Not only the people and their houses have an old-fashioned look, but you see continually out-of-doors lingering vestiges of long-past times and ancient usages. There are sledges with which they bring stone and peat from the tops of the fells. I have often wondered at the industry of mountain-people in building up those stone walls, or dykes, as they call them, which you often see running up the mountain sides, to very distant and often very steep places; but crossing these fells, I discovered that the labour was far less than it seemed at first sight. The material has not to be carried up these lofty ascents; it abounds on their summits, and has only to be loosened, and slid down the hill sides on sledges, as they proceed, for they begin to build at the top, and not at the bottom. So their peat for fuel is found in abundance on the wet and spongy tops of these hills, and is dug, and reared on end to dry through the summer, and in the autumn is slid down on sledges. In the Scottish Highlands you see the women bringing the peat from the mountains in large creels, or baskets, on their backs, while their husbands are perhaps angling in the loch below; but here the men generally act a less lordly part; cutting and drying the peat with the help of their boys, and sledging it into the bargain. Besides these sledges, they have also that very ancient species of cart, the tumbrel; or, as they call it, the Tumble-Car. This is of so primitive a construction that the wheels do not revolve on a fixed axle, but the axle and wheels all revolve together. The wheels themselves are of a construction worthy of so pristine an axle; they are, in truth, wheels of the original idea; not things of the complex construction of nave, spokes, and fellies, but solid blocks of wood, into which the axle is firmly inserted; upon this axle the body of the vehicle is laid, and kept in its place by a couple of pegs. It is such a cart as you might imagine rumbling down these hills in the days of their Saxon ancestors. Since good roads have been opened through the dales, carts of modern construction have followed, and these tumbrels will in awhile be no longer seen. They have, however, this advantage; in descending the steep sides of the hills, their clumsy construction of axle and wheel prevents them from running down too fast, and this is the cause why they are still retained. And yet this difficulty of movement sometimes becomes the cause of awkward dilemmas. These tumbrels are apt to stick in the bogs as they come down the fells, and are not easily drawn out. We were assured that there was one then sticking in a bog on the hills, past all chance of recovery; and some wag of the dale had made this distich on the accident, denoting the peculiar pre-eminence of clumsiness in the unfortunate vehicle. Willie O’Middlebrough’s tumble-car, Many were better, and none waur.