Seaside Special - Under the radar: Northumberland

Sliding down the coast from Scotland, this rambling yarn is finally re-entering territories I know well. Contrasting with previous dispatches from often unfamiliar landscapes and barely known settlements, Northumberland brings into focus towns and coastlines with which I am much better acquainted. I’ve been coming to this quiet, be-castled coastline for just about as long as I can remember. Early family holidays took in windy chalets on a regimented Hoseason’s site in Berwick; and bunking up with Geordie friends relocated to somewhere just outside the remarkable Cragside House, home to the industrialist and inventor Lord William Armstrong.

Later, with the future Mrs A, there was a busy tour of the houses, gardens, islands and the pubs, bars and restaurants offered up generously from our base in Alnmouth one bright May over a quarter of a century ago. More on this later.

Over the years I have been drawn back to the area a good few times, even from the distant comforts of cosmopolitan London and the leafy South-East. I was blogging about the precious charms of the county a few years ago. On my next visit to the family hub in Pickering, an old friend told me to pack in publicising the area. They were planning to retire to Northumberland and didn’t want the cat let out of the bag! My friend will be delighted to know that the dedicated and loyal but numerically modest readers of these blogposts are unlikely to generate the critical mass required to disturb Northumberland from its perch amongst Britain’s top best-kept secrets.

Later still, the coastline formed the spectacular backdrop to the last family holiday with my Mum. That year, 2008, was something of a game changer. At around the same time that I was negotiating a mature exit from gainful employment to become a freelancer, my Mum was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Anyone who loses a parent knows how shattering the experience is. To see the life sucked out of my effervescent Mother by that vile disease was crushing. I was a fervent and assertive anti-smoker before her diagnosis. The bitter irony of the smoking-induced carcinogens that ate away her lungs was just a further twist of the knife.

We had booked a cottage almost in the shadow of Bamburgh Castle. It’s magnificent profile visible from every vantage point in the village and down to the gentle curve of Bamburgh bay. The castle and its headland is so dominant in landscape, natural history and culture that it almost makes the word redundant.

Mum, Dad and Bruv had travelled up with Mum’s closest sister, Wendy and her husband, John. They stayed just inside the national park boundary at Wooler.  We spent the week together, nominally visiting beaches, landmarks, eateries… but we were really just spending time together. I look back at photos from the trip. Mum’s thin face, head shrouded in a bandana to hide the chemo-mauling, smiling back from a pub in Seahouses, cuddling up to my girls. We have it framed above the stairs at home. Another pic sees Mum, Wendy and John looking over the harbour from outside the boozer. There’s one of us messing about with a ball on the hard-packed beach at Beadnell. The restaurant snap that is still on the living room wall of the family home catches all of us celebrating Dad’s birthday. He was mortified when we joined the waiting staff in a rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday to You’. His discomfort making us bellow out even more. They tied a balloon to the back of his chair. Mum was in hysterics.

A light had gone out of her eyes though. She smiled a lot, teeth looking too large in her thinning face. But the eyes always betray what is behind them. She simply knew she didn’t have long, for all the fighting talk. A bundle of contradictions in one defiant and yet defeated head. Sometimes when we were out and about, she got tired. We were at Amble beach, a beautiful spot enjoying clear sunshine and absence of bracing on-shore breezes. Slap-bang in the middle of the school holidays, and yet still quiet. Mum went back to sit in the car. Wendy went to sit with her. After a bit more sand-castle building and frisby-dropping with the girls (at 10 and eight, these were still essential activities) I popped back to check on them. ‘It’s lovely still, do you want to come back out?’ Mum said no, and Wendy looked at me and said ‘I just want to be with my sister’. In amongst all the furious holidaying to make things seem as normal as possible. Wendy’s simple statement, delivered with searing honesty and an absence of edge or barb, exploded that illusion with the precision of a laser-guided missile.

Mum died the following month. We all remember that time together with her in Northumberland with deep affection and gratitude. And we remember the good weather, whilst the rest of the country froze in unseasonable chill winds and heavy rain. Indeed I commented on it in her eulogy. Mum, Dad, Bruv, Wendy and John left a couple of days before us. 

Our last days were spent in near hurricane weather. We walked on Bamburgh beach fighting horizontal rain. A land-sailor screamed down the otherwise empty beach, the mad fool pushed close to the speed of sound by a ferocious northerly. He lost control as the wind shifted and ploughed in to the sea in a tumble of sand, spray and sail. We waited to see that he was OK and then headed back to the cottage when his wet-suited head emerged above the surf. The Olympics from Beijing were on the telly and we scoffed tea and cakes, wishing that land-sailing could be one of the events.

I don’t try to read too much symbolism into the good weather of Northumberland with Mum, followed by the descent in to near winter the day after she left. But it’s become a fixture in my memory now, no matter how partial the connection with actual reality might be. That’s the way it will stay.

I had to wait another 13 years for a return to Northumberland. Nothing to do with the significance of the previous visit, just a simple calculation of time commitments divided by opportunities. So it was amongst a post-covid landscape still throwing up surreality and challenging circumstances that we eventually came back. Whitby in June was the destination for a fake Christmas Day delayed by shielding (Dad and Bruv), infection legacy (Daughters No 1 & 2) and accessible airbnb availability (all of us). The girls’ current boyfriends joined us and our good friend Julie completed the happy crowd, having driven up from the Peak District. We thanked her for making the trip by letting our four-legged foraging machine almost steal the finest take-away fish chips in Britain from out of her very lap. Bad dog.

The extended family headed home after the weekend, whist Mrs A and I struck out north for a stay on the River North Tyne, before resting up in a cottage in Beadnell. Heading through County Durham, we cast a wry smile in the direction of Barnard Castle, remembering the Dominic Cummings lockdown-breaking trip to the town in March 2020 and the excruciating, far-fetched, and frankly offensive press conference he later endured in the No10 garden. The scumbag’s days were numbered. How ironic, writing from the perspective of 2025, that his antics pale beside the despicable behaviour of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Cabinet office elitists, and their staggeringly arrogant lockdown partying. These crimes did not come to light until much later, but ultimately led to the overdue resignation of the lying, complacent, arrogant PM.  

We popped into Corbridge for a bite to eat and were bowled over by this stout, fetching border town on the banks of the Tyne. Further up the valley, we were educated and inspired at Housesteads Roman Fort and then swung north at Hexham where the Tyne splits into northern and southern branches to finish the day at Wark.

We loved a ramble up the eastern bank of the river, picking up the dismantled Border Counties Railway which used to connect Hexham with Riccarton Junction for trains to Edinburgh. A single-track line pushed through some challenging upland landscapes, finally closed in the 1960’s after an even 100 years of service. The mind boggles at the ambition of those Victorian train companies.

Even more, we loved the observatory tucked away behind our hotel, appearing to be nothing more substantial than a garden shed at first sight. The roof swung back and a fat telescope with the girth of a Krupp artillery piece cranked in to view. An astro-physics intern from Northumbria University was running a workshop for us, using the telescope to learn about the night sky. All with a glass of wine in hand and nibbles on the side. The student was really engaging, if a tad overly bearded, and after 90 minutes or so, even I could tell my Betelgeuse from my Bellatrix.

Revisiting Alnmouth was a surreal experience after our first trip in the final decade of the last century. We had stayed in a former coast guards watchtower all those years ago, somewhere behind the main road. I had taken great delight in showing Mrs A (then only Miss M, of course) the treasures and landscapes of this gorgeous county that felt barely known in the south. Alnmouth was even quieter then than now, and not geared for tourism. We struggled with our spoilt London expectations when pubs didn’t serve food, restaurants closed early and shops had half days.

The watchtower had been converted into an upside down residence with a metal spiral staircase to a lounge with widescreen, unbroken views of the River Aln. It was a bright May week, but with a stiff onshore breeze (how many times have I said that about the north coast!) whipping up plenty of bucking and frisky white horses out to sea. This was the final decider in Miss M declining my offer to treat her to a bird-spotting boat tour out to the Farne Islands.

We didn’t make that trip on this return visit either, but we did have a fun half-hour trying to locate the cottage from the river path. ‘No, it was never this far upstream’, ‘I don’t remember these houses’, ‘surely it was nearer the river?’. And then the watchtower hove into view on the next bend. A pale brick and glass construction rising above the stone houses on the main road beyond, giving the impression it had been built in their back gardens. We would both admit to little nostalgic thrills looking over towards the home that bore some of our first holiday memories together. (I also remember watching my cricketing hero Darren Gough’s one-day debut for England on the telly, but obviously that is nostalgia of a much lower order)

And some of our other activities on the return trip established a repeating pattern. Dunstanburgh Castle (surely one of the most dramatically isolated fortress ruins anywhere in England), Lindisfarne (how I’d love to stay on the island after the tide has turned and the visitors have departed) and Seahouses (stuffed with poignant family memories).

Beadnell was our base this time, rather than Alnmouth: staying in a double-fronted squat, stone dwelling in the village square between the pub and the café. There was a shop around the corner, but I was surprised how few other facilities the town had to offer. Even down to the harbour, by the beach and along esplanade, We had been to the beach before with Mum, back in 2008, when we had scoffed burgers and necked coffee from a mobile concession in the car park.

By a quirk of erosion and geology, this was the only west-facing harbour in Northumberland. Beadnell. It’s most eye catching features were the lime kilns, dating from 1798. By lighting fires with coal in the kilns and adding crushed limestone, lime was produced and used as fertilizer in the nearby fields initially and, in a brief period of success, traded as far as Scotland. After the industry’s decline, the kilns were used to smoke herring and now housed piles of lobster pots. Nice history anecdote, but where in all that industry was the boozer by the harbour, or behind the beach?

Poring over the map, Mrs A pointed out a likely looking hostelry further down the coast that might be worth a defiant expedition. We would not be defeated by Beadnell’s myopic pub planning. In those Covid times, such trips were always a lottery. Would it be open, could we get in, should we book? Websites and social media were woefully unhelpful. But we took a chance and set off for Newton-on-Sea anyway, reasoning that we had enough alcohol and crisps in the cottage to sustain us if we had to plod back unfed and thirsty.

The evening was crystal blue and warm. We padded across the firm sand of Beadnell beach, dwarfed by its towering, crescent shaped sand dunes and I was reminded of similar features at Bamburgh, down which I once chased our screaming wide-eyed girls until we all collapsed in an unruly heap at the bottom.

Part of the beach was closed off to protect breeding arctic and little terns where the Long Nanny stream spilled across the sand. We crossed the freshwater incursion by a style and footbridge in the sand dune foothills, but didn’t spot any of the gorgeous, sleek seabirds.

The quiet path followed the beach around its crescent and then through the dunes into heathland. And then we met someone. Quite noteworthy just for that fact in this sparse landscape. But even more so when we got chatting to this chap who was a conservation officer and mentioned that he worked for a small woodland protection trust based in Hertfordshire called the Royal Forestry Society. He used to manage Hockeridge Woods, an ancient woodland a mile down the road from us, famous for its bluebells in Spring. We were staggered. I mean, there we were in the most isolated spot in England.. you just can’t make this stuff up. He was pretty unfazed and was more interested in pointing out the rare orchids and other flora dotted around us in the undulating landscape.

The evening got better still. The Ship Inn was very open, and serving its own fine ales, brewed on the premises. Nestled in the corner of a three-sided collection of fishermen’s cottages, the pub had tables giving out onto the shimmering North Sea, bathed in Golden Hour sunlight. The skinny limbs of Dunstanburgh castle were standing ghostly and black away in the distance against the thickening cloud. Yes, there were pandemic-defensive plastic screens, social distancing and bar queues in heavy rotation, but we still bagged a picnic table on the lawn and chatted amiably to our neighbours. A few seemed to know about this gem already, but we were definitely in the ‘pinching ourselves’ camp, slightly unable to believe our luck. The food was all done, so we scoffed crisps and nuts and sank a couple of beers, before setting off for home with an internal glow that warded off the day’s dying warmth.

My visits to this part of the world are scattered over a lifetime and have combined with powerful memories, undercut by geography and family. But the experiences are not piecemeal. They fit together in a sentimental multi-dimensional jigsaw. Time and place and people connected through isolated moments. Northumberland will always be special for me. 

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