From Felton until Warkworth is in sight there is little over which one need linger. The country is level more or less, and the river seems to flow in a deep trench, with a fringe of trees on either side of it. At one place it comes through a deep break in the solid rock, which seems as if it must originally have been quarried. One speculates in vain as to the mighty force of the water by which such passages must have been hewn. These clefts for rivers are not uncommon, but they are incomprehensible. The water, one is compelled to feel, was but a minor element in their formation. A mile and a half from Warkworth there is another weir, a great straight wall of cement, with a passage for fish on either side. Yet though the fish may go up to left or right, as they may choose, there is what persons addicted to sport might call "an even chance" in connection with their coming down. If they take the ladder to the right they will get off to sea, but if they come down to the left they will fall into a trap, and will, in all probability, be eaten on French dinner tables as salmon. For, at Warkworth, or within a short distance of it, is the great fishery of Mr. Pape, who has not only the weir to assist his operations, but has the right--acquired by paying a rent to the Duke of Northumberland--to stop up one of the fish passes at the extremities of the weir, which privilege he exercises so ingeniously that every fish that chooses the left side of the river for its downward passage gets into his trap, from which it may be lifted out at will. [Illustration: WARKWORTH CASTLE.] [Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF WARKWORTH.] Can Edmund Spenser ever have been at Warkworth? If not, how does he come by this description?-- "A little lowly hermitage it was, Down in a dale, hard by a forest's side; Far from resort of people that did pass In travel to and fro; a little wide There was an holy chapel edified, Wherein the hermit duly wont to say His holy things each morn and eventide; Thereby a crystal stream did gently play, Which from a sacred fountain welled forth alway." Except as regards the little stream and the sacred fountain this is accurately descriptive of the hermitage at Warkworth. The Coquet is here a tolerably broad river indeed, so that to reach the lowly hermit's cell one must make employment of the boatman's art. A little church hewn out of rock, and with a certain architectural skill--that is the famous hermitage of Warkworth. A wood grows high above it; there is a pleasant walk by the riverside below; and above the cave there are some steps by which the hermit is supposed to have ascended to his garden ground. The Hermitage is, as Bishop Percy says-- "Deep hewn within a craggy cliff, And overhung with wood."