Shap is a large village, with cattle-market, and an odd squat building styled a “market cross,” now used as a parish room, but it is chiefly famous among tourists for its Abbey, which exists only in scanty ruin, a mile away, in a lonely situation: lonely, that is to say, except for its great Abbey Farm. You approach it over a sheep track down and across a narrow bridge built by the old monks so well that it stands soundly to this day and does not let my Lord Lonsdale through when he drives visitors across in his big motor-car, to see the ruined tower, practically all that remains of the Abbey. Shelter was more to the point when I came here, chased by rain-storms and thunder-storms that spouted and rumbled among the hills, and I know more of the kindly hospitality of the farm than of the antiquities of the Abbey, which, after all, are few beyond broken columns and the stone coffins of departed and forgotten abbots and brethren. The Abbey was resigned in 1541 by Richard Evenwode, the last Abbot. Its revenue was then £154 per annum, a good deal in those days. To-day black-faced, horned Scotch mountain-sheep roam the Abbey lands. [Illustration: SHAP ABBEY.] Hackthorpe village, with an old hall, now a farmhouse, beside the road, brings us to the neighbourhood of Lowther Castle and its beautiful park, seat of the Earl of Lonsdale. The mansion itself, built by Smirke in 1808, is magnificent, in the sense that it is huge and was costly to build and is princely in its appointments, but it is not a castle nor is it Gothic architecture, although the architect who designed it, and the second Lord Lonsdale, for whom it was designed, fondly imagined it to be so. [Sidenote: _THE “BAD LORD LONSDALE”_] The wicked Lowther, the “bad Lord Lonsdale,” _i.e._ the first Earl (1736-1802), once haunted this superstitious countryside, after he had run his earthly course with sinful _éclat_, and was a dreaded “boggle”—which is Westmoreland and Cumberland for “ghost.” This once notorious character, “this brutal fellow,” as Boswell styled him, was eccentric to a degree, and actually acknowledged himself to be “truly a madman, though too rich to be confined.” One of his eccentricities was the keeping of wild horses, instead of deer, in his park at Lowther. Too rich and powerful to care a rap what was thought of him, he drove about in gloomy, out-of-date majesty in an ancient mildewed carriage drawn by shaggy, unclipped horses. The entry of this equipage into Penrith, where he owned most of the property and, politically speaking, all the inhabitants, was regarded with awful expectation of what he would do next, and was feared almost as much as the coming of some mediæval judge armed with a commission to try rebels.