The road onwards is a weariness and an infliction to the cyclist, for it goes on in a heavy three miles’ continuous rise up to the summit of Heiferlaw Bank, whence there is a wide and windy view of uncomfortable looking moorlands to the north, with the craggy Cheviots, perhaps covered with snow, to the north-west. As a literary lady—Mrs. Montagu—wrote in 1789, when on a northern journey, “These moors are not totally uninhabited, but they look unblest.” How true! The proper antidote to this is the looking back to where, deep down in the vale of Aln, lie town and castle, perhaps lapt in infrequent sunshine, more probably seen through rain, but, in any case, presenting a picture of sheltered content, and seeming to be protected from the rude buffets of the weather by the hill on which we are progressing and by the wooded flanks of Brislaw on the other side. “Seeming,” because those who know Alnwick well could tell a different tale of wintry blasts and inclement seasons that belie the hint of this hillside prospect for three whole quarters round the calendar and a good proportion of the fourth. In this lies a suggestion of why the Percies were so warlike. They and their northern foes fought to keep themselves warm! Nowadays such courses would lead to the police-court, and so football has become a highly-popular game in these latitudes. But the southward glimpse of Alnwick and its surroundings from the long rise of Heiferlaw Bank is, when sunshine prevails, of a quite incommunicable charm. The background of hills, covered with Duke Hugh’s woods and crowned with his tower, recalls in its rich masses of verdure the landscapes of De Wint, and if in the Duke’s inscription on that tower he seems to rank himself in fellowship with the Creator, certainly, now he has been dead and gone these hundred and twenty years, his saplings, grown into forest trees and clothing the formerly barren hillsides, have effected a wonderful change. [Picture: Malcolm’s Cross] Beside the road are the few remaining stones of St. Leonard’s Chapel, and, a short distance beyond, on the right, in a grove of trees, Malcolm’s Cross, marking the spot where Malcolm Caenmore, king of Scotland, was slain in 1093. It replaces a more ancient cross, and was erected by the first Duchess of Northumberland in 1774. It was on his seventh foray into Northumberland, besieging Alnwick Castle, that Malcolm was killed, in an ambush carefully prepared for him. The legend, which tells how he was treacherously slain by a thrust of a spear in the eye by one of the Percies, who was pretending to deliver up the castle keys on the spear’s point, is untrue, as of course is the popular derivation of the family name from “pierce eye.” Moreover, the Percies, as we have seen, did not own Alnwick until more than two hundred years afterwards.