Thirlwall Castle is, as Hutchinson calls it, ‘a dark, melancholy fortress’ of the middle age.[123] It was for many centuries previous to its purchase by the ancestors of the earl of Carlisle, the residence of an ancient Northumbrian family of the name of Thirlwall. Amongst the witnesses examined on the occasion of the famous suit between the families of Scrope and Grosvenor, for the right to bear the shield ‘azure, a bend or,’ which was opened at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1385, before king Richard II. in person, was John Thirlwall, an esquire of Northumberland. The witness related what he had heard on the subject of the dispute, from his father, who ‘died at the age of 145, and was when he died the oldest esquire in all the North, and had been in arms in his time sixty-nine years.’ Such is the language of the record of these proceedings, preserved in the Tower of London. This locality may also bring to the reader’s remembrance the lines in Marmion— The whiles a Northern harper rude Chaunted a rhyme of deadly feud, ‘_How the fierce Thirlwalls, and Ridleys all, Stout Willimondswick, And Hardriding Dick, And Hughie of Hawdon, and Will o’ the Wall, Have set on Sir Albany Featherstonhaugh, And taken his life at the Deadman’s-shaw_.’— It is not generally known that this ‘ancient ditty,’ which sir Walter Scott gives at length in a note as a genuine antique, is a modern fabrication, the production of his correspondent Surtees, the historian of Durham. The ballad, however, breathes the very spirit of the fierce borderers, or it would not have deceived so accomplished an antiquary as Scott. The walls of the castle are nine feet thick, and are faced, both inside and outside, with stones taken from the Roman Wall. It is a singular thing to see a building, formed out of a prior structure, itself in ruins, and becoming a prey to yet more modern depredators. The stones remain meanwhile, whether in the primeval structure, or in those of mediæval and recent date, as good as ever. Brand observes— There is built up near the inn at Glenwhelt, a most barbarous, gigantic head of stone, which is most certainly not Roman. It came from Thirlwall Castle, and has no doubt belonged to some of those hideous figures made use of anciently in such castles to frighten the distant enemy. Brand’s original still graces the vicinity of the inn, and its effigy, this page. Its ugliness is no proof that it is not Roman; but, after all, whose beauty would not be tarnished by exposure such as it has endured? [Illustration: Stone Effigy] [Sidenote: CENTRAL REGION OF THE BARRIER.]