Among his many adventures traipsing about England, John Byng was proud of picnicking on the far side of High Force though the experience left him miserably wet.
After spending an uncomfortable night in an inn, Byng hired a guide and, stuffing his pockets with eatable, set out to ford the River Tees at the base of the High Force Waterfall. “We endured a most fatiguing descent,’ he writes, “and a very dangerous climb at the river’s edge, over great stones, and sometimes up to our knees in water, till we arrived at the bottom of the fall. The sweat was running from my brow, and a flap of my coat, my only coat, was nearly torn off by bushes.”
Despite the labor, Byng was pleased. “ Only those who have picnicked in the rain and cold of a Teesdale June,” he brags, “can rightly sympathise with the unhappy traveller, bored, damp, and very lonely.”
Though his picnic was cold, his bread as wet as his feet, his chief complaint was that he had forgotten a bottle of brandy.
*Byng died one month after succeeding his brother as the 5th Viscount Torrington in 1813. The High Force adventure occurred in June 1792.
Featured Image: Turner invests High Force with more grandeur than its sixty-eight-foot height warrants. He embellished the scene with a fly fisherman, a favorite sport for Turner.
See John Byng. The Torrington Diaries: Containing the Tours through England and Wales of the Hon. John Byng (later Fifth Viscount Torrington) between 1781 and 1794. Cyril Bruyn Andrews, ed. 4 vols. London: Eyre and Spottswoode, 1934-38 also William. H. Rupp; J.M.W. Turner. High Force, or Fall of the Tees (1822), engraved by John Landseer. In History of Richmondshire. London: Longman et al., 1822