Evelyn Manwaring, then, was the only daughter of one Cuthbert Piercey Manwaring, a gentleman of very ancient family, and of competent, although not very large estate. Holmcastle Manor, the family place, was situated amidst beautiful, if somewhat wild and dreary scenery on the Northern border of the County of Lancaster. Of old time the Manwarings had been great Seigneurs in those parts, and had owned vast tracts of fell and fen and moorland, besides more fertile acres; but the loyalty of some members of the family, who were cavaliers to a man, and the extravagance of others, had sadly wasted the ancestral patrimony, so that when Cuthbert Piercey Manwaring succeeded his uncle, Algernon, the family estate was reduced to the narrower bounds of the parish of Holmcastle, to a tract of moorland and fell above it which went by the name of Stanwick Chase, and to a couple of outlying rich farms in the distant flat country in the neighbourhood of Ormskirk. The Manor-house of Holmcastle, which had succeeded an ancient castle, whereof the earthworks and a few shapeless masses of weather-beaten stone were all that remained, crowned a wooded knoll which rose from nearly the centre of Arrow Dale; and round nearly three sides of the eminence, which in places descended precipitously to the river, rippled and raced and roared and rushed the swift Arrow--now plunging into deep rock-pools, now flowing over stony shallows, now overhung by huge wych-elms, the queen of all North-country trees, and now dominated by scarps of grey or reddish rock. Trout abounded in the deep pools, or lay poising, head up-stream, in the pebbly shallows, and now and then a noble salmon might be seen from the old grey bridge below the village of Holmcastle, which had made its way up past the filth of Preston, and other manufacturing towns, from the lordly Ribble, whereof the Arrow was one of the principal tributaries. On either side the valley, and at varying distances from the river, the arable and pasture land ran up to meet the broad swathes of brown or purple heather of the stately, swelling moors; and towards the end of the valley--or “dale,” as the folks called it--was seen the almost precipitous hill, or rather mountain, called “Stanwick Edge,” with its bare crest of shivered crags. Here and there small beck-formed, lateral valleys led up from the Arrow amongst the hills, and the sides of these were clothed with mountain-ashes, birches, hollies, and stunted oaks. Far up one of these, on a sort of platform in the midst of an amphitheatre of solemn hills, which had its entrance towards the South-West, stood a monument of remote and unknown antiquity, a monolith of grey, weather-stained stone, known far and wide to the country folks and dalesmen as the “Long Man,” or more correctly the “Long _Maen_,” of Stanwick.