ON THE second day of my March 2026 trip, rain was forecast to arrive around lunchtime and then hang around for most of the afternoon. Now, I’ve squelched, dripped and plodded through many a deluge but I’d just as soon not, if given the choice.
Accordingly, I hatched a cunning plan to be up and about at the crack of dawn, getting most of my walk done before the wet weather arrived. It was a good plan. A sensible plan. And it might even have worked, had I not slept right through my alarm…
Continue reading “CCLXV – Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Sunderland”
TOWARDS the end of March 2026, I headed north from London to Newcastle-upon-Tyne at a fairly ungodly hour, arriving at the latter sometime mid-morning. I promptly left it again via the Tyne & Wear Metro, returning to Tynemouth, where I last left off. From there, I planned to trek back up the River Tyne to Newcastle. So, that’s what I did.
THE final morning of my August 2025 trip saw me stagger bleary-eyed from my overnight accommodation to the end of Newbiggin-by-the-Sea’s High Street, ready – for a particular and very approximate value of ‘ready’ – to start the day’s trek, which would end in Tynemouth. Well, hopefully not actually in the mouth of the River Tyne, but in the town situated next to it.
AS HAS become my autumnal tradition, I was distracted from the write-up of my summer walking trip and thus it’s now a quarter year since the actual walks took place. That being so, I suppose I had better get on with it.
ON THE third morning of my August 2025 walking trip, I met my good friend Simkin for breakfast in Bamburgh’s Victoria Hotel and discussed our respective plans for the day. I would be continuing to Alnmouth, while he would be visiting Bamburgh Castle and then heading home to attend to other commitments. Assuming, that is, that rural Northumberland’s public transport would permit him, which it did with obstructive reluctance. Fortunately, I had only to rely on my feet and they were considerably more reliable, with a timetable of my own choosing…
TOWARDS the end of the first week in August, Simkin and I met in the breakfast room of our hotel on Lindisfarne and discussed our plan for the day. This was to walk to Bamburgh (pronounced ‘bamborough’) via the roundabout route of the Northumberland Coast Path (NCP), as shown on my physical Ordnance Survey map. 
FOR my return north to Berwick-upon-Tweed I had two would-be companions, one being my good friend Simkin, who had long proclaimed his wish to join me when my walks drew close to Lindisfarne (also known as Holy Island). Having now got to that stretch of Northumberland coast, I had planned that one of my walks would end upon the island and the next start from it – can’t really get much closer than that! 
IT WAS to a not entirely unfamiliar problem that I awoke on the second morning of my April 2025 escapade, which was that I was not where I needed to be. I had made my plans, and hotel bookings, on the assumption that day one would end in Eyemouth and it had not. Thus, while I was rising in Eyemouth at some ungodly hour, eager to resume my circumperambulatory shenanigans, I actually needed to be at St Abb’s Head – some six miles away – to begin them…
THE Sun was lurking just below the horizon when I returned to the vicinity of Dunbar railway station at the beginning of April 2025. I had an ambitious walking day planned and was going to need all the daylight if I were to reach my planned end point in Eyemouth. Or, as it actually turned out, I would still need all the daylight if I weren’t…
IT WOULD have been nicely synchronous if the last day of my August 2024 trip had also been the last day of that month but, alas, it wasn’t quite. Instead, the Lemming and I found ourselves alighting onto the platform of North Berwick station at some ungodly hour on the morning of the 29th, like the devil-may-care, unconstrained hikers we were inside our own heads, synchronicity be damned! And then, in a manner more befitting of two blokes now both inexplicably in their fifties and whose previous day’s walk had been quite tiring, we struggled to find the energy to get going…