Easter events in Northumberland - hiking, food, gardens, the stars, a beer festival, top quiz and barrel racing

A good walk - you could go to Hadrians Wall http://www.visithadrianswall.co.uk/
But if you want 5 places to visit these would all make anyone's top spots:
- The Beach at Bamburgh - a great walk and a top castle
- Roman Vindolanda http://www.vindolanda.com/ = our best Roman and historical site
- Kielder Water and Forest Park: http://www.visitkielder.com/
They win awards all the time!!
http://www.visitkielder.com/news/2013/05/kielder-water-forest-park-officially-the-best-tourism-experience-in-engl-
- Alnwick Castle and its magnificent Gardens http://www.alnwickcastle.com/
For spring flowers then I would probably pick Cragside: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/cragside/
-It is a stunning house with amazing engineering everywhere and beautiful gardens filled with 40 miles of walks, rare flowers and so much more. It is a special place.
Two gastropubs holding spcial events:
- The Battlesteads Inn has a new observatory. It is a brilliant pub and has gone to great efforts to make itself a destination in its own right. Here is the report by the Courant: http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk/home/sky-s-the-limit-for-new-observatory-1.1202156
- The award winning Feathers Inn is showcasing so much this Easter that their festival runs for many days. If you have not been I urge you to go - it's won awards for its food and has a great community atmosphere: http://thefeathers.net/news/2014/12/bed-and-breakfast-special-offer/
There is a beer festival, and on sunday night Toby sets a mean quiz and it is a good night, and Monday sees the barrel racing.

And if you want to go to church then where better to go than Hexham Abbey: http://hexham-abbey.org.uk/

Supporting Hexham QEHS Students charity trip and buying Christmas presents at the great Hexham Abbey Christmas Fair

It was a pleasure to meet Amy, one of the QEHS students selling at the Hexham Abbey Christmas Fair and support her 2015 trip, and buy some of her Christmas presents [a very pretty candle in a traditional tea cup and saucer], which she is using to fundraise for the trip. This present is now safely wrapped under the tree. Thanks Amy, and good luck!

Chrismas Market in Hexham December 12-13 - put it in your diary

Friday December 12 - 2-8pm: 85 festive stalls, roller rink, pony rides, punch and judy, charity stalls, carols and so much more
Saturday December 13: 9-3pm sees Hexham Farmers Market, around 100 stalls, reindeer, music and fun for all the family
Sunday December 14: 5pm Carols in the Park
Really looking forward to it. I shall be doing my Christmas shopping in Hexham on Saturday afternoon for sure in between surgeries and events.

Christmas Markets galore over the next couple of weeks in Hexham - come along and shop local!

- The Christmas Fair is at Hexham this weekend in the Wentworth Saturday and Sunday 10-4
- Corbridge Middle School has a Christmas Fair 1-3 this Saturday
- Henshaw School have a Christmas fair between 11-4 Sunday 30th in the Village Hall
- Kielder Castle has a Christmas Fair on Sunday December 6th between 11-4
I will blog more on the Hexham Christmas Market on December 12th / 13th, which is the biggest of them all, and which takes place both in the town and around the Abbey, next week.

Delighted that Canon Dagmar Winter is to be the new Rector of Hexham Abbey

Religious leaders matter. Whatever the faith there is no doubt that the church, in its many forms, has a pivotal role to play in any society. This extends far beyond religious belief, faith and support. And the Tynedale faithful who go, in particular, to Hexham Abbey have been without a leader since Graham Usher was created the Bishop of Dudley. So the announcement of Dagmar's elevation is very good news. It is also a rare example of the Church promoting someone local from within the local clergy and they should be praised for this. I believe this is the right person in the right job at the right time.

Commemoration of World War 1 in Hexham

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in a packed Hexham Abbey as Northumberland came together to pay their respects and commemorate the bravery of our troops who went to France so full of hope in 1914 and thereafter. As we know the war was not over by Christmas 1914, and the lives of those who survived was one long struggle of death, mud, and a changing perception of the conflict.

I have never been to a more vivid or moving service. This was a seamless blend of theatre, church, military, interested parties, local community and supportive charities all coming together in a sacred place. Due praise must go to the organisers, particularly The Lord Lieutenants team, the many churchmen of differing faiths, and the rural Dean, Dagmar, who along with all the helpers at Hexham Abbey, made this event possible. Everyone I spoke to afterwards agreed that the use of the two outstanding actors to bring the tragic events to life was a resounding success.

The lessons to be learnt were many, not least that peace is precious and often very hard won. Security and freedoms can never be taken for granted. But the service did much to covey the full horror of what those who served endured for all of us. I believe very strongly that it is important that the children of our generation need to have an understanding of what went on 100 years ago; I am delighted that so many of our local schools have plans to take their schoolchildren to the battlefields and monuments so that they have a better understanding.
The events across Europe today to continue our awareness and commemoration and they are set out in more detail by the BBC below:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28632223

Hexham Abbey Church Service commemorating World War 1 4pm this Sunday

I shall be there - and we are welcoming the band of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, members of the Northumberland Theatre Company, and various military charities. The Abbey Choir are singing. I am really pleased that so many key local community organsations are also involved. This event has been really well organised.
It is very important that we remember those who gave their lives and the changes the war brought upon us as a country. It is sobering to think that so many of our local men from 16 upwards went away to the war never to return. We are indeed very fortunate not to face such a conflict today, nothwithstanding all the problems that we see around us.    

Eating festival and Spring Fair in Hexham this Saturday

Food, drink, arts, crafts, entertainment and much more available this Saturday from 9-4.30 in the town centre and abbey grounds.
Also taking place is an open studio at The Hearth in Horsley, which combines over a dozen key art and literary events ... with one of the best cafés in the county.

Rory Stewart Guest Post - Crossing Borders and tracing our history

Rory is one of the brightest of all our intake and wise on history. He is always worth reading or listening to and we enjoyed a great day hiking together recently at Epiacum. This is us shaking hands across the border between Cumbria and Northumberland. Enjoy his post. 

RORY Writes: "Cumbrians and Northumbrians must have felt isolated and marginalised fourteen hundred years ago. Agriculture had collapsed around them, the population had plummeted, there had not been a new road or stone building constructed in two centuries. Education, industry, and trade had collapsed. We were one of the most underdeveloped places in Europe or Asia.  But within just two generations our remote, sparsely-populated area was producing the greatest art, spirituality, and scholarship in Europe. Why? I wish I knew. But it was in part because our rural isolation was a strength not a weakness.We were transformed, first, by a new faith. Christianity arrived in heathen Northumbria and Cumbria in two ways: with charismatic Irish ascetics, travelling on foot; and with horse-born Bishops sent by the papacy. We were ideally placed to combine these rival traditions because we were always a frontier zone. When Hadrian’s wall was manned, we were half part of Rome, half outside it. We were never part of Roman urban civilisation – our landscape and culture was more like ‘barbarian’ 

Ireland. But we were surrounded by the great walls and forts of Rome, and had touched a wider European civilisation. We were transformed next by our curiosity. We sent scholars to Rome, and eagerly copied down all the knowledge with which they returned. When a Syrian arrived, scholars assailed him with so many eager questions, that a witness compared him to an old boar, fending off a pack of puppies. We learned from the best musicians, masons, glaziers, and scholars on the continent. We studied crisp carving, and orthodox images from foreign sculptors. Then we surpassed them. On the Bewcastle cross, for example, we worked a sun-dial across a petal, invented unprecedented flowers, and filled an entire frame with a mystical checker-board. But the dignity of the figures, and proportions of the composition, remained in the best classical tradition.

We were transformed ultimately by our capacity to use with confidence the energy of different traditions. We preserved some of the tone of our own pagan past. We emulated the purity and spirituality of Irish Christianity while abandoning its most outdated and discredited customs. We 

followed the latest models of Rome, but we lived ascetic lives, which world-weary Romans had thought no longer possible in the modern world.  Within forty years, as the Mediterranean declined, Northumbria and Cumbria were producing the greatest artists, scholars, missionaries, and statesmen in Northern Europe. Bede, the greatest historian of his age, and one of the finest late writers of Latin prose, came from a culture which had been, not long before his birth, almost illiterate.

St.Cuthbert – an Anglo-Saxon monk, born in what we now call Scotland, dying in what we now call England – was the ultimate symbol of our Middleland civilisation. He retained an almost pagan delight in animals – he was fed by sea-eagles, and communed with ravens. According to an eye-witness, he stood all night up to his neck in the sea to pray, and at dawn, otters came to lick the frozen saint back to life. On that island he suffered alone as a Celtic ascetic. But he had a great reverence for scholarship, acknowledged he was part of a broader European civilisation, and died as an orthodox bishop, encouraging his disciples to follow the customs of Rome. It was because of men like this, that the pope, looking for a missionary, turned to Northern England. This was why Charlemagne’s chief of staff was a Northumbrian.

Our Golden Age has never been easy to admire, or even remember. It left no Ziggurat of Ur, no Machu Picchu, or pyramid. Many of its most distinctive contributions lay in advances in religion and theology, which we struggle to understand. Even its most famous treasure – the illuminated pages of the Lindisfarne gospel – is not a public monument; it is a hand-written book in an alien language: the turn, of each page, hides the last, as it reveals the next. All that remains of the seventh century Hexham Abbey – once the greatest building of its kind north of the Alps – is a narrow crypt, made of grey-stone lifted from Hadrian’s Wall. Of the major Anglian monastery at Dacre, fit to be visited by Kings, no trace remains beneath the stone beasts in the churchyard. Yet, no other civilisation has come so quickly, from rural isolation, to dominate the imagination of a continent. None has made such unpromising conditions a more rapid catalyst for seriousness, and greatness. It was a golden age lived to its fullest in places, not just without cities, but without buildings: in the red sandstone cliff walls of the Eden, right down to Wetheral, or on the island in the lake at Derwentwater. At Lindisfarne it is easy to be transfixed by the ruined priory, with its purple columns, tapering, like sandstone pillars, scoured by desert winds. But that building was constructed centuries later. The real essence of the Northern renaissance lies further out to sea, in the faint shape of Inner Farne: a place defined by the iridescence of the water at first light, by seals, and by birds. St. Cuthbert’s final home."

Hexham Abbey takes another huge step forward

Pleased to see the appointment of a specialist building contractor to begin work on the Abbeys £3.2m restoration project. The restoration of the Abbey’s medieval monastery buildings will reunite the Abbey site for the first time in 500 years, following the removal of the monastery complex from the Church by Henry VIII in 1537.
Building work by York-based restoration specialist William Anelay is due to begin within the month. The ambitious project to redevelop the 13th Century monastery is a landmark in the Abbey’s 1,339-year history. It will be funded by a £1.8m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and funds raised by the congregation, the community and on-going applications to various grant-making trusts.
The Abbey was founded in 674 AD by St Wilfrid. It is home to many internationally renowned items including an original Saxon crypt which is thought to be one of only two intact Saxon buildings of its type in the world. The monastic buildings which adjoin the Abbey were taken over by Henry VIII in 1537. They then passed through various owners before being sold to the local authority, which gifted the buildings back to the Abbey as part of the project in 2012. Full credit to the NCC for their actions.
Proving that he thinks very long term, our Canon, Graham Usher said:
“We now have the opportunity to reunite this historic site and restore it to its full role in the community. It’s a tremendous project which will take this historic place into the next 1,000 years or so of its life.”
The Project will provide many things but in particular: 
• Permanent meeting spaces for both religious and secular groups.
• A large space for community activities, celebrations and events, including wedding receptions.
• Exhibition spaces to display the Abbey’s historic treasures.
• Interpretation spaces to tell the Abbey’s long and fascinating history.
• Educational areas where people of all ages can study the significance of the Abbey in more detail and explore contemporary social issues.
• Outdoor spaces where children can play and performances can be given.
• A herb garden and place for quiet reflection.
• Quiet areas for private study and contemplation.
If you have not visited, walked around or worshipped in this wonderful building I urge you to do so. It is the jewel in Hexham's crown and a place for contemplation and so much more.