Sunday 21st May 2023 In the industrial history of North East of England one of the most persistent themes involves the extraction of raw materials – particularly coal. However, since the last deep mine closed in 2005 most of the infrastructure has disappeared, making it difficulty to appreciate the industry as it really was. A …
Thursday 11th May 2023 I probably wouldn’t have thought about putting this relatively gentle cycling route together if it wasn’t for its fascinating historical context explained below. Because there are lengthy urban sections however, it’s advisable to avoid rush hours and school runs. Living in Durham, I chose to start closest to home, on the …
Sunday 7th May 2023 You should be able to spot Doddington easily on an OS map of North Northumberland: towering over the Milfield Plain, a few kilometres north-east of the historic market town of Wooler, it’s covered in the black gothic script used by the Ordnance Survey to indicate sites of antiquity. In an area …
Thursday 4th May 2023 There was a time when being in the North Pennines around Alston Moor would mean hard toil and long hours – sometimes in the face of the most extreme English weather. Today any physical hardship is likely to be self-imposed, purely recreational and timed carefully to fit in with the good …
Mothering Sunday, 19th March 2023 For those who may not know (and I recently counted myself as such) John Martin was a popular painter and polymath of the early c19th (1789-1854) who led an impressively productive life among contemporaries such as Turner, Constable and Ruskin. He lies buried in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, …
Monday, 21st September 2020 This afternoon, as part of my long-term, casual project to record the fortifications of Northern England and the Scottish border, I paid a quick visit to Staward Peel which, between 1272 and 1384, during the Scottish Wars of Independence and much of the Hundred Years War, was a virtually impregnable tower …
Saturday 5th September 2020 Historically, the counties and shires along the border between England and Scotland have seen their fair share of conflict. Never more so than during the medieval period when for several centuries, national armies and predatory familial bands known as Reivers would decimate those individuals or communities unfortunate enough to fall within …
Thursday 3rd September 2020 Although we’d put about three thousand miles on the tandem in 2019 including a 200-mile single day event, short tours in Holland and Belgium and a 3-week camping tour of the Dordogne, Lot and Tarn regions of France, a knee injury had curtailed much of Diane’s cycling in 2020 resulting in …
Sunday, 21st July 2019 As part of the conditioning process for an upcoming cycling holiday to France we felt it might be worthwhile taking the tandem around the Otterburn military training area in the heart of the Northumberland National Park. We’d tried the same route the weekend before but had only got as far as …
