ramble can be made along
the riverside and up on the moorland heights above. For the dense
woodlands, which are often merely pretty in midsummer, become
astonishingly lovely as the foliage draping the steep hillsides takes on
its gorgeous colours, and the gills and becks on the moors send down a
plentiful supply of water to fill the dales with the music of
rushing streams.

Climbing up the road towards Larpool, we take a last look at quaint old
Whitby, spread out before us almost like those wonderful old prints of
English towns they loved to publish in the eighteenth century. But
although every feature is plainly visible--the church, the abbey, the
two piers, the harbour, the old town and the new--the detail is all lost
in that soft mellowness of a sunny autumn day. We find an enthusiastic
photographer expending plates on this familiar view, which is sold all
over the town; but we do not dare to suggest that the prints, however
successful, will be painfully hackneyed, and we go on rejoicing that the
questions of stops and exposures need not trouble us, for the world is
ablaze with colour.

Beyond the great red viaduct, whose central piers are washed by the
river far below, the road plunges into the golden shade of the woods
near Cock Mill, and then comes out by the river's bank down below, with
the little village of Ruswarp on the opposite shore. The railway goes
over the Esk just below the dam, and does its very best to spoil every
view of the great mill built in 1752 by Mr. Nathaniel Cholmley. However,
from the road towards Sleights the huge building looks picturesque
enough, with the river flowing smoothly over the broad dam fringed by
the delicate faded greens and browns of the trees. The mill, with its
massive roof and projecting eaves, suggests in a most remarkable fashion
one of the huge gate-houses of the Chinese Imperial Palace at Peking.

The road follows close beside the winding river, and all the way to
Sleights there are lovely glimpses of the shimmering waters, reflecting
the overhanging masses of foliage. The golden yellow of a bush growing
at the water's edge will be backed by masses of brown woods that here
and there have retained suggestions of green, contrasted with the deep
purple tones of their shadowy recesses. These lovely phases of Eskdale
scenery are denied to the summer visitor, but there are few who would
wish to have the riverside solitudes rudely broken into by the passing
of boatloads o