to
their full height out of the flat sea of green country that they often
appear as a coast defended by a bold range of mountains. Roseberry
Topping stands out in grim isolation, on its masses of alum rock, like
a huge sea-worn crag, considerably over 1,000 feet high. But this
strangely menacing peak raises his defiant head over nothing but broad
meadows, arable land, and woodlands, and his only warfare is with the
lower strata of storm-clouds, which is a convenient thing for the
people who live in these parts; for long ago they used the peak as a
sign of approaching storms, having reduced the warning to the
easily-remembered couplet:
'When Roseberry Topping wears a cap,
Let Cleveland then beware of a clap.'
From the fact that you can see this remarkable peak from almost every
point of the compass except south-westwards, it must follow that from
the top of the hill there are views in all those directions. But to see
so much of the country at once comes as a surprise to everyone.
Stretching inland towards the backbone of England, there is spread out
a huge tract of smiling country, covered with a most complex network of
hedges, which gradually melt away into the indefinite blue edge of the
world where the hills of Wensleydale rise from the plain. Looking
across the little town of Guisborough, lying near the shelter of the
hills, to the broad sweep of the North Sea, this piece of Yorkshire
seems so small that one almost expects to see the Cheviots away in the
north. But, beyond the winding Tees and the drifting smoke of the great
manufacturing towns on its banks, one must be content with the county
of Durham, a huge section of which is plainly visible. Turning towards
the brown moorlands, the cultivation is exchanged for ridge beyond
ridge of total desolation--a huge tract of land in this crowded England
where the population for many square miles at a time consists of the
inmates of a lonely farm or two in the circumscribed cultivated areas
of the dales.
Eight or nine hundred years ago these valleys were choked up with
forests. The Early British inhabitants were more inclined to the
hill-tops than the hollows, if the innumerable indications of their
settlements be any guide, and there is every reason for believing that
many of the hollows in the folds of the heathery moorlands were rarely
visited by man. Thus, the suggestion has been made that a few of the
last representatives of now extinct monsters may have
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