Sir Walter Scott
River Greta, near Brignall, County Durham. Great Britain1
(From Rokeby, A Poem,2 page 125)
SONG
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O, Brignall banks3 are wild and fair,
And Greta woods are green,
And you may gather garlands there,
Would grace a summer queen:
And as I rode by Dalton Hall,
Beneath the turrets high,
A Maiden on the castle wall
Was singing merrily:
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‘O, Brignall banks are fresh and fair,
And Greta woods are green!
I’d rather rove with Edmund there
Than reign our English Queen.’
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‘If, Maiden, thou wouldst wend with me
To leave both tower and town,
Thou first must guess what life lead we,
That dwell by dale and down:
And if thou canst that riddle read,
As read full well you may,
Then to the green-wood shalt thou speed
As blithe as Queen of May.’
.
chorus
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Yet sung she, ‘Brignall banks are fair,
And Greta woods are green!
I’d rather rove with Edmund there
Than reign our English Queen.
.
‘I read you by your bugle horn
And by your palfrey good,
I read you for a Ranger sworn
To keep the King’s green-wood.’
‘A Ranger, Lady, winds his horn,
And ’tis at peep of light;
His blast is heard at merry morn,
And mine at dead of night.’.
chorus
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Yet sung she, ‘Brignall banks are fair,
And Greta woods are gay!
I would I were with Edmund there,
To reign his Queen of May!
‘With burnish’d brand and musketoon
So gallantly you come,
I read you for a bold Dragoon,
That lists the tuck of drum.’
‘I list no more the tuck of drum,
No more the trumpet hear;
But when the beetle sounds his hum,
My comrades take the spear..
chorus
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‘And O! though Brignall banks be fair,
And Greta woods be gay,
Yet mickle must the maiden dare,
Would reign my Queen of May!
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‘Maiden! a nameless life I lead,
A nameless death I’ll die;
The fiend whose lantern lights the mead
Were better mate than I!
And when I’m with my comrades met
Beneath the green-wood bough,
What once we were we all forget,
Nor think what we are now.’.
chorus
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Yet Brignall banks are fresh and fair,
And Greta woods are green,
And you may gather flowers there
Would grace a summer queen.
Footnotes
- Cunningham, Paul. River Greta, Nearr Brignall. April 16, 2014. In Geograph. June 7, 2014. Accessed June 29, 2019. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4016701. licensed for reuse under (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons License (Note, that license and its provisions also applies to the image as used here.)
- Scott, Walter. Rokeby; A Poem. John Ballentine and Co., Edinburgh, 1813.
- (From Rokeby, page xxix) What follows is an attempt to describe the romantic glen, or rather ravine, through which the Greta finds a passage between Rokeby and Mortham, the former situated upon the left bank of Greta, the latter on the right bank, about half a mile nearer to its junction with the Tees. The river runs with very great rapidity over a bed of solid rock, broken by many shelving descents, down which the stream dashes with great noise and impetuosity, vindicating its etymology, which has been derived from the Gothic, gridan, to clamour. The banks partake of the same wild and romantic character, being chiefly lofty cliffs of limestone rock, whose grey colour contrasts admirably with the various trees and shrubs which find root among their crevices, as well as with the hue of the ivy, which clings around them in profusion, and hangs down from their .projections in long sweeping tendrils. At other points the rocks give place to precipitous banks of earth, bearing large trees, intermixed with copse-wood. In one spot the dell, which is elsewhere very narrow, widens for a space to leave room for a dark grove of yew-trees, intermixed here and there with aged pines of uncommon size. Directly opposite to this sombre thicket, the cliffs on the other side of the Greta are tall, white, and fringed with all kinds of deciduous shrubs. The whole scenery of this spot is so much adapted to the ideas of superstition, that it has acquired the name of Blockula, from the place where the Swedish witches were supposed to hold their sabbath. The dell, however, has superstitions of its own growth, for it is supposed to be haunted by a female spectre, called the Dobie of Mortham. The cause assigned for her appearance is a lady’s having been whilom murdered in the wood, in evidence of which her blood is shewn upon the stairs of the old tower at Mortham. But whether she was slain by a jealous husband or by savage banditti, or by an uncle who coveted her estate, or by a rejected lover, are points upon which the traditions of Rokeby do not enable us to decide.
- Raeburn, Sir Henry. “Sir Walter Scott.” Wikimedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 Mar. 2013, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Henry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott.jpg.
