Barden Tower is a building of no ordinary personal interest. Originally one of the peel-towers erected in the Middle Ages for the keepers of Barden forest under the Cliffords of the North, it became at the close of the Wars of the Roses the residence of that Henry Lord Clifford whose romantic story every one who knows their Lake Country or their Wordsworth is familiar with. Son of the fierce and formidable Black Clifford, whose life and property the Yorkists deprived him of on the first opportunity, he was sent for safety as a child to a shepherd in the Keswick country, in whose family, and in all respects as one of them, he grew to man's estate. When with the advent of Henry VII. the Clifford estates, including Skipton and Barden, were restored, their owner was nearly thirty, with the life and uprearing of a peasant as the sole equipment for his new and high position. But heredity counted for much in this case, though curiously enough it took the form of peaceful rather than warlike enterprises. Social instincts, too, seemed to have been effectually stamped out upon the lonely skirts of Saddleback and Skiddaw. For the "Shepherd lord" improved the peel-tower above the Wharfe into a sufficient residence for his doubtless modest estimate of comfort and dignity, and there seems to have lead a life of retirement for the next forty years, cultivating astronomy and the sciences. When called to action, however, he was not wanting in ability and common sense, and at sixty years of age had marched with the Yorkshiremen who formed such an important element in Surrey's victorious army at Flodden. He married twice, and his descendant Anne, Countess of Pembroke, who, by an extraordinary succession of deaths, was left sole heiress of the Clifford estates in the time of the Commonwealth, was a lady of enormous strength of character. For when over sixty she returned to the north, and in spite of Cromwell's protests, restored all her dilapidated castles from Brougham by Keswick to this of Barden on the Wharfe, in order that the sun of her race, for she had no heir, might set at least in splendour. She took her seat, against all precedent and much opposition, as High Sheriff of Westmoreland (a Clifford inheritance), and sat upon the Bench between the judges of assize and did many other racy and forcible things which we cannot tell of here. The ruins of the Abbey, lifted on a gentle elevation about a hundred yards from the rapid amber streams of the Wharfe, possess every charm of situation that one would wish for in a relic of the great days of ecclesiastical predominance with all its powers for good and evil, its scorn of concentration in crowded haunts, its eye for the beautiful and the remote, and for romantic streams where toothsome fish abound. Bolton Hall, the Duke's residence, and the ancient Rectory lying upon the same green meadow with venerable timber all about, and the stir and glitter of the moorland waters in their wide bed,