How different was the quiet Gyrwy on which Bede first opened his eyes! Beyond the furnaces and the shipyards the river broadens out suddenly over a space which is like a great bay. At low water this is nothing more than a huge acreage of mud, with quicksands beneath. To the right, Jarrow Church and Monastery stand on a lonely eminence; to the left, the little river Don flows sluggishly into the Tyne. After the landing of Hengist, says Gibbon, "an ample space of wood and morass was resigned to the vague dominion of Nature, and the modern bishopric of Durham, the whole territory from the Tyne to the Tees, had returned to its primitive state of a savage and solitary forest." All round Jarrow there was morass only--so much we should know from its ancient name, which means "marsh" or "fen," if there did not now remain something of the ancient appearance of things. The one piece of irredeemable land is this Jarrow "Slake." The river Don must have scoured out a wider estuary in Bede's day and before, for twice at least it was used as a haven--once by the Romans, who anchored their vessels at its mouth, and once by King Egfrid, who found shelter in it for the whole of his fleet. Of Bede's monastery--he was born at Monkton, close by--only a few broken walls remain, but they are attached to a large and interesting church, which has a good example of a restored Saxon tower. Ruin swept over the monastery again and again in its early days. In less than a century after Bede's death, the Danes were spreading themselves over England; the Cross went down before the hammer of Thor; and one mournful illustration of the reasserted supremacy of heathenism was to be found in the ruined monastery of St. Paul at Jarrow. When the monks of Lindisfarne, bearing with them the body of their saint, turned round to look upon Jarrow on their way to Chester-le-Street, they saw quick tongues of flame shooting upwards, and the wild, active figures of marauding Danes visible in the midnight glare. That same year a great battle was fought near the monastery, and the Vikings were overcome; whereat the monks crept back to their former quarters, rebuilt dormitories there, and enjoyed eighty years of peace; but in 867 a fleet of Baltic pirates sailed up the Tyne, and so plundered and burnt Jarrow Monastery that "it remained desolate and a desert for two centuries, nothing being left but the naked walls."