It is true that it shows no signs of decay, but it has suffered loss. Two of its main stems were shattered years ago by a hurricane, and were sawn off at the bole. Let us go along the road to the farm buildings, and turn back down to what now serves for a watering-place for horses. It is thus we shall best get an idea of how 'it stands single, in the midst of its own darkness.' The branches stretch their shadow over the stream, and the ripple of the sunny talkative beck contrasts strangely with the deep silence of the solemn tree. If we go up to Whinfell Hall and ask a keen observer of nature and plant life about this famous yew, Mr. Wilson Robinson will tell us that he once measured the trunk at its least circumference and found it 23 feet 10 inches, and that, about thirty years ago, a strong south-east gale came with hurricane force down Hope Ghyll, wrenched off one of the side limbs and carried away a third of the tree. Another limb has fallen since then, and yet, shattered and torn, what a magnificent ruin it {172} is, how well worth climbing over Whinlatter Pass to visit. After gazing up the beck towards the picturesque bridge from which we first surveyed the yew, towards the grand old farmstead and its cluster of sycamores as a background for the bridge, let us go back to the bridge and across into the meadow wherein the 'Pride of Lorton Vale' stands, and, gazing from under the tree towards the west and south, let us wonder at the beauty of faintly bronzed fern on Whiteside, the amethystine lilac of the Grasmoor mass, the far-off cones of Red Pike and High Stile blue above Mellbreak, and far to the west, Herdhouse ghostly grey; all seeming to join in shutting out the world and making the quiet emerald meadow in which we stand a sanctuary for thought and restfulness. Then let us go back to that day in the year 1653 when George Fox, having narrowly escaped death by a boy's rapier thrust, and with his hand and wrist still smarting from the cruel blow of a rough fellow down at Bootle, where they mobbed him on the previous Sunday, pale and worn came hither to the ford and found already James Lancaster, one of his disciples, who had gone forward {173} as an avant-courier on the way to Cockermouth, busy haranguing the people. The quiet meadow of to-day was on that day full of armed men. A detachment of Cromwell's soldiers had been told off from Cockermouth to keep the peace--it being known that Fox was on his way to Lorton; and Mr. Larkham, the Congregationalist minister of Cockermouth, and Priest Wilkinson, the Vicar of Brigham-cum-Mosser-cum-Lorton, were probably among the crowd that covered the field and stood by the banks of the stream. 'The people,' we read in Fox's _Journal_, 'lay up and down in the open, like people at a leaguer.' Fox had seen something of camp life during the late civil war, and he doubtless felt that day that, man of peace though he was, the field of the Lorton yew would be indeed a field of battle for him.