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THE RIVER TYNE.

EVERAL of our rivers have had their histories written.

Who has not read with delight the "Book of the Thames," by Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall? Dean Howson and others have lovingly recorded many of the quaint and noble stories that rendered "holy Dee" a renowned river from remotest ages, dating back, as the enthusiastic Welsh genealogists would have us believe, to the great Noachian Deluge. The Derwent of Cumberland, the Usk and Wye of Wales, and the Exe of Devonshire have each found historians in the last few years. But, so far as I am aware, no one has ever written a memoir of the Tyne beyond the dry statistics and history of her trade and manufactures, which, in company with those of Wear and Tees, appeared in a noble volume a few years ago. Yet I venture to say that no river in England is more worthy of a careful descriptive and historic treatment. I am not, of course, in these pages attempting a history of this glorious Northumbrian stream, but merely throwing together a few rough sketches to show what might be done were the subject fully followed up.

Only a few weeks ago, when remarking to a learned friend the fact that each of our rivers, large and small, has some special individual characteristic, making it stand out in some one or other matter strikingly prominent from all its fellows, my friend laughed at me, calling me a river enthusiast, and saying: "No doubt, no doubt. We all know, for example, how coaly the Tyne is. Everyone will agree with you that there is no need to bring coals to Newcastle; that river, at any rate, has a characteristic of its own--the filthiest, smokiest, most disagreeable river, not only in England, but in the universe, I verily believe it is. Why, the very vapour that rises from it blasts the trees along its banks; and the grass, I am told, is withered and dead upon its sides for more than half its course. I speak from some experience. I was there early last spring, and I cannot conceive a drearier sight than the country about Newcastle, except the town itself and its filthy sewer of a river." As if relenting a little, he added: "The trade and manufactures of the Tyne are grand in their way, no doubt; but the smoke and dirt hang such a perpetual pall of depression

over everything else that might appeal to the tastes of the non-trading part of the community, that I imagine no amount of enthusiasm could evoke interest out of such a subject."

Now, I have not transcribed one half of the unjust tirade uttered against this noblest of salmon rivers, which my friend chose to designate as a filthy sewer! I admit I am a river enthusiast, as he called me; and would there were a few more of the fraternity, who, if banded together, might cause some practical movement to issue from that mass of evidence on the pollution question, now reposing lifelessly in many expensively compiled parliamentary blue-books. Armed with the facts recorded in those books, and with a little enthusiasm wherewith to burnish the weapons and make keen their edges, what a crusade might be started against the prevalent sordid self-interest, ignorance, and neglect which now combine to cast intolerable burdens upon our rivers, only too often converting large portions of them into a deplorable condition, fouling their bright, life-giving waters until they become turbid, pestilent streams, unlovely to look upon and deadly to drink! Although the Tyne to this day, as I shall show, holds its own without the help of the much-needed crusade, better perhaps than any other river in the land, I know full well that the views of my learned friend already quoted would be re-echoed by innumerable hasty visitors or railway passengers through Newcastle, who carry away with them a confused idea of a water-way wholly absorbed by its modern trade, and unpleasantly enveloped in noise and smoke. It is not many years since the present Inspectors of Salmon Fisheries advised that the two upper branches of the Tyne, because of the pollutions existing therein, should be blocked against the ascent of salmon. Happily the advice was disregarded; but its having been given will show how not only hasty visitors, but even those whose business it was closely to examine into the condition of the river, were led, after making their inspection, to conclude that those upper waters had become unfit for the habitation of fish. Fifty, nay a hundred times and more, has it been reiterated to me: A dirty, uninteresting river is the Tyne." In fact, the Tyne somehow seems to have got a bad name for all save its coal mines and its trade. Of course Tynesiders know the truth about their river. I do not write for them, but for those who know nothing at all about it, beyond a vague idea as to its whereabouts on the map of England and its wealthy trade productions.

Cradled in a district bounteously rich in geological formations, the Tyne is composed of two great branches and innumerable attendant rivulets and tributaries. The two branches rise about forty miles

apart from each other, and unite above Hexham. The southernmost, called South Tyne, has the place of honour, its topmost stream being considered the source or head of the river. It rises in Cumberland, among the fierce, tempestuous mountain heights of Cross Fell, "Throne of the stormy winds," as the wild legend-haunted mountain has well been styled. The northern branch is called the North Tyne. Many of its tiny streamlets stretch up through high moorlands, across the bog-buried pine forests of a now almost treeless region, to the very confines of Scotland, whence they draw their abundant water supply from the dense mists and heavy rain-clouds constantly passing along from the north to descend in torrents over the Cheviot Hills. Far down on the main stream, below where the two head branches unite, another considerable tributary-feeder, the Derwent, comes in from southward, carrying no small amount of water from Durham. One half of the main stream, from Ryton to the sea, belongs, according to riparian rules, to Durham; the Tyne here, as the Derwent, for most of its course, forming the boundary-line between the two counties; but the major part of the waters lie in Northumberland. The Tyne is essentially a Northumbrian river. Its length, from Tyne head to the sea, is sixty-eight miles; if, however, the principal tributaries, North Tyne, Reed, the two Allens, east and west, Devilswater, and Derwent are included, we find a watercourse measuring in all some 200 miles.

The industries and trade of the river are, no doubt, her most prominent features in the present day. Birthplace of the locomotive engine, "coaly Tyne" has, indeed, vast possessions, from source to sea, in the laborious restlessness of mining operations, coal exportations, iron foundries, world-famed gun factories, pottery works, chemical works, and great ship-building yards. A most industrious river, as all will allow, it assuredly is; but, notwithstanding the ill things said of it, and the extraordinary hardships given it to bear on certain spots, the glory of the stream consists in this unlike its compeers in labour, the Tyne has not yet been, or ever, I trust, shall be, transformed into a mere machine-moving motive power, a burdenbearer of commodities, or a filthy sewer. This is the most distinctive quality of the river as regards its modern history, with all its carrying of ships, steamboats, and barges, its factories and forges, its mill-dams, its underground water-ways, its stream ceaselessly busy at lead mining, coal mining, turning of mill-wheels, printing of news. papers, and I know not what other wonderful works its great hydraulic engineers may have set it to do. Working from its very head streams up among the mountains, down to where it flows into the VOL. CCXLI, NO. 1760.

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sea, it performs innumerable labours, yet, with them all, the Tyne still maintains its natural vitality. Its waters are alive with prime salmon to an extent that none other of our waters can boast in the present day, yet such as they all held in ancient days. The Mersey, the Medway, the Thames, each famed of old for an annual, ever-recurring good store of salmon, no longer possess a single specimen. The common brown trout they may have in some more favoured spots, or chub, dace, roach, barbel, perch, or those less fastidious fishes which, unlike the lordly salmon, content themselves with artificially sluggish and much fouled streams; but anglers, who would care little to sport among such small fry, know Tyne river well. Rod in hand, they who have traversed it throughout its breezy moorlands and meadows, and along its branching tributaries, and have tested for themselves its sporting qualities, know what bright sparkling waters, what grand unsullied deeps, what glorious rapids, in fine, what a fit habitat for countless thousands of trout and salmon, it continues to be, notwithstanding the death-stricken, blackened patches unhappily to be found in some parts, and the tons of poisonous stuffs so ruthlessly cast in at several points; and that uninviting-looking, turbid steamer-andbarge-laden stream the fish have to make their way through, as it rushes sullenly by the mighty cinder-heaps, quays, and smokebegrimed walls of Newcastle. Nor is this fact regarding piscatory possessions only to be learned from the lips of enthusiastic anglers. Even more definitely it may be read in the pages of grave official records, from the statistics of which we gather that the Tyne yields every year from her bountiful bosom a larger amount of salmon for the food supply of the nation than any two other of our English rivers put together. It is vastly the most productive salmon-farm in England. It is well worth while to cull a little from blue-books to elucidate this. In the official reports published annually by the Home Office, the Severn, in fish productiveness, stands next to the Tyne. Moreover, when comparing them, it must be remembered that the Severn is four times the larger of the two rivers. The catchment basin of the Severn extends over an area of 4,437 square miles, while the catchment basin of the Tyne has an extent of but 1,053 square miles. This, of course, makes the contrast the more striking. The mighty Severn yielded in the last five recorded years, i.e. from 1871 to 1875 inclusive, 65,012 salmon, while during the same period the comparatively diminutive Tyne yielded no fewer than 382,528 fish. This is something to boast of in these days of river degeneracy. I should like well to dilate a little upon the reasons why we find this fish vitality in the Tyne, but space forbids to do more than give the facts.

Having been so often authoritatively told, until at length it became generally adopted as a truism, that the greater the strides made by arts and sciences in developing river-side industries, the more completely must we expect to see the natural life of the rivers succumb and salmon disappear from English waters, it is reassuring to find the actual facts in this case, at the present moment, so emphatically denying the dismal proposition. Amid all the smoke, the noise, the toil, the ceaseless sweat of brow and brain, the countless evidences of that painfully elaborated and most refined inventive energy, the marvellously dexterous application of water as a motive power, and all the other vast mechanical problems thought out for the benefit of the whole world, and first carried into practice in those great workshops which have made the river famous in all lands, surrounded in fine by the most scientific artificial appliances of modern river industries in full operation, and knowing that, added to the works already alluded to, one half of all the chemical products (generally considered the most deadly of manufactures to fish) of the entire kingdom are manufactured on the Tyne, the exuberant salmon life of the river is a strikingly pleasing feature to contemplate. It brings before us, not in a theoretic but in a most practical form, the possibility of salmon living and thriving abundantly as they do here, along with the most enormous wealth-producing river industries to be found anywhere. So much for those two important commercial aspects of the stream.

But has the Tyne no scenic attractions or stirring historic associations of her own? The visitor to Newcastle might, perhaps, think the river has not much to boast in the way of scenery; the smoke hangs heavy at times over the town, making the surroundings, for those in search of nature's loveliness, dismal enough, I grant. Travellers, however, who cross the country by rail to Carlisle can tell another story; they catch glimpses of many bright and even grandly beautiful scenes. But the Tyne deserves a closer acquaintance than can be made from the window of a railway-carriage. Get out, my friend, and walk those storied banks; make up your mind to spend a few weeks in these parts, and I warrant you will speedily agree with me that England possesses no river more worthy of admiration and loving study; no river that can better repay a careful exploration into its varied attractions, whether into its scenic beauties or into its rare sporting qualitieswhether into the marvellous mazes of its busy works of to-day, or into the relics of its strange past history, or into the pursuits and characters of the industrious, mining, manufacturing, agricultural labourers, keelmen, sailors, and fishing folks. A rough, brave, hard-working race of men, with tender homely touches in their natures, who seem to have