Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/342

320 family belonged, and will only add that Mr. Procter stated at the time that he could bring forty witnesses to attest the supernatural visitations which marked his residence at Willington.

There was a wild legend in my native city of a subterranean passage between Finchale Abbey and the cathedral of Durham, and of an attempt to penetrate it. One man succeeded up to a certain point where there was a strong door which barred progress. He returned scared by the horrors he had witnessed and refused to brave them again. Another, more desperate, declared he would succeed or perish in the attempt. He took with him a horn which he blew from time to time, so that those in the upper air might know of his whereabouts. The horn was heard at intervals till the crowd above reached Gilesgate Moor, when a shrill and hasty blast alarmed them—it was the last they could distinguish—the man had succumbed to the horrors of the place.

Respecting Cleveland, Mr. G. M. Tweddell says that every old castle and ruined monastery there has its legend of a subterranean passage leading therefrom, which some one has penetrated to a certain distance till he came to an iron chest supposed to be full of gold, on which was perched a raven. This raven points out, he considers, the Scandinavian origin of the legend. A cock or hen, however, sometimes takes the place of the raven.

I learn from Mr. Robinson, of Hill House, Reeth, Yorkshire, that in his neighbourhood as in many others is a place called Maiden’s Castle, in which tradition avers a chest of gold is buried. “Many attempts,” he says, “have been made to gain possession of the treasure, and one party of adventurers actually came up to the chest and laid hold of it, when a hen appeared, flapped her wings, and put out the light. This occurred three times, and the men were obliged to desist. The next day was Sunday, still they returned to the place. A violent storm of thunder and rain came on, however, and the ‘drift,’ in miners’ phrase, ‘ran.’ My informant, an old man of the place, knew this, he said, for a fact.”

A somewhat similar tale is told of Kirkstall Abbey, near Leeds. I give it in the genuine vernacular as it was told to my informant fifty years ago by the last survivor of the family of