ULPHA—COCKLEY BECK—THE SUNKEN GRAVES—DALE-HEAD—“THE STEPPING STONES”—HINGING HOUSE—THE CLAN TYSON—ANECDOTES—T’ BIRKS BRIG—REMARKS ON SCENERY, AND QUOTATIONS—SEATHWAITE BECK—MISS MARTINEAU ON THE CHURCH AND PARSONAGE—NEWFIELD—ENTERTAINMENT FOR MAN AND BEAST—DAN BIRKETT—WALLA-BARROW CRAG—STONEYTHWAITE—MR WORDSWORTH’S ANECDOTE—CHARACTER OF SCENERY. As you pursue your rugged way down the vale, you at length come in sight of a group of buildings, which offers to you, as the gibbet did to the castaway mariner, the comforting assurance that you are still a sojourner in a civilised country—a matter on which you were beginning to feel uneasily dubious. It is the onstead of a large sheep farm, well known by the designation of Black Hall, which forms the most northerly portion of the Chapelry of Ulpha—a wild tract of country extending for many lonely miles along the Cumberland side of the Duddon, deriving its outlandish looking appellation from the same royal personage who is said to have accorded the honour of bearing his name, as part of theirs, to the town of Ulverstone and the Lake of Ullswater, the old Saxon Monarch Ulfo or Ulphus (some call him one and some the other), who, for anything that I know to the contrary, was one of the Kings of the Heptarchy. Probably, when I mention this, you will remember that Scott, in the Bridal of Triermain, tells of the Baron’s Page, when sent by his lord to enquire at the Sage of Lyulph’s Tower whether the fair apparition in his dream was “an airy thing” or of the earth earthy— “He traced the Eamont’s winding way, Till Ulfo’s lake beneath him lay.” [Illustration: COCKLEY BRIG.] [Sidenote: ETYMOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY.] Push on, and, as you round the elbow of the hill, you are farther cheered by the nearer prospect of another domicile on the Lancashire side of the brook; that is the residence of Mr Daniel Tyson, the worthy proprietor and occupant of Cockley Beck, the name of the house and farm being derived from the stream that rushes along its north-western boundary, and said to signify “a winding or rugged stream;” others say its name is derived from the former condition or character of the bridge here which used to be “Cocklety,” a term implying “a daring contempt of danger and accommodation” on the part of its architect; others, again, say that the name of the brook ought to be Cockling or Cackling Beck, because the noise it occasionally makes in its stoney bed may, by the aid of a _leetle_ imagination, be likened to that by which a hen announces to all concerned that she has just got safely quit of an egg. [Sidenote: CONJECTURES.]