Travel to Northumbria

“It’s there! There! LOOK! Can you see him? Oh look! He’s coming closer!!” We clung onto each other on the slippery seaweed covered rocks at the back of St. Mary’s Lighthouse in Whitley Bay and waved and waved at the sweet face of the grey seal who plashed and played in the water beneath us. “Seeeeeal! Seeeaaaaaal!’ My daughter cried with delight as he swam a little closer and even raised a flipper as if in greeting. ‘Oh isn’t he lovely?’ My sister’s face shone. I felt a glimmer of pride that her weekend away, visiting us in our new seaside home, had resulted in this superb wildlife ‘spot’.

Not for the first time had the delights of Northumbria wowed and delighted one of our guests. Newly arrived back in the North East after an absence of fifteen years I have discovered more about the beauties of this enormous county in the ten months since we moved back here than I did in all my years as an impoverished undergraduate student at Newcastle University.

This spring my Japanese friend, Itsuko, came to stay with us. An extremely well-travelled woman, even she gasped as she caught her first glimpse of Bamburgh Castle as it rose magnificently above us on our drive out to the coast. We wound the windows of the car down to take in the scents and smells of the beautiful fields on either side of us and grinned like small children as we wove our way up through the village to the imposing castle walls and there caught our first glimpse of the sea.

This stunning stretch of coast is home to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to the north of Bamburgh. The island, accessible twice a day at low tide, is a magnet for bird watchers, horse riders and visitors to its Tudor Castle and the Priory which dates back to Norman times. Further south from Bamburgh, the Farne Islands lie a few miles out into the North Sea. Boat trips, taken from the pretty village of Seahouses, can be taken out to the islands to see the thousands of puffins, terns, guillemots and kittiwakes, which roost here every year between the months of May and July. Back on land the scent of smoking kippers from the nineteenth century Swallow Fish smokehouse in Seahouses drifts through the streets of the town, drawing customers into the tantalisingly stocked Fisherman’s Kitchen shop to purchase Rick Stein acclaimed kippers and smoked salmon.

The beaches of Northumbria could be viewed by some as a secret, a string of golden treasures known only to those of us who are lucky enough to live here. Possibly the best known beach is the Blue Flag awarded Longsands in Tynemouth, with its well established surf scene and influx of stand-up-paddleboarders. We also have our share of proper ‘old fashioned’ beaches, like the one at Whitley Bay where ice creams are sold from parlours with Formica tables and 1930’s décor, while every fish and chip shop commands snaking queues out of the door at opening time. However it’s the stretches of empty seashore, caressing the coast for mile after mile in the north of the county, which we don’t seem to shout about.

The Canadian Tourist Board inadvertently ‘outed’ one of the prized stretches of Northumbrian sand in early 2009 with an advert for the Canadian province of Alberta. In the advert two children run along the sand dunes above an empty windswept beach. So wild, so unspoilt, so Canadian? Except that the beach in question turned out to be that at Beadnell Bay, famed locally for its golden sands and watersports, and which in fact lies half way between Bamburgh Castle and Craster, the home of the delicious Craster Crab. So wild, so unspoilt – so Northumbrian!

There is a fine balance, I suppose, between the delight of walking up through the dunes at any of these incredible beaches and looking up and down the sands to see no one else in sight and embracing the new spirit of the age. Now that the ‘staycation’ has replaced ‘two weeks in Ibiza’ and with over a hundred miles of coastline to choose from, perhaps the time has come to let the cat out of the bag and offer an invitation to the rest of the country to join us on the glorious wild dunes and golden beaches of Northumberland, fish and chips in hand and windswept smiles on faces.

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