Walking in Northumberland: 36 walks throughout the county - coast, Cheviots, Hadrian's Wall and Pennines

INTRODUCTION

Northumberland – a land of open spaces and big skies

There’s something very special about walking in Northumberland. It’s got a lot to do with all the history in the landscape – from cliff-top castles and world-class Roman remains to long-abandoned prehistoric settlements hidden in the hills. It’s also got something to do with those big northern skies, largely free of pollution, unfettered by man-made constructions and opening up views that stretch on for miles and miles and miles… It’s undoubtedly got a lot to do with the landscape itself: remote hills, seemingly endless beaches, wild moors, dramatic geological features and valleys that are so mesmerizingly beautiful they defy description. It’s surely related to the wildlife, too – from the feral goats and the upland birds that are sometimes the walkers’ sole companions to the ancient woods and vast expanses of heather moorland that burst into vibrant purple bloom every summer.

Stretching from Berwick-upon-Tweed in the northeast to Haltwhistle in the southwest – two places that, even as the crow flies, are about 95km apart – Northumberland covers more than 5000km2. It’s not quite the biggest county in England, but as you wander its hills and valleys and beaches it feels like it. There are wide, open spaces here like no others found south of the border. Unsurprisingly, this is England’s most sparsely populated county – with just 62 people per km2. To put that into perspective, it compares with 73 in neighbouring Cumbria with its vast areas of uninhabited fell and moorland, or, at the other extreme, 3142 in the West Midlands and 5521 in Greater London. Want to escape from it all? This is the place to come!

Roughly 25 per cent of the county, including Hadrian’s Wall and the Cheviot Hills, is protected within the boundaries of the Northumberland National Park. The county also has two designated Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty – the Northumberland Coast and the North Pennines.

This book covers the whole county. The routes range from easy ambles on the coast and gentle woodland trails to long days out on the lonely hills: hopefully, something for all types of walker – and all types of weather.

Weather

Like the rest of the UK, Northumberland experiences plenty of meteorological variety but, being on the east side of an island dominated by moisture-laden southwesterlies, it tends to be drier and generally more benign than the western side. Having said that, the Pennines and the Cheviot Hills get more than their fair share of strong winds, heavy rain and snow. And, in winter, the easterly winds that periodically come in off the North Sea are enough to bring tears to your eyes. During summer, the coast is prone to sea fog, or haar, an annoyance that will normally burn off quickly, but can linger all day if there’s a steady wind coming off the North Sea to keep replenishing the banks of moisture.

It’s shorts weather above Rothbury!

Now for the statistics. July and August are the warmest months, with a mean daily maximum temperature of about 18°C. The coldest months are January and February with a mean daily minimum of 1.5°C. According to rainfall totals for Boulmer on the coast, the wettest period is from October to December, while April to July are the driest months. Obviously these figures will differ according to altitude, as well as latitude and longitude; and don’t forget, they’re averages.

Snow is even more widely varied from one part of the county to another – with the white stuff rarely lying for long on the coast while, in the North Pennines, it’d be an unusual winter if there weren’t occasional road closures. Generally speaking, January and February see the most, although snow can fall any time from late October to late April in the North Pennines and, to a lesser extent, in the Cheviot Hills.

The weather becomes an important consideration when heading on to the high ground, particularly in winter. Check forecasts before setting out, and prepare accordingly. The Mountain Weather Information Service (www.mwis.org.uk) covers the higher Cheviot Hills in its Southern Uplands forecast for Scotland, while the Meteorological Office (www.metoffice.gov.uk) provides detailed predictions for locations throughout the county.

Geology

Northumberland’s size gives rise to a varied and complex underlying geology. In its most simplistic form, it could be summed up as a mixture of largely Carboniferous sedimentary rocks and volcanic rocks, both intrusive and extrusive, all topped by Quaternary deposits, including those of the last glacial period.

The rolling hills of the Cheviot range are generally associated with a period of mountain building known as the Caledonian Orogeny, about 490 to 390 million years ago. The collision of several mini-continents, including Avalonia, with Laurentia and the subduction of the Iapetus Ocean, resulted in volcanic activity. This created a mass of granite surrounded by extrusive volcanic rocks, most notably andesite. The collision of the plates also resulted in faulting, evident in places such as the Harthope and Breamish valleys.

Although there are older rocks dating as far back as the Ordovician, about 450 million years ago, the rocks of the North Pennines are largely Carboniferous limestone, sandstones and shales laid down about 360–300 million years ago, when this area was covered by a tropical sea.

Hadrian’s Wall was built on the Great Whin Sill

There are certain surface features that will stand out as walkers explore the county – the andesite outcrops that form small crags on the otherwise smooth slopes of the Cheviot Hills; the fell sandstones, most prominent on the Simonside Hills; and, probably most famously, the dolerite of the Great Whin Sill, on which Hadrian’s Wall and several castles were built. The latter was formed towards the end of the Carboniferous period, when movement of tectonic plates forced magma to be squeezed sideways between beds of existing rock. The magma, as it then slowly cooled, crystallised and shrank, forming hexagonal columns.

Wildlife and habitats

With habitats covering anything from coastal dunes to 600m-plus hills, it’s not surprising that the wildlife of Northumberland is extremely diverse. While walking the coast, keep your eyes peeled for seals and even the occasional dolphin out at sea. Seals often haul out on the sands of the Lindisfarne National Nature Reserve (see Walk 4), while dolphins have frequently been spotted playing in the waters around Berwick. Seabirds such as puffins, guillemots, Arctic terns and shags nest on the rocky Farne Islands, while winter visitors to the coast include barnacle geese, brent geese, pink-footed geese, wigeon, grey plovers and bar-tailed godwits. The waders, in particular, enjoy feeding on the sand and mudflats, where they are joined by their British cousins, who abandon the hills for a winter holiday at the seaside.

Curlew in flight

At first sight, the delicate and ever-shifting dunes seem to be home to nothing more than marram grass; closer inspection reveals an array of wildflowers such as lady’s bedstraw, bloody cranesbill, houndstongue, bird’s foot trefoil and restharrow. They’re also home to common lizards and an assortment of moths and butterflies, including the dark green fritillary and grayling.

Moving inland, the uplands contain some very important ecosystems. Almost 30 per cent of England’s blanket bog is found in the North Pennines, home to peat-building sphagnum moss as well as heather, bog asphodel, bilberry, crowberry and cotton grass. Rare Arctic/alpine plants, such as cloudberry, still thrive on the highest moors. The nutrient-poor, acidic soils also support native grasses such as purple moor grass, mat-grass and wavy-hair grass, which give the Cheviot Hills, beyond the heavily managed grouse moors, their distinctive look.

The North Pennines and Cheviot Hills are important for a variety of bird species, including red grouse, some of England’s last remaining populations of elusive black grouse, and the heavily persecuted and extremely rare hen harrier, as well as merlin, kestrel, short-eared owl, peregrine falcon, ring ouzel, skylark, lapwing, golden plover, whinchat and wheatear.

As far as mammals go, the most common species you’re likely to see on the uplands is sheep, but there is wildlife too – foxes, brown hares, weasels and stoats can be seen, particularly around dusk and dawn. Small bands of feral goats also roam parts of the Cheviot Hills.

Feral goat in the Cheviot Hills

The valleys and low-lying woods are home to badgers, roe deer, voles, shrews, minks and otters. Northumberland is also one of England’s last bastions of native red squirrels, driven to extinction in other parts of the country by the introduced grey squirrel. Herons, kingfishers and dippers can often be spotted along the burns, and the woods are home to wagtails, long-tailed tits, great spotted woodpeckers, cuckoos, siskin, redpolls, finches and warblers, among others. Buzzards are probably the most common of the raptors, but any of the species found on the uplands, with the exception of the hen harrier, can also be spotted at lower altitudes.

Adders are the UK’s only poisonous snakes

Walkers should be aware that, as in most of the UK, there’s always a chance of stumbling across adders, our only venomous snake. They’re most likely to be spotted on warm days, basking out in the open – sometimes on tracks and paths. Don’t be too alarmed: the adder will usually make itself scarce as soon as it senses your approach. They bite only as a last resort – if you tread on one or try to pick one up. Even then, for most people, the worst symptoms of an adder bite are likely to be nausea and severe bruising, although medical advice should be sought immediately. It’s a different story for our canine friends: an adder bite can kill dogs.

History

People have been leaving their mark on Northumberland’s landscape for millennia. There is even evidence of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers – in the form of a dwelling at Howick (see Walk 1) and small pieces of worked flint in Allendale. But it was really only in Neolithic times that human beings, farming for the first time, began to have a more profound impact on the landscape. Suddenly, after centuries of being left to their own devices, the forests that had slowly colonised the land after the departure of the last ice sheets were under threat as trees made way for crops and livestock.

By the Bronze Age – roughly 2500

BC

to about 800

BC

– people were not only developing the first field systems seen in Britain, they were also using metallurgy to create tools and ornaments. There are Bronze Age remains scattered throughout the county, most notably burial cairns, stone circles and the prolific cup-and-ring marks found on boulders. This ‘rock art’ was made by Neolithic and early Bronze Age people between 6000 and 3500 years ago, but its meaning has been lost in the intervening centuries.

Duddo Stone Circle

Several walks in this book take in some of these important prehistoric sites, but there are others well worth visiting such as the 4200-year-old Duddo Stone Circle a few kilometres southeast of Norham, and Routin Linn, the largest decorated rock in England. A few kilometres east of the historic village of Ford, it’s covered in dozens of carvings and can’t fail to impress.

Rock art at Routin Linn

The Iron Age, starting in Britain in roughly 800

BC

and lasting up until the arrival of the Romans, gave us the hillforts that today dot the Cheviot Hills. These were built by the Votadini, a tribe of Celts that lived in an area of southeast Scotland and northeast England from the Firth of Forth down to the River Tyne. When the Romans arrived, the Votadini were at first ruled directly. After Hadrian’s Wall was built, and the Romans retreated south, this tribe remained allied with the invaders and formed a ‘friendly’ buffer between the legionaries and the Pictish tribes further north.

Roman ruins at Housesteads Fort (Walk 30)

The Romans left Northumberland with its most famous historic feature – Hadrian’s Wall. In

AD

122, while on a visit to Britain, the Emperor Hadrian ordered a defensive wall to be built against the Pictish people. Over the next six years, professional soldiers, or legionaries, built a wall almost 5m high and 80 Roman miles (73 modern miles) long, from Wallsend in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west. Some of the best-preserved remaining stretches of the wall, as well as forts and other settlements associated with it, feature prominently in several walks in this book.

The departure of the Romans in the early part of the fifth century left something of a vacuum in terms of government and leadership in much of Britain. Germanic settlers, namely the Angles and Saxons, were happy to step into the breach. The first known Anglian king of the area that includes modern-day Northumberland was Ida, who ruled from about

AD

547. Later, his kingdom, Bernicia, united with the neighbouring Deira to form the powerful Northumbria. Now began something of a ‘golden age’ for the region: a time of peace when religion, culture, art and learning flourished. This was the time of King Oswald, the Irish monk Aidan, Lindisfarne’s Bishop Cuthbert (see Walk 4) and the great scholar Bede, all later venerated as saints. The peace was shortlived, however: in

AD

793 Vikings desecrated Lindisfarne in one of their first attacks on the British Isles.

Following William the Conqueror’s brutal Harrying of the North, when tens of thousands of people