—so are we. Ben, the wretch, treats the pace of the fast-trotting mare as a joke; and actually, ever and anon, jumps a dike, and takes a turn for himself, and hard-pressed hares cross the road, and dodge under gates. But Ben is more agile and swift than skilful; and he returns satistied apparently with his chasse, perhaps dimly feeling this the surest thing in life. There is joy in the air, for the north-west wind rushes, and sways the heavy-leaved trees ere we get into the bare moorland; and the pearly white clouds overhead speed, gliding on and revealing the broken spaces of the blue sky that overhangs the wide-spreading expanse of varied earth, rising out of the dim Cheviots to the north, and bounded by the Pennine Hills to the west and south-west. Along these nine miles of road the Roman Wall itself has greatly disappeared; but the stout old Vallum—whether contemporaneous or not with the Wall—dug in the ground with its deep facing mounds, has held its place more firmly, in spite of improving plough, with its beneficial results of turnips and potatoes. Recent excavations here and there show the line of the Wall with its mile castles and stations, and at a point a little to the west of our purposed destination is Housesteads, the ancient Borcovicus, whose broken and fallen columns, pedestals, and green mounds that cover the foundations of once stately edifices—among the oldest accredited remains of the skilled human hand in Britain—tell us of the constructive power of the Roman brain, and the persistent, unbaffled energy of the Roman arm. The grass and the wild flowers which tenderly clothe the ruined strength and grandeur have for us their pathetic lesson. The touching contrast between the past and the present is to be read and felt in these lines:—

But we are not specially concerned with the Wall at present. Our aim is the sight of another work altogether, the name of which I venture to say few people have ever heard, The Black Dike. Yet this may be something even older than anything Roman hands have raised; and, even if later, of quite a distinct interest for those who care for what are somewhat contradictorily called the prehistoric problems of Britain.