Any traveller by Tyneside whom night should overtake would be amazed to see fires gleaming out of the hillside about two miles below Bywell. They are unaccounted for by the presence of any town. The river, indeed, is about to plunge through clustering woods, and there is an aspect of solemn quiet all around. Here, nevertheless, in a small and unpretentious way, the industrial career of the river Tyne begins. The fires between the river and the hill are those of coke ovens, and they burn where, in his sturdy boyhood, Thomas Bewick, the great wood-engraver, used to play. Cherryburn House, his birthplace, is close by, and on the other side of the river--that is to say, on its north bank--stands the ancient village of Ovingham, where a tablet against the wall of the church tower announces his grave. The brother of Dora Greenwell was incumbent of the parish for a while, by which means it came about that the poetess spent much of her youth at Ovingham. On the south side of the river, directly facing Ovingham, on a hill which is like a huge mound, stand some fragments of Prudhoe Castle. A ruin it has been for three centuries at least, and it is a very picturesque and interesting ruin still. [Illustration: NEWBURN.] After a shady passage between high-banked woods, the river emerges to the broad light of day once more in front of the village of Wylam, which is one of the oldest, one of the most dismal and miserable, and one of the most famous, of the colliery villages of Northumberland. Here is George Stephenson's birthplace, a little two-storeyed cottage, standing solitary by the side of a railway. The Roman wall ran along the high ridge of ground beyond Wylam. Some interesting portions of it still remain at Denton Burn, which is over above Newburn, from two to three miles further down the Tyne. At Denton Hall lived Mrs. Montague, first of blue-stockings. Here Johnson was a visitor, and Reynolds and Garrick were occasional guests. There is a "Johnson's chamber" and a "Johnson's walk" to this day. The village of Newburn lies about half-way up the heights, on the north side of the Tyne. Here was the last spot at which the river could be forded, for though Newburn is seventeen miles from the sea, as the river flows, it is reached twice a day by the tide. Across this ford the Scots troops under Lesley poured in 1640, to overcome the king's troops on Ryton Willows. The spot is still marked on the maps as a battlefield, and the event is spoken of as "the battle of Newburn."