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Thence the Coquet descends in many a winding by scenes of the richest sylvan loveliness to Warkworth, renowned for its hermitage, which is still, as the old Percy ballad describes it, “deep hewn within a craggy cliff, and overhung with wood.” And so we reach the sea, where Coquet Island, with its lighthouse, lies amid the gleaming waters, scarcely suggesting, as we gaze upon it in the fair sunshine, how terribly the storm sometimes there rages, or how those dark rocks are chafed by the angry billows!
But for the full splendour of cliff and ocean scenery we journey still a little northward, and come to Dunstanborough Castle. Here a dark ridge of basalt rises in pillared form sheer from the sea, and in the words of Alarmion, “the whitening breakers,” surging with ceaseless thunder into the caves which pierce the cliffs, “sound near,”
“As boiling through the rocks they roar
On Dunstanborough’s caverned shore.”