singularly remote neighbourhood contains
can be realized by making such a peregrination as we made through the
Wolds.

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 grasslands
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, Vanbrugh, the greatest architect
of early Georgian times, designed the enormous building 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 should at one view see a palace, a town, a
fortified city; temples on high places, woods worthy of being each
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.

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. 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.

The mossy steps of the cross just outside the gateway are, according to
a tradition in one of the Cottonian manuscripts, associated with the
event which led to the founding o