Page:Old Castles.djvu/73





LINSTOCK, AND LINSTOCK CASTLE. INSTOCK is a small straggling village, about two miles east of Carlisle, on the north side of the Eden, and closely contiguous to the site of Severus’ Wall, one road to it following the direct route of the wall nearly all the way. It has nothing notable about it but its castle; but, leaving Carlisle one beautiful April afternoon, and proceeding thither through Rickerby Holmes, we found a thousand new inspiring charms in the homely irregular beauty of its quiet rural unambitious seclusion, for it really is a very secluded place—no public road, no railway, no noisy works flushing its dreamy nooks with the clash and clatter of earthly care and confusion. The “march of intellect” has certainly left no outward or visible sign of its many-footed train at Linstock, if it has ever been there. It is an old, old place, its cottages and farm-houses following, like antiquated country people, the fashions of very remote and uncouth times, and its gardens and fences generally, too, seem soundly conservative; the pretty simple flowers, which are both eye-salve and heart-salve to meditative loiterers, growing in promiscuous prolixity under a busliy bearding of hedge, over which shears surely have never