As there are many inns claiming, each one of them, to be the “oldest,” so there are many others disputing the point which is the highest situated. I must confess the subject--for myself, at least--lacks charm. I know--how can you help knowing it?--that to reach those eyries you must use incredible efforts, scaling preposterous heights and faring over roads that are, as a rule, infernally rough. And when you are come, in summer hot, in winter searched through and through by the bitter blast that--Shakespeare notwithstanding--is by a long chalk more unkind than man’s ingratitude, to these unkindly altitudes, what, oh my brothers, do you see? Without exception some plaguy ill-favoured shebeen, presiding over starve-all fields at the best, but generally president over some aching solitude that the hand of man--man being a reasoning animal--has never sought to bring under cultivation. The best you can say of such spots--and it is bad at the best--is that they usually command fine views of better places, whence, you cannot help thinking, you were a fool to come, and from which, you suspect, the innkeepers removed from misanthropical motives, rather than from love of bracing air, or for the mere idea of earning a livelihood. The peculiar honour of being the highest-situated inn appears, after much contention, to belong to the “King’s Pit,” usually called the “Tan Hill” inn, in midst of a ghastly hill-top solitude in the North Riding of Yorkshire, between Reeth and Barras. You get to it--I will not say most easily and conveniently, for convenience and ease in this connection are things unknown, but with less discomfort and fatigue--by way of Richmond, and, when you have got there, will curse the curiosity that brought you to so literally “howling” a wilderness. For there the winds do generally blow, and, when they _do_, heaven send you have not to face them, for it is a shelterless common where the “Tan Hill” inn stands in loneliness, and not a tree or a hedge is there to break the stinging blast. [Illustration: “TAN HILL” INN.] Cheerfulness is not a characteristic of those who keep hill-top inns: hence the suspicion that they are misanthropes who, hating sight or sound of their kind, retire to such unfrequented spots, and, when the stray traveller seeks refreshment, instead of weeping salt tears of joy, or exhibiting any minor sign of emotion, grudgingly attend to his wants, and vouchsafe as little information as they safely can.