There is no need to avoid the main road south of Malton. It has a park-like appearance, with its large trees and well-kept grass on each side, and the glimpses of the wooded valley of the Derwent on the left are most beautiful. On the right we look across the nearer grass-lands into the great park of Castle Howard, and catch glimpses between the distant masses of trees of Lord Carlisle’s stately home. The old castle of the Howards having been burnt down, Vanburgh, the greatest architect of early Georgian times, designed the enormous buildings now standing. In 1772 Horace Walpole compressed the glories of the place into a few sentences. ’... I can say with exact truth,’ he writes to George Selwyn, ‘that I never was so agreeably astonished in my days as with the first vision of the whole place. I had heard of Vanburgh, and how Sir Thomas Robinson and he stood spitting and swearing at one another; nay, I had heard of glorious woods, and Lord Strafford alone had told me that I should see one of the finest places in Yorkshire; but nobody ... had informed me that I should at one view see a palace, a town, a fortified city, temples on high places, woods worthy of being each a metropolis of the Druids, vales connected to hills by other woods, the noblest lawn in the world fenced by half the horizon, and a mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive; in short, I have seen gigantic places before, but never a sublime one.’ The style is that of the Corinthian renaissance, and Walpole’s description applies as much to-day as when he wrote. The pictures include some of the masterpieces of Reynolds, Lely, Vandyck, Rubens, Tintoretto, Canaletto, Giovanni Bellini, Domenichino and Annibale Caracci. [Illustration: KIRKHAM ABBEY The gateway is the chief relic of this once beautiful Cistercian abbey. On the right and through the archway the Derwent can be seen flowing beneath hanging woods.] Two or three miles to the south, the road finds itself close to the deep valley of the Derwent. A short turning, embowered with tall trees whose dense foliage only allows a soft green light to filter through, goes steeply down to the river. The railway, although traversed by thundering express trains bound for York or the coast, is so hidden that it scarcely interferes with the beautiful spot where stand the ruins of Kirkham Abbey. We cross the deep and placid river by a stone bridge, and come to the Priory gateway. It is a stately ruin partially mantled with ivy, and it preserves in a most remarkable fashion the detail of its outward face. Ten shields bear the devices of Clare, Plantagenet, Ros, Greystoke, and Vaux, with others of some uncertainty, possibly including Espec, the founder of the Abbey. Through the wide pointed arch there is a glimpse of a sloping meadow backed by tall trees and the steeply rising ground just beyond the river. It appears in the picture of the gateway reproduced in these pages.