TALES AND LEGENDS OF THE ENGLISH LAKES AND MOUNTAINS. THE BRIDAL OF TRIERMAIN. A LEGEND OF THE VALE OF ST. JOHN. IN travelling from Ambleside to Keswick, after passing Wythburn Chapel, the high road winds by the base of Helvellyn and the margin of the Lake of Thirlmere, or Leathes water, which latter it afterwards leaves by a very steep ascent, exhibiting, in all their grandeur, the Fells of Borrowdale. Arrived at the top of this ascent, a very exquisite landscape presents itself below, extending over the vale of Legberthwaite; or, more euphoniously and modernly, the Vale of St. John's. In the midst of this valley is a fantastic pile of rocks, which, from their resemblance to the walls and towers of a dilapidated and time-worn fortress, are known as the Castle Rock. Hutchinson, in his Excursion to the Lakes, describes this singular scene with much poetic feeling. "We now gained the Vale of St. John's," he says, a very narrow dell, hemmed in by mountains, through which a small brook makes many meanderings, washing B 66 little enclosures of grass-ground, which stretch up the rising of the hills. In the widest part of the dale you are struck with the appearance of an ancient ruined castle, which seems to stand upon the summit of a little mount, the mountains around forming an amphitheatre. This massive bulwark shows a front of various towers, and makes an awful, rude, and Gothic appearance, with its lofty turrets and ragged battlements; we traced the galleries, the bending arches, the buttresses. The greatest antiquity stands characterized in its architecture; the in habitants near it assert it is an antediluvian structure. "The traveller's curiosity is roused, and he prepares to make a nearer approach, when that curiosity is put upon the rack by his being assured, that, if he advances, certain genii who govern the place, by virtue of their supernatural art and necromancy, will strip it of all its beauties, and, by enchantment, transform the magic walls. The vale seems adapted for the habitation of such beings; its gloomy recesses and retirements look like haunts of evil spirits. There was no delusion in the report; we were soon convinced of its truth; for this piece of antiquity, so venerable and noble in its aspect, as we drew near changed its figure, and proved no other than a shaken massive pile of rocks, which stand in the midst of this little vale, disunited from the adjoining mountains, and have so much the real form and resemblance of a castle, that they bear the name of the Castle Rocks of St. John." "The inhabitants to this day," says Mackay, "believe these rocks to be an antediluvian structure, and assert that the traveller, whose curiosity is aroused, will find it impossible to approach them, as the guardian genii |