Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/89
At length we reach the school-house on the roadside, and proceed quietly up the ascent to Sewingshields farmhouse—close on 1000 feet above sea-level. The house stands on the southern slope of the Sewingshields Crags (1069 feet), the bold dip of which is to the north, and not visible here. But to the south, east, and west there opens one of the most commanding and magnificent views in England. Below, on the south side of the Roman Wall, is seen winding the valley of the gentle Tyne; its wooded banks contrasting with the grass, corn-fields, and moorland which fill up the area of the vast plain around it. West and south beyond runs the dim line of the Pennine Hills, which, forming a natural continuation of the Cheviots, for long severed the early tribes of the north of England,—especially Angles and Cymri. On the far west and south-west rise, grand and grey under the heavens, the long ridge of Skiddaw and the mass of Helvellyn. A soft light is on the earth, white clouds chase each other overhead; gleams of sunshine and shifting shadows flicker and flit over the ever-varying face of the almost limitless landscape. Verily, that old Mile Castle of Sewingshields, which stood on the crags a little higher up than the present farmhouse—to the north-west on the very verge of the northern cliff—must have been a truly regal outlook,—worthy of the hand and soul of the imperial Roman who built it, and not less of its subsequent associations with the chivalrous King Arthur and his Queen Guinevere.
We now leave trap and pony well housed, and make our way along the edge of the cliff to the highest point, 1069 feet. It is green-mantled all along the southern side and ridge. On the north there is a sheer descent of, it may be, 100 or more feet down the perpendicular basaltic columns,—that stand erect, firm, compact, as giants phalanxed,—facing attack from the wilds that stretch northward to the Cheviots.
But the object of our investigation—the Black Dike—is to the west of these crags; and accordingly we make in this direction for the hollow below. And there, to be sure, we are rewarded for our pains; for immediately to the west of the boundary-wall of Sewingshields appears the well-cut, well-defined fosse and mound of which we are in quest; and here, too, it is seen to flank an old earthwork, too rude to be Roman. We have now left the Sewingshields Crags a little to the north, and have reached another parallel line of rocks of the same character (rising to 889 feet), which further west get the name of the Hotbank Crags. The Roman Wall and Vallum run on the south side of these crags; and a little to the west is the well-known Borcovicus or Housesteads, already noticed, near the break in the basaltic line of rock known as Busy Gap. This was the notorious pass for reivers from north or south—from Scotland or into Scotland—during the troubled Border time of the middle ages, and avoided as dangerous by travellers well down in the eighteenth century.
“Busy Gap,” says the writer of the letterpress connected with Speede’s Map, “is a place infamous for robbing and thieving, and is therefore rather remembered as a cautiatory note for such as have cause to travel that way, than for any proper matter of worth it hath.” About the middle of the