To the north, the nearest neighbor of De Taillebois was the Threlkeld, of Threlkeld Castle, on the skirts of Keswick, at thirty miles or more of distance across the pathless mountains of Scafell, Helvellyn, Saddleback, and Skiddaw. Nigher to him, on the south, and adjoining his lands, lay the estates of the Abbots of Furness; and to the westward, beyond the wide range of moor and mountain, which it took his party-two days to traverse, and in which, from Bolton till they reached Kendal, they had seen, according to the words of the motto prefixed to this chapter, ----------- "neither rich, nor poor, But moss, and ling, and bare wild moor," lay the lands of the Cliffords and the mighty Nevilles. All the inner country, among those glorious peaks, those deep glens, encumbered with old unshorn woods, those blue waters, undisturbed by the presence of a foreigner, since the eagles of the ubiquitous Roman glittered above his camps on the stern hill-sides, over that most unprofitable of his conquests, was virgin ground, uninhabited, save by fugitive serfs, criminal refugees from justice, and some wild families of liberty-loving Saxons, who had fled to the mountains, living by the strong hand and the bended bow, and content to sacrifice all else for the priceless boon of freedom. It was, perhaps, the very wildness and solitude of the locality, as much as the exquisite charm of the loveliest scenery in England, to which, strange to say, he was fully alive--enhanced by the certainty that in those remote regions, where there were no royal forests, nor any territorial magnates who could in any way rival himself, his forest rights, of which every Norman was constitutionally jealous, were perfectly intangible and unassailable--which had so much attached Sir Yvo de Taillebois to his Cumbrian castle of High Furness, in preference to all his fair estates and castles in the softer and more cultivated portions of the realm. Certain it is, that he did love it better than all his other lands united; and hither he resorted, whenever he could escape from the duties of camps and the restraint of courts, to live a life among his vassals, his feudal tenants, and his humbler villagers, more like that of an Oriental patriarch than of a Norman warrior, but for the feudal pomp which graced his castle halls, and swelled his mountain hunts into a mimicry of warfare. At about ten miles distant across the lake, up toward the lower spurs of the north-eastern mountains, lies the small lake of Kentmere, the head-waters and almost the spring of the river Kent; which, flowing down southward through the vale of Kendal, falls into the western head of Morecambe Bay, having its embouchure guarded by the terrible sands of Lancaster, so fatal to foot-passengers, owing to the terrific influx of the entering tides.