Page:Transactions of the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1867).djvu/102

84 geography is more like what is usual. From Ridlees Cairn (1346 feet) to Simonside (1447 feet), a distance of 15 miles, stretches a bank of hill of an altogether different character from those we have left behind on the west, heathery and plateau-like, forming at first the watershed between the Coquet and the Reed, and afterwards between the Coquet and upper part of the Wansbeck. Harbottle Lough, a lonely little tarn in the heart of hill a mile south-west of the village of Harbottle, with flocks of screaming sea-gulls wheeling about it in summer-time, and swamps of Comarum, Menyanthes, Equisetum limosum, and cotton-grass, and sweeps of heathery moor fragrant with gale and juniper, stretching far away towards Redesdale on the south, and ridges of grey gritstone crag shutting it in on every side, is well worthy of a visit. The edge of moor at this point is barely 1000 feet above sea-level, and the gradual slopes about Harbottle and Holystone are covered with fir-plantations, and in one place a natural wood of oak and birch stretches down to the road-side. At Holystone, close to the village, is the well of Paulinus, a small spring of water, crystal-clear, one of the places where the indefatigable missionary baptised an indefinite number of converts, as a statue and inscription commemorate. All along this part the north side of the river has nothing of the mountain aspect; but above Rothbury, where the stream has sunk to under 100 yards above the sea-level, we strike the sandstone ridge in its northward course transversely, the hills again attaining a height of 1000 feet, and rising above the town with considerable steepness, crested with edges of gritstone crag. A streamlet which flows down from this hill is called Hebden Burn. Simonside is a characteristic feature of Northumbrian physical geography, a great mass of hill rising up in the very centre of the county to a height of 1500 feet, and commanding nearly the whole of it at a single view. From the loosely-piled cairn of stones that marks the highest point the eye stretches on the north to the Cheviot ridge, Cheviot and Hedgehope standing out like two camel-shaped humps prominently in front, to the west a slightly lower continuous ridge sweeping away to bound the view for a quarter of a circle, and on the east a spur prolonged from them in the direction of the