CANON RAWNSLEY AT MUNCASTER
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THERE is a witchery about the stretch of coast between St. Bees and Black Combe which is born of the echoes of history and legend that like the sound of the sea fill the air with constant whispering. St. Bega and her maiden broideresses and all the wonder of the snow miracle on Midsummer Day call to us through the salt sea air. The great Viking Chieftain who set up his cross in shape of the Igdrasil or holy Tree of Life and to remind him of the Hammer of Thor, at Gosforth, moves still upon the dunes where the huts or 'scales ' of his sea-folk once were hidden, and we can watch him on the seventh day- a Christian on land and an honest worshipper of Balder afloat- listening to the harangue of the mission priest in the Gosforth kirk-garth, and joining his brothers on the Thursday at Thor worship in the stone circle by the coast rampire at Seascale. Go on a little further and the druids of the Drigg oak groves come forth to meet one- a little further and King Aveling's town is reached.
Who King Aveling or Eveling was, none know; but there is a breath of early British lore about the word, as there is sign and seal of the occupation of this harbour town in very early days from the great bee-hive burial mound of oaken chambers and earth, which was pierced through by the Furness Railway navvies, when they constructed the line, three hundred yards south of the present rail-way station of Ravenglass.
Nor is the place free from the haunting of King Arthur. The ancient ruin close by the bee-hive burial mound, bore in the seventeenth century the name of Lyon's Guard and was held to be a mansion of King Arthur, son of Pendragon. As we roam the sand-locked harbour or, by leave of Lord Muncaster, pass the ferry to visit the interesting gullery close by, we may well be roaming the shores of a northern Lyonnesse that once knew the gathering of the goodliest knights whereof this world holds record. The very word Lyonnesse brings us to Viking times. Hither doubtless came the Norse sea-farers in their beaked ships from far-off Mona's Isle, when in the ninth and tenth centuries they swooped down upon the coast of the Cymbri and made themselves the permanent flock-masters of our northern fells.
But earlier than the days of Lyon's-guard and before even the raven standards gave their name to Ravenglass, here flew the Roman eagle in its mig'ht. For here in A.D. 79 came the great general Agricola, who gave us our two Roman walls to the North, advancing from Anglesea up the western coasts with his fleet to bear him company. Here he must have left an army of road-makers to construct the continuation of the road from Millom to Moresby and Ellenborough, Allonby and Bowness on Solway, and to establish his line of communication with Ambleside and the interior of the country by way of Hardknot and Wry nose within signalling distance of Newton Knot. It was no temporary camp that Agricola made here at Ravenglass. Whoever was left in command when the General went northward must have been a man of considerable importance- a man whose dignity needed a palace to give it home. Thus to-day, as we move in thought among the remains of Walls Castle with its thick sandstone masonry on which the terracotta plastering made by Roman cement, mixed with finely crushed tile, still remains, and within which was discovered, a few years ago, the hypocaust for winter's use and for the daily bath, we call up the figure of some mighty captain of a cohort who here, towards the end of the first century after Christ, though he knew not the Father we worship, still believed in spiritual realities, and insisted that a guardian deity of his house, the bust of the Roman Emperor as God's viceregent, should have place in his house, and bade the architect arrange for the 'cella' or niche wherein the bust should stand.
We leave Walls Castle remembering that nowhere in Great Britain to-day are there any ruins of Roman domestic masonry standing so high above ground, and so we go up by a private drive towards the Decoy. Golden-leaved wych-elms and hazelwands light the path. The bracken burns at our side, the brook sings through a tangle of fiery maple and rosy bramble leaf, and we are soon in the breezy deer-park on the height that of old time knew Roman soldier and Viking sailor who had clomb up to have a look out over shining estuary and wooded vale. Passing through the deer park, we find ourselves in a glen walled up to Heaven either side with elm, and pine, and deodar, and sycamore, and horse chestnut. The blue of the pinus insignis against the chestnut gold is wonderful, and all the rhododendrons gleam green beneath a canopy of lustrous amber light. So down towards the Castle-hold, with squirrels leaping from bough to bough, and rabbits scuttling across our path, till with a great swoop the rosy-gravelled drive takes us round through verdurous lawn sentinelled by umber beech and russet oak to the terrace upon which the granite tower and hooded porch in one, opens its kindly door. I say kindly advisedly. There is no one in our North country where all the great squires are kind, more public-spirited in the use of his beautiful Castle grounds than the Lord of Muncaster. A letter to the Lord's agent for permission to view the Castle grounds has never yet been unanswered, or answered in the negative. It seems to be the joy of his life to share this goodly heritage of perfect scene with all who have hearts to feel and eyes to see.
We will not linger at the Castle front, though from beneath the mighty tree in the foreground few nobler visions of the valley from here to Scafell foot are vouchsafed us. We have on other visits passed through the beautiful hall to gaze face to face on Tom Skelton, the jester, who was lord of misrule in ancient time at Muncaster, and on another occasion have been permitted sight of that quaint green glass bowl, enamelled in white lilac and gold, given by the royal Seigneur Henry VI., which whilst it nestles safely in the cotton wool within its oaken case will keep the luck of Muncaster whole. In one of the rooms hangs the panel portrait of the King in his ermine cape presenting the bowl, with the date 1461 beneath it, and, if we walk to the edge of the terrace in front of the Castle door, we may see away to the east the tower that keeps in mind the fact that here after the battle of Towton was given, by Sir John Pennington, sanctuary and welcome to the unfortunate Lancastrian King who had been- so tradition has it- found wandering on the fell near by, by the friendly shepherds of the then Lord of Muncaster.
But we must away to the famous terrace that stretches along the side of the hill in the direction of that memorial tower. There is in Great Britain no Castle terrace that seems better to combine everything needed to a perfect panorama of glorious scene. Bending round a deep cutting filled with rhododendron and crossing what once was the moat, we find ourselves upon a broad walk of softest turf, that seems to run endlessly away to the eastward. Fenced from the north by lilac bushes and arbutus and bay and laurel, the border on our left hand, though it is mid-October, is still gay with flowers. The Michaelmas daisy vies with the tritonus and lingering gladioli, the last roses and geraniums are still glowing at our side, while the red-admiral butterfly opens and closes his gorgeous wings as though he feared no frost. On our right a low wall of box runs like a rampart; out of it at intervals of twelve paces, rise Irish yews, now darkly green, now gleaming gold, and beyond on the sloping meadow-lawn that falls to the valley of the Esk, stand in every variety of Autumn colour, gorgeous chestnuts and wych-elms and beech trees from whose depths of russet beauty fly in startled hundreds the wood pigeons who clash the grey-winged cymbals of their wings and flash from shadow into sun. The silver torrent suddenly pours back through the sunlit air, and shines against the russet woodland, while startled by the rush of the dainty multitude the sheep look up from their feeding. Down below us glides the silver coiling river. A few hours hence it will be hardly visible, but now it is high tide and here twice a day
"The salt sea water passes by
And makes a silence in the hills."
Yet I am not so sure that the babbler up at Eskdale Head needs any silencing, for here as it swerves from left to right, it finds such calm contentment that its voice, except in flood time, is not heard, and the laughter of the black-headed gull and clang of the heron and bleating of the sheep are the only sounds that come up through the quiet air as we pace the soft green terrace, lost in thought.
I do not know any terrace in England so magical in its entire restfulness. It is true that as one looks out to Birker Moor, the gulls, sailing over towards Devoke, carry one's eye away to the grey-purple Harter Fell and Hardknot, and echoes of Roman arms come back down the light wind from the north-east; or again, one gazes away West to the glimmering sea that saw the Roman galleys and the Viking prows, or south to the huge Black Combe where the Britons lit their Baal fires and cried from their stone circles to their gods to help them against the foe; but none of these sounds seem to disturb the sense of absolute peace and security which this green garden-terrace gives to all who wander here. Peace breathes from the ground. There stands the Fortress Castle but her warfare is accomplished; though the ghost of a king comes pale and haggard from his fellside wandering, the battle terror still upon his face, and passes with his shepherd friends toward the Castle gate, he cannot break the spell of absolute tranquillity that haunts this half a mile of grassy lawn above the gentle Esk.
Away in the distance gleam the Crinkle Crags that lead us ladder-like to the heights of Bowfell, to Great End and the mountain mass of Scafell and Scafell Pike. In this all golden October afternoon the mountains seem to have been carved from chrysolite and lapis lazuli and burning amethyst; you might believe that August was back again, and had flung its purple mantle over the kingly shoulders of the far-away hills. Sometimes, by one of those magic transformations our October afternoons bring, all colour suddenly fades, and the vast mountain monarchs that just now burned like flame, or seemed built of solid cobalt, are pale as a dead man's face, and shine as if they were not children of the great volcanoes' central fires, but creatures of the sea-shell's making-vast chalk barriers lifted from the deep.
But for the fairest view at Muncaster of those far fells, we must retrace our steps and passing through the retired churchyard with its broken cross, that takes us back to the knot work of Viking times, we may make our way to a lane beyond the Vicarage that leads us on to Muncaster Fell and the tarn that glimmers on its height. Words fail one to describe the prospect from that tarn side, whether a man come in emerald April, in purple heather time, or in the golden Autumn-tide. Here on a ridge that gives fair view of either dale, the Mitedale on the one side and the Eskdale on the other, with view of the old harbour of King Aveling's town, and the rolling dunes of Ravenglass to the west, with Mona's Isle laid like a vast jewel in the far ocean waterflood, a man may dream of all the historic pageant of the past that has gone to make our Cumberland. The Britons holding their 'strengths ' of earth upon the shoulders of the inland fells; the Romans marching along the sea-coast northward, or building their camp at Hardknot; the Christian missionaries landing with St. Bega at Tomlin Head; the Vikings filling the waterpool below with their beaked ships, or gathering for worship in the far hamlet of Gosforth; the monks of Calder building their Abbey in the woodland further north, the baron of medival time rearing his fortress hard by round the ancient tower which the Romans may have founded; the fishermen of Queen Elizabeth's time following the bends of the Irt and Mite and Esk and fishing the shallows for pearl-bearing oysters; the stranding of some Armada wreckage on the shore, the sailing by of the privateer that the daring Captain Paul Jones commanded, all these are pictures that may rise to the mind's eye, as one gazes; and yet all these fade before the splendour of those mountain giants to the east, that have gazed on the changing life of the men who have lived and died upon this western shore, and know that one work remains untouched, one care undiminished, the work and care of the keepers of the fellside flock, and that one race has outlived all changes, the race of the ruff-necked mountain-sheep, the Herdwicks, that are round about us as we gaze.
"Ay, it's a grand daay is this hooiver for t' time o' year," said the shepherd at my side, "and you can gang farder and fare warse for a bonnie leuk oot I'se thinkin. Fine wedder an aw by t'leuks o' Scafell. It's best when he's a bit o' cloud on't heed on 'im."
As he spoke I saw a white plumy cloud lay its great wreath upon the mountain's height, and fill the lower slopes with shadow of violet blue, while the sun upon the flanks of the hill seemed doubly gold from the fiery warmth of the bracken vesture that it enlightened. I had never seen such colour since I stood upon the hills of Edom, and the heights of Serbal and Sinai, or gazed from Hermon upon the Lebanonian range. The Syrian colours of gold and amber and rose and lilac and puce and purple and amethyst and cobalt and turquoise seemed to have possessed the hills to the east, and to be flooding fell and valley to our very feet; with the lights of amber mixed with emerald, the young gorse and juniper mingling in the withered fern close beside us, swept down the ridge of the Muncaster Fell, and the great cloud shadows dropped purple upon the golden bents and tussock grass, and changing the silver tarn to the colour of mother-of-pearl, passed on out seaward and mottled the sea with islands of steel-blue darkness.
We turned our backs unwillingly upon that fair plain of shadowy green and gold and purple plow-land, of white farms seen upon the fells, and clustered hamlets in their happy peace to the north. We turned our backs right loath upon the blue and gold of distant hills and glimmering mountain wastes to the eastward, and homeward through the leaf-strewn lanes that whispered to our feet we went, down the long hill of pleasant Muncaster with assuring whispers of contentment in our heart.
Poorer for loss of the scene, we were richer in soul for all its loveliness, rich with such a treasury of Autumn memories in one's mind as might make a man in sorrow smile to think upon, and a man in gladness give God thanks for joy.