Well, I might be exaggerating a wee bit. We didn’t walk all the way there. Just the last half mile. Let me explain.
Thursday was, for the first time in many days, bright and sunny although much cooler than we have enjoyed of late. And while the weather has been better here on the coast (we live just a few miles inland), it has been much more unpredictable in the hills, and rainy on many days.
However, with a more promising forecast we decided to head off to the Cheviots, and specifically to Chew Green Roman fort and encampment (built around 79 AD) close to the border with Scotland, and a location we have visited twice before.
At its nearest, the Scottish border is only 40 miles or so (65 km) northwest as the crow flies from our home in North Tyneside, or about 55 miles or so by road. This is the route we took.
Chew Green is just beyond the ‘end’ of the road near the headwaters of the River Coquet, and the drive there (on a very narrow road) beyond Alwinton winds its way through beautiful Upper Coquetdale.
This video, of the drive from Alwinton to Chew Green lasts over 41 minutes. You can double the playback speed (without affecting your appreciation of the marvellous landscapes) by clicking on the Settings button.
The road does continue beyond Chew Green. However, it passes over the Otterburn Ranges, an area of the Northumberland National Park controlled by the Ministry of Defence where troops are trained and live firing takes place. Access is often restricted, as it was on Thursday, when the red flags are raised.
Nevertheless, we just drove a few hundred meters beyond the parking spot, climbing the hill facing Chew Green to get a better view of the embankments of the camp, something we had not done on either of our previous visits.
Leaving the parking spot on foot, we headed west (just south of the fort/encampment) until we reached a dip in the landscape with a small burn (and tributary of the River Coquet, if not the beginnings of the river itself), crossing over a stile, and stepping into Scotland.
No border patrols here, although for centuries past this was a most contentious border, and the location of many cross-border raids and cattle rustling.
That’s Scotland beyond the dip in the landscape in this video. It’s a pity there was no post along the path to indicate exactly where you pass from one nation into the other.
One foot in England, the other in Scotland.
Then we walked up over the fort, and made our way back to the car. Dere Street, one of the most important Roman roads that connected Eboracum (York) with Roman forts beyond Hadrian’s Wall and over the border into Scotland, runs right beside Chew Green. It’s remarkable that the camp’s embankments are so well preserved, after 1900 years.
At its headwaters here in the Cheviots, the River Coquet is no more than a babbling brook.
But within a short distance from Chew Green, it becomes a substantial river (as you can see in this video of the return journey down the valley) wending its way east to the North Sea at Amble.
Fifty years ago today, Steph and I were married at the town hall (municipalidad) in the Miraflores district of Lima, where we had an apartment on Avenida José Larco. Steph had turned 24 just five days earlier; it would be my 25th in the middle of November.
Municipalidad de Miraflores, Lima
It was a brief ceremony, lasting 15 minutes at most, and a quiet affair. Just Steph and me, and our two witnesses, John and Marian Vessey. And the mayor (or other official) of course.
John, a plant pathologist working on bacterial diseases of potato, was a colleague of ours at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, who had joined the center a few months before I arrived in Lima in January 1973.
Enjoying pre-lunch drinks with Marian and John at ‘La Granja Azul‘ restaurant at Santa Clara – Ate, on the outskirts of Lima.
Steph arrived in Birmingham in September 1971, just after I had finished the one-year course. I was expecting imminently to head off to Peru where I had been offered a position at CIP to help curate the large collection of native potato varieties in the CIP genebank. So, had I flown off to South America then, our paths would have hardly crossed.
But fate stepped in I guess.
My departure to Peru was delayed until January 1973. So I registered for a PhD with renowned potato expert Professor Jack Hawkes (right, head of the Department of Botany and architect of the MSc course), and began my research in Birmingham while CIP’s Director General, Richard Sawyer, negotiated a financial package from the British government to support the center’s research for development agenda, and my work there in particular.
It must have been early summer 1972 that Steph and I first got together. Having completed the MSc written exams in May, Steph began a research project on reproductive strategies in three legume species, directed by Dr Trevor Williams (who had supervised my project a year earlier on lentils). And she completed the course in September.
By then, she had successfully applied for a scientific officer position at the Scottish Plant Breeding Station in Edinburgh (SPBS, now part—after several interim phases—of the James Hutton Institute in Dundee), as Assistant Curator of the Commonwealth Potato Collection. But that position wasn’t due to start until November.
Our VW Variant in Peru, around May 1973 – before receiving a Peruvian registration plate.
In early November I took delivery of a left-hand-drive Volkswagen for shipment to Peru. On a rather dismal Birmingham morning, we loaded up the VW with Steph’s belongings and headed north to Edinburgh. She returned to Birmingham in mid-December for her graduation.
Then, just after Christmas 1972, we met up in a London for a couple of days before I was due to fly out to Lima.
At that time we could not make any firm commitments although we knew that—given the opportunity—we wanted to be together.
Again fate stepped in. On 4 January 1973, Jack Hawkes and I flew to Lima. Jack had been asked to organize a planning conference to guide CIP’s program to collect and conserve native Andean potato varieties and their wild relatives.
Potato varieties from the Andes of Peru.
While I stayed in a small hotel (the Pensión Beech, in the San Isidro district) until I could find an apartment to rent, Jack stayed with Richard Sawyer and his wife Norma. And it was over dinner one evening that Jack mentioned to Richard that I had a ‘significant other’ in the UK, also working on potato genetic resources, and was there a possibility of finding a position at CIP for her. Richard mulled the idea over, and quickly reached a decision: he offered Steph a position in the Breeding and Genetics Department to work with the germplasm collection.
With that, Steph resigned from the SPBS and made plans to move to Lima in July, with us planning to get married later on in the year.
In the CIP germplasm screenhouses in La Molina. Bottom: with Peruvian potato expert Ing. Carlos Ochoa.
A couple of weeks after I arrived in Peru, I found an apartment in Miraflores at 156 Los Pinos (how that whole area has changed in the intervening 50 years), and that’s where Steph joined me.
In our Los Pinos apartment, Miraflores in July 1973.
A few weeks later we found a larger apartment, nearby at 730 Avda. Larco, apartment 1003. Very interesting during earthquakes!
Around mid-August 1973 we began the paperwork (all those tramites!) to marry in Peru. Not as simple as you might think, but on reflection perhaps not as difficult as we anticipated.
While we were allowed to post marriage banns in the British Embassy, we had to announce our intention to marry in the official Peruvian government gazette, El Peruano, and one of the principal daily broadsheets (El Comercio if memory serves me right), and have the police visit us at our apartment to verify our address. I think we also had to have blood tests as well. This all took time, but everything was eventually in place for us to set the wedding date: 13 October.
Some friends wanted to give us a big wedding, but Steph said she just wanted an intimate, quiet day. So that’s what we organized.
In the week leading up to our wedding, we had to present all the notarised documents at the municipality. After the ceremony, we signed the registry, hand-written in enormous volumes (or tomos). There was a bank of clerical staff, all with their Parker fountain pens, inscribing the details of each wedding in their respective tomo. A week later we collected our Constancia de Matrimonio (with some errors) which detailed in which tomo (No. 83, page 706) our marriage had been recorded, as well as photocopies (now sadly faded) of the actual page.
My work, collecting potatoes, took me all over the Andes; not so much for Steph who only made visits every other week or so to CIP’s highland experiment station (at over 3000 masl) in Huancayo east of Lima, and a six hour drive away.
However, Steph and I explored Peru together as much as we could, taking our VW on several long trips, to the north and central Andes, and south to Lake Titicaca. We also delayed our honeymoon until December 1973, flying to Cusco for a few days, and spending one night at Machu Picchu.
At Machu Picchu, December 1973.
In May 1975, we returned to the UK for seven months for me to complete my PhD, returning to Lima just before New Year.
With Jack Hakes and Trevor Williams at my PhD graduation on 12 December 1975 at the University of Birmingham.
Christmas Day 1976 in Turrialba.
Then, in April 1976, we moved to Costa Rica where I worked on potato diseases and production, based in Turrialba, some 70 km east of the capital city, San José. Under the terms of our visas, Steph was not permitted to work in Costa Rica. I became regional representative for CIP’s Region II (Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean) in August 1997 when my colleague, Oscar Hidalgo (who was based in Toluca, Mexico) headed to North Carolina to begin his PhD studies.
Our elder daughter Hannah Louise was born in San José in April 1978. Later that year, we took our first home leave in the UK and both sets of grandparents were delighted to meet their first granddaughter.
24 April 1978 in the Clinica Santa Rita, San José, Costa Rica.
On home leave in the UK in September 1978.
With Steph’s parents Myrtle and Arthur (top) in Southend-on-Sea, and mine, Lilian and Fred, in Leek.
We spent five happy years in Costa Rica before moving back to Lima at the end of November 1980, and began making plans to move to the Philippines by Easter 1981.
However, in early 1981, a lectureship was created at the University of Birmingham, in the Department of Plant Biology (formerly Botany, where Steph and I had studied), for which I successfully applied. We left CIP at the end of March and had set up home in Bromsgrove (about 13 miles south of Birmingham in north Worcestershire) by the beginning of July.
4 Davenport Drive
A decade after we were married, we were already a family of four. In May 1982 Philippa Alice was born in Bromsgrove.
30 May 1982 in Bromsgrove hospital.
During the 1980s we enjoyed many family holidays, including this one in 1983 on the canals close to home.
Many other family holidays followed, in South Wales, in Norfolk, on the North York Moors, and in 1989, in the Canary Islands.
In Tenerife, Canary Islands in July 1989. Steph is carrying the binoculars that I bought around 1964 and which I still possess.
Hannah (left) and Philippa (right) thrived at local Finstall First School, shown here on their first day of school in 1983 and 1987, respectively.
My work at Birmingham kept me very busy (perhaps too busy), but I particularly enjoyed working with my graduate students (many of them from overseas), and my undergraduate tutees.
All in all, it looked like Birmingham would be a job for life. That was not to be, however. By the end of the 1980s, academic life had sadly lost much of its allure, thanks in no small part to the policies and actions of the Thatcher government. We moved on.
By 1993, we had already been in the Philippines for almost two years, where I had been hired (from July 1991) as head of the Genetic Resources Center (GRC) at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, some 65 km south of Manila in the Philippines. I moved there ahead of Steph and the girls (then aged 13 and nine) who joined me just after Christmas 1991.
Meeting fellow newcomer and head of communications, Ted Hutchcroft and his wife at our joint IRRI welcoming party in early 1992.
In 1993 I learned to scuba dive, a year after Hannah, and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. Philippa trained a couple of years later.
Getting ready to dive, at Arthur’s Place, Anilao, Philippines in January 2003.
Steph was quite content simply to snorkel or beachcomb, and we derived great pleasure from our weekends away (about eight or nine a year) at Anilao, 92 km south from Los Baños. In fact, our weekends in Anilao were one of our greatest enjoyments during the 19 years we spent in the Philippines.
Steph became an enthusiastic beader and has made several hundred pieces of jewelry since then. In Los Baños we had a live-in helper, Lilia, and so in the heat of Los Baños, Steph was spared the drudgery of housework or cooking, and could focus on the hobbies she enjoyed, including a daily swim in the IRRI pool, and looking after her garden and orchids.
Steph and Lilia on our last day in IRRI Staff Housing #15 on 30 April 2010.
Hannah and Philippa completed their school education at the International School Manila (ISM) in 1995 and 1999 respectively, both passing the International Baccalaureate Diploma with commendably high scores.
Graduation at ISM: Hannah and Philippa with their friends from around the world.
Traveling to Manila each day from Los Baños had not been an easy journey, due to continual roadworks and indescribable traffic. It was at least two hours each way. By the time Philippa finished school in 1999, the buses were leaving Los Baños at 04:30 in order to reach Manila by the start of classes at 07:15.
In October 1996, Hannah started her university degree in psychology and social anthropology at Swansea University in the UK. However, after two years, she transferred to Macalester College, a highly-rated liberal arts college in St Paul, Minnesota, graduating summa cum laude in psychology and anthropology in May 2000. She then registered for a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Minnesota. Philippa began her BSc degree in psychology at the prestigious University of Durham, UK later that same year, in October.
Hannah’s graduation in May 2000 at Macalester College, with Philippa and Michael (Hannah’s boyfriend, now her husband).
Once Hannah and Philippa had left for university, IRRI paid for return visits each year, especially at Christmas.
Christmas 2001. Michael joined Hannah for the visit.
While my work took me outside the Philippines quite often, Steph and I did manage holidays together in Hong Kong/Macau and Australia. And, together with Philippa, we toured Angkor Wat in Cambodia in December 2000.
But Steph also accompanied me on work trips to Laos, Bali, and Japan. She also joined me and my staff when we visited the rice terraces in northern Luzon in March 2009.
Enjoying a cold beer as the sun goes down, near Sagada, northern Luzon, Philippines.
Overlooking the Batad rice terraces in northern Luzon in March 2009.
However, we always used our annual home leave allowance to return to the UK, stay in our home in Bromsgrove (which we had purposely left unoccupied), and meet up with family and friends.
Philippa was awarded a 2:1 degree in July 2003, and the graduation ceremony took place inside Durham Cathedral. She then headed off to Vancouver for a year, before returning to the UK and looking for a job, eventually settling in Newcastle upon Tyne where she has lived ever since.
Outside Durham Cathedral where Phil received her BSc degree from the university’s Chancellor, the late Sir Peter Ustinov.
Hannah married Michael in May 2006, and finished her PhD. We flew to Minnesota from the Philippines.
15 May 2006, at the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory in Como Park, St Paul.
PhD graduation at the University of Minnesota.
Philippa registered for a PhD in biological psychology at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne where she was already working.
Professionally, the period between 2001 and my retirement in 2010 was the most satisfying. I had changed positions at IRRI in May, moving from GRC to join the institute’s senior management team as Director for Program Planning and Communications (DPPC). I worked with a great team, and we really made an impact to increase donor support for IRRI’s research program. However, by 2008/9 when my contract was up for renewal, Steph and I had already agreed not to continue with IRRI, but take early retirement and return to the UK.
But as our retirement date approached in April 2010, I was honored by the institute’s Board of Trustees with a farewell party (despedida) coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the very first Board meeting in April 1960.
14 April 2010 – IRRI’s 50th celebration dinner and our despedida.
Friday 30 April was my last day in the office.
With my DPPC friends. L-R: Eric, Corinta, Zeny, me, Vhel, and Yeyet.
We flew back to the UK two days later, arriving on Monday 3 May and taking delivery of our new car, a Peugeot 308, the following day.
Philippa and Andi flew off to New York in October 2010 and were married in Central Park. She graduated with her PhD in December.
By 2013 we had been married for four decades, and were well-settled into retirement, enjoying all the opportunities good weather gave us to really explore Worcestershire and neighboring counties, especially as National Trust and English Heritage members. And touring Scotland in 2015, Northern Ireland in 2017, Cornwall in 2018, East Sussex and Kent in 2019, and Hampshire and West Sussex in 2022.
We were, by then, the proud grandparents of three beautiful boys and a girl.
Callum Andrew (August 2010) – St Paul, Minnesota
Elvis Dexter (September 2011) – Newcastle upon Tyne
Zoë Isobel (May 2012) – St Paul, Minnesota
Felix Sylvester (September 2013) – Newcastle upon Tyne
And how could we ever forget a very special day in February 2012, when Steph, Philippa and my former colleague from IRRI, Corinta joined me at Buckingham Palace for an investiture.
Receiving my OBE from King Charles III (then HRH The Prince of Wales) on 14 February 2012.
With Steph and Philippa outside the gates of Buckingham Palace.
With Corinta and Steph in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace after the investiture.
Since 2010, we have traveled to the USA each year except during the pandemic years (2020-2022), and only returning there this past May and June. We’ve made some pretty impressive road trips around the USA, taking in the east and west coasts, and all points in between with the exception of the Deep South. Just click here to find a list of those road trips.
In July 2016, a few months after I broke my leg, Hannah and family came over to the UK, and we got together with Phil and Andi and the boys for the first time, sharing a house in the New Forest.
Our first group photo as a family, near Beaulieu Road station in the New Forest, 7 July 2016. L-R: Zoë, Michael, me (still using a walking stick), Steph, Callum, Hannah, Elvis, Andi, Felix, and Philippa.
And they came over again in July 2022, to our new home in the northeast of England where we had moved from Bromsgrove in October 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In our garden in Backworth, North Tyneside, August 2022.
L-R: Felix, Elvis, Zoë, and Callum, at Dunstanburgh Castle, Northumberland in August 2022.
So it’s 2023, and fifty years have passed since we married.
During our visit to the USA this past May and June, we met up with Roger Rowe and his wife Norma, along the Mississippi River at La Crosse in Wisconsin.
Roger joined CIP in 1973 as head of the Breeding and Genetics Department and was our first boss. Roger also co-supervised my PhD. So it was great meeting up with them again 50 years on.
We’ve been in the northeast just over three years now, and haven’t regretted for a moment making the move north. It’s a wonderful part of the country, and in fact has given us a new lease of life.
At Steel Rigg looking east towards the Whin Sill, Crag Lough, and Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland, February 2022.
Steph has taken great pleasure in developing her new garden here. It’s a work in progress, and quite a different challenge from her garden in Worcestershire, discovering what she can grow and what won’t survive this far north or in the very heavy (and often waterlogged) soil.
22 August 2023
I’ve had much enjoyment writing this blog since 2012, combining my interests of writing and photography. It has certainly given me a focus in retirement. I never thought I’d still be writing as many stories, over 700 now, and approaching 780,000 words. Since returning to the UK, I’ve also tried to take a daily walk of 2-4 miles. However, that’s not been possible these past six months. A back and leg problem has curtailed my daily walk, but I’m hopeful that it will eventually resolve itself and I’ll be able to get out and about locally, especially along the famous North Tyneside waggonways.
After 50 years together, we have much to be thankful for. We’ve enjoyed the countries where we have lived and worked, or visited on vacation. Our daughters and their families are thriving. Hannah is a Senior Director of Talent Management and Strategy for one of the USA’s largest food companies, and Philippa is an Associate Professor of Biological Psychology at Northumbria University.
Sisters!
With Hannah and Michael, Callum and Zoë (and doggies Bo and Ollie, and cat Hobbes) in St Paul, MN on 18 June 2023.
With Philippa and Andi, Elvis and Felix (and doggies Rex and Noodle) on 2 September 2023.
And here we are, at South Stack cliffs, in the prime of life (taken in mid-September) when we enjoyed a short break in North Wales.
Steph with Philippa and family on her birthday on 8 October.
13 October 2023 – still going strong!
While drafting this reminiscence, I came across this article by Hannah Snyder on the Northwest Public Broadcasting website, and it inspired the title I used.
I have been very fortunate. There’s no denying. Since I made my first trip outside the UK, to the west coast of Ireland for a botany field course in July 1968, followed a year later, in September 1969 to participate in a folk festival in Czechoslovakia, I’ve had so many opportunities to travel around the globe—to more than 60 countries (sometimes on vacation, but mostly on business associated with my work in international agricultural research).
Morris dancing at the folk festival in Strakonice, Czechoslovakia in 1969. That’s me on the extreme right.
I’ve lived and worked in three countries (besides the UK of course): Peru (1973-76); Costa Rica (1976-1980); and the Philippines (1991-2010). I’ve visited several countries multiple times, and others just the once. Whenever I was traveling on business, I would also try to fit in some tourism over a weekend if possible. I have so many memories over those 55 years. Here are some that spring to mind.
The Americas I guess I should begin this section with Peru. In 1971 I was thrilled to be offered a job in Peru, at the newly-founded International Potato Center (CIP), although I didn’t actually travel there until January 1973.
13 October 1973
So many memories. Steph and I were married in Lima in October 1973.
Looking at a farmer’s field of potatoes in the Mantaro Valley near Huancayo.
Solanum lignicaule, 2n=2x=24, from southern Peru
In Pisac market
The street of the thirteen-sided stone.
Cuzco cathedral.
School time.
North of Ayacucho, but before the Mantaro gorge.
Arequipa’s cathedral with El Misti in the background.
On the river near Puerto Bermudez
Near Cuzco in southern Peru, 1974
Machu Picchu
Sacsayhuaman at Cuzco
It’s almost impossible to choose any one aspect that stands out. The diversity of landscapes, with desert on the coast, the high Andes, and the jungle on the eastern side. The long history of agriculture in difficult environments, and the archaeology of civilizations that go way back before the invasion by the Spanish in the 16th century.
Then we moved to Costa Rica in April 1976, living in Turrialba, about 70 km east of the capita, San José. Once again I was working on potatoes and with farmers.
We enjoyed our five years in that beautiful country, and our elder daughter Hannah was born there in April 1978.
A land of volcanoes (some very active), Costa Rica is a verdant country, and there are national parks everywhere. The bird and plant life is extraordinary, so I guess this is what stands out for me in particular.
Potato fields of var. Atzimba on the slopes of the Irazu volcano
Northern Costa Rica on the way to Monteverde.
Just after we’d taken delivery of our VW Brasilia
Typical ox carts in Costa Rica
Steph and Hannah at the Monteverde Biological Reserve
A respendent quetzal that we saw at Monteverde
Carrying Hannah on my back at Monteverde
Tamarindo Beach on the Guanacaste coast in northwest Costa Rica
CATIE in Turrialba
The Turrialba volcano from our garden at CATIE
Hannah growing up at CATIE
On a visit to the Poas volcano
My work took me to all the countries of Central America, as well as to Mexico where, until 1977, CIP’s regional headquarters was based just outside Mexico City at Toluca. And also out into the Caribbean islands, to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, to Jamaica, St Kitts, Antigua, Montserrat, Barbados, and Trinidad.
In Mexico, most of my visits were to Toluca. But on one visit there, I joined the participants of a potato training course to study potato production in Mexico State, Michoacán, Puebla, Jalisco, and Guanajuato. Later, in the 1980s I also visited Nuevo Leon in the north, and Morelos south of Mexico City.
But if I had to choose one highlight, it would be the pyramids at Teotihuacán, northeast of Mexico City that Steph and visited in 1975 when we visited some friends at CIMMYT (a sister center to CIP) on our way back to the UK.
Guatemala is a fascinating and beautiful country, and I was a regular visitor. A land of lakes and volcanoes, it has a high indigenous population, who wear the most colorful fabrics.
In 1977, Steph and I flew into the Mayan city of Tikal, deep in the jungle, for an overnight stay.
On another trip I spent a few days in Belize, first in Belize City on the coast, then in Belmopan, the smallest capital city in the Americas.
The overriding memory I have of Honduras was the white-knuckle landings in Tegucigalpa. How they managed to land jets there is beyond me. What pilot skill!
I visited El Salvador and Nicaragua just once each, and then only overnight. They had virtually no potato sector.
Flying in and out of Panama City was quite a regular occurrence. It was a transit for Costa Rica from South America. The main potato area was in the west of the country near the frontier with Costa Rica (map), north of the city of David at Volcán and Boquete. A region of deep volcanic soils, it was very good potato-growing country, and one I traveled to by road from my base in Turrialba on a couple of occasions.
Potato fields in Boquete, northern Panama
It was only after I moved to the Philippines in 1991 that my work took me back to Costa Rica for the first time in about 15 years, and one other country, Venezuela, which I’d not visited before although landing at Caracas airport on several occasions. This airport is located on the Caribbean coast north of the city, and is connected by a 27 km motorway that crosses the mountains, a spectacular drive over what I assume is a northern extension of the Andes.
In the 1990s I spent a week in Caracas attending a potato network meeting, but seeing very little of the city, just the metro from hotel to meeting venue and back!
Another international agricultural research center in Cali, Colombia is CIAT (map), supported in the same way as CIP and CIMMYT (and the rice institute, IRRI, in the Philippines, that I joined in 1991). Located in the Cauca Valley, CIAT is surrounded by huge plantations of sugar cane, but the rice-growing area is nearby as well. The last time I was there (and in Peru and Mexico) was in July 2016 conducting a review of the CIAT genebank.
I was in Chile just the once, for a week in Santiago in July 1979. I’d flown down from Costa Rica to join two colleagues from Lima to carry out a short review of the Chilean potato program. Two things come to mind: wine and ABBA. Wine, because we were taken to dinner at Enoteca, a fine restaurant overlooking the city on Camino Real, where all the wines produced in Chile were on display, and we were invited to sample many of them. On one evening, while out enjoying some souvenir shopping, I heard (for the first time) the refrains of Chiquitita by ABBA emitting from one of the shops. My visit to Santiago will always be associated with ABBA.
What can I say about Brazil? It’s huge. My first visit there was in 1979 when I attended a potato conference at Poços de Caldas in Minas Gerais (map), followed by a couple of nights in Rio de Janeiro. On another occasion I attended a conference in Foz do Iguaçu (in Paraná state) close to the border with Argentina and Paraguay, and site of the impressive Iguazu Falls.
I’ve been to Brasilia twice, and once upon a time, that nearly became home for Steph and me when CIP’s Director General deliberated whether to post me to Brazil or the Philippines. In the event we returned to the UK in 1981 when I joined the faculty of the University of Birmingham.
I guess the most impressive thing I’ve experienced in Brazil is the statue of Christ at Corcovado, high above Rio de Janeiro, with the most spectacular views over the city. My dad was there in the 1930s.
I’ve been to Canada twice, the first time in 1979 (with Steph and 15 month-old Hannah) when I attended a potato conference in Vancouver, then we drove across the Rockies to meet up with my late elder brother Ed and his wife Linda in Edmonton, AB.
In the early 2000s, I made a short visit to Ottawa to meet with representatives of Canadian overseas development assistance agencies, and managed to spend a day getting to know the city, before heading back to the USA.
Parliament Hill from the banks of the Ottawa River
Over the decades I’ve traveled to the USA many times, and have now visited all states and DC except Hawaii, Alaska (although one flight touched down in Anchorage), Idaho, Nevada (I changed flights in Las Vegas), Oklahoma, Kansas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. It’s such a vast country, but since 2011, Steph and I have managed several mega road trips and seen so many wonderful sights. It’s hard to pick any one. I have written about these trips and you can find a link here; just scroll down to the USA section).
However, I’ve often said since we made the visit there in 2011, that if I ever got the opportunity to return, it would be to Canyon de Chelly in northeast Arizona. It’s a special place.
Canyon de Chelly, AZ
Spider Rock in the Canyon de Chelly
There’s not a lot of potatoes grown throughout the Caribbean, with only the Dominican Republic having any significant potato program, in the central highlands close to the border with Haiti. The Dominican Republic became one of the founder members of a regional potato program, PRECODEPA, set up in 1978, so I guess I must have traveled there five or six times.
I was just the once in Haiti, in the late 1970s attending a conference for about a week. We stayed in a nice hotel overlooking Port-au-Prince, and ventured out into the city just the once. Even then the city was not a safe place to wander round, and following the disastrous 2010 earthquake followed by the cholera outbreak, the country has become even more ungovernable, and not somewhere I would want to visit again. It’s one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.
I also paid short visits to Jamaica, St Kitts, Montserrat (which had a small but thriving potato sector before the Soufrière Hills volcano erupted in 1995, covering half the island with ash), Barbados, and Trinidad. Before long-haul jets could make the flight direct from Europe to South America, Antigua was a refuelling stop, which I made a couple of times. And after being being bumped off a flight to Montserrat, I spent the night in Antigua at a luxury resort (the only hotel bed I could find on the island!) and enjoying a delicious lobster dinner for the same price as a steak.
My first trip to Asia, to Indonesia in fact, was in the early 1980s, when I attended a genetic resources meeting in Jakarta, but spending a weekend at the Bogor Botanical Garden beforehand. The oil palm tree on the right below is one of the original trees introduced into Asia and became the foundation of the oil palm industry.
Bogor botanical garden
Bogor botanical garden
One of the original oil palms in the garden
Over the 19 years I spent living in the Philippines, I returned to Indonesia several times, the most memorable being in September 2005 when the IRRI Board of Trustees held one of it bi-yearly meetings there. Steph was able to join me on that trip, and along with excursions into the Bali countryside, we also enjoyed a long weekend break at our hotel before returning to the Philippines.
Bali landscape, Indonesia
In the Philippines, we lived in Los Baños, some 60 km south of Manila, where IRRI had its research center.
On the IRRI experiment station, with Mt Makiling (a dormant volcano) in the background.
Although we didn’t travel much around the Philippines (and apart from one short trip to Cebu, we didn’t wander beyond the island of Luzon), we went to the beach most months, and in March 2009, Steph joined me and my DPPC staff when we took an office outing over five days to the rice terraces in the mountains north of Manila. Very impressive.
Looking south towards Banaue town center.
In 1993 I learnt to scuba dive, one of the best things I’ve ever done, opening up a totally new world for me. The Philippines has some of the best diving in the world, especially at Anilao south of Manila.
Diving at Anilao, Philippines
But one of the best things about the Philippines? The Filipinos! Always smiling. Such friendly people. And I had great Filipino colleagues working with and for me in both the roles I took on at IRRI.
The ‘IRRI All Stars’ who helped during the IRRI Day in October 2002.
Colleagues from the Genetic Resources Center.
In 1995, I launched a major rice biodiversity project (funded by the Swiss government), and one of my staff, Dr Seepana Appa Rao was recruited to help the national rice program in Laos to collect native varieties of rice. Over five years, I visited Laos at least twice a year, taking part several times in a baci ceremony to welcome me to the country, and other visitors as well. Steph joined me on one trip, and here we are during one such ceremony at the house of my colleague, the late Dr John Schiller.
On that particular trip, we took a weekend off, flying to Luang Prabang and enjoying a river trip on the Mekong.
Mekong River, nr. Luang Prabang, Laos
IRRI had a country program in Cambodia, and I visited a couple of times to discuss rice germplasm conservation, and stayed in Phnom Penh. But after Christmas 2000, Steph and I were joined by our younger daughter Philippa (who had just begun her undergraduate studies at the University of Durham in the UK) for a mini-break in Cambodia (and Singapore).
We flew from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, and spent three nights there visiting the amazing Angkor Wat temple complex, and a boat trip on the Tonle Sap, before flying back to the capital for one night, and back to Singapore.
We celebrated the New Year in Singapore, taking in the beautiful botanic gardens. Work has taken me to Singapore on several occasions, and Changi airport has to be one of the world’s aviation destinations. How it must have changed since I was last there.
Work took me to Seoul in South Korea on several occasions, and Japan. Steph joined me on one trip to Japan in September 2009 when the IRRI Board of Trustees met in Tsukuba north of Tokyo. We stayed on for a long weekend sightseeing in Tokyo, although she got to see more than I did earlier in the week, when a series of excursions for IRRI and Trustee wives were organised from Tsukuba.
Narita airport was also a hub for Northwest Airlines (now Delta) for flights from Manila to the USA, so I would fly through there at least a couple of times a year, also Osaka.
I’ve been to Beijing in China a couple of times, taking in the Great Wall during my first visit in 1995.
With my colleague, Bao-Rong Lu (middle) on the Great Wall, north of Beijing
On that trip we also took in Hangzhou and Guangzhou. I was in Beijing again around 2005 for a meeting, and in 2004, Steph and I flew to Hong Kong over Christmas and New Year. We also crossed to Macau on that trip.
The view from Victoria Peak, Hong Kong
Ruins of St Paul’s, Macau
Again, Hong Kong was one of those hub airports that I passed through many times, first at the old Kai Tak airport alongside Kowloon harbor (an interesting approach), and later at the new airport reclaimed from the sea.
I’ve only been to India a handful of times, always to meetings, and only then to Delhi and Hyderabad, so I can’t say that I’ve ever seen much of the country. There’s no doubt it’s a fascinating country, but I’m not sure it’s really on my bucket list – except if I could travel on one of those luxury trains, perhaps.
The same goes for Bangladesh, with just a couple of visits to Dhaka so I can’t say that I’ve ever known the country.
I was in Sri Lanka just the once, spending most of my time in Kandy. The hotel where I stayed was outside the city, on a hill, with breath-taking views over the surrounding hills. And I remember waking up early one still morning, and listening to the bird calls echoing all around. Magic!
I been to the north and south of Vietnam. On my first trip, I traveled to Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, and on the return journey to the airport in Ho Chi Minh City, I had to cross the river in a small boat (the bridge was down) and flag down a tuk-tuk for the last 20 km or so. I caught my flight!
Then I was in Hanoi several times in connection with the rice biodiversity project, but in 2010 I was the chair of the science committee for the 3rd International Rice Congress held in that city.
Myanmar has been closed off to visitors for many years, but I was able to visit just the once in the late 1990s, to the rice genebank at Yezin, about 250 miles north of the old capital Yangon. The train ride was interminable, and the sleeper on the return journey left a lot to be desired in terms of comfort and cleanliness. Nevertheless it was an interesting visit, but compared to the cuisine of other countries in the region (especially Thailand and Indonesia) the food was not inspiring: served quite cold and swilling in oil.
I’ve been in Bangkok many times, as it where I would change flights for Vientiane in Laos, having to spend one night to catch the early morning flight on Thai or Lao Airlines. But I never got to know the country, just a couple of visits to Chiang Mai in the north (again for meetings but no tourism). The same goes for Malaysia, with meetings in Kuala Lumpur and Penang.
In 2014 IRRI once again asked me to chair the science committee for the 4th International Rice Congress that was held in Bangkok, so I made several visits there (and on to the Philippines) before the congress was held in November.
Australia
I’ve been in Australia four times. As a family, Steph, our elder daughter Hannah, Philippa and I flew from the Philippines just after Christmas 1998 to Sydney, spending just under a week there, enjoying a trip up into the Blue Mountains, and watching the awesome fireworks display over Sydney Harbour on New Year’s Eve.
I made a work trip there around 2001, taking in Canberra, the rice-growing area in the Riverina, Adelaide, and Melbourne.
In December 2003, Steph and I drove from Sydney to Melbourne over the course of a week, taking the train back to Sydney, where we enjoyed a harbour dinner cruise.
At the Sydney Harbour Bridge during our Christmas vacation in Australia in December 2003
We spent New Year’s Eve on the south coast near Melbourne.
Next stop: Antarctica
The last time I was there was November 2016, when my friend and former colleague, Professor Brian Ford-Lloyd flew from Birmingham to Melbourne for three days as part of a review of genebanks.
Enjoying a stiff one on the Emirates A380 flight from Melbourne to Dubai.
Africa
Africa now, where I have visited Morocco in the north, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria in West Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya in East Africa, and Zambia, South Africa, Mozambique, and Madagascar in southern Africa. I wrote this general account in 2013.
There are several international agricultural research centers in Africa: ILRI (a livestock center) in Kenya and Ethiopia; World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Kenya; IITA in Ibadan, Nigeria; and Africa Rice (WARDA) in Bouaké, Ivory Coast. I have attended meetings there on several occasions. In Ethiopia, the ILRI campus is located in Addis Ababa, and during my first visit there, in January 1993, I had the opportunity of traveling down into the Rift Valley. What I most remember about that trip, and the stay in Addis, was the incredible bird life. An ornithologist’s paradise. Likewise on the campus of IITA in Nigeria. IITA has a 1000 ha campus, and part of it has been left as pristine rainforest with its assemblage of species, some of them crop wild relatives.
Looking for wild yams on the IITA Forest Reserve.
I made my first visit to Nigeria and Ivory Coast after the genetic resources meeting in Addis Ababa in 1993. For security reasons, visitors to IITA who arrive in Lagos in the afternoon and evening spend the night there, before being escorted to Ibadan, around 2 hours by road to the northeast. I always enjoyed my visits to IITA. But Lagos airport was another thing. The situation there did improve, but throughout the 1990s, I always felt uneasy passing through, as officials (some in uniform, others in plain clothes) would often ask for a bribe.
I must have visited Ivory Coast a couple of times, the first time flying from Abidjan (the capital) to Bouaké on the national airline, a Boeing 727 that had once been the presidential aircraft! I made those visits before the disastrous civil wars of 2002-2004 and 2010-2011.
Africa Rice had to abandon its research center in Bouaké for many years, although the institute has now returned there. I planted a tree during my first visit. I wonder if it’s still there?
With Deputy Director General Perter Matlon at the tree planting.
On another occasion, I was in Ghana for a week, attending a planning meeting, and didn’t see much of Accra outside my hotel.
I’ve been in Kenya probably half a dozen times, straddled the Equator, and enjoyed the wildlife in the Nairobi National Park.
With my dear friend from CIMMYT, the late Sir Bent Skovmand (from Denmark), wheat pathologist and then head of the CIMMYT wheat genebank.
In October 2005, I was in Marrakech, Morocco to attend the annual meeting of the CGIAR, the consortium of donors and international centers. I got sick, and I had to work on a project proposal so spent much of my time in my hotel room, with just one excursion to the souk for some souvenir shopping.
Looking for silver beads for Steph.
In southern Africa, I spent several days in Lusaka, Zambia visiting the SADC genebank there. I’ve passed through Johannesburg several times, and on my transit there (on my way to Lusaka) was caught up in a car bomb incident on the day of the election that first brought Nelson Mandela to power in April 1994. On another occasion I spent a week in Durban (meetings once again) with a side trip to Pietermaritzburg, almost 90 km inland from Durban,
IRRI had a country program in Mozambique, and I was there a couple of times. The rice program joined our biodiversity project, and the CGIAR held its annual meeting there in 2009.
I was in Madagascar just the once, staying in the capital Antananarivo on the east coast, and traveling along dreadful roads north to the rice experiment station. Madagascar also participated in the rice biodiversity project.
At a training course on rice genetic resources in Madagascar in 1998.
Middle East
I had the opportunity of visiting Izmir in Turkey in April 1972, one of my first overseas trips from Birmingham, to attend a genetic resources conference. There was an excursion to Ephesus.
On another visit (also to Izmir) in the late 1970s, I spent a day in Istanbul before taking an evening flight to the UK, enjoying the Topkapi Palace and various mosques.
The Blue Mosque
I was fortunate to travel to Syria several times, to Aleppo, before the civil war pulled the country apart. Another agricultural research center, ICARDA, had its headquarters there and genebank. I even went for a job interview once. It’s a beautiful country, and I guess many of the beautiful almond orchards have probably been destroyed in the fighting. I also spent some time in Damascus, visiting the famous souk there.
In 1982, I took a party of graduate students from the University of Birmingham to Israel for a two week course on genetic resources of the Mediterranean. I wrote about that visit here.
And then there’s Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. I’ve spent a few nights there in between flights but never had enough time to explore the city. When Emirates Airlines began a service from Manila (MNL) to Dubai (DXB), and on to Birmingham (BHX), we flew that route each year on home leave, and Emirates also became my airline of choice for trips into Europe. In the 1990s it had either been with Lufthansa into Frankfurt (FRA) or KLM into Amsterdam (AMS).
Europe
Steph and I have been married almost 50 years but we’ve never taken a vacation on mainland Europe. But my work has taken me there quite often, and to three countries, Germany, Switzerland and especially Italy, several times a year between 1991 and 2010.
On that first trip to Czechoslovakia in 1969, we traveled by road, through the Netherlands, southern German, and into Czechoslovakia.
I was next in Germany in the late 1980s, when I visited agricultural research institute near Hannover (also taking in the scenic town of Celle), before crossing into East Germany. I spent several interesting days at the genebank in Gatersleben (now part of The Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research), before flying on to Warsaw in Poland.
There I gave a series of seminars on crop evolution and genetic conservation (focusing on potatoes) to staff of the agricultural research institute (IHAR). My hosts took me to the family home of Frédéric Chopin west of Warsaw. As we walked around the gardens, we could hear several of Chopin’s piano pieces broadcast over speakers there. His Mazurka in D Major has remained a firm favorite ever since (here interpreted by acclaimed pianist Vladimir Horowitz), and is always a reminder of that visit whenever I hear it.
I also took in Cracow in the south of the country, a most elegant city.
While I was DPPC at IRRI, my work with the institute’s donors took me many times into Europe, particularly to Germany (Bonn and Frankfurt), to Switzerland (at Bern), and to Rome in Italy.
I had a good friend, plant pathologist Dr Marlene Diekmann, who lived near Bonn, and who worked for one of the German aid agencies. Whenever I was in Bonn, we’d try and spend some time walking the wine terraces of the Ahr Valley south of Bonn.
The last time I was in Bonn was 2016 during the genebank review I mentioned earlier.
I love trains, and have often traveled that way from one European capital to another. In fact I have traveled from my former home of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire to Rome, with stops in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland on the way.
One of the best trips I made was to view the Matterhorn in Switzerland near Zermatt. I had a free weekend before I had to travel on to Rome, so I took the opportunity of a day excursion from Bern.
My trips to France have taken in Paris, where I spent a very wet weekend once walking around the city. But it was worth it. And to Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast several times, the last being in 2016.
Brussels (in Belgium) has a beautiful central square, but I’ve never had much time to explore there.
For many years, Amsterdam was a hub airport for home leave flights back to the UK. In the Netherlands, I’ve spent time in the university town of Wageningen (east of Amsterdam), in the capital, The Hague, and in Amsterdam itself. A boat tour of the canals is well worth it.
My donor trips took me to Lisbon in Portugal and Madrid in Spain, which I wrote about in this blog post from 2019. Then in 2012, Steph and I visited my late eldest brother Martin and wife Pauline at their beautiful home in Tomar, north of Lisbon. What a glorious 10 days.
Central square in Tomar
I was in the Canary Islands (part of Spain) a couple of times, collecting various wild crop relatives. Steph, the girls, and me had a holiday there in 1989.
On the north coast of Tenerife
Looking over the Tenerife landscape.
However, the country I have visited most in Europe is Italy, and Rome in particular. I was once in the Po Valley southwest of Milan, looking at the rice research there. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has its headquarters in Rome, as does Bioversity International (formerly the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, IPGRI). I guess over the 19 years I spent in the Philippines, I must have traveled to Rome at least once a year for one meeting or another, and up to five times in one year. It’s a magnificent place, although my elder daughter Hannah who has just spent a few days there commented on how dirty it was, and full of tourists. But I’ve always enjoyed my stays there, and have had ample opportunity to enjoy the history and archaeology, and the fantastic cuisine.
I’ve only been in Austria, Norway, and Denmark on one occasion each, and in the capitals Vienna, Oslo, and Copenhagen. In Vienna, I spent a week at the International Atomic Energy Agency (where they have a program in mutation breeding) consulting on germplasm databases. I visited donor agencies in Norway and Denmark, but had no time for any tourism in Oslo. It was a different situation in Copenhagen where I looked round the pretty city over a weekend.
I started this blog post in the Republic of Ireland, and Steph and I have returned there three times, two with Hannah and Philippa in the 1990s, and also in 2017 after we’d spent a little over a week touring Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland was a revelation. Prosperous, and beautiful. We visited many National Trust properties over there, and I wrote about our 10 days there afterwards, with links in the post to many of the properties we visited.
Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland
In Great Britain (United Kingdom minus Northern Ireland), Steph and I have visited so many National Trust and English Heritage properties around the country. This link gives a complete list (and maps) of all those we have visited.
Since we returned to the UK in 2010, we have toured Scotland, spent time in the south and southeast of England, and in Cornwall.
South Harris beach, Outer Hebrides
Calanais Standing Stones, Isle of Lewis
Isle of Skye
Stormy weather at the Butt of Lewis
The Lizard, Cornwall
Cape Cornwall
Tintagel Castle, Cornwall
At the White Cliffs of Dover, Kent
Th whole family together for the first time, in the New Forest in 2016
South Harting from Hartin Down, West Sussex
Now that we are living in the northeast of England, we have spent time exploring Northumberland, including its incredible Roman heritage.
The Whin Sill along Hadrian’s Wall
As a small boy, I spent many holidays with my parents in different parts of Wales, and Steph and I will be returning there at the beginning of September to renew our acquaintance with North Wales after so many decades.
So, there we have it. Fifty-five years of travel. So many special experiences.
The weather has been none too kind in recent weeks here in the northeast of England. And there hasn’t been much incentive for getting out and about. On top of that, I’m suffering from a very painful bout of sciatica that is severely restricting my mobility. At least until the pain medication I was prescribed has kicked in.
A couple of days ago, the day dawned bright and sunny, although none too warm. But, for once, my medication did its job quite quickly, which has not been my general experience. So we decided to head up the coast to one of our favorite beaches at Cresswell, and one of the first we explored after we arrived here in the northeast at the back end of 2020.
Cresswell beach in November 2020.
Just 17 miles north from our home in North Tyneside, the drive to Cresswell Beach took just under half an hour.
The beach lies at the southern end of the much larger Druridge Bay, with rocky outcrops at the northern and southern ends, just under a mile apart. Above the tide line there is a stretch of soft sand, and behind the beach a low-lying cliff, perhaps 10m high, with interesting limestone and coal strata exposed.
On the occasions we have visited, there have been just a few people taking a stroll, walking the dog. But I guess in high summer it can get quite busy on a sunny, warm day, as there is a holiday park (with static caravans) just across the road from the beach.
Here’s another view, filmed from the rocks at the southern end (you can see the nearby Lynemouth power station just south of the beach, and in the far distance the five turbine wind farm off Seaton Sluice beach) and panning round to view Druridge Bay to the north.
Behind the rock platform at the southern end, it appears that the cliff was once excavated (behind Steph in the image below) and perhaps accessible at high tide as a small quay.
While there is a lovely stretch of clear, yellow sand along the beach, at both ends of the beach there are patches of what appear to be—at first glance—black sand. On closer inspection, it’s clear that the black grains are not sand but COAL!
This coal, derived from erosion of the coals seems on the beach and out to sea, is actually collected. There are larger pieces the size of small gravel.
In fact, while we were there on an earlier visit, one man had driven on to the north end of the beach on his quad bike, scooping up bucketfuls of the coal.
At the southern end, near the ‘quay’ I asked one ‘coalman’ what he used the coal for. He told me that he heated his shed and greenhouse since it was a free and plentiful source.
Sea coaling at Lynemouth, south of Cresswell.
It seems there is quite a long traditionof collecting sea coal on the Northumberland coast.
Coal is abundant along the coast. Just a mile or two north from Cresswell, the government eventually rejected the development of a large open cast mine behind Druridge Bay, where coal had been mined in the past. In fact several important wildlife reserves have been opened on former open cast sites.
And while doing some background reading for this blog, I came across this other blog.
Just click on the image above to open an interesting post about a feature on Cresswell beach, just north of where we visited. There’s a submerged forest and tree stumps are exposed at low tide.
Now that’s a good enough reason to return to Cresswell before too long.
And while our visit to Cresswell was not primarily for bird-watching, we were very lucky in some of our sightings. Skimming along the cliffs and beach, sand martins were very active, and nesting. Along with five fulmars sitting on a ledge and squabbling. A lone curlew hugged the crest of the waves as it flew down the beach, and out to sea we saw a lone eider duck. Pied wagtails were flitting around the beach.
Sand martin
Fulmars
Curlew
Eider
Pied wagtail
But the greatest surprise, while we were enjoying a picnic lunch overlooking the beach, was a lone male stonechat that alighted on a bush on the cliff edge just in front of us and in full sunlight. What a magnificent little bird it is.
By November 2019, Steph and I finally decided to up sticks and move to Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England, to be closer to our younger daughter and her family. Our elder daughter and family live in Minnesota, but a move to the USA was never on the cards.
We didn’t actually make the move until 30 September 2020 – right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic!
Locking up and moving out!
We were living in Bromsgrove, a small market town (population in 2001 of just over 29,000), in northeast Worcestershire, and about 13 miles south of Birmingham in the West Midlands.
We originally settled in Bromsgrove in July 1981 after returning from South America, when I joined the University of Birmingham as a lecturer in the Department of Plant Biology. Then, in 1991, I took up a position at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), a renowned international agricultural research center in Los Baños, about 68 km south of Manila, staying there almost 19 years until retirement beckoned in April 2010.
Do we miss Worcestershire? In some ways. It is a lovely county, and within a 50 mile radius of Bromsgrove there are many attractions, into Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Shropshire.
Since 2011 we have been keen members of the National Trust (NT) and English Heritage (EH). Just check out the list of places (and maps) we have visited over the past decade or more.
There are fewer NT and EH properties here in the northeast, but the region has so much to offer with possibly some of the most spectacular landscapes in the country: coast, river valleys, moorlands, mountains, and a huge dose of history, especially the history and remains of the Roman occupation almost 2000 years ago.
March 2021 saw us move into our new home in Backworth, North Tyneside, and 15 minutes on the Metro from Newcastle city center. We are also just 10 minutes’ drive from the North Sea coast. The Tyne and Wear area (comprising the five metropolitan boroughs of Newcastle, North Tyneside, Gateshead, South Tyneside, and Sunderland) as well as the surrounding counties of Northumberland and Co Durham (even as far south as North Yorkshire) have so much to offer.
And since our move here in 2020, we have been out and about exploring our new home whenever the weather permits.
On this map I’ve marked all the places we have visited over the past 30 months. NT and EH properties have a dark red icon, coast and landscapes are green, other attractions are purple, and other historic sites are marked with a yellow icon. I’ve included photographs, and there are links to my blog posts and other websites where you can find more information about this wonderful corner of England.
So far, Steph and I have managed to avoid COVID-19. We still mask when we shop at the supermarket, when we travel on the Metro here in Newcastle upon Tyne, or anywhere we might be in close proximity with others. Mostly we are the only ones wearing masks.
And while most people feel that the pandemic is over and done with, latest data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics indicate that the virus is, once again, on the increase.
About 1 in 40 of England’s population (2.66%) tested positive at the end of March. COVID-19 has certainly not gone away, and given some of the horror stories circulating about the effects of long-COVID, it’s better to avoid infection if at all possible. Or at least reduce the risk of infection. That’s why we continue to mask.
And while we have been COVID-free, it has affected our nearest and dearest. Both our daughters and their families were struck down on a couple of occasions, even though everyone had been vaccinated.
As for Steph and me, we received our initial vaccinations in February and April 2021, with boosters in October that year, and in September a year later.
At New Year 2020, who would have envisioned that we were on the verge of a global pandemic. It was only on 31 December that the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was subsequently identified from patient samples.
Less than a month later, two Chinese nationals staying at a hotel in York tested positive for coronavirus. It was downhill thereafter, with the first lockdown coming into force on 26 March 2020. Other lockdowns followed. The Institute for Government has published an interesting timeline of the various government measures taken over the subsequent year here in the UK.
Daily life for everyone changed overnight. Although with hindsight, we now know that not all the rules that governed the lives of millions throughout the country were followed by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and 10 Downing Street staff!
Boris Johnson partying with Downing Street staff.
So, in retrospect, how has the COVID pandemic affected us?
Surprisingly little, if I’m honest. Despite all the inconveniences to daily life, the past three years have flown by. We’ve been rather busy. We kept to ourselves.
Another type of Corona . . .
Fortunately, we prefer the quiet life and since we don’t go pubbing, clubbing, or eating out regularly, we didn’t miss those during the lockdowns. And since the rules permitted exercise outdoors with one person in the same family bubble, we continued to enjoy the outdoors, with Steph joining me on my daily walks around Bromsgrove in Worcestershire where we were living at the time, weather permitting.
And once the National Trust started to open up once again, we seized the opportunity and headed off, on a glorious afternoon, to Dudmaston Hall in Shropshire, and several other properties close by before the end of September.
At Dudmaston Hall on 24 June 2020.
The first impacts of lockdown back in 2020 seem almost a lifetime ago. Deserted streets, and long queues at the supermarkets and shortages (caused primarily by panic buying in the first instance) of some food items and other basics like hand sanitizer and toilet rolls, until the inevitable rationing that was brought in.
Our nearest supermarket, Morrisons, was just 5 minutes or 1.6 miles away by car. Being the driver, the weekly shop fell to me since the supermarkets were only permitting entry to one person per household. I also took on the weekly shop for a widower friend and former University of Birmingham colleague, Jim Croft (a few years older than me) who lived close by. In fact I continued to shop for Jim right up till the day we moved north to Newcastle.
And talking of moving, by November 2019 (during a visit to our younger daughter Philippa and her family in Newcastle upon Tyne) we had bitten the bullet and decided we’d put our Bromsgrove house on the market, and make the move north.
Having appointed an estate agency (realtor) to handle the sale of our house, we waited until the New Year for the first adverts to be placed in the local press. Come mid-January 2020, a For Sale board had been firmly planted in our front garden, and we sat back waiting for a surge of prospective buyers. To our surprise—and disappointment, given the location of our house (proximity to excellent First and Middle schools, close to Bromsgrove town center, nearby dental and medical practices, and an upgraded commuter rail service into the center of Birmingham) we expected there would be more interest than we actually experienced.
By the end of March when the first lockdown came into effect, we’d received fewer than ten viewings. Even under lockdown, the government rules permitted house viewings to continue, as long as they were managed safely (social distancing, hand sanitation, and the like; we were always away from the house in any case during the viewings that were managed by the estate agent).
However, we decided not to accept any more viewings until the rules had been relaxed. Except for one, that had been pencilled in for a week hence. After that, we sat back, wondering when we would finally be able to make the move to Newcastle. We had already decided to rent a house there in the first instance, and use it as a base to look for a new home. But until we had sold our house, it was impossible to make any progress on finding a suitable rental property.
Come the lifting of the lockdown at the end of May, almost immediately we received a request for a second viewing from that last couple. And after a little negotiation, they made an offer which was acceptable. Less than the house had been advertised for (which I never expected to get) but considerably higher than a couple of offers we did receive earlier on, or how other estate agents had valued the house. Happy times! Or at least I thought so.
But anyone who has struggled through a house sale (and purchase) will know and understand the considerable angst that the whole conveyancing process can bring. We were at the top of a chain, since we had no purchase waiting to be completed. There was one solicitor two links below in the chain of four who made life miserable for everyone. By the end of September, however, we had all exchanged contracts and completed the sale on the 30th. And moved out that same day. We had used the intervening months to pack many of our belongings and upcycled many items that we no longer wanted to hold on to.
Fortunately I had identified a nice three-bedroom house east of Newcastle in the Shiremoor district of North Tyneside, and just 10 minutes from the North Sea coast. Offering to pay six months rent up front, I had secured a ‘reservation’ on the property at the beginning of September, not knowing exactly when we would be able to move. We moved in on 1 October.
The removal van arrived at 1 pm and was on its way south once again by 4 pm.
Within a fortnight of landing in Newcastle, we had already made an offer on a four bedroom, and two-year-old house, about a mile from where we were living at the time. It should have been the simplest sale/purchase but once again the solicitors made a meal of the process. However, the purchase was completed on 13 February 2021 and we moved on 6 March.
Moving out of Cloverfield
Moving into our new home
But because of repeated lockdowns, and the rules around meeting other family members and the like, we saw very little of our younger daughter and her family for the next 12 months. Christmas morning 2020 was enjoyed outside in a socially-distanced garden, followed by a solitary lunch for Steph and me.
Unfortunately COVID also put paid to family Christmases in 2021 and 2022.
There hasn’t been a day since that we have regretted the move north. Northumberland is an awe-inspiring county. Our home is only 10 minutes from the North Sea coast. There are miles and miles of paths and bridleways (known locally as ‘waggonways’) on the sites of old mine workings and rail lines. So even just after we moved here, and given the right weather, we have headed out into the countryside, enjoying what we like best: visiting National Trust and English Heritage properties (of which there are quite a few up here with magnificent gardens and walks), and enjoying the fresh air, socially-distanced of course. Just type Northumberland in the search box or open my National Trust and English Heritage page (organized by regions) and you’ll discover for yourselves some of the magical places we have visited over the past two and a half years. Here is just a soupçon of some of those around the northeast.
Seaton Sluice harbor.
The beach at Seaton Sluice.
National Trust Seaton Delaval Hall
National Trust Dunstanburgh Castle
Druridge Bay
English Heritage Warkworth Castle in April
National Trust Cragside
The garden at Cragside
Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall
The Whin Sill along Hadrian’s Wall
Underfloor heating at Chester’s Roman Fort (English Heritage)
The River North Tyne at Chester’s Roman Fort
Crossing the River Tyne at Ovingham
National Trust Thomas Bewick’s home at Cherryburn
National Trust Allen Banks
Whitburn close south of the River Tyne
Marsden Cliffs south of the River Tyne
National Trust Souter Lighthouse
The Millennium Bridge in Newcastle
The Tyne Bridge, Newcastle
Grey’s Monument, Newcastle city center
Grain stores at Corbridge Roman Town, National Trust
Corbridge Roman town,
Elsdon castle – 11th century motte and bailey
Elsdon Castle
St Mary’s Lighthouse.
Bolam Lake Country Park
Shaftoe Crags
English Heritage Belsay Hall
Quarry garden at Belsay Hall
Christmas at Wallington National Trust
National Trust Wallington central atrium
Prudhoe castle from the pele yard, English Heritage
Upper Coquetdale
Chew Green, Upper Coquetdale
Coquetdale
The cascade at the Alnwick Garden
Cherry blossom at the Alnwick Garden
Looking over Coquetdale
The River Tyne at Ovingham
At this time last year, we spent a week in the south of England—staying at a cottage in the New Forest—and visiting more than a dozen National Trust and English Heritage properties, our first proper holiday since the beginning of the pandemic.
We haven’t traveled to the USA since September 2019, but we are gearing up for a visit come the end of May this year.
COVID restrictions for international travel were lifted sufficiently by July/August 2022 for Hannah and family to fly over from Minnesota, and at last (and for the first time since 2016) we had a family get-together with our two daughters, Hannah and Philippa, husbands Michael and Andi, and grandchildren Callum, Zoë, Elvis, and Felix.
Nestling beneath the England-Scotland border in the far west of Northumberland in the northeast of England, Kielder Water (owned by Northumbrian Water) is the largest man-made reservoir in England by capacity (Rutland Water has a greater surface area), holding 200 billion liters, and with a maximum depth of 52 meters.
It took six years (1975-1981) to construct the reservoir, which was first flooded in 1982. The River North Tyne is the primary inflow.
The Kielder Water dam.
The view east down the valley of the River North Tyne from the Kielder Water dam.
View from the dam across Kielder Water towards the England-Scotland border on the hills in the distance.
Kielder Water is surrounded by Kielder Forest, the largest woodland of its kind in northern Europe, managed by Forestry England (an executive agency sponsored by the Forestry Commission).
We have been waiting for a break in the weather to make a return visit. We first visited this area in 1998 during a touring holiday in Northumberland. And then again in December 2017 when we spent a couple of nights in one of the cabins (with our daughter Philippa, husband Andi, and grandsons Elvis and Felix) at the Leaplish Waterside Park along the western shore of the reservoir.
There are paths for walking and cycling right around Kielder Water.
Kielder Water on a cold and calm December morning, looking east towards the dam.
From our home in North Tyneside, it’s just under 60 miles by road to Kielder Water, taking in much of the awe-inspiring Northumberland landscape along the way. Talk about big skies!
We stopped at the Kielder dam to enjoy a welcome cup of coffee; our journey had taken a little over an hour. Then we crossed the dam to a viewpoint on the far side before heading back and continuing our trip north on the western shore.
Less than a mile from the dam we made a slight detour to view the reservoir from Elf Kirk Viewpoint (it’s marked on the map above). What a delight to see the Autumn colors beginning to shine through, particularly all the golden bracken.
The view northeast from Elf Kirk Viewpoint, looking over the small marina at Merlin Brae.
This was the view southeast from the northern end of Kielder Water, with the dam in the distance.
However, the main focus of our trip was the Kielder Forest Drive, a 12 mile toll road (£3) from Kielder village northeast to the A68 road (Newcastle-Jedburgh) just south of Byrness village.
About a mile in, we stopped to take a stroll up the hillside, which ended up being a three mile walk, and climbing maybe a couple of hundred feet. But the weather was glorious, and it was most enjoyable.
Here is a short video taken along the Forest Drive. It’s really remote, and on the day we visited virtually no other travelers apart from some Forestry England employees.
The rough gravel roads reminded me of traveling around Peru all those decades ago, fifty years come January. The Forest Drive certainly passes through some wild landscapes, made even more ethereal in those parts of the forest that have been felled but not yet replanted. A torn landscape. No cellphone signal.
And there was one object we saw on the hills marking the border between England and Scotland. A container with fire retardant fluid to combat any forest fires, perhaps? Or maybe a defence installation, and early warning system the Scots have installed to repel English encroachments once they gain independence. What do you think?
Fire prevention or defence?
Having reached the A68, it was a smooth and direct drive back down to the coast. Here are a couple of videos (below) traveling through glorious landscapes near Otterburn and Elsdon. Why not listen to Kathryn Tickell, an acclaimed exponent of the Northumbrian pipes (and fiddle); the first tune is Kielder Jock.
Steph and I have been Friends of the Alnwick Garden since April 2021, and being only 34 miles north of where we live in Newcastle, we try to visit the Garden every couple of months or so. It’s always nice to see how the Garden awakens in the Spring, flourishes during Summer, and closes down in the Autumn and Winter. And we always enjoy a welcome cup of Americano in the Pavilion Cafe.
However a stroll round the Garden usually takes no more than 90 minutes, so we often try to combine a visit there with somewhere else: on one of Northumberland’s glorious beaches, or deep in the county’s fabulous landscape.
And that’s just what we did last week, heading south from Alnwick to Lordenshaws Iron Age hill fort, south of Rothbury and beyond.
This is the route we took, and I have marked the various interesting sites along the way that encompass various aspects of Northumberland’s history over the millennia. We only stopped at three of these (having visited the others many times before): Lordenshaws, Mote Hills motte and bailey castle at Elsdon, and Winter’s Gibbet high on the moorland beyond Elsdon.
So without further ado, let’s explore what can be seen along this route.
(1) The Alnwick GardenPlanning for the Alnwick Garden began in 1997, with the first phase opening in 2001. It was the inspiration of Jane, Duchess of Northumberland. The land was donated by her husband, Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland, and covers 42 acres. The garden is managed by a charitable trust. The garden also includes a display of some of the world’s most poisonous plants, and there is a narrative of how they have been used for various nefarious purposes.
(2) Alnwick CastleHome of the Percy family for over 700 years, and residence of the 12th Duke of Northumberland and his family, the first parts of Alnwick Castle were erected in 1096.
Today, it’s open to the public, although we have never visited. The castle has been the filming location for several movies and television programs such as two of the Harry Potter films, and Downton Abbey.
Leaving the Alnwick Garden, we headed south towards Rothbury on the B6341, with views back towards the coast from the high, heather-covered moors, then descending towards Edlingham and magnificent views over the Upper Coquet valley all the way to the Cheviot Hills and the Scottish border.
The line was closed to passenger traffic in 1930. Freight services continued until 1965.
(4) Edlingham Castle and chapel The castle dates from the 14th century, although there was an earlier manor house on the site dating from about 1300. It was the home of Sir William Felton. The castle was abandoned as a residence in the mid-17th century.
Close by the castle is the 11th century chapel of St John the Baptist. Services are still held in the chapel.
(5) Cragside This must be one of the jewels in the National Trust crown, being the first house in the world powered by hydro-electricity. It was built by Lord William and Lady Margaret Armstrong. What is particularly striking about Cragside, in addition to the magnificent house and its location, is the fact that the Armstrongs transformed an area of high Northumberland heath into a remarkable garden with trees a hundred feet tall or more, something that they would never have seen. We’ve visited there several times, even before we moved to the Northeast in 2020.
Cragside
National Trust Cragside
Cragside
Cragside
(6) Rothbury Proudly proclaimed as the ‘Capital of Coquetdale‘, Rothbury is a small, traditional market town, and a convenient staging post for tourists wishing to explore the surrounding Northumbrian landscape. It was the birthplace, in 1970, of radio and TV celebrity Alexander Armstrong (a distant cousin of the Cragside Armstrongs). In 2010, Rothbury was also the focus of a massive police manhunt.
From Rothbury, the route climbs towards the Simonside Hills. Lordenshaws hill fort is close by. On this section of the route—as from Alnwick to Rothbury—the damage to trees caused by Storm Arwen in November 2021 was very much in evidence.
(7) Lordenshaws Iron Age hill fort and rock carvingsThis was our second visit to Lordenshaws. The Iron Age fort was built around 2000 years ago. There is also a Bronze Age burial mound. Close-by are the cup and ring marks etched in large boulders, and dating from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, 6000 to 3500 years ago. Also, the views from there over Coquetdale are impressive.
Heading west from Lordenshaws, we traveled below the Simonside ridge before reaching the meandering River Coquet. Then climbing once more before descending into the village of Elsdon, a small hamlet we had visited in 1998 and which, for us, held an interesting story.
(8) Tosson Tower The tower appears in the video above around 5 minutes mark.
It is a Pele tower built in the 14th or 15th century to protect against raiders in this border region with Scotland. It had walls 2 m thick. We didn’t stop as the tower is on private land.
I’d been trying to locate some of the villages we had visited in Northumberland in 1998. And as we entered Elsdon I realized this was one of them. On that holiday we never had a set route, just ending up each day finding bed and breakfast accommodation when and where we could. In Elsdon, we had an evening meal in the local Bird in Bush pub, before retiring for an early night. You can imagine our surprise the following morning when we came down to breakfast to discover that the landlady’s husband, who we’d met the evening before, had suffered a heart attack during the night. A doctor and ambulance had been called and he was in hospital, probably in Morpeth. We slept through the whole commotion!
(9) Mote Hills motte and bailey castle, Elsdon Parking close by the village hall (where the toilets are open to the public!), we walked the short distance up a lane to Mote Hills, the earthwork remains of a late 11th/early 12th century motte and bailey castle, and one of the finest in the country. It’s very impressive, from a distance and close up.
Click on the image below to enlarge.
We had come across the Umfraville family on one of our earlier trips, in Upper Coquetdale, at Harbottle castle. And like the castle at Elsdon, Harbottle was built on a steep mound, the motte. At Elsdon the slopes must be 60° at least, and after struggling up the sides (before we found a much easier exit) I could imagine just how easy the site would have been to defend against unwanted visitors.
Having spent around 30 minutes exploring the remains of this interesting castle, we left Elsdon, and headed southeast to the last stop on that day’s tour of Northumberland: Winter’s Gibbet.
(10) Winter’s GibbetHigh on the moors southeast from Elsdon, and with a magnificent 360° panorama, stands a sinister reminder of a late 18th century crime.
Winter’s Gibbet stands out clearly against the skyline. It a replica of the one first erected in 1792.
It was here that the body of one William Winter was hung in chains and left to rot following his execution (in August 1792 in Newcastle, along with two women accomplices) for the murder a year earlier of an old woman, Margaret Crozier who lived in a nearby Pele tower. It was the custom back in the day to leave the body of a murderer in a place overlooking the scene of their horrific crime. Click on the image below to enlarge.
William Winter was the only criminal to be ‘displayed’ at this gibbet.
From Winter’s Gibbet we headed home, passing on the way Wallington Hall, the village of Kirkharle, and Belsay Hall.
(11) Wallington This is a late 18th century mansion in the Palladian style, that replaced a medieval Pele tower on the estate (the cellars of which are still visible in the basement). It passed to the Trevelyan family in 1777.
We have visited Wallington on several occasions, and enjoyed not only walks in the garden and parkland, but also understanding the links of the Trevelyan family with the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the late 19th century. I have written about our visits in three blog posts.
Capability Brown
(12) Kirkharle Just west of the A696 and about two miles south of Wallington, lies the village of Kirkharle. Birthplace in 1715/16 of the famous landscape architect, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who I wrote about after a visit to the National Trust’s Croome in Worcestershire. Brown received one of his earliest commissions from Earl Coventry to redesign the landscape at Croome and dig a large lake, the ‘Croome river’.
(13) Belsay Hall and castleThis was one of the first English Heritage properties we visited even before we moved to the Northeast. It lies about 14 miles northwest of Newcastle.
Besides the Regency style house built in the early 19th century, the Belsay estate includes an impressive garden within the quarry from which stone for the house (and castle?) was taken, and the ruins of a 14th century castle, original home of the Middleton family.
There is access to the roof of the tower with good views over the estate and the Northumbrian hills to the north.
Northumberland has something for everyone. I think we’ve hardly scratched the surface in terms of its history. And although we have traveled quite extensively already throughout the county, there is still plenty more to explore. After all, it is 1820 square miles (or 4716 km²).
Ernest who? Ernest Marples. Minister of Transport in the Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home Conservative governments between October 1959 and October 1964.
As Minister of Transport he introduced parking meters, the provisional driving licence, the MOT test, yellow parking lines, and traffic wardens. He also oversaw an expansion of the road network and the opening, in November 1959, of the first section (53½ miles) of the M1 motorway, between Luton and Crick (although it had been inaugurated a year earlier).
The M1 was not the country’s first motorway, however. That honor is given to an 8¼ mile section of the Preston by-pass, opened in November 1958, and which became part of the M6 motorway.
I remember the first time my father took us on the recently-opened first section of the M1. It must have been around 1960. What an experience on such wide carriageways, and very little traffic. That’s hardly the case today. More like Chris Rea’s The Road to Hell, released in 1989, supposedly about the London Orbital Motorway, the M25, although, to be fair, it could be about any of our motorways.
So much congestion, lines of juggernauts traveling nose-to-tail. I never relish having to take one of the motorways for my journeys, but they are a necessity. Many motorways were constructed with three lanes in each direction, but some like the M5 (opened in 1962 and connecting the West Midlands with the southwest of England) had only two for much of its length, but later widened to three.
From those humble beginnings more than 60 years ago, the motorway network in Great Britain (not including Northern Ireland) now extends over 2300 miles (out of a total of 247,500 total road miles). Another 29,500 miles are A roads, major routes connecting cities, but only about 18% are what we in the UK call dual carriageways (divided highways in the US).
Originally there was no speed limit on the motorways. In December 1965 a temporary speed limit of 70 mph was introduced and made permanent in 1967. That remains in force today on motorways and dual carriageways, with 60 mph the limit on other A and B roads. The limit in urban areas is generally 30 (maybe 20) mph.
But if you want to really explore the countryside, as Steph and I like to do, then you have to get off the main routes and take the B roads, as you can see in this video, which I made recently as we crossed Northumberland (in the northeast of England). In any case, for me it’s never about the trip itself but the many interesting places and sights along the way.
I passed my driving test (at the second attempt) in May 1966, six months after my 17th birthday, the earliest age when one can apply for a driving licence here in the UK. I got to drive my father’s car from time to time, but while away at university between 1967 and 1972 I didn’t have much opportunity to drive, until I had my own car (in October 1971), a rather battered Ford Anglia. In September 1972 I bought a new left-hand drive Volkswagen Variant to export to Peru, where I moved in January 1973.
Between 1973 and 1981 we lived in Peru and Costa Rica (in Central America), and from 1991 spent almost 19 years in the Philippines (from where we traveled to and down the east coast of Australia). We also made two road trips around Ireland in the 1990s while on home leave from the Philippines. Our road trip experiences were very different.
Since retiring in 2010, however, Steph and I have enjoyed several road trips around the UK. taking in Scotland in 2015, Northern Ireland in 2017, Cornwall in 2018, and Sussex and Kent in 2019.
And, since 2010, we have (until the Covid pandemic struck) visited the USA every year and made some epic road trips that are described briefly later on.
Touring Peru
A couple of months after I arrived in Peru, the ship carrying my Volkswagen finally docked at Callao, the port for Lima. It was just the right sort of vehicle for the rugged roads that Steph and I traveled exploring that fascinating country. Solid suspension (although I did add heavy-duty shock absorbers) and an air-cooled engine.
Almost five decades ago, there were few paved roads in Peru, the main one being the Panamerican Highway stretching the whole length of the country, just a single carriageway in each direction. And the Carretera Central from the coast to the central Andes at Huancayo, crossing the high pass at Ticlio on the way.
Most elsewhere, apart from in the towns and cities, the roads were unpaved. And through the Andes, these roads followed the contours of the valleys. Often you could see your destination in the valley below, but know there would be many kilometers to travel as the road snaked down the valley, as you can see in these photos.
Above Tarma on the road to San Ramon
Then there was the ever-present danger of landslides which might take hours if not days to clear, or precipitous drop-offs at the side of the road. I remember on one occasion driving along one road (in fog) in the north-central part of Peru, and afterwards checking the maps to discover that the drop was about 1000 m.
Three of the most interesting trips we made were to Arequipa and Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca in the south of the country, to Cajamarca in the north, and to Ayacucho and the central Andes on another occasion.
In Costa Rica
Many of the roads in Costa Rica were paved when we lived there in the mid-70s, with some notorious exceptions. Turrialba, where we lived, lies 41 km due east from Cartago (San José lies a further 19 km beyond Cartago). From Turrialba to Cartago, there’s a climb of almost 800 m, passing through a cloud zone (zona de neblina) on a narrow and twisting road that was, back in the 1970s, unpaved for most part.
Further this was the main route from the Caribbean port of Limón on the east coast to San José, and was always busy with one juggernaut after another. Not to mention the tractors towing a dozen or more sugar cane carts along sections of the road, without any hazard lights whatsoever.
The Philippines
Mostly, the Philippines has good roads. It’s just the congestion and the lack of driver discipline that makes driving in that country stressful. Also, farmers drying their rice or maize harvest along one side of an already narrow road.
Drying maize along the highway in Nueva Ecija, north of Manila. The more numerous rice farmers do the same.
We lived in Los Baños, the Science City of the Philippines, location of the University of the Philippines-Los Baños, the Institute of Plant Breeding, a local office of PhilRice, as well as the headquarters of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) where I worked for almost 19 years.
Los Baños is sited along the shore of Laguna de Bay, and on the lower slopes of a dormant volcano, Mt Makiling. It’s almost 65 km south of Manila and, on a good day, a little under 90 minutes by road. Back in the day we used to joke that it took anywhere between 90 minutes and a lifetime to make the journey. Major road improvements took almost 15 years to complete and with traffic congestion (caused mainly by tricycles and jeepneys) the journey could take several hours. Here’s a short video of a trip to Tagaytay (a town that overlooks the Taal volcano), about 50 km west of Los Baños by the quickest route (map).
In 2009, my staff, Steph and I made a long-weekend trip to the world-famous rice terraces in the Ifugao-Mountain Province of northern Luzon. Staying in Banaue, we took a jeepney to the end of the trail leading to the Batad rice terraces.
From there we had to hike for well over an hour deep into the valley.
Steph and I would also spend about eight weekends a year on the coast at Anilao (map) where I scuba dived and she would snorkel.
When we first visited Arthur’s Place in March 1992, there was no passable road from Anilao to the resort, and we had to take a 30 minute outrigger or banca ride. By 2009, the road had been paved.
Touring the USA
I really enjoy driving in the USA, once I’d become familiar with a number of the driving norms and the various road signs. Our elder daughter lives in Minnesota so our trips have begun or ended there. Thank goodness for the interstate highways whose construction was begun under President Eisenhower in the 1950s. We prefer to follow the US or state highways mostly if we can, even county roads.
These are the trips we have taken:
2011 – the southwest states of Arizona and New Mexico, taking in the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, among other wondrous sights.
2015 – since we had already traveled round Scotland earlier that year, we visited Chicago by train instead.
2016 – I’d broken my leg in January, so when we visited in September, we spent a few days seeking out the source of the mighty Mississippi in Minnesota.
And, along these travels, one thing that caught my attention. In the UK, road construction has involved the building of just a few major bridges, over river estuaries, the most recent being a second bridge crossing the Firth of Forth west of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Not so in the USA. East-west or north-south, immense bridges had to be constructed across the many rivers that criss-cross that vast country. Some of the most impressive have been along the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers.
Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge over the Ohio River at Aberdeen, OH connecting OH and KY on US62.
Champ Clark Bridge carrying US54 from IL to MO at Louisiana, MO.
Bridges over the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at Fort Defiance State Park, connecting KY, IL and MO.
South Grand Island Bridge over the Niagara River, NY.
Do you remember all the places and houses where you have lived? I do. Such varied and (mostly) happy memories.
I left my parents’ home in Leek (a small market town in North Staffordshire) at the beginning of October 1967, almost 19 years of age, to study at university; I only went back for short visits during vacations. Less than six years later I was headed for new adventures overseas living in Peru, Costa Rica, and the Philippines (with a break in between of 10 years back in the UK) over the next 40 years.
Early days in Congleton
I was not born in Leek however, although to all intents and purposes I consider it my home town. We moved to Leek in April 1956 from Congleton in Cheshire. I’d turned seven the previous November.
In Congleton, we lived at 13 Moody Street just a few minutes walk away from the offices and print shop of the Congleton Chronicle newspaper on the High Street where my father worked as staff photographer. No. 13 was owned by the Head family, then proprietors of the Chronicle.
It is a three-storey property. Back in the day, the attic rooms on the top floor weren’t furnished, and we used them as play rooms on wet days. On the ground floor, it seems to me that we hardly ever used the front parlor. A room, the width of the building at the rear of the house, served as dining and living room, with a kitchen and larder off to one side.
Taken in Congleton in about 1952 or so. L to R: Mike, Martin, Margaret and Edgar
My best friend Alan Brennan, a year younger than me, lived just a few doors further up Moody Street. But we didn’t go to the same school. I was enrolled at Mossley C of E village school, a couple of miles south of the town, like my two brothers and sister before me. Each weekday morning, my elder brother Edgar (just over two years older than me) and I took the bus together from the High Street to Mossley. Sometimes, in the summer, I’d walk home on my own (something that parents wouldn’t even contemplate today).
In the early 1950s we made our own entertainment. We didn’t have television. (In fact my parents didn’t own a B&W TV until about 1964). During the summer we’d play outside until dark, even walking the mile south to the Macclesfield Canal where we had fun on the swing bridge (now replaced by a static bridge), or hiding in the old air raid shelter near the cemetery on the way to the canal.
May Day, early 1950s. The kids of Moody Street. That’s me on the extreme left.
In the winter, we tobogganed on Priesty Fields nearby. We also had the Saturday matinee at one of the local cinemas, the Premier on Lawton Street (now demolished and the site of Congleton in Bloom Community Garden) enjoying Laurel and Hardy, or B movie westerns with the Lone Ranger, and Hopalong Cassidy, to name a few of the movie stars we emulated in our games. Happy days!
Thinking of my early years in Congleton makes me realize we did not have the luxury of central heating either in the house or at school. In fact, at home, we must have sat around a small fire in the living room to keep warm.
At school, we actually had a large coal fire in the classroom. Can you imagine? No Health and Safety Executive to put a stop to that. All that separated us from the inferno was a large fire guard. Even when I was in high school in the late 1960s each pupil was entitled to a small bottle (1/3 pint) of milk daily. I doubt that continues today. Anyway, at Mossley during the winter, we would place our frozen bottles of milk in front of the fire to thaw.
65 St Edward St, Leek
Moving to Leek
My parents decided to set up on their own in Leek, and took over an existing photographic business at 65 St Edward St, on the edge of the town center. Not an ideal location, but as an ongoing concern, I guess it was the most appropriate approach to enter the retail trade.
It was by no means a large property, for a family of six. We three brothers shared a bedroom on the front of the property (the top window in the photo on the right). My parents had their bedroom at the rear. That property didn’t have central heating either.
On the first floor was the bathroom/ toilet, and at the front of the house, an L-shaped living room. My sister Margaret (then 15) had her own private space and bed in the ‘L’ of that room. Not an ideal situation, but there was no other alternative. In July 1957 my eldest brother Martin left to join the Royal Air Force, and thereafter we saw him at home only on leave.
The kitchen was located on the ground floor, behind the shop and we ate most of our meals there, only moving to the first floor room for special family meals like Christmas. My father converted the cellar into his photographic dark room.
A side entrance led to an enclosed yard, Court No. 3, with three or four cottages, none with toilets or bathrooms, but probably just one tap of running water. These were demolished not long after we moved into No. 65, and we then had a large open space to play in.
With my best friend Geoff Sharratt (who lived at The Quiet Woman pub a few doors away) playing with my Hornby clockwork train set.
Winter fun and games with my brother Ed (center), me (crouching), and one of our friends, behind 65 St Edward St, after the cottages had been demolished.
I remember well-attended Christmas parties at No. 65, Christmas lunches around a table in the first floor living room.
Around 1960 or 1961, the lease came due on No. 65 and my parents decided not to renew the tenancy, opting to try and find a better location in the town. That took a couple more years.
In the interim, they moved the shop across St Edward St to No. 56, that was a fine porcelain retailer at the time. When we visited Leek in 2019 it was once again the premises of a photographer, and we discovered other earlier historical links.
My dad took on that fine china business, moving his photographic business there. For about six months we didn’t actually have a house. We had a room behind the shop, and a small kitchen, and a caravan on a farm a few miles north of the town. Somehow we managed, until an apartment became available at the top of the Market Place, at No. 26, above a building society.
No. 26, the red-brick building on the right at the top of the Market Place. We occupied the two upper floors.
We stayed there about two years, even over the coldest (and longest) winter I can remember, 1962/63. Everything froze and we had no running water for almost 10 weeks. Dad’s business was still operating from No. 56 St Edward St.
Then, a semi-derelict property (formerly a watchmaker’s) came on the market at No. 19 Market Place. Despite considerable trepidation on the part of my mother, Dad sold her on the idea of purchasing the property because of its central location in the town, and renovating the two upper floors into a comfortable apartment.
No. 19, with the yellow and black ‘Jackson’ sign, in between Jackson Optician (no relation) and Victoria Wine in the early 1960s. No. 26 is the building on the extreme right at the top of the Market Place.
The renovation was no easy task. There was only one tap in the property, in the cellar. No bathroom or toilet, and no central heating. These all got added and we must have moved in by late 1963, since my sister Margaret had married David by then and they took over the tenancy of No. 26.
The views over the Market Place from both No. 26 and No. 19 were great, being right in the heart of the town. Each Wednesday there was a busy market (you don’t see many of those any more, and I don’t think Leek market runs in the same way any more).
And both were great vantage points to watch the Club Day (or Walking Round Day) procession each July, which I used to take part in when a small boy.
Assembling in the Market Place on Club Day. This was taken around 1960 or so. The awning over the premises of J Cosgrove (watchmaker) is clearly seen at the top of the image. That is No. 19 Market Place before it became my father’s premises.
University days
Mum and Dad lived at No. 19 until 1976 when they retired. But I had moved out almost a decade earlier, when I headed south to study at the University of Southampton from 1967 to 1970. For the first two years I lived in South Stoneham House, one of the halls of residence just under 1¼ miles from the campus. I lived in the 16 storey tower block, not the original Queen Anne house to which it was attached. I’ve since learned that the grounds were designed by 18th century landscaper, Capability Brown. The tower was condemned for occupation in 2005, partly because of the asbestos in the building. But also the fabric of the tower (built in the 1960s) had deteriorated, and conditions for students were described as ‘squalid’.
South Stoneham House
It was due to be demolished earlier this year. This is how it looked until then, shrouded in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. Very sad. We had happy days there.
In my final year (1969-70), I moved to digs (half-board accommodation) at 30 University Road, just down from the newly-opened university administration building and bookshop on the southeast side of the campus. Within a year or so of leaving Southampton many of the houses along University Road had been bought up by the university and became annexes to university departments. No. 30 was demolished.
This is No. 28. No. 30 to its right has been demolished and stood where the trees now stand.
In September 1970, I moved to Birmingham to begin a 1-year MSc course in genetic conservation. I rented a room in a house on Portland Road in the B16 Edgbaston area of the city, and a 2 mile walk to the campus. I think it was the one on the extreme left. But it was more than 50 years ago, and many properties along Portland Road look different today.
After one year, as I started my PhD research, I joined two engineers in an apartment south of the campus on Abdon Avenue. It was certainly one of the apartments on the left of the entrance, but I don’t remember if it was the first or top floor.
I stayed there until December 1972 when I prepared to leave the UK and head to warmer climes, in Lima, Peru to join the International Potato Center (CIP) as an Associate Taxonomist.
Off to South America
Arriving in Lima at the beginning of January 1973, I lodged for about three weeks in the Pensión Beech (now demolished it seems) on Calle Los Libertadores in the San Isidro district of the city. Then I had to start looking for an apartment to rent.
I found a furnished one-bedroom apartment on the 12th floor of a tower block on Los Pinos in the Miraflores district, close to the Pacific Ocean coast. I don’t have any clear images of the building. I’m not sure it’s even still standing after 50 years. In 1973 it stood apart beside a vacant lot, and next to a Todos supermarket (long since disappeared).
Steph joined me at the beginning of July that year, and very soon we decided that the apartment was too small. We married in Miraflores in October that same year.
At our Los Pinos apartment, just after Steph arrived in Lima in July 1973.
We quickly found a furnished two-bedroom apartment on Avenida Larco just around the corner. Parking was on the first floor, accessed by a lift from the street. At street level, there was an ice cream parlor, Veinte Sabores (20 Flavors), now replaced by a commercial outlet named Mardigras.
The apartment was on the top (12th) floor, on the rear of the building with a view to the coast.
A view to the Pacific Ocean over the Miraflores rooftops.
In October 1974, the coast of Peru was hit by a major earthquake, more than 8 on the Richter Scale. Living on the 12th floor was not so comfortable then, and for many weeks there were countless aftershocks which didn’t do much for our nerves.
So by Christmas that year, we’d moved out to house-sit for several colleagues while they were on home-leave, until the following May when we were returned to the UK for six months. I had to complete the PhD residency requirements at the university and defend my thesis.
We landed in Birmingham at the end of May 1975 having returned to the UK via Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico. We found a one-bedroom apartment in a large house on Farquhar Road close to the campus, which had been converted to about five apartments, with the owner occupying the ground floor.
The ‘bridge’ connecting the house to the garage was our bathroom.
We stayed there until the end of the year before returning to Lima, spending a few months in the CIP Guesthouse. But we didn’t remain in Peru for much longer. CIP asked me to move to Costa Rica in April 1976 to set up a potato breeding program focusing on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
Moving to North America (actually Central America)
CIP signed an agreement with CATIE, a regional research and training center in Turrialba, some 70 km east of the capital, San José. It was a campus institute, nestling below the Turrialba Volcano, and was the headquarters of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) from 1942 until 1976 (when it moved to San José).
The Turrialba volcano from the town below.
Initially, we stayed in CATIE’s guesthouse, then moved into a rather run-down house in the #109 sub-division just outside the campus before eventually moving on campus. We rented a two-bedroom detached house with a lovely garden, full of fruit trees, and the most wonderful wildlife: birds, mammals, and reptiles (some very venomous). Our elder daughter Hannah was born there in April 1978, so these were very special years we spent in Turrialba.
In our garden, probably early 1977.
Hannah enjoying a stroll around the garden in 1979.
I don’t have any decent images of the house that we occupied until November 1980 which, after we left, became additional space for the international school nearby.
Hannah visited Costa Rica in 2002, and took these two photos of the house. The upper image shows the car port and rear door to the house (which we used as our main entrance). The lower image shows the front door and living room to the right and Hannah’s bedroom left of the door.
By the end of 1980 I was looking for a new challenge and asked CIP’s director general for a new posting. We returned to Lima and several more months in the guesthouse. In the meantime, however, I had successfully applied for a teaching and research post at the University of Birmingham. I resigned my post at CIP, and we returned to the UK in March 1981 in time for my 1 April start date at Birmingham.
We then set about finding somewhere to live. Within a week of so we had put in an offer on a house in Bromsgrove, a market town in north Worcestershire, about 13 miles south of the campus.
Back in the UK – Bromsgrove
Located just under a mile east of the town center, our three bedroom house was built in 1975. In 1982, just before our second daughter Philippa was born, we extended the kitchen on the front of the house. In 2015 we installed an electric garage door and had the front drive re-paved.
The garden was Steph’s pride and joy, that she carefully nurtured over almost 40 years.
Growing up, Hannah and Phil attended the local schools, and had a wide circle of friends living close by. The house always seemed filled with a small group of girls. And each year there were two birthday parties to organize.
Philippa’s 6th birthday party in May 1988. She is sitting facing the camera on the left, and Hannah is standing.
But that’s not the whole story. Yes, we owned No. 4 for 39 years, but for 19 of those, we lived in the Philippines, only returning to the UK in May 2010. In fact, our stay in the Philippines has been, to date, the longest continual period I have lived anywhere.
In July 1991, I accepted a position at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, some 70 km south of Manila. From the outset we decided to keep No. 4 empty but fully furnished, which we could occupy when we returned to the UK on our annual home-leave. We thought having tenants and the like just wasn’t worth the hassle. In any case, we had a ‘bolt hole’ should our assignment in the Philippines not live up to expectations or the civil/political situation deteriorated to an extent that we might have to leave.
Asia calls
IRRI provided houses for its senior, mainly non-Filipino staff in a gated community about 10 minutes drive from the research center, across the campus of the University of the Philippines – Los Baños (UPLB). IRRI Staff Housing or ISH as it became known, was developed on the lower slopes of a dormant volcano, Mt Makiling that dominated the skyline over the town.
Mt Makiling from the IRRI Research Center.
Founded in 1959/60, the construction of the IRRI research center and housing began in 1961.
ISH takes shape in July 1961, with Laguna de Bay in the distance.
On the lower slopes of Mt Makiling, ISH takes shape in December 1961, and almost ready for occupation. Our house, No. 15, is the fourth from the bottom, middle column.
Los Baños has grown along the shore of shallow Laguna de Bay (911 km²) that stretches all the way north to Manila, a little over 65 km by road. (Click map to enlarge).
The video below (from my good friend and former IRRI colleague Gene Hettel who has retired in the Philippines near Los Baños) shows the panoramic view over the volcano and lake.
By 1991, ISH was unrecognizable from the site thirty years earlier. Mature trees covered the compound, and everywhere was lush with vegetation. The houses however, were beginning to show their age, and some of the facilities, like the kitchens had never been updated, and that remained the case for House #15 that we occupied until we left the Philippines almost 19 years later.
We had the use of a swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts, and the ISH compound was a safe place for all the children to play, often inventing their own games that were passed down from year to year over the decades. I guess an important downside of living in Los Baños was schooling for the children, most of whom attended the International School in Manila, entailing for many years a two hour journey each way, and an ungodly start time (by the end of the 1990s) of 4:30 am!
While Peru was a country of earthquakes, Costa Rica had its volcanoes, the Philippines had both of these AND typhoons. Several would sweep in from the Pacific Ocean each year and cross the country leaving a trail of destruction in their path. These images show some of the damage around ISH and the UPLB campus in the aftermath of Typhoon Milenyo in September 2006, which passed almost directly overhead, with winds approaching 150 mph.
As often as we could we’d get away to the beach, at Arthur’s Place south of Los Baños where Steph would snorkel and I would scuba dive.
8 Dec 2002: in front of Arthur’s Place
All things come to an end, and by 2009 I’d already decided not to seek another full contract, just extending my current one by a year and then retiring. We returned to the UK and our Bromsgrove home in May 2010.
However, by the end of 2019 we had eventually decided to leave Bromsgrove and move north to Newcastle upon Tyne where our younger daughter Philippa and her family live. (Our elder daughter lives in Minnesota).
So, in January 2020, we put No. 4 on the market, just before the first Covid-19 lockdown. By the beginning of June we’d received an offer that we accepted and began making plans for the move.
We completed the sale on 30 September and moved out that same day.
The removers on their way north!
Goodbye to No. 4.
The following day we moved into a 3-bedroom detached house that we rented for the next six months in the West Allotment area of North Tyneside (east of the city center) while we looked for a new home to buy.
Move-in complete at Cloverfield by 15:55 on 1 October 2020.
We took a week to get ourselves settled and find our local bearings. But then began the search in earnest for a new home. And found just the house almost immediately, viewing it one morning and putting in an offer that same evening. The conveyancing to purchase the property was not as straightforward as we and the vendors expected, but the sale/purchase was finally completed on 15 February last year. We moved in on 6 March.
Finally settled.
Yes, finally settled. A warm, well-appointed home. Only the garden to sort out, and almost from Day 1 Steph has been busy designing, planning, and developing her new garden.
April 2021 and beyond.
And although we enjoyed living in Worcestershire, the prospect of many more treats to come in beautiful Northumberland is something we look forward to.
So sang Florrie Forde in her November 1909 recording of the popular 1907 British music hall song of the same title.
A few days back, the weather being the warmest and sunniest of the year so far, Steph and I took a walk along the coast south of the River Tyne here in the northeast of England, and about 11 miles from home. And as we sat down on Marsden Beach to enjoy our picnic lunch, I told Steph that I still had to pinch myself that we now lived so close to the coast.
The magnesian limestone cliffs at Marsden Bay.
We moved to North Tyneside (just east of Newcastle upon Tyne city center) 18 months ago, and whenever we get chance, we head off to the coast to enjoy a bracing walk along the beach, the dunes, or cliffs. At its closest, the coast is less than 4 miles as the crow flies.
I hail originally from Staffordshire in the north Midlands, which is almost equidistant from the west and east coasts. So, when I was growing up, a trip to the seaside was always a treat, and holidays with parents were almost always spent camping at or near the coast.
Steph, on the other hand, comes from Southend-on-Sea and the closest beach to her family home was just 5 minutes walk.
Moving away to university in 1967, I chose Southampton on the south coast in Hampshire. However, apart from the odd day trip or field excursion connected with my botany and geography degree, I didn’t see much of the coast at all. Not so a decade earlier. Southampton is a major seaport, from where my father sailed when he worked for the Cunard company in the 1930s. And he took us visit the docks in the late 1950s/early 1960s just when both of Cunard’s Queens were in port.
RMS Queen Elizabeth
RMS Queen Elizabeth
RMS Queen Mary
RMS Queen Mary
When Steph and I moved to Peru in 1973, we lived just a few hundred meters inland from the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the Lima suburb of Miraflores. During the ‘summer’ months between January and March, we’d spend at least one day each weekend on the beach at one of the resorts about 50 km south of Lima.
The view to the Pacific Ocean from our apartment
The coast south of Lima
Moving to Costa Rica in 1976, we made only two trips to the beach in the northwest of the country to Playa Tamarindo on the Pacific coast of the Guanacaste peninsula (map). It was about 350 km (almost 7 hours) by road, but new routes have probably made the journey quicker since then. And just one trip to the Caribbean coast at Limón.
In the Philippines, we made about eight or nine weekend visits each year (over almost 19 years) to Arthur’s Place, a dive resort at Anilao on the Mabini Peninsula (map), a drive of just under 100 km south from Los Baños that, in 1992 (until about 2005), used to take about 3 hours. I’d go diving and Steph would snorkel.
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In December 2003 we traveled to Australia and drove down the east coast from Sydney to Melbourne, around 1000 miles, enjoying each stretch of coastline every day. At Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria we stopped off at Tidal River, the furthest south (at almost 39°S) I’ve ever traveled. Antarctica next stop! And that same evening, New Year’s Eve, we sat on the beach near Wonthaggi and watched the sunset over the Indian Ocean (map).
Christmas Day at Bondi Beach.
Hanggliders at Stanwell Park
Seven Mile Beach south of Kiama
Jervis Bay
At Tidal River
Wilson’s Promontory looking south to Antarctica.
New Year’s Eve on the beach nr. Wonthaggi
Since retiring, we’ve visited the west and east coasts of the USA in Oregon and California, and Massachusetts and Maine, the coast roads right round Scotland, the coast of Northern Ireland, as well as Cornwall, and the southeast of England in East Sussex and Kent.
Oceanside, OR from Cape Meares
Oregon coast nr. Netarts
Coast south of Netarts, OR
Herring Cove beach, Cape Cod, MA
Sailing on West Penobscot Bay, ME
Nr. Beauchamp Point, Rockport, ME
The Lizard, Cornwall
Tintagel Castle, Cornwall
North Cornish coast
At the White Cliffs of Dover, Kent
Crossing the shingle at Dungeness, Kent
The Seven Sisters at Birling Gap, East Sussex
Looking east from Dunnet Head towards Thurso, Scotland
At the Butt of Lewis, Outer Hebrides
South Harris beach, Outer Hebrides
South Harris, Outer Hebrides
South Uist beach, Outer Hebrides
Looking west to Barra from Eriskay, Outer Hebrides
Isle of Skye
Giant’s Causeway, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland
While here in England’s northeast (North Yorkshire, County Durham, and Northumberland) we don’t enjoy tropical temperatures, the region does boast some of the finest stretches of coastline and beaches in the country.
Dunstanburgh Castle and Craster
This is a rocky coast and the castle itself was built in the early 14th century on the Whin Sill, an outcrop of igneous dolerite that cuts across Northumberland. The castle is a walk of about 1¼ miles from the fishing village of Craster; there’s no road into the castle.
Craster itself has ample parking away from the harbor. The village is also famous for its smoked fish, especially kippers.
At Dunstanburgh a healthy population of kittiwakes nest on the cliffs.
To the north there are excellent views of Embleton Bay that we have yet to visit.
View north from the Great Gatehouse
Alnmouth
A tricky pronunciation. Some say ‘Aln-muth’, others ‘Allen-mouth’. I have no idea which is correct. It’s a pretty village at the mouth of the river of the same name. There’s good paid parking behind the beach for a couple of hundred cars.
Warkworth
We’ve only visited the beach once, back in April 2018. It’s a nice long stretch of beach accessed from the north side of the town, which is more famous for its 12th century castle.
Looking north along Warkworth beach towards Alnmouth.
Warkworth Castle
Amble
Standing at the mouth of the River Coquet, we’ve found the beaches very pleasant on the south side of the town (where there is free parking), and facing Coquet Island which is now a bird reserve with an internationally important colony of roseate terns in the breeding season.
The view south along the Amble beach with the Lynemouth power station in the far distance.
Coquet Island.
Druridge Bay and Hauxley Nature Reserve
This must be one of the longest beaches in Northumberland, with massive dunes at the rear of the beach in its southern portion.
At the northern end, and just inland is Hauxley Nature Reserve, owned by Northumberland Wildlife Trust. When we visited last week, we observed 37 different bird species in the space of two hours. It really is a wonderful site, and we must go back there on a regular basis. There’s no entrance fee, but parking costs £2 all day. There’s also footpath access on to the dunes and beach, which lie just beyond the reserve’s perimeter fence.
The Tern Hide from the West Hide at Hauxley Nature Reserve.
The North Sea can be seen in the middle distance beyond the dunes and reserve perimeter fence.
Cresswell Bay
This was one of the first ‘northern’ beaches that we viisted in 2021, just 17 miles from home. It’s both sandy and rocky, and we saw somone collecting sea coal that had been washed up on the shore. All along the Northumberland and Durham coast there were once extensive coal mines. Waste from the pits was dumped in the sea. In places the beaches look quite black.
Blyth and Seaton Sluice Beaches
These are the closest to home, but are in effect a singe beach. Both are very popular with dog walkers, and we enjoy often heading there on a Sunday morning, weather permitting, for a late morning stroll.
At the Seaton Sluice southern end of the beach, there is a small harbor, that had originally been constructed in the 17th and refurbished in the 18th century to handle coal shipments from local mines.
Seaton Sluice harbor, showing ‘The Cut’ in the middle distance.
St Mary’s Lighthouse and Whitley Bay
The lighthouse was built in 1898, but there had been lighthouses on the island for centuries. This lighthouse was decommissioned in 1984. The island lies at the north end of Whitley Bay, a popular resort.
The island is approached across a causeway that is submerged at high tide. On the visits we have made we’ve often seen the grey seals that bask on the rocks.
King Edward’s Bay, Tynemouth
This is a small bay that lies beneath the headland on which Tynemouth castle and priory (now owned by English Heritage) were built.
From the headland there are magnificent views north along the Northumberland coast.
To the immediate south is the mouth of the River Tyne, and beyond the shore at South Shields and the coast south into County Durham.
Souter Lighthouse and the Whitburn coast
The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1988. It stands on the edge of magnesian limestone cliffs, that stretch both north and south.
To the south of the lighthouse, there was a colliery and this area has been reclaimed and opened (under the National Trust) as a recreational area.
Immediately outside the walls of the lighthouse to the north is the site of a former mining village, Marsden, that was demolished soon after Whitburn Colliery closed in 1968.
The longer grass indicates where the two lines of terraced cottages once stood.
Marsden beach was very popular holiday or day-out destination in the early 20th century.
The cliffs are home to colonies of cormorants (one of the largest in the UK), herring gulls, kittiwakes, and fulmar petrels.
Whitby Abbey
The abbey, built in the 13th century, occupies a headland that juts out into the North Sea above the town of Whitby. It’s the furthest south we have ventured over the past 18 months.
The approach from the north along the A174 high above the coast affords the most spectacular views over the town and right along the North Yorkshire coast. Most impressive.
I don’t think I’ll ever tire of visiting the seaside. There’s something magical, inspirational about the interface between land and sea. Solid and liquid.
We couldn’t have asked for better weather yesterday. Even though a little on the cool side, accompanied by a blustery wind, there was hardly a cloud in the sky. A perfect early Spring day.
So we headed for the National Trust’s Gibside estate, about 11½ miles southwest from where we live in North Tyneside, as the crow flies (or just over 15 miles by road).
Covering 600 acres (just over 240 hectares), Gibside provides excellent walking. While the old house lies in ruins, and the chapel is not open every day, there’s plenty to explore on foot. We covered almost five miles.
Taking my trusty binoculars along (a pair of Swift Saratoga 8×40 that I’ve had for about 60 years) we hoped there might be some interesting wildlife to observe. On one of our previous visits, we’d come across a pair of roe deer among the pine trees. I was hopeful there might be some interesting birds along the River Derwent, the northern boundary of the Gibside estate.
And we weren’t disappointed. As we were leaving the Trust cafe after enjoying a refreshing regular Americano, a solitary grey heron flew low overhead, buffeted by the gusting winds, and crabbing to make headway. It’s one of the largest birds in this country, and doesn’t look designed for flying in high winds.
Grey heron
Then, as we walked down to the banks of the Derwent, we came across a pair of dippers on a shallow cascade; and further on, a pair of goosanders in full breeding plumage. What a magnificent sight!
Dipper
Goosanders
We’d seen a dipper a few weeks back alongside Seaton Burn in Holywell Dene close to home, the first I’d encountered in more than 20 years. And I’d seen my first ever goosander just a couple of months back on a local pond, so seeing a breeding pair yesterday was a real delight.
At the bird hide we watched great, blue, coal, and long-tailed tits, and as we sat having a picnic in the early afternoon sun (quite warm out of the breeze), beside the fish pond below the 18th century Banqueting Hall (not National Trust), we enjoyed the antics of a trio of little grebes, another species I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before.
Little grebe
Then, as Steph was finishing her lunch, and I was taking a photo of the view, a red kite swooped overhead; we saw another one later in the walk.
Red kite
Then, just before we continued on our walk, I happened to look up at the Banqueting Hall and spotted a single roe deer grazing in front of the building. What luck!
Since moving to North Tyneside from the West Midlands around 18 months ago, I have revived my interest in and enjoyment of bird watching.
Compared with our garden and surrounding countryside in north Worcestershire (some 230 miles south of where we now live)—and which I wrote about in one of my early blog posts in May 2012—there seem to be more birding opportunities here in the northeast: in the garden, on the coast (which is less than five miles as the crow flies), and the river valleys, moors, and hills of Northumberland.
Close to where we now live, the land has slowly recovered over the last four decades since the coal mines were closed. A mosaic of streams, hedgerows, scrub land, reed beds, ponds, arable and grassland, not to mention woodlands in various stages of development, has now replaced what had been a desolate industrial landscape, supporting an abundance of bird life and even some large mammals like roe deer. The routes of the former mine railways—the waggonways—have been left as footpaths and bridleways, serving as excellent wildlife corridors across North Tyneside and connecting urban sites with the surrounding countryside.
Source (for all photos in gallery): MTJ
Upper Coquetdale
To date, my northeast bird list comprises about 80 species observed and one, a grasshopper warbler, heard but not seen (according to a more experienced birder than me).
Some species, like goldfinches (left below) or bullfinches (right) which I saw only occasionally down south, are quite common here, often in flocks of 20-30 birds.
Goldfinch
Bullfinch
Herring and black-headed gulls are ‘as common as sparrows’ (which we don’t actually see very often, although I did come across the more scarce tree sparrow just a week ago while on one of my walks).
House sparrow (L) and tree sparrow
Rather than describe all the birds on my current list, do go back to that earlier post to see many of the birds that we see regularly here. I’ll just highlight some of those that have particularly caught my attention.
When we moved into our new house just over a year ago, the rear and front gardens were just patches of grass. Calling them ‘lawns’ would be an exaggeration. Steph worked hard from the end of April 2021 to design and build a new garden, hopefully attracting more insect and bird life.
Certainly the insects increased in number and type, with many different types of bees visiting the range of flowering plants that we introduced.
Throughout the summer and into autumn, there was a family of five or six pied wagtails (right) that we saw in the garden almost everyday. They disappeared during the coldest weeks of the winter, but have once again started to show up in the garden.
And when we took a trip in July to the headwaters of the River Coquet and the Cheviot Hills, we saw many pied wagtails flitting back and forth along the banks of the river.
Upper Coquetdale
Another surprising visitor to the garden, just once, was an uncommon mistle thrush (right), a much larger cousin of the song thrush.
Song thrush numbers have declined dramatically, but they were a common presence in my younger days, over 60 years ago. However, over the past week, I’ve seen three song thrushes and heard them belting out their glorious songs.
Close to home is an overflow pond for the local stream or burn that has its source less than half a mile away to the west.
Surrounded by lush vegetation, particularly knapweed and bulrushes closer to the water’s edge, this pond hosts several species like mallards and moorhens. Throughout most of last year, and until quite recently, there was a semi-resident grey heron. I hope he will return as the frog population grows in the Spring. Recently, however, a little egret has made an appearance over a couple of days.
Little egret
And in the summer months, the site hosts a thriving population of reed warblers, reed buntings, and whitethroats.
Reed warbler
Reed bunting
Whitethroat
The goldfinches have an autumn feast when the knapweed seed heads ripen.
On the coast we see the usual range of waders such as oystercatchers, ringed plovers, sanderling, dunlin, and turnstones. One of my favorites however is the redshank (right), easily spotted because of its bright orange-red bill and legs. And, of course, several species of gull.
Another new species is the golden plover that I’ve seen on local farmland during the winter as well as at the coast foraging among the rocks. In summer it can be found inland on the hills and moors.
Golden plover
On the cliffs just south of the River Tyne (south of our home) and further north at Dunstanburgh Castle near Craster on the Northumberland coast are colonies of kittiwakes (below) and cormorants.
Source: MTJ
Source: MTJ
Cormorants on the coast south of the River Tyne at Whitburn.
We’ve also seen other cliff-dwelling species like guillemots and razorbills surfing on the waves, but we’re waiting on a trip out to the Farne Islands later in May to really get a look at these up-close.
But perhaps the most impressive sight, to date, have been flocks of pink-footed geese. We saw them first in a field (together with a small flock of about 30 curlews) near Seaton Sluice back in the Autumn. Then, on a walk close to home I could hear them honking in the distance and, gaining some height on the spoil heap at the former Fenwick Colliery, we could see a flock of several hundred grazing in a nearby field.
Pink-footed goose
But it wasn’t until about a month ago, when we were sat enjoying a picnic lunch just south of Amble, that I saw a ‘murmuration‘ of large birds which I’m pretty certain were pink-footed geese even though I didn’t have a clear sight as they were too far away to the west and I was looking into the sun. There must have been 1000 birds or more (based on my rough and ready count), flying this way then that, and finally spiraling down one after the other to land close to Hauxley Reserve. Until I have experienced a starling murmuration, this one will have to suffice, even though it was less frenetic than the starling version.
As in that earlier post, most of the bird images here were taken by amateur photographer Barry Boswell (below), based in Northamptonshire.
Barry has accumulated an impressive portfolio of bird photos. It’s remarkable how digital photography has revolutionized this particular hobby. When I see images of this quality I do wonder where he (and others with the same passion) get their patience, and indeed bird-spotting luck. Patience has never been one of my virtues.
Unlike the 500 mm lens (and Canon bodies) that Barry is sporting in the image above, I only have an 18-200 mm telephoto lens on a Nikon D5000 DSLR body.
There were days, a little over a year ago, when I thought that the sale of our house in Worcestershire would never be completed. It was a really stressful time, not made any easier by the solicitors ‘managing’ the house sale chain.
Even today I find it slightly surreal that we finally managed to sell our house and move 226 miles to Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England (map), in the middle of a pandemic. But, at just after 12:30 on 30 September last year, that’s what we did, closing the front door of our home of 39 years for the final time.
Since we hadn’t found anywhere to buy in the Newcastle area—the pandemic restricting any travel plans we initially had to view properties for sale—we took a six month rental on a three bedroom house in the West Allotment-Shiremoor area of the city, about six miles northeast of the city center towards the North Sea coast, moving in on 1 October.
After taking a little over a week to settle in and familiarize ourselves with the local area and shopping, we began the search for a new home to buy, armed with a list of properties that I’d already lined up through online searches of estate agent (realtor) websites.
The search didn’t take long at all. On 14 October our offer on a two-year old house in the Backworth area (just under a mile from where we were renting) was accepted. However, the actual sale didn’t complete until the first week of February this year, and we finally moved in on 6 March.
Moving out of Cloverfield on 6 March
Moving into our new home
Having spent so little time searching for somewhere to live, we could then sit back and relax, so to speak, and explore the local North Tyneside area and Northumberland more widely.
We already knew something about the county. In 1998 during one of our home leaves, Steph and I spent a week traveling around Northumberland. Then, our younger daughter Philippa commenced her degree course at Durham University in October 2000, and afterwards she moved permanently to Newcastle. So for 20 years or more we’ve had good reason to come back to this neck of the woods.
Northumberland is one of the most beautiful counties in the country, located just south of the border with Scotland, with Cumbria (and the Lake District) to the west, and North Yorkshire (and the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB) to the south. There are so many interesting and beautiful locations to visit, and keep up our interest in properties owned and managed by the National Trust and English Heritage. And it’s a county with a long and illustrious history.
The Backworth area was, until 40 years ago, home to several collieries. After they were closed, the buildings demolished, rail tracks lifted, and spoil heaps leveled, the whole area has re-wilded, and the routes of the former rail links (the waggonways) to the coal depots or staithes on the River Tyne to the south have opened as footpaths and bridleways. There are miles and miles of waggonways. The plant and animal and bird life is incredible. I try to get out most days for a 2-3 mile walk along the waggonways.
Along the Cramlington Waggonway, West Allotment
Just a few miles to the east of Backworth is the North Sea coast. Northumberland boasts of some of the finest beaches in the country. Our closest is at Seaton Sluice, and many times since we moved north we have headed there for a bracing walk along the beach, weather permitting.
This interactive map (with links to other blog posts or photo albums) shows all the places we have visited over the past 12 months. And although it looks as though we have been quite busy, there’s just so much more to explore for the first time or renew our acquaintance from previous visits to Northumberland.
Being a new build house, there were only a few things that needed my attention inside and they were quickly dealt with over a few weeks. Outside was a different prospect, and a project that has kept us busy—well, kept Steph busy— ever since: the creation of a new garden. Both the front and rear of the house only had lawns. So Steph came up with a design and we called in a small company at the end of April to remove the surplus turf. Then we set about planting all the materials we’d brought from Bromsgrove and carefully nurtured over the winter.
Quite a difference for just five months. But Steph has lots more plans.
As we have for exploring Northumberland and the wider region in the coming months and years.
There is only circumstantial evidence that the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (AD 145-211, ruling from AD 193) ever visited Coria (that we know today as Corbridge Roman town) in Northumberland. However he arrived in Britannia in AD 208 to suppress uprisings in Caledonia (Scotland).
The route to the north lay along the Roman road Dere Street. And Dere Street passed through Coria. After campaigning for three years he took ill, withdrew to Eboracum (York), and died there in 211.
Coria claims to be the most northerly town in the Roman Empire, founded almost 2000 years ago. I can’t vouch for that, but it was certainly the most northerly Roman town in Britannia, just a few miles south of Chesters Roman FortandHadrian’s Wall, the northern boundary between Roman civilization and barbarism to the north.
The remains of Corbridge Roman town lie just under 20 miles due west from Newcastle upon Tyne city center. Steph and I took our two grandsons, Elvis and Felix, there a few weeks past.
Any visitor to Corbridge can’t help but be impressed when entering the ruins, especially taking into account what is actually on display, and what is not. English Heritage has domain over only a small section of the entire Corbridge site. It stretches much further out in all directions. Just south of the site is the River Tyne where there was once a crossing. Much of the site has been excavated, but large areas were covered over once the excavations were complete, over a century ago.
Entrance to the site passes through a fine museum chronicling the history and timeline of the town, with many impressive artefacts on display from the mighty to the mundane. Among the most notable of these is the Corbridge Lion that was discovered more than a century ago inside a water tank.
Just outside the museum are the remains of two large granaries with their vaulted floors that allowed heated air to flow and keep grains dry.
These granaries stand next to the impressively wide high street that bisected the town.
Around the site are the remains of walls that have become bowed through subsidence yet impressively retained their integrity.
Another feature of the site which interested me were the sophisticated drainage channels, some covered, along the streets and connecting different buildings, presumably some carrying clean water into dwellings.
In the southwest corner of the site is a deep, wall-lined pit that apparently was the strongroom.
There’s so much to explore at Corbridge Roman town that I don’t think I did the site justice during this first visit. Another visit is surely on the cards come the Spring.
One of Northumberland’s most famous sons was artist and naturalist Thomas Bewick who became England’s finest wood-engraver.
Born in 1753 at Cherryburn in the village of Mickley beside the River Tyne, 12 miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne, Thomas was apprenticed in October 1767, aged 14, to Newcastle silver and copper engraver Ralph Beilby(1743-1817), who quickly (though reluctantly, so it is said) recognized Thomas’s skill as an engraver, particularly of wood. After his seven year apprenticeship, Thomas went into partnership with Beilby, and eventually took over the business.
Thomas was the eldest of nine children of John Bewick and his wife Ann Toppin. A younger brother John also became a renowned engraver and was apprenticed to Thomas. Click on the genealogy chart below to enlarge.
Thomas married Isabella Elliot in April 1786, and they had four children: Jane, Robert, Isabella, and Elizabeth. None of his children married and so Thomas has no direct descendants. Robert (also an artist) was apprenticed to his father; he became an accomplished player of the Northumbrian pipes.
Last week, Steph and I traveled the 20 miles from our home to Cherryburn that is now owned and managed by the National Trust.
National Trust Thomas Bewick’s home at Cherryburn
A couple of rooms in the old farmhouse can be viewed, and are sparsely furnished with period pieces, much as it would have appeared, I imagine, in the late 18th century. The fireplace is particularly impressive.
Across the cobbled farmyard is a more recent house, from the 1820s that became the family home of Thomas’s brother.
This houses a small museum displaying many Bewick artefacts such as original boxwood blocks and prints from two of Thomas’s most accomplished works: A General History of Quadrupeds (published in 1790), and The History of British Birds (published in two volumes in 1797 and 1804).
There is a gallery of engravings from his major publications on the website of The Bewick Society, and is well worth a look. They are simply beautiful.
Perhaps one of the best known of Bewick’s engravings is that of The Chillingham Bull (1789) as a single sheet print (7¼ x 9¾ inches). It was commissioned by Marmaduke Tunstall, of Wycliffe in North Yorkshire. Just look at the remarkable detail.
At the rear of the house, one room has now been converted into a printing shop, with a single sheet printing press (made in Edinburgh) that would have been similar to the type that Thomas Bewick was familiar with, although this particular press was not contemporaneous with Bewick. One of the National Trust volunteers was on hand to demonstrate just how these single sheet prints were made, with a copy wood block depicting the heron that appears in his book of British birds. The resulting print was a souvenir of our visit to Cherryburn.
Before his death in 1828, Bewick had campaigned for a bridge across the River Tyne, something that was not completed until 55 years later in 1883. It is a single carriageway bridge and footbridge connecting Prudhoe on the south bank with Ovingham on the north.
Crossing the River Tyne at Ovingham
And it’s in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin in Ovingham (a 13th century building with a Saxon tower) where Bewick and his wife are buried on the west side of the tower. A stone memorial that was originally on the outside wall of the church now sits inside the porch, and there is a more recent one on the south wall near the altar. Memorials to Bewick’s three daughters and his wife, and his artist brother John can also be seen outside the porch.
As you can see from the photos in this post, the weather was beautiful on the day of our visit to Cherryburn, affording superb views north over the Tyne into the Northumberland countryside. It’s no wonder that Thomas Bewick was inspired by the nature all around him. Who wouldn’t be? They are images forever engraved on my mind.
Once the weather improved in May and June, and we could get out and about more regularly, Steph and I visited several abbeys and priories managed by English Heritage that dot the landscape of this northeast corner of England, including Tynemouth Priory, Brinkburn Priory, Whitby Abbey, and Mount Grace Priory.
More recently, however, we’ve turned our attention to military historical sites, from the Romans (with visits to Chester’s Fort and Housesteads along the iconic Hadrian’s Wall) to the post-Norman conquest period of the late 11th century, with visits to Prudhoe Castle, Aydon Castle (more a fortified manor house), and most recently, Dunstanburgh Castle that proudly looks out over the North Sea on a windswept headland (home to the largest breeding colony of kittiwakes in Northumberland).
Northumberland has many castles, over 70 in fact. While most are ruins, shells of their former glory, some are still lived in today (such as Alnwick, Bamburgh, and Chillingham). All have played a significant role in British history, situated as they were at a great distance from the seat of power in London, along the border with Scotland (an independent country then), and prone to inter-familial conflict. Many castles and towers were also built for protection against the Border reivers, raiders from both England and Scotland who terrorized communities in the region.
Prudhoe Castle overlooks the River Tyne from a hill on the south bank, a little over 11 miles west of Gateshead (map).
The barony of Prudhoe had been granted to the d’Umfraville family, and construction of the castle began around 1100. It was this same family who built Harbottle Castle in the Upper Coquet valley that we visited a fortnight ago. It remained in the d’Umfraville family until 1381, when it passed by marriage to the Percy family, who became Earls and Dukes of Northumberland.
Prudhoe has an impressive gatehouse, with the room above converted to a chapel in the 13th century. The curtain wall encloses a large bailey or courtyard, and the remains of a substantial keep still stand on the west side. An 18th century manor house stands in front of the keep and now houses the offices of English Heritage and a museum.
Prudhoe castle from the pele yard, English Heritage
The dry moat
Prudhoe’s curtain wall on the north side, overlooking the River Tyne
Approaching the gatehouse
Looking back from the gatehouse
Inside the bailey
The gatehouse from the bailey
the 13th century chapel above the gatehouse
The bailey
the 18th century mansion house
The remains of the keep
Stairway inside the wall of the keep
I have posted more photos of the castle here, together with images (with descriptions) taken in the museum.
About 7 miles northwest from Prudhoe, as the crow flies, the fortified manor house of Aydon Castle occupies a site overlooking a small stream known as the Cor Burn (map). Its construction began in the late 13th century.
It’s remarkably intact, because since the 17th century it was used as a farmhouse, and apparently still occupied until the mid-1960s.
There is an outer courtyard, with enclosed battlements on the curtain wall surrounding the site, if the model of the house has been interpreted correctly (rather like those we saw at Stokesay Castle in Shropshire in 2015 (below).
Model of Aydon Castle, with enclosed battlements on two walls.
Stokesay Castle, Shropshire
English Heritage has carefully removed the wall paneling and room partitions that were in place when the house was most recently occupied. So you get a real sense of what Aydon Castle must have been like in its fortified heyday.
And there are more images and building plans here.
We have visited 14th century Dunstanburgh Castle several times, but this visit less than a month ago in mid-July was the first time we had ventured this far north since moving to the northeast last October (map).
There’s not too much of the castle left standing, apart from the main gatehouse, and a couple of towers on the east and north sides of the bailey. But the location is spectacular, and the cliffs teem with seabirds.
National Trust Dunstanburgh Castle
Even though the ruins themselves are not extensive, it’s perhaps the enjoyment of the walk from the village of Craster, some 1½ miles to the south, that attracts so many visitors. And, the Craster kippers of course.
The view south towards Craster from the ramparts of Dunstanburgh Castle.
Brinkburn Priory, an early 12th century Augustinian ‘transitional’ priory (architecturally between Norman and Gothic), nestles in a deep bend of the River Coquet in central Northumberland. All that remains today is the priory church, which was restored in the 19th century with the completion of a new roof, and installation of beautiful stained glass windows.
The free car park is located about 400 m from the priory itself, but from experience I can say just how enjoyable that stroll was, high above the fast-flowing Coquet, the trees, shrubs and understorey plants coming into flower, and a multitude of birds singing all around, trying to out-compete one another.
Brinkburn was dissolved in 1536. It was considered a ‘Lesser Monastery’ with a value of only £69, so was spared the fate of most monasteries. The church continued to be used until the late 16th century when it fell into disrepair and the roof collapsed. A manor house was built alongside the priory church in the late 16th century, incorporating parts of the other monastery buildings that had been destroyed. This manor house was refurbished by the Cadogan family who also undertook the restoration of the priory church from 1858. It took just a year to replace the roof, and the windows were installed by 1864.
Just click on the image below to open the album of the photos I took during our visit yesterday.
Access to the manor house is limited to just the ground floor and basement, where the ancient stonework from the former priory buildings is exposed, and how the undercroft from the old monastery was used as a foundation for the house.
As we sat on a bench, eating a picnic lunch and facing the west end of the priory church, I couldn’t help reflecting on the other ruined monasteries and the like that we have visited over the years: Fountains Abbey, Rievaulx Abbey, Mount Grace Priory, Lilleshall Abbey, Wenlock Priory, White Ladies Priory, and Hailes Abbey. And they all have one thing in common. The monks knew how to choose just the right location to build their communities. Such peaceful places to think, take pause. The bench we sat on was dedicated to the memory of a couple who had visited Brinkburn frequently, simply because they found it such a peaceful place. I know how they felt, sitting there beside the church and the babbling River Coquet.
In July 2013, during one of our regular trips to Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast England to visit our younger daughter Philippa and her family, we headed out into the Northumberland countryside to the National Trust’s Wallington, a late 17th century house west of Morpeth (map).
Since we moved to Newcastle a couple of months ago, we have taken advantage of many fine days to get out and about. And last Monday (14 December) we headed to Wallington once again. After a welcome cup of Americano, we enjoyed a walk of just under four miles around the grounds. The house was closed due to Covid-19 restrictions, like most if not all National Trust properties nationwide.
Sir William Blackett (c.1657-1705), by Enoch Seeman the younger; National Trust, Wallington
The Wallington estate was purchased in 1688 by Sir William Blackett (1657-1705) who came from a prosperous Newcastle mining and shipping family. He demolished the existing Fenwick family tower on the site (parts of which can still be seen apparently, in the basement), and Wallington became a country retreat. It underwent further developments, gaining its Palladian facade in the 18th century.
In 1777, Wallington passed to the Trevelyan family who continued to reside there until 1941. Then the 3rd Baronet (of the second, Wallington creation of 1874), Sir Charles Trevelyan, gave Wallington to the National Trust and, in the process, disinheriting his eldest son George (the 4th Baronet). [1]
Approaching Wallington, there are two features which stand out. In the valley below the house the River Wansbeck flows eastwards towards the North Sea. There is a beautifully constructed hump-back bridge over the Wansbeck, which from its architecture must date from around the time that Wallington was redeveloped in the 18th century.
The second feature, and close to the house on a lawn overlooking the approaching road B6342, is a group of four stone dragon heads (or some other mythical creature, perhaps griffins), lined up and glaring (or grinning—take your pick) over the Northumberland countryside.
They were brought to Wallington in the 1730s as ballast in one of Sir Walter Calverley-Blackett‘s ships. Presumably he was shipping coal to the capital. Anyway, from what I have been able to discover, these dragon heads came from Bishopsgate in London after it was demolished to make way for the increase in London traffic. They have been in their current location since 1928.
Like many country houses, Wallington has its fair share of treasures displayed by the National Trust in the many rooms, which we enjoyed during our 2013 visit.
But, for me, the pièce de résistance is the central hall, once an open courtyard that was enclosed (at the insistence of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founding member John Ruskin) by Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, wife of the 6th Baron Trevelyan of Nettlecombe, Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan (a renowned naturalist and geologist) who bequeathed Wallington to his cousin, Sir Charles Trevelyan (created the 1st Baron Trevelyan of Wallington in 1874).
From this satellite image from Google maps you can see the original layout of the house, and the enclosed central courtyard.
Wallington became a retreat for the Pre-Raphaelites, one of whom, William Bell Scott, a Newcastle painter and poet, was commissioned to decorate the central hall with a series of exquisite murals depicting scenes from Northumbrian history and folklore (and often incorporating local personalities into these). I recently wrote a separate piece about Scott.
I shall enjoy returning to Wallington as soon as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted and it’s once again safe to make such visits inside (and after receiving one of the vaccines).
But there’s so much more to see and appreciate at Wallington, since the woods, garden, and park are quite extensive. Last week we re-explored the East Wood and ponds, and the walled garden, before heading down to the Wansbeck which could not be crossed at the stepping stones due to the high water level.
We didn’t complete the full river walk, heading back up the B6342 from the bridge back to the house, and then into the woods on the west side of the house.
The south front of the house is protected by a rather impressive ha-ha – somewhat more formidable than others we have seen at the likes of Hanbury Hall (in Worcestershire close to our former home in Bromsgrove) and Berrington Hall in Herefordshire, for example.
The walled garden, some minutes walk from the house was splendid during our July visit, but had bedded down for its winter sleep a few days ago. Surrounded by red brick walls, mirroring an even more impressive wall just outside the garden and overlooking the garden pond, it never ceases to amaze me just how much these landowners and would-be aristocrats spent on improving their properties.
Because Steph and I are retired, we can take advantage of good weather (and sometimes not so good) to drop everything and head off to glorious properties like Wallington. And although there are perhaps fewer owned by the National Trust here in the northeast, we shall just have to travel a little further afield and visit those parts of northern England that we have not yet had chance to explore more fully yet. Added to the properties of English Heritage, we will have more than enough to fill our retirement for several years to come.
[1] In summer 1966 (or maybe late Spring 1967) I met Sir George Trevelyan at Attingham Park near Shrewsbury, when I attended a weekend course on the reclamation and botanical rehabilitation of industrial waste sites. Sir George was, for many years, the warden of the Adult Education College at Attingham Park, which is now owned and managed by the National Trust, and has been considerably restored internally and externally since the late 1960s.
2020 started where 2019 had ended – half way through George Eliot’s Middlemarch (published 1871-1872). That was a bit of a struggle in places, but I finally got there. And, on reflection, I did quite enjoy it.
Feeling at a loss as to what to turn to, I decided to quickly devour a couple of Arnold Bennett novels. Last year, I’d downloaded the ‘complete works’ to my Kindle.
First it was The Pretty Lady (1918) set at the outset of the First World War in 1914, and progressing through the war years as protagonist Gilbert (GJ) Hoade, a fiftyish bachelor of independent means, progresses in his relationship with French courtesan Christine who escaped to London from the German Army advancing on Ostend in Belgium.
Then it was back to the Five Towns at the end of January for The Price of Love (1914), a tale of lost money.
I finished that by mid-February, so decided to return to George Eliot and Daniel Deronda (1876). But I didn’t get very far. I’d been listening to some fine music on Classic FM one morning while lying in bed drinking my early morning cuppa, when I began to ask myself questions abut the development of music.
Then I decided to tackle the two books by Hilary Mantel about Tudor Machiavellian Thomas Cromwell that both won the Man Booker Prize (in 2009 and 2012, respectively): Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. In March she published the last part of her Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, but because of the library closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I wasn’t able to get hold of it. Until later in the year.
During the pandemic I had expected to read more. But by the beginning of May I’d run out of steam. So it took me almost two months to finish re-reading Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar. It was fascinating to understand something about perhaps the greatest Roman (often based on his own words, as he was a prolific writer, ever keen to make sure his place in history was secure). I bought this book around 2007, and first read it while I was working in the Philippines.
Here’s a review that appeared in The Independent when the book was first published in 2006. It’s not an easy read, and I found myself constantly confused by Roman names, as so many individuals had the same or similar name. I couldn’t help being reminded of the Biggus Dickus scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Anyway, during the first week of July as we were preparing to move to Newcastle upon Tyne once our house sale has completed, I decided to return to the novels of Thomas Hardy, which I had first enjoyed in the 1970s when we lived in Costa Rica. A re-run of the 2008 adaptation by David Nicholls of Tess of the D’Urbervilles was screened on BBC4, so I decided to tackle that novel first to see just how true to the original the screenwriter had stayed. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t find Tess as easy a read as I had imagined. Somehow, Tess just didn’t click with me this time round. Maybe it was because I had so much on my mind. During August and September things were becoming rather fraught with regard to our house sale and move. I wasn’t sleeping well at all. Feeling anxious and stressed all day, every day.
Anyway, I eventually finished Tess and on 30 September the sale of our house went through and we moved north. Settling into our new home (a rental for six months until we found a house to buy – which we have), we registered with the local North Tyneside library, just ten minutes from home. And there, on the new books shelf was Hilary Mantel’s magnum opus, and the last in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light. Highly tipped to take the 2020 Booker Prize, The Mirror & the Light didn’t even make the shortlist.
Much as I enjoyed The Mirror & the Light, I don’t think it was the masterpiece that The Guardian reviewer Stephanie Merritt claimed. It was a long read, just over 900 pages. I think Hilary Mantel was being somewhat self-indulgent. She does have an accessible writing style, and although it took me over three weeks to finish, I almost never felt as if I was struggling with the text. It was only when she had her main protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, reminiscing in his own mind that the pace of the novel tapered off.
I finished The Mirror & the Light just before we went into our second national lockdown at the beginning of November, so I hurriedly returned it to the library, and searched for a couple of local histories. The first of these was Tyneside – A History of Newcastle and Gateshead from Earliest Times, by Alistair Moffat and George Rosie, published in 2005 (and made into a TV documentary, which I haven’t seen).
This was an ambitious history of the Tyneside region over the past 10,000 years. Ambitious, indeed! But remarkably accessible, with usefully placed boxes which went into greater detail on aspects related to the main narrative. Often, boxes such as these can be a distraction from the narrative, pulling the reader from the points at hand. But the authors have cleverly drafted their text such that the narrative came to a sort of conclusion just before a box, and picked up again afterwards.
I certainly have a better appreciation of the origins and history of Newcastle, and look forward to exploring over the coming years, especially those relating to the Roman occupation of the region between AD43 and AD410.
Next, I picked up A Man Most Driven, by Peter Firstbrook, about ‘Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America’ in the early seventeenth century. Now, I’d heard about Captain Smith since I was a child. Just the other day I talking (via Zoom) about him and Pocahontas with my 8 year old grandaughter, Zoë, in Minnesota, just as I was getting into Firstbrook’s biography. Zoë had been reading all about Pocahontas for one of her remote schooling assignments, and reminded me that Pocahontas did not marry Captain Smith (as I actually believed), but another Englishman named John Rolfe.
A Man Most Driven is a fascinating story of a really driven man who, from his own (and very possibly exaggerated) accounts had certainly had some scrapes all before he was thirty, and lucky to escape with his life on more than one occasion. It also describes how close, and many times the Jamestown colony came to failure, and Smith’s role (from his own and some independent accounts) in ensuring the early survival.
Did Pocahontas (a daughter of the paramount chief of the Powhatan, named Wahunsenacawh) really save his life as Smith wrote in his The Generall Historie? She was just a young teenager when this happened just as Smith was about to have his brains bashed out by hostile Powhatan tribe members near the early Jamestown colony in present-day Virginia. After marrying John Rolfe, Pocahontas came to English and was presented to Queen Anne (wife of James I & VI). But she took sick before she could return to America and died (aged about 21) in Gravesend where she was buried. Unfortunately the site of her grave has been lost.
I then turned my attention to local Newcastle history once again, by former Northumberland county court judge and one-time MP for Newcastle Central from 1945-1951), Lyall Wilkes called Tyneside Portraits. It’s a short anthology of eight men who contributed to the artistic and cultural life of Newcastle since the seventeenth century, as well as its physical appearance through the buildings they designed and built. Among them was William Bell Scott, and Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet whose exquisite murals grace the walls of the central hall at Wallington Hall near Morpeth in Northumberland, a National Trust property we visited in August 2013.
This was the third and last book I had borrowed from the local library before the most recent pandemic lockdown and then Tier 3 restrictions locally. The library has not yet re-opened and I was unable to replace these books. So it was back to the Kindle and a touch of Rudyard Kipling once again: The Light That Failed, first published in January 1891 (his first novel, and not critically acclaimed).
With a number of things to occupy me during December (including my daily walk whenever the weather permits) I reckon The Light That Failed will see me through to the end of the month. I’ll include a summary in my 2021 reading list compilation a year from now.
So that’s another year’s reading accomplished. And what a year 2020 has been. Who could have imagined, as the clock was about to strike midnight on 31 December last, just what we would be facing in the coming months. We’ve made it through the pandemic so far, and having access to books, good music of every genre, and daily fresh air have been key to that achievement.
I’ve just finished reading Tyneside Portraits, a 1971 book written by Lyall Wilkes (1914-1991), former MP (1945-1951) for Newcastle Central and a county court judge for Northumberland.
It’s a collection of essays about eight men (!) who had a profound on the cultural and artistic life of Newcastle upon Tyne, as well as its physical makeup. They were painters, silversmiths, engravers, architects, and an author.
Among the eight was Edinburgh-born William Bell Scott (1811-1890)—painter, poet, and Pre-Raphaelite—who became principal of the School of Art in Newcastle for two decades from 1843. When I was half way through this particular chapter I realised that I knew about William Bell Scott, at least had personally seen some of his work, although from the outset had not drawn the connection.
Pauline, Lady Trevelyan
Anyone who has visited Wallington Hall that lies 12 miles west of Morpeth in Northumberland will know exactly what I’m referring to. Between 1856 and 1861 Scott painted a series of murals on the walls of what had been the central courtyard at Wallington. Victorian art critic and founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John Ruskin had persuaded Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, first wife of the 6th Baronet to enclose this space with a roof.
What’s particularly interesting about these murals is that local personalities, including Lady Trevelyan, are depicted in some. Indeed, painter Alice Boyd, Scott’s former pupil who became his longtime ‘companion’ figures in the scene of Northumberland heroine Grace Darling.
Alice Boyd (L) and Christina Rossetti (R)
Now I say ‘companion’; the relationship was undoubtedly more intimate. Scott had, apparently, a natural attraction for women. At a relatively young age he married Letitia Norquoy, whom he treated shabbily for the rest of their married life. In 1847, Scott became acquainted with the Rossetti family in London, after receiving a letter from a young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His sister Christina, also a renowned poet, fell in love with Scott. It was more than two years after they became acquainted that the Rossetti family discovered that Scott was already married. It seems Christina pined all her adult life for a relationship that could never be, although she did visit on occasion with Scott and his wife, and the significant other, Alice Boyd. As Princess Diana once famously said: “There were three persons in this marriage“. Scott lived openly with Alice Boyd for more than 30 years, and she and Letitia became friends.
John, a plant pathologist working on bacterial diseases of potato, was a colleague of ours at the 
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But fate stepped in I guess.
While we were allowed to post marriage banns in the British Embassy, we had to announce our intention to marry in the official Peruvian government gazette, El Peruano, and one of the principal daily broadsheets (El Comercio if memory serves me right), and have the police visit us at our apartment to verify our address. I think we also had to have blood tests as well. This all took time, but everything was eventually in place for us to set the wedding date: 13 October.
Steph became an enthusiastic beader and has made several hundred pieces of jewelry since then. In Los Baños we had a live-in helper, Lilia, and so in the heat of Los Baños, Steph was spared the drudgery of housework or cooking, and could focus on the hobbies she enjoyed, including a daily swim in the IRRI pool, and looking after her garden and orchids.
I guess I should begin this section with 
Let’s turn to Asia now. I spent almost 19 years in the Philippines, joining the 
In 2014 IRRI once again asked me to chair the science committee for the 
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There I gave a series of seminars on crop evolution and genetic conservation (focusing on potatoes) to staff of the agricultural research institute (IHAR). My hosts took me to the 
One of the best trips I made was to view the Matterhorn in Switzerland near Zermatt. I had a free weekend before I had to travel on to Rome, so I took the opportunity of a day excursion from Bern.
I hope I’m not tempting Providence.
And while most people feel that the pandemic is over and done with, 
Our nearest supermarket, Morrisons, was just 5 minutes or 1.6 miles away by car. Being the driver, the weekly shop fell to me since the supermarkets were only permitting entry to one person per household. I also took on the weekly shop for a widower friend and former University of Birmingham colleague, Jim Croft (a few years older than me) who lived close by. In fact I continued to shop for Jim right up till the day we moved north to Newcastle.
Having appointed an estate agency (realtor) to handle the sale of our house, we waited until the New Year for the first adverts to be placed in the local press. Come mid-January 2020, a For Sale board had been firmly planted in our front garden, and we sat back waiting for a surge of prospective buyers. To our surprise—and disappointment, given the location of our house (proximity to excellent First and Middle schools, close to Bromsgrove town center, nearby dental and medical practices, and an upgraded commuter rail service into the center of Birmingham) we expected there would be more interest than we actually experienced.
Having reached the A68, it was a smooth and direct drive back down to the coast. Here are a couple of videos (below) traveling through glorious landscapes near Otterburn and Elsdon. Why not listen to 
My best friend Alan Brennan, a year younger than me, lived just a few doors further up Moody Street. But we didn’t go to the same school. I was enrolled at Mossley C of E village school, a couple of miles south of the town, like my two brothers and sister before me. Each weekday morning, my elder brother Edgar (just over two years older than me) and I took the bus together from the High Street to Mossley. Sometimes, in the summer, I’d walk home on my own (something that parents wouldn’t even contemplate today).
However, by the end of 2019 we had eventually decided to leave Bromsgrove and move north to Newcastle upon Tyne where our younger daughter Philippa and her family live. (Our elder daughter lives in Minnesota).
Taking my trusty binoculars along (a pair of Swift Saratoga 8×40 that I’ve had for about 60 years) we hoped there might be some interesting wildlife to observe. On one of our previous visits, we’d come across a pair of roe deer among the pine trees. I was hopeful there might be some interesting birds along the River Derwent, the northern boundary of the Gibside estate.
Another surprising visitor to the garden, just once, was an uncommon mistle thrush (right), a much larger cousin of the song thrush.
On the coast we see the usual range of waders such as oystercatchers, ringed plovers, sanderling, dunlin, and turnstones. One of my favorites however is the redshank (right), easily spotted because of its bright orange-red bill and legs. And, of course, several species of gull.
Being a new build house, there were only a few things that needed my attention inside and they were quickly dealt with over a few weeks. Outside was a different prospect, and a project that has kept us busy—well, kept Steph busy— ever since: the creation of a new garden. Both the front and rear of the house only had lawns. So Steph came up with a design and we called in a small company at the end of April to remove the surplus turf. Then we set about planting all the materials we’d brought from Bromsgrove and carefully nurtured over the winter.
One of Northumberland’s most famous sons was artist and naturalist 
There is a gallery of engravings from his major publications on the website of 
Once the weather improved in May and June, and we could get out and about more regularly, Steph and I visited several abbeys and priories managed by English Heritage that dot the landscape of this northeast corner of England, including 
About 7 miles northwest from Prudhoe, as the crow flies, the fortified manor house of 
We have visited 14th century 
The site is owned and managed by 
As we sat on a bench, eating a picnic lunch and facing the west end of the priory church, I couldn’t help reflecting on the other ruined monasteries and the like that we have visited over the years: 
2020 started where 2019 had ended – half way through George Eliot’s Middlemarch (published 1871-1872). That was a bit of a struggle in places, but I finally got there. And, on reflection, I did quite enjoy it.
That got me into 
During the pandemic I had expected to read more. But by the beginning of May I’d run out of steam. So it took me almost two months to finish re-reading Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar. It was fascinating to understand something about perhaps the greatest Roman (often based on his own words, as he was a prolific writer, ever keen to make sure his place in history was secure). I bought this book around 2007, and first read it while I was working in the Philippines.
Anyway, I eventually finished Tess and on 30 September the sale of our house went through and we moved north. Settling into our new home (a rental for six months until we found a house to buy – which we have), we registered with the local North Tyneside library, just ten minutes from home. And there, on the new books shelf was Hilary Mantel’s magnum opus, and the last in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, 
I finished The Mirror & the Light just before we went into our second national lockdown at the beginning of November, so I hurriedly returned it to the library, and searched for a couple of local histories. The first of these was Tyneside – A History of Newcastle and Gateshead from Earliest Times, by Alistair Moffat and George Rosie, published in 2005 (and made into a TV documentary, which I haven’t seen).
Next, I picked up A Man Most Driven, by Peter Firstbrook, about ‘Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the Founding of America’ in the early seventeenth century. Now, I’d heard about 
I then turned my attention to local Newcastle history once again, by former Northumberland county court judge and one-time MP for Newcastle Central from 1945-1951), Lyall Wilkes called Tyneside Portraits. It’s a short anthology of eight men who contributed to the artistic and cultural life of Newcastle since the seventeenth century, as well as its physical appearance through the buildings they designed and built. Among them was 
This was the third and last book I had borrowed from the local library before the most recent pandemic lockdown and then Tier 3 restrictions locally. The library has not yet re-opened and I was unable to replace these books. So it was back to the Kindle and a touch of Rudyard Kipling once again: 
Among the eight was Edinburgh-born 
A balanced diet . . . 