About two miles to the west of Morpeth, on a spot romantic enough to inspire a poet’s dream, fair enough for a painter to linger over with a lover’s delight, stand the ruins of the old Saxon castle of Mitford. That is the Cradle of our Race. The keep, battered by storms of war and weather, rises on a rocky eminence to the south of the river Wansbeck,[1] close to the point where the two fords of the Wansbeck and the Font meet. It was from this meeting that the Castle and village took their name,[2] just as Coblenz did from the _confluentiæ_ of Rhine and Moselle. The rivers of Northumberland, tearing their way through the rocks, between banks fringed with the most picturesque vegetation, overhanging trees, shrubs, ferns, docks, and all the fairy-like greenery which they wear with such grace, are the glory of that part of the country. Such streams as the Wansbeck and the Coquet are a haunting memory. Not even the most audaciously inventive of antiquaries has, so far as I know, been brave enough to fix the date of the Castle’s building; all that can be said is that it is very old. Burke, on the authority of the “Durham Booke,” tells the story how a certain “Robert Mitford, Esq., carried an old writeing to produce at Durham upon some occasion, by wch one of ye ancestors of Mitfords, of Mitford, in ye time of K. Edwd. ye Confessor, did assure his wife’s joynture out of Lands in Mitford, wch writeing Sir Joseph Craddock saw and attests it under the hand, but is since embezzled and lost.” That, since the document is lost, is but a weak foundation upon which to base a belief. The tale, however, must be true, for William the Conqueror’s advent followed almost immediately upon the death of King Edward, and that the Castle was at the time of the Conquest in the possession of Sir John de Mitford is a fact. Beyond that time we must be content to leave the family history lost in the clouds. Even so, the story is old enough, and we may well be proud of our old cousin Edward Mitford, the head of the family, who fulfilled more than his century of life in 1911, and died on the property and in sight of the ruined Castle which belonged to our ancestors some nine hundred years ago.