Shortly after the North Tyne has dreamed leisurely along through Bellingham village, its quiet ways are suddenly disturbed by the inrush of a water which is almost as wide as its own, and greatly more turbulent. The Rede has come down from the wild and bare region which the Watling Street traversed on its way to Jedburgh and beyond. Its springs are in the slopes of the Cheviot range north of Carter Fell. Forcing its way over a rock-strewn bed, it flows under the dark shade of Ellis Crag, and by the battlefield of Otterburn, and, with many a capricious bend or lordly curve, past the ancient Roman station of Habitancum, where, until a splenetic farmer destroyed all but its lower portions, the heroic figure of "Rob of Risingham," one of the most ancient of English sculptures, might be seen. The Rede is a stream which drains an enormous acreage of moor. A day's rain will swell it into a broad and boisterous torrent, with wide skirts extending far over the haughs. Famous for salmon-breeding is the Rede, and it is only by constant watching that the men of Redesdale are prevented from taking, out of all due season, what they regard as their own. When there is no "fresh" in the river the fish may be seen lying crowded together in the shallow pools, so that it is possible to wade in and take them without intervention of net, or gaff, or rod. But it is an exasperating circumstance that, plentiful as the salmon are, the season for rod-fishing in Redesdale is short, in spite of the law which permits it to be pursued for most months of the year; for as the fish come up here for the spawning season only, there are not more than some two months during which they may become the angler's legitimate prey. Doubtless such scenes as that which is depicted by Sir Walter Scott in "Guy Mannering" have been witnessed in Redesdale on many a former day. Salmon-spearing from "trows" was common down to at least the middle of the present century, the "trow" being a sort of double punt, pointed at the bows and joined together by a plank at the stern, and the spear, or "leister," being a barbed iron fork attached to a long pole. The Tyne has a Salmon Conservancy Board in these more severe times, and if trow or leister were to be seen on the river they would be seized as spoil of war. The narrow streak of gleaming water which made a silvery line across Deadwater Bog has now taken toll of wide lands-- "The struggling rill insensibly has grown Into a brook of loud and stately march, Crossed ever and anon by plank and arch."