Still time to book places on the Haltwhistle Walking Festival and enjoy great Northumberland hiking

Marjorie Baillie and her team run a great walking festival and I warmly recommend it. The west of Northumberland has great country to hike over. The dates are April 23-May 2. Full details here:
http://www.haltwhistlewalkingfestival.org/page17.html

Haltwhistle Walking Festival - April 25 - May 4th - come hiking in Northumberland this spring

Not too late to book and come along to the Norths top walking festival. Marjorie Baillie and all the volunteers lay on an amazing spectacle. Having walked through Northumberland on the all of the Hadrians Wall, The Isaacs Tea Trail, and the Pennine Way I can assure you there is no place better in the spring to come, pull on the hiking boots, and fill you lungs in Englands Montana. We have great B and Bs, pubs and tea shops to keep you going!   

Full details here: http://www.haltwhistlewalkingfestival.org/page19.html

Haltwhistle Walking Festival Autumn Programme now published - come along!

October 11th - 19th sees a packed programme of hikes for all ages and abilities. There is no festival like it - full details here: http://www.haltwhistlewalkingfestival.org/
Book now to avoid disappointment - I am going to try and go at some stage on the weekend of the 18-19th but diaries are always difficult, not least as the House is sitting.

See God's own county with the Haltwhistle Walking Festival

Some places still available on the 27 - yes 27 - different guided walks across south west Northumberland. All details here.
http://www.haltwhistlewalkingfestival.org/spring2014.html

You will not regret this. Great views, nice people, well organised, and plenty of tea shops and pubs to reward yourself with at the end of the day. It all starts next week, but there is nothing to stop you pulling on your hiking boots and coming to see us this Easter.

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."

Allen Valley Tourism

Great news on how South Tynedale is marketing itself as a number one tourist destination: it is an amazing spot for walking and fishing.
I have to put a plug in for the work of Roger Morris and the Heritage Centre, Allenheads who support and promote the local Isaacs Tea Trail walk:
http://www.northumberlandlife.org/teatrail

Similarly there is good news on fishing in the Allen Valley.
Funding has also been secured from Tyneside software company Sage, which will allow the new club to undertake significant conservation work on the river in the near future.
Fishing is for Salmon, Sea Trout and Brown Trout, and with the East Allen being a tributary of the South Tyne, it is, of course, a part of the best Salmon fishing river catchment in England! The club are now taking subscriptions for the 2012 season, which includes the right to fish the remainder of the 2011 season for free. Details on how to join, as well as loads more info (including prices of full membership, week and day tickets) can be found on the club website at
http://www.allenvalleyanglers.co.uk/