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.
Tag: ruins
CCLXIII – Newbiggin-by-the-Sea to Tynemouth
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.
CCLXII – Alnmouth to Newbiggin-by-the-Sea
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.
The fourth day of my August 2025 trip found me up and about at an early hour wandering the streets of Alnmouth. Well, one of them, at least…
Continue reading “CCLXII – Alnmouth to Newbiggin-by-the-Sea”CCLXI – Bamburgh to Alnmouth
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…
CCLX – Lindisfarne to Bamburgh
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.
We soon spotted that this deviated considerably from the England Coast Path (ECP) shown online and I realised that my paper map, although purchased just a couple of weeks past, was revised in 2015. So, just a decade out of date, then! Pfft! Whatever! We were going to follow it anyway…
Continue reading “CCLX – Lindisfarne to Bamburgh”CCLIX – Berwick-upon-Tweed to Lindisfarne
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!
The second, uninvited party was Storm Floris, which initially made its own arrangements to await us in the north. Then, perhaps belatedly realising that it was unwelcome, it opted to skulk out of sight and spitefully cancelled all our trains. After all, if it couldn’t come, then why should it let us go?
Continue reading “CCLIX – Berwick-upon-Tweed to Lindisfarne”CCLVIII – St Abb’s Head to Berwick-upon-Tweed
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…
CCLVII – Dunbar to St Abb’s Head
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…
CCLVI – North Berwick to Dunbar
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…
CCLV – Edinburgh to North Berwick
IT WAS at approximately stupid o’clock in the morning that the Lemming and I met each other in the foyer of our Edinburgh hotel. My plan for the day had been to walk from Prestonpans to North Berwick and I still very much intended that that was what we’d do.
The complicating factor was that this rather hinged on my having walked from Edinburgh to Prestonpans the afternoon before and, well, I hadn’t. Consequently, we’d now be doing both walks in one go…
Continue reading “CCLV – Edinburgh to North Berwick”