PREFACE.
The following, to some extent incomplete and unfinished sketches of “Old Castles,” were written three or four years ago, and one of them appeared in the Border Magazine, for which the sketch of Carlisle Castle was also written, but owing to the failure of the magazine it did not appear. It was afterwards printed in two consecutive numbers of the Carlisle Express, and some who saw it there for the first time were kind enough to say that it deserved a better place–that it was a mistake to allow it to appear in a newspaper at all. Feeling that there was some truth in these remarks, the author concluded to reprint the whole of them in the more permanent and more availabe form of a book, which while it may perhaps serve as a handbook to strangers and others, may at the same time perhaps serve also to enlarge to some small extent the general appreciation of places whose eventful histories comprehend so much of the general history of the past, and which ought as a result to be sources of interest and instruction to the localities in which they stand.
M. S.
March 31, 1868.
