The tea room at Rokeby

Greta Bridge, the subject of a famous and beautiful watercolour by John Sell Cotman, was an important staging post on the London to Glasgow road in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ten miles or so after leaving the Great North Road at Scotch Corner, passengers would break their journey at one of the two inns, from which they could visit the picturesque ruins of Barnard Castle, Egglestone Abbey or Mortham Tower, or explore the sublime gorge of the River Greta. Above the bridge the river ran between the steep and wooded Brignall Banks; below it, in Rokeby Park, the "property" of J.B.S. Morritt, it cascaded northwards for about a mile before joining the Tees. In the nineteenth century this junction came to be known, like many more famous confluences elsewhere, as "the Meeting of the Waters," the name borroowed from Thomas Moore's song. It was conveniently overlooked by the viewing balcony of a tea room, "fitted up with exquisite taste," according to the local guide-book. The Bowes Museum, five miles west of Greta Bridge at Barnard Castle, is currently staging an exhibition called Rokeby: Poetry and Landscape. Do the boys and girls of to-day still immerse themselves in Scott's long poem with all its magnificent passages?





The junction of the Greta and Tees by first Turner and then Pye.