If its surroundings may be said to fit in with a crime, then this seems an ideal spot for the commission of dark deeds, this eerie place where an oozy plantation, or little wood, is placed beside the road, its trees standing in pools or on moss-grown tussocks; the road in either direction a solitude. Raskelfe, or “Rascall,” as it is generally called, lies away from the road. It has a church which still possesses a wooden tower, and the local rhyme, Wooden church, wooden steeple, Rascally church, and rascally people. is yet heard in the mouths of depreciatory neighbours. XI THE Hambleton Hills now come in sight, and close in the view on the right hand, at a distance of five miles; running parallel with the road as far as Northallerton; sullen hills, with the outlines of mountains, and wanting only altitude to earn the appellation. The road, in sympathy with its nearness to them, goes up and down in jerky rises and falls, passing the outlying houses of Thormanby and the farmsteads of Birdforth, which pretends, with its mean little church, like a sanctified cow-shed, to be a village—and signally fails. The gates of Thirkleby Park and the “Griffin” inn, standing where a toll-gate formerly stood on what was once Bagby Common, bring one past a bye-road which leads to Coxwold, five miles away, and to the Hambleton White Horse, a quite unhistorical imitation, cut in the hillside in 1857, of its prehistoric forerunners in Berkshire and Wilts. Coxwold is a rarely pretty village, famous as having been the living of the Reverend Laurence Sterne from 1760 to 1768. The house he lived in, now divided into three cottages, is the place where _Tristram Shandy_ was finished and the _Sentimental Journey_ written. “Shandy Hall” it is called, “shandy” being the local dialect-word for “crazy.” Thirsk lies less than three miles ahead. There have been those who have called it “picturesque.” Let us pity them, for those to whom Thirsk shows a picturesque side must needs have acquaintance with only the sorriest and most commonplace of towns. The place is, in fact, a larger Easingwold, with the addition of a market-place like that of Selby—after the abbey has been subtracted from it! There are Old Thirsk and New Thirsk, the new town called into existence by the railway, a mile to the west. The “Three Tuns,” “Crown,” and “Fleece” were the three coaching inns of Thirsk, and still show their hard-featured faces to the grey, gaunt streets. The one pretty “bit” is encountered after having left the town behind. Passing the church, the road is bordered by the beautiful broad sheet of water formed by damming the Caldbeck. Looking backwards, the view is charming, with the church-tower coming into the composition, a glance to the left including the Hambleton Hills.