Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/820

 Percies being now crushed, and their head, Henry Percy, being in prison. Northumberland did not at first join his brother Warwick and the other Nevilles when they revolted against Edward IV., but neither did he help the king. Edward, doubtless suspecting him, restored the earldom of Northumberland and its vast estates to Henry Percy, while John Neville’s only recompense was the barren title of marquess of Montagu. At Pontefract in 1470 he and his men declared for Henry VI., a proceeding which compelled Edward IV. to fly from England, and under the restored king he regained his position as warden, but not the earldom of Northumberland. He did not attempt to resist Edward IV. when this king landed in Yorkshire in March 1471, but he fought under Warwick at Barnet, where he was slain on the 14th of April 1471. His son George (d. 1483) was betrothed to Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., and was created duke of Bedford in 1470, but the marriage did not take place and he was deprived of his dukedom in 1477.

 NORTHUMBERLAND, the northernmost county of England, bounded N.W. by the Scottish counties of Berwick and Roxburgh, W. by Cumberland, S. by Durham, and E. by the North Sea. The area is 2018 sq. m. It has a general inclination eastward from the hill-borders of Scotland and Cumberland. The Cheviot range partly separates Northumberland from Scotland, and reaches in the Cheviot, its culminating point north-eastward, the greatest elevation in the county, 2676 ft. The elevation of the Cheviots rarely falls below 1300 ft. along the Border, and generally exceeds 1600. A line of high ground, bending southward, forms the watershed between the North and Irish Seas. The boundary with Cumberland crosses the low divide between the Irthing and the South Tyne, after coinciding with the former river for a short distance, and giving Northumberland a small drainage area westward. In the south-west a small area of the Pennine uplands is included in the county, reaching elevations up to 2206 ft. in Kilhope Law. Few eminences break the general eastward incline, which appears as a wide billowing series of confluent hills that for half the year mingle tints of brown, russet, and dun in a rich pattern, and at all times communicate a fine sense of altitude and expanse. The Simonside Hills (1447 ft.) form one not very conspicuous exception. The configuration of much of these uplands has a certain linearity in its details due to groups and ranges of ridges, crags, and terrace-like tiers, termed “edges” (escarpments) by the country folk, and generally facing the interior, like broad ends of wedges. The line of pillared crags and prow-like headlands between the North and South Tynes along the verge of which the Romans carried their wall is a fine specimen. Passing eastwards from the uplands the moors are exchanged for enclosed grounds, “drystone” walls for hedgerows, and rare sprinklings of birch for a sufficiently varied wooding. The hills and moors sink to a coast generally low, a succession of sands, flat tidal rocks and slight cliffs. Its bays are edged by blown sandhills; its borders are severely wind-swept. Several islands lie over against it. Holy Island, the classic Lindisfarne, 1051 acres in extent, but half “links” and sandbanks, is annexed to the mainland and accessible to conveyances every tide. The (q.v.) are a group of rocky islets farther south.

Deep glens and valleys, scoring the uplands, and richly wooded except at their heads, are characteristic of the rivers. Of these the chief are the Tweed, forming the north-eastern part of the Scottish border, its tributary the Till (with its feeders the Glen and College), the Aln and the exquisite Coquet, flowing into Alnmouth Bay, the Wansbeck, with its tributary the Font, the Blyth and the Tyne, forming part of the boundary with Durham, the union of the North and South Tynes. Many of the upland streams attract trout-fishermen.

Geology.—The core of the county, in a geological aspect, is the northern Cheviots from Redesdale head nearly to the Tweed. Its oldest rocks are gritty and slaty beds of Silurian age, about the head of the rivers Rede and Coquet and near the Breamish south of Ingram—a part of the great Silurian mass of the southern uplands of Scotland. Volcanic activity about the period of the Old Red Sandstone resulted in the felspathic porphyrites, passing into the syenites and granites, that form the mass of the northern Cheviots. Round this core there now lie relays of Carboniferous strata dipping east and south, much faulted and repeated in places, but passing into Coal Measures and Magnesian Limestone in the south-eastern part of the county. The whole system consists of (1) the Carboniferous Limestone series in three divisions; (2) the Millstone Grit; and (3) the Coal Measures. Lowest in Northumberland lies Tate’s Tuedian group, the first envelope of sinking Cheviot-land. Some reddish shore-like conglomerates lie in places at its base, as at Roddam Dene; its shales are often tinged with distemper greens; its coals are scarcely worthy of the name; its limestones are thin, except near Rothbury; and its marine fossils are few. The Tuedian group is overlaid by the Carbonaceous group; its shales are carbonaceous-grey, its coals, though mostly small, very numerous, its limestones often plant-limestones, and its calcareous matter much diffused. Upon this lies the Calcareous group; its lime occurs in well-individualized marine beds, cropping up to the surface in green-vested strips; its fossils are found in recurrent cycles, with the limestones and coals forming their extremes. These three groups now range round the northern Cheviots in curved belts broadening southwards, and occupy nearly all the rolling ground between the Tweed and the South Tyne, the sandstones forming the chief eminences. The middle division becomes thinner and more like the Coal Measures in passing northwards, and the upper division, thinning also, loses many of its limestones. The Millstone Grit is a characterless succession of grits and shales. The Coal Measures possess the same zone-like arrangement that prevails in the Limestone series, but are without limestones. They also are divided, very artificially, into three groups. The lowest, from the Brockwell seam downwards, has some traces of Gannister beds, and its coal-seams are thin. The famous Hutton collection of plants was made chiefly from the roof-shales of two seams—the Bensham and the Low Main. The unique Atthey collection of fishes and Amphibia comes from the latter. The Coal Measures lie along the coast in a long triangle, of which the base, at the Tyne, is produced westwards on to the moors south of that river, where it is wedged against lower beds on the south by a fault. The strata within the triangle give signs of departing from the easterly dip that has brought them where they are, and along a line between its apex (near Amble) and an easterly point in its base (near Jarrow) they turn up north-eastwards, promising coal-crops under the sea.

The top of the Coal Measures is wanting. After a slight tilting of the strata and the denudation that removed it, the Permian rocks were deposited, consisting of Magnesian Limestone, a thin fish-bed below it, and yellow sands and some red sandstone (with plants of Coal Measure species) at the base. These rocks are now all but removed. They form Tynemouth rock, and lie notched-in against the 90-fathom dyke at Cullercoates, and again are touched (the base only) at Seaton Sluice. No higher strata have been preserved. The chief faults of the county extend across it. Its igneous rocks, other than the Cheviot porphyrites and a few contemporaneous traps in the lowest Carboniferous, are all intrusive. An irregular sheet of basalt forced between planes of bedding (perhaps at the close of the Carboniferous period) forms the crag-making line of the Great Whinsill, which, with many shifts, breaks and gaps, extends from Greenhead near Gilsland to the Kyloe Hills. Numbers of basalt dykes cross the county, and were probably connected with the plateau of Miocene volcanic rocks in the Hebrides. Everywhere the Glacial period has left rocks rounded and scored, and rock-fragments from far and near rubbed up into boulder-clay. The glaciers at first held with the valleys, but as the ice-inundation grew they spread out into one sheet—the Cheviot tops, heavily ice-capped, alone rising above it. Two great currents met in confluence around these hills—one from across the western watershed, the other skirting the coast from the north. Boulders from Galloway, Criffel, the Lake District and other places adjacent, and from the Lammermuirs and Berwickshire, lie in their track. Of moraines there are only a few towards the hills. Glaciated shell-fragments have been detected at Tynemouth. Laminated brick clays occur among the boulder-clays. Sheets and mounds of gravel of the nature of kames exist here and there on the low grounds, and stretch in a chain over the low watershed between Haltwhistle and Gilsland, sparsely dotting also some more upland valleys. An upper boulder-clay, containing flints, skirts the coast.

The older valleys are all pre-Glacial, and may date from the Miocene period. They are much choked up with Glacial deposits, and lie so deep below the surface that, if they were cleared-out arms of the sea, one of them, 140 ft. deep at Newcastle, would extend for miles inland. After the departure of the glaciers the streams here and there wandered into new positions, and hence arises a great variety of smooth slope and rocky gorge. In the open country atmospheric waste has hollowed out the shales at their outcrops, leaving the sandstones, &c., as protruding “edges,” roughened here and there into crags. In the lower grounds, where this surface-dissection first began, the “edges” have much run together; on the heights, whose turn came last, they are often prominent and crest-like, but have glacier-rounded brows. Many old tarns are now sheeted over with peat. The sloping peat-fields are often the sites of straggling birch-woods, now buried.

Climate.—The climate is bracing and healthy, with temperate summers (e.g. the average July temperature at Alnwick is 57·9° F.). In spring east winds prevail over the whole county. The lambing