Causey Park Bridge, over a little rivulet, a ruined windmill, and the remains of Causey Park Tower are the next features of the way before reaching a rise where an old road goes scaling a hillside to the right hand, surmounted by a farm picturesquely named “Helm-on-the-Hill.” Thence downhill on to Bockenfield Moor, and then precipitously down again through West Thirston and across the picturesque bridge that spans the lovely Coquet, into Felton: villages bordering either bank of the river, where the angler finds excellent sport, and where the rash cyclist, regardless of the danger-boards erected for his guidance on the hill-tops, tries involuntary conclusions with the aforesaid bridge at the bottom. A mile onward, up the rising road, is the park of Swarland Hall, with “Nelson’s Monument,” a time-stained obelisk, seen amid the trees within the park fence, and showing against the sky-line as the traveller approaches the moorland height of Rushy Cap. Alexander Davison, squire of Swarland Hall and friend of the Admiral, erected it, “not to commemorate the public virtue and heroic achievements of Nelson, which is the duty of England, but to the memory of private friendship.” Occupying so prominent a position by the roadside, it was probably intended to edify the coach-passengers of old. So to Newton-on-the-Moor—which might more fitly be named Newton-on-the-Hill—with its half a dozen cottages and its coal-pits, and thence by a featureless but not unpleasing road into Alnwick. [Picture: The Market-Place, Morpeth] [Picture: Felton Bridge] It is something of a shock to the sentimental pilgrim, northward-bound, that the entrance to historic Alnwick should be by the gas-works, the railway station, the Farmers’ Folly (of which more shall presently be said), and other unmistakable and unromantic evidences of modernity that spread beyond the ancient confines of the town to form the suburb of Bondgate Without; but man cannot live by medievalism alone. The town itself is gained at that point where the heavy blackened mass of Bondgate itself spans the road, just beyond the elaborately rebuilt “Old Plough,” still exhibiting, however, the curious tablet from the old house:— That which your Father old hath purchased and left You to possess, do you dearly Hold to show his worthiness. 1714. [Picture: Alnwick] XXVII