From Corbridge to Bywell the winding course of the Tyne has as various a beauty as heart could desire. There are wide, open reaches, and still, deep, shadowy spaces between overhanging woods, and passages of lively water scourging a rocky bed. Bywell itself is an idyllic place. There are stories of how it was once a bustling town, much liable to attack from moss-troopers and all manner of Border thieves. Old records have it that so late as "the stately days of Great Elizabeth" it was "inhabited with handicraftsmen, whose trade is in all ironwork for the horsemen and borderers of that county, as in making bits, stirrups, buckles, and such others, wherein they are very expert and cunning, and are subject to the incursions of the thieves of Tynedale, and compelled, winter and summer, to bring all their cattle and sheep into the street in the night-season, and watch both ends of the street, and when the enemy approacheth to raise hue and cry, whereupon all the town prepareth for rescue of their goods, which is very populous, by reason of their trade, and stout and hardy by continual practice against the enemy." A quaintly confused statement this, but sufficiently explicit as to the uncertain conditions under which the artificers of Bywell lived. The place now sleeps quietly under its woods, lulled by the waters of the Tyne as they fall over Bywell Weir, and seems to dream of its past. "The antique age of bow and spear" has left for memorial a ruinous square tower, all mantled over with ivy, and hidden, with the exception of its battlements, in the surrounding trees. This ruin is a portion of a projected castle of the Nevilles, Earls of Westmorland; but the building was never completed, or, indeed, carried far, for the last Earl of Westmorland of the Neville family took part in that "rising of the North" of which Wordsworth's "White Doe of Rylstone" tells the sorrowful tale.