Page:Transactions of the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1867).djvu/103

Rh head of the Aln. The foreground in front of this wall-like ridge consists of a broad space of comparatively low cultivated country, of which Alwinton, Alnham, and Rothbury are the limits, brown fallows, bright-green fields of grain, duller green pastures and meadows, very little wood, and what there is not in patches but principally scattered trees in the hedgerows and along the streams, the Coquet winding along the dale, sometimes hidden, sometimes gleaming in the sunshine. To the east rises the heathery moor which runs without a break from Rothbury northward to the Aln, scattered over with edges of grey gritstone rock. The western hill shuts out the view of the Harbottle fir-woods and upper part of the Coquet valley, but on the right the long line of coast from the Aln to the Tyne can be clearly seen; and due south a wide tract of low undulated moory country across the Wansbeck and Tyne to Kilhope Law and the Durham fells, and further west the similar valleys of the Reed and North Tyne, with the Lake hills far away over them on the distant horizon. Eastward of Rothbury the watershed ridge on both sides of the valley declines rapidly, and soon assumes the character of low cultivated country. On the south it is 600 feet in altitude above Long Horsley, and on the north 473 feet at Shillmoor. Past Brinkburn Priory, Felton village, Acklington Park, and the castle and priory of Warkworth, margined often, like its neighbour-streams the Aln and Wansbeck, with steep wooded banks, the Coquet flows with many windings to its mouth at Warkworth Harbour. The total area of the district is about 250 square miles.