Barnard Castle is one of the oddest and most interesting towns in the North. There is a wholly individual character in its buildings, as if its architects had devised a style of their own. Few of the houses are older than the period of Elizabeth, but they are almost all of them of respectable age. The building material is stone in all cases, and the houses are unusually high and substantial, often of four and sometimes of five stories. On either bank below the castle they are built down into the bed of the river, and as, in Scott's words, the Tees here "flows in a deep trench of solid rock," the houses by the riverside descend as much below the level of the street as they rise above it. Yet despite the stoutness and the elaboration of these buildings, the riverside streets present that appearance of misery and squalor which seems inevitable in every manufacturing town, however limited may be the field of its industry. Dwellings which were clearly built for persons of wealth and position are let as tenements, and, there is, consequently, an odd contrast between their stateliness and the dress and appearance of those who lounge about their doors. However, the wide central street of Barnard Castle, sloping down from the Market Place to the river, still preserves an air of old-time respectability, and has the sleepy aspect of a country town, as if it had dozed away a century or two without activity or change. There is in this street a remarkable old Elizabethan house, in which Oliver Cromwell is said to have lodged himself for a while. [Illustration: BARNARD CASTLE: THE TOWN.] The Castle, which enclosed a circuit of six acres or more, was built by Bernard Baliol, a son of that Guy Baliol whom I have had occasion to mention in connection with Bywell-on-Tyne. A descendant of Bernard climbed to the Scottish Throne, doing homage for the Crown at Newcastle to the first Edward. Edward Baliol did like homage to Edward III. for the crown and kingdom of Scotland. It was a short and unfortunate dynasty which the Baliols founded, brought to an end by the battle of Bannockburn. John Baliol presumed too much on his independence as a king, wherefore his patron, Edward I., seized upon his castle and his English estates, and the stately building on the banks of the Tees was given to the Beauchamps of Warwick. Thence it passed by marriage into the hands of the Nevilles, and was part of the dower of Anne Neville, the daughter of the King-maker, when she married the scheming politician who was to become Richard III. Gloucester not only dwelt here for some time, but left decided marks of his tenancy, the latest portions of the building being held by antiquarians to have been erected under his superintendence. Since 1592 Barnard Castle has been a ruin, the survey of that year exhibiting it as tenantless, mouldering, and weather-worn, "the doors without locks, the windows without glass."