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We continued for around an hour, bouncing around over bumpy paths admiring the views and stopping every now and then to listen to curlews and skylarks before we descended back to the valley and the welcome site of the Ingram village café. It’s a wild and desolate landscape, with the rounded Cheviot hills rippling away in the background. We stopped at late Iron-Age Brough Law hill fort, with the circular stone layout of the ruins still clearly visible. It was another scenic part of the national park, enhanced by a crisp sunny morning, which we got to admire from a Traxter open-sided all-terrain vehicle that made light work of the rough tracks and steep climb to moorland.Ĭheviot sheep scattered in the distance and down below the call of rutting red deer carried on the wind. Patrick Norris leads tours in the county (Photo: Will Hide) As we approached, a kingfisher darted along the river Breamish and a red squirrel scampered away in the trees as we parked, and some Angus and Luing bulls eyed us nonchalantly from their paddock. The following day, we were off on safari with Patrick, a new venture he has set up with Rebecca and Ross Wilson on their 1,800-acre farm in the Ingram Valley. It was hard to tear ourselves away from the celestial show – but the warmth of the pub was calling. The Northumbrian gods of clement weather smiled on us with clear skies and just a light breeze.ĭusk fell over the horizon and the heavens lit up with a billion pricks of luminescence. The Northern Lights were spotted here recently, too. Here on a clear night, you can see the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, with the naked eye. The town lies just outside Northumberland National Park, which is, according to a “night blight” report from 2016, recognised as having the most pristine dark skies in the country. Patrick was happy to take us, so we headed just outside Wooler. Our plans had been to go hiking in the late afternoon so we could stay out late as night fell and observe the stars on an evening walk devoid of any light pollution. The most pristine dark skies in the country It was a grounding experience to be so solitary, with what felt like the woes of the past two years carried away by a strong, north-easterly wind. The views to the north and the coastline were wild. Then it was up higher still, where a fence marks the border between England and Scotland.
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Over an hour or so, we hiked up to a series of increasingly hard-to-reach waterfalls at Hen Hole, where our only companions were merlins, red grouse, meadow pipits and some swallows that seemed to prefer Northumberland to South Africa. When we arrived in the College Valley, there was a stiff breeze blowing as we traversed the soft ground. It was rather enthralling to be so close to something 6,000 or more years old. On the way, we’d detoured south via Roughting Linn, yomping our way through dense undergrowth to get a closer look at one of the finest collections of prehistoric “cup and ring” rock art in Britain, set on an expansive rock outcrop and not far from a waterfall with rocks that looks like a dragon drinking from the pool at its base. Cup and ring marks (Photo: Footsteps Northumberland) This is 12,000 acres of undulating, biodiverse landscape, where the prebook-only car park has a limit of just 12 cars a day.
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On our first full day, we hiked deep into the gloriously remote, glacially carved College Valley in the Cheviot Hills. Centuries of spats with Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, not to mention our Caledonian cousins to the north, have left it with a history that marks the landscape, the people and the language. To me, it’s rugged in a way other places in the country aren’t and the perfect antidote to being largely cooped up indoors over the past 18 months.
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There’s something perceptibly different about Northumberland. He offers small-group tours around England’s northern-most county. But this time, with my friend James, I descended from an early London departure to meet our guide, Patrick Norris, a former member of the Royal Navy and transplant from Swindon. I’ve always just sped past Berwick-upon-Tweed en route to Scotland. Which is how, on an inky-black evening in Northumberland I found myself lying on my back outside the town of Wooler clutching a Thermos of coffee, deliberating on whether I should share a bar of Dairy Milk and staring up at the Plough. How many times have I been somewhere by rail, gazed out of the window and thought “well, that looks rather lovely… I really should get off the train here next time”. I’ve emerged on the other side of the pandemic with a new, if not very sexy, mantra: get off the train.