Tag Archives: Pennines

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The northeast has it all . . .

Have you ever visited the northeast of England? The ancient Kingdom of Northumbria. If not, why not? We think the northeast is one of the most awe-inspiring regions of the country.

My wife and I moved here, just east of Newcastle upon Tyne, in October 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Newcastle is the largest city in the northeast, on the north bank of the River Tyne (seen in this video from the Gateshead south bank) with its many iconic bridges, and the Glasshouse International Centre for Music on the left (formerly Sage Gateshead, known locally as The Slug).

We visited Northumberland for the first in the summer of 1998 when home on leave from the Philippines, never once contemplating that we’d actually be living here 22 years later. We have been regular visitors to the northeast since 2000 when our younger daughter Philippa began her undergraduate studies at Durham University, and she has remained in the northeast ever since.

Northumbria has it all: hills, moorlands, river valleys, beaches and, to cap it all, a rich history and lively culture. There are so many glorious landscapes to enjoy: the Northumberland National Park stretching to the border with Scotland; the dales and uplands of the North Pennines National Landscape in Durham and North Yorkshire, as well as the North York Moors a little further south. And all easily accessible from home. Here’s just a small sample.

Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall, in February 2022 just before vandals felled this iconic tree.
Hadrian’s Wall, near Housesteads fort
Whitby Abbey
Upper Coquetdale
The beach at Druridge Bay
Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre
Byland Abbey
Warkworth Castle
Duddo Five Stones
Lordenshaws Iron Age Hill Fort
Coquetdale, Northumberland
Blast Beach, Co Durham
Marsden Rock
National Trust Souter Lighthouse
Plessey Woods Country Park along the River Blyth
Penshaw Monument
Exhibition at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland
National Trust Cragside
Wall paper at Belsay Hall (English Heritage)
Prudhoe castle from the pele yard, English Heritage
High Force waterfall on the River Tees
St Jon’s Anglo-Saxon church, Edlingham
Angel of the North

On this map I have pinpointed all places we have visited since October 2020 (and a couple from earlier years), several places multiple times. Do explore by clicking on the expansion box (illustrated right) in the map’s top right-hand corner. I have grouped all the sites into different color-coded categories such as landscapes, coast, Roman sites, religious sites, and castles, etc.

For each location there is a link to one of my blog posts, an external website, or one of my photo albums.

This map and all the links illustrate just how varied and beautiful this northeast region of England truly is.

Northumberland is one of the least populated counties in England. Most of the population is concentrated in the southeast of the county, in areas where there were, until the 1980s, thriving coal-mining communities, and a rich legacy of heavy industry along the Tyne, such as ship-building. The landscape has been reclaimed, spoil heaps have been removed, and nature restored over areas that were once industrial wastelands.

So why did we choose to make this move, almost 230 miles north from our home (of almost 40 years)  in Worcestershire? After all, Worcestershire (and surrounding counties in the Midlands) is a beautiful county, and we raised our two daughters there, at least in their early years.

When we moved back to the UK in 1981 after more than eight years in South and Central America, we bought a house in Bromsgrove, a small market town in the north of the county, and very convenient for my daily 13-mile commute into The University of Birmingham, where I taught in the Department of Plant Biology. And there we happily stayed until mid-1991 when I accepted a position at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, while keeping our house empty but furnished for the next 18 years.

Retiring in April 2010, we moved back to Bromsgrove, getting to know the town and surrounding counties again. Joining the National Trust in 2011 (and English Heritage a couple of years or so later) gave us an added incentive to explore just how much the Midlands had to offer: beautiful landscapes, historic houses and castles, and the like. You can view all the places we visited on this map.

But we had no family ties to Bromsgrove. And to cap it all, our elder daughter Hannah had studied, married, and settled in the United States and, as I mentioned before, Philippa was already in the northeast.

For several years, we resisted Philippa’s ‘encouragement’ to sell up and move north. After all we felt it would be a big and somewhat uncertain move, and (apart from Philippa and her family) we had no connections with the region. But in early January 2020, we took the plunge and put our house on the market, with the hope (expectation?) of a quick sale. Covid-19 put paid to that, but we finally left Bromsgrove on 30 September.

Last moments at No. 4.

We are now happily settled in North Tyneside and, weather permitting, we get out and about for day excursions as often as we can. There’s so much to discover.

 

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Let the Force be with you . . .

Since moving to the northeast of England almost four years ago, Steph and I have grabbed every opportunity (weather permitting, of course) to explore Northumberland north of the River Tyne, and the Durham coast south of the river.

What we hadn’t done, until last week, was explore the hills southwest of Newcastle in the North Pennines National Landscape (NPNL, formerly known as the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or AONB). Within the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumbria, and North Yorkshire, the NPNL covers an area of approximately 770 square miles (2000 km2), and the landscape encompasses heather moors, deep valleys or dales, and several of its villages are the legacy of a rich mining history. Click here to explore an interactive map.

Specifically, we were headed to High Force Waterfall in Upper Teesdale, about 55 miles from home on the circuitous (and rather tedious) route that my satnav chose skirting around Durham before heading southwest. Tedious that is until we reached Teesdale itself and a glorious landscape opened up before us, as you can will appreciate from this video (the blue route on the map below).

High Force Waterfall is one of the most impressive in the country, with the River Tees tumbling around 70 ft (>21 m) to a splash pool below.

And the reason for this spectacular waterfall lies in its geology, comprising three different layers (which you can be seen in the image above): two relatively soft (of limestone and sandstone) overlain by the hard volcanic Whin Sill, explained in the next image (click to expand). And like Niagara Falls, High Force is slowly (very slowly) migrating upstream as the Tees erodes the rock millimeter by millimeter.

It certainly is impressive, and for an attraction in the middle of nowhere, remarkably accessible, albeit through privately-owned land with an entrance fee of £3.50 per adult. There’s also a minimum car park fee of £3 for three hours. The Pennine Way footpath follows the south bank of the River Tees, and passes the top of the waterfall with perhaps even more impressive views.

The path from the car park to the waterfall is just under half a mile, gently sloping suitable even for wheelchairs. There’s a return route through the woodland, but there are several very steep sections, which we didn’t attempt. Beside the splash pool, a small viewing platform (down some very steep steps) provides excellent views of the river tumbling over the precipice.

High Force waterfall on the River Tees

I was quite unaware of the waterfall’s existence until fairly recently, when I read a crime novel by Northumberland-born author LJ Ross, in which it featured.

After a picnic lunch back at the car park, we continued our journey to Cow Green Reservoir, and an altitude of around 1600 feet (±500 m) at the car park just above the reservoir.

This area of Upper Teesdale is rather special botanically, and has an assemblage of plant species that are found in few other places in the British Isles. They are relics from the last Ice Age, and some, like the Spring Gentian (Gentiana verna L.) that is featured on the cover of this book by Margaret Bradshaw, are otherwise found for example in the mountains of Central Europe.

The importance of the so-called Teesdale Assemblage (* see footnote image) came to the fore in the 1960s with the proposed construction of a reservoir to meet the increased water demand from heavy industry on Teesside. Despite strong and sustained opposition, Cow Green Reservoir was built, but the area is now one of the country’s largest nature reserves.

Botanist Margaret Bradshaw published her book about the Teesdale flora (after seven decades of study, and often seen out and about on her sturdy pony) when she was 97! She has been a fierce campaigner to save this unique landscape and its rare species. Her book is one of the most comprehensive (and authoritative) monographs that I have come across. A delight for the wealth of detail that she has compiled, and certainly makes us want to visit Upper Teesdale again next year, in the Spring and early Summer when many of these botanical rarities are in flower.

Leaving Cow Green, we headed north and a long and steep descent into Weardale, and from there over the moors towards the valley of the River Tyne. These routes are shown in red and green on the map above, and feature in the next two videos.

What a magnificent day excursion, and one we hope to repeat before too long.

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