Seals, saints and stars in Northumberland

A journey around Northumberland takes in fledgling guillemots in the Farne Islands, the cradle of Christianity in England on Lindisfarne and stargazing at Kielder Observatory

The dogs of Low Newton By Sea

There’s no timid tippy-toeing for the gung-ho Jack Russell. It bounds into the North Sea without so much of a flinch, channelling its boundless energy and enthusiasm into chasing the same tennis ball it has already retrieved several times. His owner wears a raincoat despite the mellow afternoon sun – you can never be too careful – and is quite content to keep throwing.

To the left, seagull stomp about in the rock pools. To the right, wisps of seaweed decorate the beach, and the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle act as a siren call to muddy-booters who regard not being able to get there by car as an integral part of the appeal.

Idyllic contentment laps over Low Newton By Sea. It’s a tiny place, dominated by a grand horseshoe of whitewashed buildings that seem to have gone AWOL from a town square. Amongst them is the Ship Inn pub, where the bar queue snakes to the door over uncompromisingly unvarnished wooden floors. It brews its own Sea Dog smoked porter and serves up lobster without the fine dining frippery. It’s very Northumberland – the good things in life, with an active disdain for tarting them up.

Newton Pool Nature Reserve

This mental cobweb-clearing simplicity extends to the Newton Pool Nature Reserve, a short squelch along the path. Here, two spartan wooden hides look out over the wetlands. Elsewhere, the idea of just sitting down for an hour looking at what birdlife drops by might seem phenomenally dull. Here, where mobile phone reception’s gallant attempts to break through have resolutely failed, it seems oddly appealing. Previous protestations of not giving a damn which bird is which suddenly morph into painstaking debate over whether the one gliding across the water is a European white-fronted goose or a Greenland white-fronted goose.

Two plodding ponies peer in as they shamble past. They’re allowed to stay because they do a fine job in deterring predators. And a swallow busily flits through the hide window to the nest it has cheekily built beneath the roof. But otherwise, it’s as if anyone cooped up in the shed is invisible to the unfolding ecosystem being nosily gazed upon.

North of Hadrian’s Wall

Going unnoticed is quite a common theme in Northumberland. It’s the bit skipped through between Newcastle and Edinburgh, a journey everyone living further south assumes should take about 45 minutes. It’s realistically two hours even if you don’t get stuck behind a tractor on the A1.

There’s a small belt of towns along the River Tyne in the south of the county, largely huddling around the path of Hadrian’s Wall. But north of the wall, population density drops to a half-hearted dribble, inviting all manner of lazy Game Of Thrones comparisons. A patchwork of pastures, National Park moorland, conifer forest and frankly lovely coastal scenery takes over.

The coastal path to Seahouses

There’s about six miles of the latter to take in on the thistle-lined Coastal Path from Low Newton to Seahouses, a town seemingly built on gargantuan fish and chip restaurants. Here, as with everywhere else in Northumberland, virtually every human is being walked by a dog. This, surely the Good Boy capital of Europe, presents tremendous array of padding Labradors, strutting beagles and tottering Airedale terriers. It’s a never-ending supply of catnip for the sort of giddy reprobate who can’t resist bounding up to fuss other people’s dogs.

How many Farne Islands are there?

But the real wildlife lies just offshore on the Farne Islands, rocky clumps that have given sailors the cold sweats over the centuries and are now liberally dotted with lighthouses. No-one can quite agree how many of them there are, but Bobby Pearson, skipper of the Glad Tidings VI settles on: “There are 28 or 14, depending on the tide.”

He speaks with an incongruously cheery gruffness that appears to be the default setting in Northumberland. It’s no-nonsense, suffer-no-fools and not a word wasted, but pulled off in a sing-song manner that borders on jolly.

Puffins and Guillemots on the Farne Islands

The iconic birds of the Farne Islands – there were 39,362 pairs of puffins clocked in the most recent breeding season – have already departed for the year. The puffins will return to the same nests each year, but they spend seven to eight months at sea, taking a buffeting from the North Atlantic winds.

They may look adorable, but they’re seriously hardcore battlers. And the same applies to the other feathered residents of the Farnes. Arctic terns, for example, migrate between 25,000 and 49,000 miles each year.

Guillemots, meanwhile, indulge in the sort of parenting that should see their chicks taken into care.  When chicks are ready to fledge, the parent bird will wait on sea below and call encouragement to the ‘jumplings’. The littl’un then has to take a massive fly-or-die leap of faith from the cliff.

In breeding season, the sheer numbers of birds jostling for the good spots on the islands are astounding. One rock face can have 5,000 guillemots on it at any one time. And once you know that, you can understand why some cliffs are stained almost entirely white, like some sort of giant ablutionary carpet.

The seals of South Wamses

It’s not just about the birds, though. Bobby wrangles the boat round to South Wamses, an island that an awful lot of Atlantic grey seals call home.

It’s difficult to tire of watching seals. They are such consistent, unstinting entertainers. As the sea washes onto the rocks, providing a temporary grey-blue laminate blanket, one attempts to shuffle down into the water. This is not a graceful process. It pushes weight down on its front flippers, then drags its body along, heaving away until it can finally splosh off the edge.

Once in the water, cute takes over from clumsy. Heads pop out every now and then, scoping out what’s going on around them, like big-eared meerkats.

St Cuthbert and St Aidan in Northumberland

Humans haven’t just left the Farne Islands to the wildlife, though. Inner Farne, the nettle-covered main island where the National Trust rangers are based, is home to a gorgeous old stone chapel. It’s named in honour of St Cuthbert, one of the first hermit monks to stake out a base on the island in the 7^th century.

Cuthbert became the big celebrity – pilgrims still flock to Durham Cathedral to see his relics. But it’s his predecessor, St Aidan who played the pioneering role. In 634, he was summoned from the Scottish island of Iona by Northumbrian king Oswald. His task? To spread Christianity throughout the land. His base? Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island and, perhaps more ambitiously, the cradle of Christianity in England.

The isolation of Lindisfarne

There’s a certain romance about Lindisfarne that stems from its relative isolation. Access is determined by the tides, with warning signs relentlessly hammering home what tragedies could befall anyone who attempts to cross the causeway outside the published safe times. As a result of this, and the history of the island, there’s an expectation that Lindisfarne will be a deeply spiritual, mist-shrouded place, permanently soundtracked by The Best Of Enya and inhabited by monks who only break prayer to make prodigious quantities of mead.

Well, the mead part’s true. Rock up to St Aidan’s Winery on the island, and you can taste plenty of it. The darker version, made with honey from hives on the banks of the River Tweed, is the less sickly sweet incarnation.

Why there are no monks at Lindisfarne Priory

It’s not made by monks, though. Henry VIII saw to that, with the 16^th century dissolution of the monasteries. But the fact that there’s no monastic community on island is less surprising than the fact that there’s a village, where peoples everyday lives are at the mercy of the tides. There’s no shortage of work available, either – pubs, cafés, hotels and B&Bs seem to do a roaring trade, while fruit, veg and crab meat sandwiches are sold from ramshackle stalls on the way from the giant car park at the entrance to the village. It’s all very… normal.

Those in search of Enyaness will find adequate doses at the Lindisfarne Priory. The current version dates back to the 12^th century, but it’s on the site where St Aidan set up the initial monastery and the unknown artists created the Lindisfarne Gospels – an 8^th century masterpiece regarded as one of the most beautiful books ever made.

The priory is now a ruin, but a mighty evocative one. Arched windows fight the ravages of time that claimed the vaulted roofs. Foundation stones peep through grassy lawns. Elegant columns reach for the heavens.

Looking for answers on Lindisfarne

Slowly exploring Lindisfarne – browsing the English Heritage hub next to the Priory, mooching through the Lindisfarne Centre’s history exhibits, walking away from the village towards the fishing boats marooned on the harbour mudflats – starts to give answers to a puzzle that has been nagging away. Why on earth would such a remote, out of the way place be chosen as the springboard for the exciting product of launch of the Christian faith?

The peace and solitude thing makes sense. But surely there are places that provide such monastic brain space that aren’t so awkwardly far away from anywhere else?

The view to Bamburgh Castle

The view from by the harbour confirms the truth. Here, the retreating tide flows like river rapids through channels created by islets. But standing above one of the finest beaches you’ll see anywhere in the world, let alone Northumberland, is Bamburgh Castle.

Nowadays, the Duchy of Northumberland has its seat at Alnwick Castle, a lavish art-packed kid magnet that doubled as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films and crowns the honey-coloured market town of Alnwick. But back in the 7^th century, Northumberland was a kingdom much larger than the current county – the name basically means Land North of the Humber. And the king lived at Bamburgh.

Aidan wasn’t based at Lindisfarne because it was remote – he was based there because it was pretty close to the centre of the action, and in sight of the king. It was only when William the Conqueror arrived and systematically depopulated northern England that Northumbria went back to being the largely uninhabited wild zone beyond the Wall.

The Breamish Valley in Northumberland National Park

But before the Romans ventured in, thought better of it and drew a line at the edge of their mighty empire, there was life here.

The Breamish Valley largely rests inside the sprawling Northumberland National Park, which butts heads with the Scottish border. Otherwise, it is largely defined by the fact no-one’s really got round to building houses there, and thus it may as well be cordoned off as a National Park. The hills can’t quite decide whether they’re going to settle for gently rolling or up their game to be something more ambitious, while grazing sheep saunter around wherever the bracken isn’t too out of hand.

It doesn’t take too much puffing and panting along grassy tracks to the ridge line to discover that the sheep haven’t always had the valley to themselves. At the top of the exposed, windy hill are a suspicious number of rocks. Either nature has contrived to organise them all into a ring shape, or man has been meddling.

The mystery of the Brough Law Hillfort

The Brough Law hillfort is one of several in the valley. Look over to other hills and you can just about make out more. Each seems to sit in its own territory, with dykes and gullies marking boundaries, and faint circles on the ground are probably the remains of timber roundhouses. Some of the hillsides are clearly sculpted and cultivated, and further round there are piles of stones thought to be burial cairns. But aside from an estimated age – the Brough Law fort is thought to be around 2,300 years old – we know puzzlingly little about the ancient Britons that built it.

Weirdly, this feels far more mysterious than Lindisfarne. Continuing the walk, taking many a wrong turn and getting dirty looks from grandstanding Limousin cattle, throws up more questions than answers. The key borders here not physical – they’re chronological. The walls and national boundaries don’t cut the world off from truly wild Northumberland as much as the lack of written record does.

The largest man-made lake in the UK

A far more recent addition to the local landscape is Kielder Water. The largest man-made lake in the United Kingdom, it was created in the 1970s as a giant reservoir and hydroelectric provider for northern England. It is surrounded by tightly packed sitka spruce forest, much of which is grown, managed then chopped down for timber. For somewhere that has become a family-friendly beauty spot, it is weirdly industrial.

Infrastructural necessity and money-making may be why Kielder Water and the Kielder Forest exist, but this Machiavellianism is well hidden. The place is a great, big playground. Mountain bike trails of varying savagery are shrouded by groves of supersized Christmas trees. Trout fishermen putter around in little boats. Walking tracks lead to hides where red squirrels thrive in one of their last bastions against the relentless onward march of the invading greys.

But once the sun goes down, it all goes dark. Very, very dark.

Stargazing at Kielder Observatory

The area is part of the 572 square miles Northumberland International Dark Sky Park, an honour bestowed because the lack of development means there’s hardly any artificial light from streetlamps and buildings to get in the way. For the astronomers at the Kielder Observatory, this is marvellous news.

The hillside Observatory, which opened in 2008, looks like a Bond villain lair that has been designed by an ardent environmentalist.  It’s slender, elevated and made almost entirely out of wood. And, on the deck are telescopes trained on the moon, showing it off in all its pockmarked glory.

Space presentations at Kielder Observatory

The evening stargazing sessions here are complimented by the presentations. And Hayden Goodfellow wants to talk about the Northern Lights, which if you get really lucky, can be seen from Kielder. He starts off with some bad news – aurora borealis events can only realistically be predicted a couple of days in advance, and most photos of vivid green lights have been heavily Photoshopped. Don’t expect to see that with the naked eye.

But then the talk morphs into something wider-ranging, explaining how the light show starts with solar winds ejected from spots on the sun.

“The sun is 109 times the diameter of the earth,” says Hayden. “The Apollo 13 mission is the furthest man has ever been from earth. Take that flight path, and it would still fit three and a half times within the sun.”

What follows is an expansive, awe-provoking journey into distances and temperatures that seem unfathomable to the average human experience. The monumental ferocity of the sun seems a far, far cry from the horizon-prettying effects it can have far, far away.

Looking up to the heavens

The talk has a jolting, perception altering effect. Leaving the warm room for a shivering huddle next to the telescopes for a look at the night sky, the darkness is accompanied by silence. Everyone’s lost in galloping thought, their brains whirring like they’ve not whirred for years. Then, looking up, the whole Dark Sky Park advantage reveals itself – there’s a canopy of stars, thousands in view, and many billions beyond.

The scale and complexity of the night sky is overwhelming, and the thought that we’re alone in the universe suddenly seems absolutely absurd. Out there, amongst the loose band of zodiac signs, there is almost certainly someone throwing his tennis ball into the sea for whatever the Cassiopeian equivalent of an excitable Jack Russell is. And he too will be revelling in the moment of utterly blissful simplicity.

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This article was originally written for National Geographic Traveller UK.