Last week in UK - continued

Wednesday, 11th July 2014.

Another beautiful day but still cold enough to need to wear a fleece. We went to Berwick on Tweed to see if we could fix up a banking issue and for Brian to have a hair cut. His is very short and just the way he wanted it and it too was cheaper than he pays in Canberra.
Had coffee and cake at the restaurant associated with the theatre - you always get good coffee at these restaurants - and then walked around the ramparts which, according to the information panels, were the most expensive and also the least efficient to be undertaken in the reign of Elizabeth 1st. They were built to defend England against the Scots. It provides a wonderful green space to walk around the town and
on a sunny day you couldn't find anything better to do. One of the most striking images in Berwick is this fantastic viaduct. We saw a train go across it, so even though it looks pretty old, it is still operational.

Came back to Seahouses and walked across the golf course and beach to the villageof Beadnell. Discovered a very nice pub there - Craster Arms. 


Thursday, 10 July 2014

Busy today with blogging update and preparing to move out tomorrow for Newcastle and onward on Saturday to Amsterdam. 

One last comment today was to note that the cottage at Seahouses has been the only place in the UK where there is no traditional 'sink bowl' which we have noticed is a great UK tradition even though it is in the majority of cases redundant. The one case we did observe where the sink bowl was not redundant was at Black Swan Cottage which had still retained the old large Belfast sink.  

Last week in Uk

MONDAY 7 JULY 2014


Today we discovered more of the story of St Cuthbert. We decided to drive down to have a look at Durham. We have not been there before and I really liked it. It is a small manageable city with a University, so fits my criterion as a good place to live. The Cathedral is magnificent and the city itself has been declared a World Heritage site. 

The first thing we did was go into the World Heritage site office to get an introduction to the site and were impressed with the Audiovisual about it. It was informative and entertaining. New techniques were used in the construction of the Cathedral which made it more interesting when we came to see them. What impressed me though was the fact that the castle is now part of the University. The disappointing part was that the public are not able to visit the castle, but the audio visual showed the students having a great time in the dining room etc.



As we were going through the exhibitions in the Cathedral, we discovered more of the story about St Cuthbert. He was a monk and considered a very holy man while he was alive. He was sent by St Aidan to Northumbria, and ended up becoming Bishop of Lindisfarne (now also known as Holy Island). When he died his coffin was kept in the altar in the Church. When the Vikings started making incursions into Northumbria, the monks opened his coffin and discovered that his body and even his clothes were still in almost perfect condition. They took the coffin with them. They did this for a long time and finally ended up in Durham.

There are two versions of how this came about. In the Cathedral an exhibition label said that one of the monks who was carrying the coffin experienced a visitation from St Cuthbert who described the site on which the Cathedral was subsequently built. The other, which was in a square near the theatre in Durham next to another sculpture the same as the one we saw in the Church in Holy Island. The label next to the sculpture there says that the coffin got too heavy for the monks to move. Brian's comment on reading that one was that the monks had just got too old to carry it, and that the one who had the vision mentioned in the label in the Cathedral was the first to realise that he was too old to be carrying it.

As I read it the journey started from Holy Island to lay St Cuthbert's coffin to rest in Ripon (Fountains Abbey) but at Durham the coffin had from one account to have become "too heavy to move" and from another to have become "immovable". I was at some difficulty in understanding how a coffin and its occupant can become heavier or immovable. Then came the report that one of the bearers had a vision of St Cuthbert himself declaring his preference to laid to rest at Durham. May I suggest that this vision came at a most appropriate time from the viewpoint of the monks bearing the coffin and all quickly agreed to the request of the posthumous request of St Cuthbert.


We had used the park and ride service to Durham, but of course the bus doesn't go from the same place as it lets you off. We were not sure we were in the right place and started talking to a young woman who was in the same boat. Finally found out that we were at the wrong bus stop but by that time she had told us that she was new to Durham and was on here way home after enrolling in a course to help her set up her own business. She is a photographer and before moving to Durham, she worked for the Defence Department and did the photographs of all the men who had been killed in Afghanistan. It was part of the involvement of Royal Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire. 
I do remember seeing a documentary about the way this was handled. It was extremely moving and she said that she had found it so, but also very rewarding.

Chores, TV and English Walks

Saturday, 5 July 2014

It started raining on Friday night, and when we woke up it was raining, so spent morning doing domestic chores.  The sun came out after lunch, so I left Brian working on the computer and went for a walk.  The tide was out so walked on the rock self to discover what the little hut on the far side of it is.  Turns out it houses life saving equipment.  Continued on over the golf course and came back and sat on one of the benches overlooking the sea.  It was such a beautiful afternoon the other woman sitting on the bench turned out to be a twitcher and she was taking photos of the rookery at the edge of the cliff near the golf course.  Her husband is into diving, so I learned about another activity which operates out of Seahouses.  

I watched as they prepared the boat for diving on Sunday morning

A boat full of divers leaving Seahouses early Sunday morning

She was complaining about the lack of mobile coverage in England so I was telling her about the NBN debate in Oz.  I was explaining that Turnbull's plan disadvantages the people who live in rural areas in Australia, and she said that there is a similar debate going on here.  Apparently the Post Office is complaining that it cannot compete with the private parcel delivery service in the remoter parts of Britain and want to stop this aspect of their business.  With conservative governments in both Britain and Australia  "open for business" is the go, so long as it is for private profit!

Played Scrabble on the iPad in the evening.  We usually watch TV at night.  There are a tremendous number of "free to air" stations here, but they are very similar to the ones at home.  Reruns of just about everything.  To top it all, the BBC has gone sports mad - Wimbledon takes precedence over everything, but that is supplemented with large doses of over enthusiastic reporters raving about the Tour de France which started in Yorkshire this year plus the World Cup football.  As someone who can't abide all the sport broadcasting in Oz I'm flabbergasted by the coverage here.  I told Brian the other night that I'm sure it is because the western world is "male"!  Don't think he agreed with me though.

On the subject of TV.  We do enjoy the program "Pointless".  It is a type of quiz show where 100 people are surveyed with the question and the objective is for the contestants to come up with the most obscure or pointless answer.  It is quirky and often the contestants come up with an answer that scores 2 or 3 but the object is that it has to be 0.  It is very British centred which is probably why we have not seen it in Oz. 

There are lots of programs similar to Grand Designs.  While all the sport was going on we watched one called "A place in the Sun: At home or away?"  Brian has a running commentary about it which runs along the lines that none of them have done much research and most of them don't know what they want!  The other that we watched often are the reruns of MASH.  There have also been a few good movies, but nothing to write home about.  At one stage we even saw one of our favourites "As time goes by".

SUNDAY, 6 JULY 2014

Another beautiful sunny morning.  The first day of our last week in England.  I went for a walk on the beach and when I got back, Brian suggested we could do the walk we had talked about with the very helpful woman at the Wooler tourist information office.  It is a new walk in the Northumberland National Park and had been written about in one of the brochures we had found at the house we are staying in.  She explained that there are a lot of "finger valleys" in the Cheviots but most of the walks are linear, and walkers like circular walks.  Being an optimist I believed her but the College Valley walk from Hethpool was the straw that broke the camel's back.  I'm sorry that I was so angry about it and that Brian had to put up with me cursing and swearing as we progressed through the second half of it, but I will never ever go for another walk like this in an English national park.

Apart from a few cars cleaning up after a party in the National Park the night before it started out as a nice walk.  It was on a small road beside a river and we could see what looked like trails on the other side. 

This is the youth hostel with two tipi tents - part of the accommodation for the party on Saturday night. 

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When we left the road, the directions were to turn left after crossing the river into some trees.  In this environment that is a bit like the description someone else reported on about going across the paddock with the sheep in it!

There was no way mark to be seen anywhere near the start of this new part of the walk.  So we went on up further to what looked like a track.  The description of the walk included a cya (cover your a....) statement about it being steep, so we took it that this was the steep bit, but when we got there we could find no alternative route down.  So down we came and retraced our steps to find a break in the trees which is where the way mark should have been.

I agree. The instructions were that 'just before the second gate leave the track and bear left down through the trees'. Well I was interested in how we had missed the turning. The turning had all the appearance of a small gap in a privet hedge! Definitely no sign or waymark. The whole point of signs and waymarks is that they be placed in situations which are unclear or there is some ambivalence about the exact direction. It should be noted that these instructions were in the 'Northumberland National Park - Visitor Guide 2014' although it should be stressed that the authorities are constrained by the interests and influences of private and often influential land holders not to mention the world wide shift to small government which often gives low priority to social investment.  

We could see that the trees formed a kind of wood, so we walked through them, me thinking that the track had to get better.  But there simply was no track unless you call this one -

The black dot two thirds up and centre is me chest high in bracken!

 


The things that look like posts are not actually posts, they are shields protecting small oak trees!

 The vegetation on either side was so high a short person would have difficulty seeing where they were going.  I couldn't see what was under my feet but could feel lots of rocks, long grass and water.  By this time we were so far in we were hoping it would get better because the thought of going back was horrible.  About two hours later, it did get a bit better.  But not much.  The best part of it was the bridge across the river that got us back to civilisation.  But that's it as far as I'm concerned.  Never again will I believe anything anyone tells me about a walk in an English National Park.  

Which brings me to my favourite gripe concerning the putative term 'National Park' for large areas of English countryside. It would be far clearer, from the viewpoint of the international visitor, if the original and more accurate term 'Commons' were used. The existing 'National Parks' contain many farmhouses, hamlets, some villages and in some cases at least one town. Also, crop farming and the grazing of domestic sheep and cattle are widespread. In the New Forest, for example, animal husbandry of feral horses is permitted and domestic cattle and horses are allowed on occasions to run free in this so called 'National Park'; and also the cropping of the forest is allowed albeit to approved foresters as a private business activity - all in the claim of conserving the park's environment. Essentially the problem lies in that Britain started far too late (1951) in gazetting these so called national parks.