The Great North Road crosses the Tees by Croft Bridge, on which the boundary between Yorkshire and Durham is marked by a stone dated 1627. This road is the "Darnton Trod," along which criminals from the South sought refuge all through the Middle Ages. Once across the Tees the fugitive was safe, for the King’s writ did not run in the Bishopric. Moreover, this was the road to the great sanctuary of St. Cuthbert at Durham, where a man was safe from the vengeance of his enemies; and so it happened that Darlington became a great resort of evil-doers, and in 1311 Bishop Kellaw issued a proclamation threatening with the terrors of excommunication all those who molested merchants going to and returning from Darlington market. The ill-name of the neighbourhood was not lost after the Bishop had been deprived of his own writs in 1536. The little inn of Baydale was the resort of the gentlemen of the road in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rendezvous of Catton’s gang, the haunt of Barwick and of Sir William Browne, all noted highwaymen of the North. The first hamlet in Durham through which the road passes is Oxneyfield, where, in the fields by the wayside, may be seen the Hell Kettles, four dark, still pools, formed by the natural sinking of the soil over the salt measures in the north bank of the Tees. There is a tradition that an Eastern diver, a black man, plunged into one of the pools, and reappeared in the Skerne, having discovered a subterranean connection between the two waters. The Black Man in North Country legends is usually the devil, and this story may be connected with the belief that the Hell Kettles sometimes grow boiling hot, and that the devil "seethes the souls of sinful men and women in them," at which times the spirits may be heard to cry and yell about the pools. [Illustration: THE MARKET-CROSS AT DARLINGTON.]