That Morpeth folk still cherish old anti-Scottish sayings is not at all remarkable; for old manners, old sayings, and ancient hatreds die slowly in such places as this, and moreover, the Morpeth of old suffered terribly from Scottish raiders. Later times saw a more peaceful irruption, when Scottish youths came afoot down the great road in quest of fame and fortune in the south. People looked askance upon them as Scots, while innkeepers hated them for their poverty and their canniness. Those licensed victuallers thought, with Dr. Johnson, who did not greatly like them either, that “the finest prospect for a Scotchman was the high road that led him into England.” This bitter satire, by the way, was in reply to a Mr. Ogilvie, who had been contending on behalf of the “great many noble wild prospects” which Scotland contained. Smollett, in his _Humphry Clinker_, shows how greatly the Scots were misliked along this route about 1766. He says that, from Doncaster northwards, all the windows of all the inns were scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of the Scottish nation. This fact was pointed out to that fine Scottish character, Lismahago, and with it a particularly scurrilous epigram. He read it with some difficulty, the glass being dirty, and with the most starched composure. “Vara terse and vara poignant,” said he; “but with the help of a wat dishclout it might be rendered more clear and parspicuous.” The country between Morpeth and Alnwick is dotted with peel-towers and their ruins, built in the wild old times when the ancestors of these peaceful Scots came in quest of spoil, laying waste the Borders far and wide. One had but to turn aside from the road at Warrener’s House, two miles beyond Morpeth, and thence proceed eastward for a further two, for ten castles to be seen at once from the vantage-point of Cockle Park Tower, itself a fine relic of a fortress belonging in the fifteenth century to the Ogles, situated now on a farm called by the hideous name of Blubberymires. The peculiar appropriateness of Morpeth’s name, meaning as it does “moor-path,” is fully realised when coming up the road, up the well-named High Highlaws to where the road to Cockle Park Tower branches off, and where an old toll-house stands, with “Warrener’s House,” a deserted red-brick mansion, opposite. It is quite worth while to ask any passing countryman the name of that house, for then the “Northumbrian burr” will be heard in all its richness. As De Foe remarked, two hundred years ago, Northumbrians have “a Shibboleth upon their Tongues, namely, a difficulty in pronouncing the letter R,” and in their mouths, consequently, the name becomes, grotesquely enough, “Wawwener.”