It is supposed to have been a Roman station; but at all events its importance was considerable in Saxon times. The Church of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert is six hundred years old; and the most remarkable of its features is perhaps the "Aisle of Tombs," a row of fourteen recumbent effigies supposed to represent the ancestors of the Lumley family, who have lived or had possessions hard by since before the Norman Conquest, and whose pedigree is so long that James I., compelled to listen to its recital, conjectured that "Adam's name was Lumley." Camden has it, however, that a Lord Lumley of Queen Elizabeth's time, who brought this collection of monuments together, "either picked them out of demolished monasteries or made them anew." The family are now represented by the Earl of Scarbrough whose seat, Lumley Castle, overlooks the Wear and the deep wooded valley through which, coming from Houghton-le-Spring and Hetton-le-Hole, runs the Lumley Beck. It is a goodly and in parts an ancient pile, but since the collieries have crowded around it, Lumley sees little of its owners, and has to be content with the range of old family portraits in the Grand Hall, a companion set to the stone effigies in the church. [Illustration: LOOKING UP THE RIVER, SUNDERLAND.] Lambton Castle is not only surrounded but undermined by pit workings to such an extent that the ground and the fine semi-Norman, semi-Tudor building upon it--the home for many centuries of the Lambtons, now Earls of Durham--threatened to collapse, and are partly supported by the solid brickwork with which the old mines were filled. Lambton belonged of old to the D'Arcys; but, according to the legend, it was after it came into the hands of the present family that the famous fight between the heir of the estate and the "Worm" took place. The county, as would appear from its traditions, once swarmed with loathly "worms" or dragons; and this one took up its station by coiling itself around the "Worm Hill," and also frequented the "Worm Well." The heir of Lambton encountered it in armour "set about with razor blades," and the monster cut itself to pieces, the penalty of victory, however, being that no chief of Lambton was to die in his bed for nine generations. The most eminent name in the Lambton pedigree is that of John, first Earl of Durham, the champion of Reform, and the Greek temple that crowns the summit of Penshaw Hill, on the opposite or south side of the Wear, is erected to his memory.