was a wide flat way fashioned by man's hand. Thus was the water
again a good defence to the Thorp, for it ran slow and deep there,
and there was no other ground betwixt it and the cliffs save that
road, which was easy to bar across so that no foemen might pass
without battle, and this road was called the Portway. For a long
mile the river ran under the northern cliffs, and then turned into
the midst of the Dale, and went its way westward a broad stream
winding in gentle laps and folds here and there down to the out-gate
of the Dale. But the Portway held on still underneath the rock-wall,
till the sheer-rocks grew somewhat broken, and were cumbered with
certain screes, and at last the wayfarer came upon the break in them,
and the ghyll through which ran the Wildlake with Wildlake's Way
beside it, but the Portway still went on all down the Dale and away
to the Plain-country.

That road in the ghyll, which was neither wide nor smooth, the
wayfarer into the wood must follow, till it lifted itself out of the
ghyll, and left the Wildlake coming rattling down by many steps from
the east; and now the way went straight north through the woodland,
ever mounting higher, (because the whole set of the land was toward
the high fells,) but not in any cleft or ghyll. The wood itself
thereabout was thick, a blended growth of diverse kinds of trees, but
most of oak and ash; light and air enough came through their boughs
to suffer the holly and bramble and eglantine and other small wood to
grow together into thickets, which no man could pass without hewing a
way. But before it is told whereto Wildlake's Way led, it must be
said that on the east side of the ghyll, where it first began just
over the Portway, the hill's brow was clear of wood for a certain
space, and there, overlooking all the Dale, was the Mote-stead of the
Dalesmen, marked out by a great ring of stones, amidst of which was