The Rivers and Streams of EnglandBradley, A. G. (Arthur Granville)
General
The Rivers and Streams of England
Bradley, A. G. (Arthur Granville)
England -- Description and travel; Rivers -- England
blood and etymology is everywhere in striking evidence; whereas on the
east of them the Saxon is held to be almost untouched with Norse blood.
We there walked by "burns" and "forces" and beneath "laws." Of "becks"
and "ghylls" there were none, nor scarcely any "fells," till the spine
of the dividing range was almost reached. Many of the Lakeland streams
run under their original name to the sea; the Kent, rising behind
Mardale and flowing by Kendal to Morecambe Bay; the Leven, carrying the
waters of Windermere under Newby bridge by a short course to the same
destination; the Esk, rising under Scafell and pursuing its own
delightful dale to Ravenglass on the coast of Cumberland. The Irt bears
the burden of Wastwater to the same destination, while the Ehen carries
the waters of Ennerdale to the coast upon its own account. The Duddon,
which Wordsworth invoked so freely, rising near Langdale Pikes, runs a
long course, dividing Cumberland from Lancashire to Broughton-in-Furness
and its own well-known estuary. But these streams themselves, save while
nameless becks, are not so familiar to Lakers--to use an obsolete
term--as the Derwent, which, gathering size above Rossthwaite within a
very short space, races down Borrowdale into Derwentwater, a beautiful
and lusty river. Indeed, the head of the Lake knows Derwent well: when
raging down in flood from the rainiest watershed in England, to lift its
surface over field and roadway. Every one, too, knows the Derwent during
its three-mile run through the meadows by Portinscale into
Bassenthwaite. Thence it leaves the rather circumscribed bounds of the
Lake tourist, and, running a rapid picturesque course to Cockermouth,
where the Cocker brings down to it the waters of Buttermere and
Crummock, soon afterwards passes into the sea at Workington amid much
signs of coal smoke, of which there was little enough when Mary Queen of
Scots made the landing here which sealed her fate. But amid such a maze
of spouting rivers, a score of which will leap to the memory of those
who know and love this glorious bit of England, it will be seen at once
how futile it would be to single out any one or two of them merely to
dwell in ineffective prose upon their natural charms.
CHAPTER V
TWO AVONS
Two Avons join the Severn, if that of Bristol may be accounted a
tributary at so late a period of its entry. Such hair-splitting,
however, matters nothing, for, as the other Wiltshire Avon has claimed
so much notice in our chapter on Chalk Streams, no process of selection
would quite justify another pilgrimage by what is, on the whole, a less
seductive stream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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