Excerpt from The Romance of Northumberland It is curious that in view of the time-honoured and perennial plaint of the more fastidious that the romantic portions of England are over-run, he should never have discovered that this is an hallucination due to the fact that, like most other people, he does not know his own country. An equally striking and spacious wilderness, for that matter, varying only in detail, lies also hidden from the tourist and from fugitive literature and journalism, in South Wales, but that is not celebrated in household ballads and familiar tales, and belongs rather to the song and story or the Cymry. But there is a great deal more in Northumberland than the map would suggest, much of which will, I trust, reveal itself to such readers as may bear me company through these pages. But to do justice to Northumberland between the covers of a single volume is not easy. To borrow a rather happy phrase from a well-known author, I would call this rather an "Appreciation" of that noble county. One consolation at any rate is mine: for with all the valuable historical, archaeological, and other work of a technical kind that has been done on Northumberland, no descriptive book of the nature of this one, appealing to the general reader, save one or two of purely local significance and circulation, has ever, so far as I know and can learn, been published. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EMBLETON BAY ON that larger and altogether more attractive half of the Northumbrian coast, stretching northward from Warkworth and Alnmouth, there are several villages which have quite recently awoke to find themselves, if not famous, at any rate much sought after by holiday-makers, and scarcely able to keep pace with the modest tide of their waxing popularity. For, save at Alnmouth, where two or three terraces of Victorian villas suggest, at any rate, his blighting finger at the edge of a not unpicturesque townlet, the jerry-builder appears to have gained but scant footing on this coast . Whether the landowners are too many for him, or whether the adamantine whinstone, that is the chief local building material, presents too solid terrors, I do not know; for a summer lodging-house calculated to stand a siege would obviously not pay good interest on the outlay. I am not prepared to say that the force of ancient habit is so strong that the Northumbrian still erects his dwellings with an eye on the Scottish border, but he keeps it, at any rate, on his heirs, and his handiwork is at least not likely to blow away; so the August visitors who affect this coast have mainly accommodated themselves to such adapted quarters as the modest stone tenements of fishing villages can provide. That these are held sufficiently adequate in the matter of comfort is evident from the annual competition for them, which is now quite brisk, and the invaders do not come only from Tyneside but sometimes from Yorkshire, and very occasionally from far countries, even London itself. They are, after all, not a formidable host. Bamburgh, with its matchless castle and excellent golf course, squeezes in the most. Holy Island harbours a few score who are prepared to forswear the world for a season...