nothing to disturb the peace that
broods here, for the village consists of a mere handful of old and
picturesque cottages, and we might stay on the terrace for hours, and,
beyond the distant shouts of a few children at play and the crowing of
some cocks, hear nothing but the hum of insects and the singing of
birds. We take a steep path through the wood which leads us down to the
abbey ruins.

The magnificent Early English choir and the Norman transepts stand
astonishingly complete in their splendid decay, and the lower portions
of the nave, which, until 1922, lay buried beneath masses of
grass-grown debris, are now exposed to view. The richly-draped
hill-sides appear as a succession of beautiful pictures framed by the
columns and arches on each side of the choir. As they stand exposed to
the weather, the perfectly proportioned mouldings, the clustered
pillars in a wonderfully good state of preservation, and the almost
uninjured clerestory are more impressive than in an elaborately-restored
cathedral.

CHAPTER X

DESCRIBES THE DALE COUNTRY AS A WHOLE

When in the early years of life one learns for the first time the name
of that range of mountains forming the backbone of England, the
youthful scholar looks forward to seeing in later years the prolonged
series of lofty hills known as the 'Pennine Range.' His imagination
pictures Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough as great peaks, seldom free from
a mantle of clouds, for are they not called 'mountains of the Pennine
Range,' and do they not appear in almost as large type in the school
geography as Snowdon and Ben Nevis? But as the scholar grows older and
more able to travel, so does the Pennine Range recede from his vision,
until it becomes almost as remote as those crater-strewn mountains in
the Moon which have a name so similar.

This elusiveness on the part of a natural feature so essentially static
as a mountain range is attributable to the total disregard of the name
of this particular chain of hills. In the same way as the term 'Cumbrian
Hills' is exchanged for the popular 'Lake District,' so is a large
section of the Pennine Range paradoxically known as the 'Yorkshire
Dales.'

It is because the hills are so big that the valleys are deep and it is
owing to the great watersheds that these long and narrow dales are
beautified by some of the most copious and picturesque rivers in
England. In spite of this, however, when one climbs any of the fells
over 2,000 fe