“Foremost,”—the quotation is drawn from the writings of an author who, beyond any other of the present day, makes his own mark upon what he writes,—“in interest among the monuments of Northumberland, in the narrower sense of the earldom beyond the Tyne, stand the castles; the castles of every size and shape, from Bamburgh, where the castle occupies the whole site of a royal city, to the smallest pele-tower, where the pettiest squire or parson sought shelter for himself in the upper stage, and for his cows in the lower. For the pele-towers of the Border-land, like the endless small square towers of Ireland, are essentially castles. They show the type of the Norman keep continued on a small scale to a very late time. Perhaps many of the adulterine castles which arose in every time of anarchy, and were overthrown at every return of order, many of the eleven hundred and odd castles which overspread the land during the anarchy of Stephen, may not have been of much greater pretensions. At any rate, from the great keep of Newcastle,—were we not in Northumberland we should speak of the far greater keep of Colchester,—to the smallest pele-tower which survives as a small part of a modern house, the idea which runs through all is exactly the same. The castles and towers then, great and small, are the most marked feature of the county. They distinguish it from those shires where castles of any kind are rare; and the employment of the type of the great keeps on a very small scale distinguishes it from the other land of castles. In Wales the Norman keep is not usual; the castles are, for the most part, later in date and more complex in plan; and the small square private tower, the distinctive feature of the North, is there hardly to be found. Northumberland has much to show the traveller in many ways, from the Roman wall onward, but the feature which is especially characteristic is that it is the land of castles.”