Bowness is a quiet little place, standing high up above the Solway, with steep cobbled streets and many clay houses, "whose walls," said an old inhabitant to me, "are as thick as my stick is long." As seen from the ridge above the road to the west of the village, eight strips of colour, gradually receding, make up my impression of the view. {221} First a strip of white road, then a strip of green grass; beyond that, a strip of yellow gorse; behind the gorse, a strip of marshland, pink with sea-thrift; then a strip of yellow dry sand, then a strip of brown wet sand; beyond that the blue water of the Solway, and, last of all, the blue-grey distance of Scotland. There were fishing-smacks on the Solway, and there were fishermen fishing with their "half-nets" for salmon and trout. Camden says of this part: "I marvailed at first, why they built here so great fortifications, considering that for eight miles or thereabout, there lieth opposite a very great frith and arme of the sea; but now I understand that every ebbe the water is so low, that the Borderers and beast-stealers may easily wade over." And he records how, in 1216, they came, and having stayed too long were swept away by the tide. His quaint words (or rather, Dr. Philemon Holland's quaint translation of them) are worth quoting: "For Eden, that notable river, * * * powreth forth into a mighty masse of water, having not yet forgotten what adoe it had to pass away, struggling and wrestling as it did, among the carcasses of freebutters, lying dead in it on heapes, in the yeer of salvation, 1216, when it swallowed them up, loaden with booties out of England, and so buried that rabble of robbers under his waves." {222} I searched about for the end of the Wall, where it was supposed to run northwards into the water, and was just about to give it up in despair, when I saw an old lady in a black sunbonnet leaning over the gate of a pretty little cottage. I got into conversation with her, and then of her own accord she told me that the Roman Wall ended in her garden, "behind that apple-tree." She spoke of the gentlemen who had come to investigate, and how they had followed it down from her garden to the shore, by the old schoolhouse, which is now used by the fishermen for keeping their nets. She added: "There's not many that sets any store by the Roman Wall here--only me."