This little burn is one of the prettiest of mountain streams; and in the district surrounding it are perhaps more points of interest than any other stream of such inconsiderable dimensions can show, saving only its neighbour, the Till.  The whole of the surrounding country, wild, lonely, and romantic, teems with memories and reminders of the past.  Sir Walter Scott, while on the visit already referred to, found an additional pleasure in the presence of so many relics of ancient days in the neighbourhood.  “Each hill,” he wrote to a friend, “is crowned with a tower, or camp, or cairn, and in no situation can you be near more fields of battle.”

Indeed, the whole district of the Cheviots, and the lower lines of swelling hills into which the land subsides as it nears the sea, is crowded with the memorials of an earlier race; from every hill-top and rocky height they speak with tantalising half-revelations of that race which the Romans found here when their galleys brought them to the land which was to them Ultima Thule.  No convincing explanation has yet been found of the concentric circular markings, with radiating grooves from the cup-shaped hollow in the middle, which are scored on the rocks wherever traces of an ancient camp are found; and the numbers of these traces are proof that this district was once a very thickly populated part of Britain.

And when Angle and Saxon were driving the early inhabitants before them, westward and southward, these hills and valleys still sheltered a considerable population; and Bede tells us of a royal residence not far away, at the foot of the well known Yeavering Bell, one of the more important hills of the range.  It rises to a height of more than 1,100 feet, and then abruptly ends in a wide, almost level top, grass-grown and boulder-strewn, and crowned near the centre with a roughly-piled cairn.  The ancient name of Yeavering Bell, as given by Bede in his account of the labours of St. Paulinus, was Ad-gefrin.

To recall the days when King Edwin and his queen, Ethelburga, came here from the royal city of Bamburgh, we must go back to a time nearly forty years after the Bernician chieftain, Ida, established himself in that rocky fortress, from whence he ruled a district roughly corresponding to the present counties of Durham and Northumberland, and known as Bernicia.  One of Ida’s successors, Ethelric, overcame the tribe of Angles then established in the neighbouring district of Deira—­the Yorkshire of to-day.  His successor, Ethelfrith, ruled over the united district, and married the daughter of Ella, the vanquished chieftain.  Her brother, Edwin, he drove into exile, and the young prince found refuge at the court of Redwald of East Anglia, where he remained for some years.