Shipwrecks and Axework
Leaving my sweet clifftop campsite was like wire brushing a hemorrhoid.
The mesmerizing sunrise over the sea compounded my distress.
I had to suck it up to press onward, but the promise of Bamburgh castle beckoned, and Scotland dangled beyond. I'd never been to Bamburgh, which is unusual considering my love of medieval history: Bamburgh is one of the more famous strongholds in England, lying on the evocatively named 'Coast and Castles' cycle route, which I was to follow into the lumpy country of uptight religion, boiled offal, and the hair colour I've associated, since a traumatizing childhood experience, with the smell of rotting apple.
I'll withhold names to protect the guilty: the girl who sat in front of me in primary school, with hair like a burst mattress bonfire, had a habit of gnawing apples like a rodent, peeling away the skin first, then the flesh, ever so slowly, while it oxidized. Even at that tender age I couldn't help but internally scream Jesus Christ, it's turning fucking brown! Eat faster! but of course, manners brokered silence. One day, immediately after eating her smelly rotten fucking apple, she announced she needed to go to the lavatory, and promptly pissed herself right in front of me. I can remember the smelly rotten apple piss puddle like it was yesterday, spreading on the wooden floor beneath her chair.
Another time, again post nibbling, she told the teacher she felt nauseous, and was told to go to the bathroom. Halfway across the classroom she clamped a hand over her mouth and projectile vomited smelly rotten apple stomach mulch through her fingers, all over the front third of the class. Stephen King's Carrie had nothing on this lass.
I've never seen redheads, or apple sauce, or The Exorcist, the same way since.
Years later, while studying psychology at university, I discovered the mechanism of this prejudice, and swiftly moved to eradicate it. It didn't work. Powerful salience, these formative olfactory experiences.
Whitburn contd
I noticed, down on the beach, a substantial piece of driftwood.
It was obviously a ship's timber, and I'd love to have known its tale. One end looked to have been ripped off and a chunk out of the middle was burned away.
Oh, there was a story here alright. My imagination, ever eager to exert itself, leaped to compose a yarn of mountainous seas and heroic derring-do as I cycled along the modest cliffs into South Shields.
(I've since discovered two Spanish galleons shipwrecked here during a storm while fleeing from the English following the thwarted Armada invasion in 1588. This timber was most likely a remnant. The locals immediately plundered the wreckage (as you do) and much of the wood was used in the construction of several buildings. One of the ships' bells is apparently still installed at the local church. I don't know about you, but this kind of high adventure stuff makes me giddy as a schoolgirl.)
This 26 mile stretch of coast, from the Tees to the Tyne, is one of the most dangerous in the world. There are an average of 44 shipwrecks per mile, blighting the formerly intense maritime traffic in the region. One of the chief culprits is a range of rocks known as Whitburn Steel, now warded by Souter lighthouse (the first in the world to be powered by electricity) a mile north of my campsite.
Before the lighthouse was built in 1871, these rocks held the record for a single year, with 20 shipwrecks in 1860. Whitburners must've been rolling in lovely salvage. I'm surprised the world's first electric lighthouse didn't get accidentally smashed with a hammer whenever the weather turned.
Newcastle
I was to meet up with an old friend in Newcastle, but communication issues meant I didn't get hold of him until I was already on the Tyne ferry and committed to a day in the saddle.
The perfect weather helped persuade me not to spend the day idling: I wanted to be on the road, and I could always catch him on the way back.
The road through North Shields is characterized by gentrified residential developments in the pervasive dockland fashion. While it looks attractive, one can't help but sense the loss of industry and of Great Britain's ability to make stuff. Throughout history, countries have always relied on heavy industry as their economic backbone, but outsourcing to cheaper countries has obviously changed this dramatically: to what end remains to be seen. The simple fact is when you deflate the industrial heart of a country, you create a massively unemployed underclass. The irony is the people complaining about the hordes of shuffling dole zombies roaming former industrial regions are often the same people profiting from the transition.
Tynemouth
The mouth of the Tyne is guarded by the imaginatively named Tynemouth Castle, one of the largest fortified strongholds in England.
So big, it's got its own 7th century priory.
This was the home of Tostig Godwinson, Earl of Northumbria and brother to King Harold, and of course, doomed bad guy at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. By all accounts, the man was a heavy-handed twat, indelicately governing the volatile local blend of Norse and Saxon warlords to the point he was eventually banished by his father, King Edward the Confessor. Part of the problem was he came from a markedly different culture in the south, with a distinctly arrogant method of rulership compared to the more egalitarian north. The North-South Divide existed even then. Indeed, this is probably where it began.
Tostig burned my home town to the ground in 1066. He and his Grima Wormtongued conspirator, King Harald Hadrada of Norway (who quite honestly deserves a book of his own. Harald was a bad motherfucker in the Conan mould), came ashore with 300 ships at Scarborough on their way to York, seeking allies among the colonial Danes. They were met with defiance, so responded by pushing bonfires down from the clifftops onto the fortified fishing village below, cutting down anyone trying to escape.
(It's worth noting Tostig may have been otherwise motivated: Falsgrave Manor was one of the holdings of his earldom before banishment, then a separate village half a mile inland, now part of Scarborough proper.)
Blythe
The only thing I knew about Blythe was a lazily browsed TV documentary/reality show about people out on the piss in the town. If the programme is to be believed, the place is packed with blank-eyed twentysomething alcoholics conga-twerking between the gym, tanning bed and dance club. The kind of person, if I accidentally fell into conversation, I couldn't guarantee I wouldn't stab through the heart with a hiking pole. So I deemed it wise to breeze on through, but stopped in at the Morrisons. Feeling adventurous, I gathered the ingredients for a curry, concentrating on the value brands. I bought the cheapest tin I could find of beef madras, along with fresh augmenting vegetables (onion, carrot, garlic, ginger, and chilli pepper).
Cambois
I dismissed the fear of irradiating my testicles and camped under an electricity pylon just outside of Cambois, breaking out my hatchet Bumpkinslayer for the first time, to slaughter some perfectly innocent roots and saplings to make way for my tent. So this is what politics feels like.
Cooking up the curry took a while and I was shocked how much fuel I used in the Trangia. And it was quite mediocre. I'd made curry the same way before, but always with a premium brand, and they turn out much better. Duly noted.
Cambois is a curiously French-sounding name for an English colliery village. The unfounded rumour is it was formerly some kind of French colony. It's pronounced 'Cammus' by the locals, and probably derives from 'camus', which means bend or crook in Gaelic, likely referring to the shape of the bay. 'Cambion' is another Gaelic word, referring to a place of trade or exchange. The portmanteau 'Cambois' began to appear on maps around 1700. Before this it was spelled more phonetically.
Gaelic? I sense Scottish, Irish and Welsh readers gasp, in England?! Why yes. These places predate our respective antipathies.
The next day proved why the 'Coast and Castles' route is so named. I had no idea there were so many. I mostly cycled along coastal paths, alternating between remote and tiny villages, broad expanses of sheep-speckled coastal wilderness, and spectacular stone fortresses to remind of Britain's supremely violent (and therefore supremely interesting) past. I passed through Lynemouth and Cresswell, and lingered for a time in the very fetching Amble, with its small marina and port.
I stopped for a butcher's at the impressive Warkworth Castle, and while passing through the
quaint village below bumped into one of the MG rally guys from a few days ago. He beeped his horn and yelled across the road to me, 'You're going very slowly!' as he drove past. Downhill, I might add. I chastised his combustion-powered wimpery with some unnecessarily obscene body language.
Alnmouth
I stopped for the night in an empty field next to a lay-by just outside the very posh Alnmouth, overlooking their expansive golf course.
I cooked up some chow mein noodles to accompany a bag of prawn crackers, and got on with Battlestar Galactica, which was beginning to come to a head. I was impressed by the multilayered themes being explored, especially the integral links between patriotism, nationalism, and racism. This is the beauty of sci-fi: it can address complex and controversial issues coded in allegory, thereby sailing over the heads of the declawing censors, dumb-it-down advertisers, and offended internet commenters. Whenever someone says they don't like, or get, fantasy and sci-fi, especially after I've pointed them to the good stuff, I can't help but forever label them a fuckwit.
The next day I rose late and was on the road by 9.30 am.
I rode ten rough coastal path miles to Craster, having to navigate a frustrating number of hikers' gates, each one specifically designed, it seemed, to make passage with a bike trailer as inconvenient as possible. I was forced to unhook and haul over every time, like a Naval Gun Run for the Increasingly Unmotivated.
In the great scheme of things, these gates don't particularly rankle me that much because I've chosen to travel this way, but in the moment, many sheep, cattle, and elderly ramblers have heard the countryside echo with 'OH COME THE FUCK ON YOU CUNT!!'
And while we're on the subject of bike paths, these 'anti-horse' gates certainly don't seem to keep the horses out, and horses shit a hell of a lot more than dogs. We have all these rules in place about picking up dog shit with plastic bags, with special bins dotting pedestrian areas specifically for their disposal, but no one says a word about horse shit. We're talking a volume factor of fifty here, at least. I've mentioned this to more experienced cyclists, and they've dismissed horse shit as the price of cycling bridleways. Apparently it's less sticky and smelly, consisting mostly of grass or hay, so doesn't stick to your tyres so much, and sprays off far less readily. Very important, this, especially when hill-climbing around a corner with your mouth open.
Howick
Howick's coastal mesolithic remains are fascinating. Excavated in 2000 and 2002, archaeologists found remains of a 7,800 BC tepee-style hut, which they reconstructed at the time to get a better idea of the process.
.JPG)
They also uncovered an early bronze age (around 2,000 BC) cist cemetery containing five stone-lined graves, four of which were sized for infants.
The remains showed their diet consisted of pig and fox, nesting birds, shellfish and hazelnuts. Seal and fish were also likely. The cliffs supplied them with the ever-important flint for tools. At the time, of course, the sea was a couple of hundred yards further out.
Craster
Craster is a coastal fishing village allowing only residential traffic, with a large car park for everyone else on the single road in. This seems very theme parkish, but the place is lovely to look at and surprisingly lacking in bouncy castles, obesity, garish carnival lighting and the inbred. (Mind you, I was here early in the day so don't take this as gospel. It is a cul-de-sac, after all.)
.JPG)
.JPG)
Built on modest volcanic cliffs a mile or so south of the 14th century Dunstanburgh Castle ruins, themselves sited atop iron age remains, it's famous for its oak-smoked kippers, widely proclaimed as the best in the world.
.JPG)
.JPG)
I bought a cup of tea and sat for a while on a bench overlooking the tiny harbour to bask in the sun and demolish a packet of chocolate digestives. I didn't try the kippers.
I checked in at Dunstanburgh campsite for a couple of days to clean myself up and get some work done. It has a great view of the castle and the staff could not have been more accommodating, allowing me to use their office to recharge all my electronics before I set off again. Alas, I couldn't afford the time to get down to the beach or castle or explore the nearby pub because of a looming 5,000 word deadline. My entire time at the site was spent typing furiously away, stopping only to sleep, eat, shower and do laundry, and they even allowed me to stay well after my check out time to get finished. I can't recommend the place enough.
The mesmerizing sunrise over the sea compounded my distress.
I had to suck it up to press onward, but the promise of Bamburgh castle beckoned, and Scotland dangled beyond. I'd never been to Bamburgh, which is unusual considering my love of medieval history: Bamburgh is one of the more famous strongholds in England, lying on the evocatively named 'Coast and Castles' cycle route, which I was to follow into the lumpy country of uptight religion, boiled offal, and the hair colour I've associated, since a traumatizing childhood experience, with the smell of rotting apple.
I'll withhold names to protect the guilty: the girl who sat in front of me in primary school, with hair like a burst mattress bonfire, had a habit of gnawing apples like a rodent, peeling away the skin first, then the flesh, ever so slowly, while it oxidized. Even at that tender age I couldn't help but internally scream Jesus Christ, it's turning fucking brown! Eat faster! but of course, manners brokered silence. One day, immediately after eating her smelly rotten fucking apple, she announced she needed to go to the lavatory, and promptly pissed herself right in front of me. I can remember the smelly rotten apple piss puddle like it was yesterday, spreading on the wooden floor beneath her chair.
Another time, again post nibbling, she told the teacher she felt nauseous, and was told to go to the bathroom. Halfway across the classroom she clamped a hand over her mouth and projectile vomited smelly rotten apple stomach mulch through her fingers, all over the front third of the class. Stephen King's Carrie had nothing on this lass.
I've never seen redheads, or apple sauce, or The Exorcist, the same way since.
Years later, while studying psychology at university, I discovered the mechanism of this prejudice, and swiftly moved to eradicate it. It didn't work. Powerful salience, these formative olfactory experiences.
* * *
Whitburn contd
I noticed, down on the beach, a substantial piece of driftwood.
It was obviously a ship's timber, and I'd love to have known its tale. One end looked to have been ripped off and a chunk out of the middle was burned away.
Oh, there was a story here alright. My imagination, ever eager to exert itself, leaped to compose a yarn of mountainous seas and heroic derring-do as I cycled along the modest cliffs into South Shields.
(I've since discovered two Spanish galleons shipwrecked here during a storm while fleeing from the English following the thwarted Armada invasion in 1588. This timber was most likely a remnant. The locals immediately plundered the wreckage (as you do) and much of the wood was used in the construction of several buildings. One of the ships' bells is apparently still installed at the local church. I don't know about you, but this kind of high adventure stuff makes me giddy as a schoolgirl.)
This 26 mile stretch of coast, from the Tees to the Tyne, is one of the most dangerous in the world. There are an average of 44 shipwrecks per mile, blighting the formerly intense maritime traffic in the region. One of the chief culprits is a range of rocks known as Whitburn Steel, now warded by Souter lighthouse (the first in the world to be powered by electricity) a mile north of my campsite.
Before the lighthouse was built in 1871, these rocks held the record for a single year, with 20 shipwrecks in 1860. Whitburners must've been rolling in lovely salvage. I'm surprised the world's first electric lighthouse didn't get accidentally smashed with a hammer whenever the weather turned.
Disused lime kilns near Souter lighthouse
Newcastle
I was to meet up with an old friend in Newcastle, but communication issues meant I didn't get hold of him until I was already on the Tyne ferry and committed to a day in the saddle.
The perfect weather helped persuade me not to spend the day idling: I wanted to be on the road, and I could always catch him on the way back.
The road through North Shields is characterized by gentrified residential developments in the pervasive dockland fashion. While it looks attractive, one can't help but sense the loss of industry and of Great Britain's ability to make stuff. Throughout history, countries have always relied on heavy industry as their economic backbone, but outsourcing to cheaper countries has obviously changed this dramatically: to what end remains to be seen. The simple fact is when you deflate the industrial heart of a country, you create a massively unemployed underclass. The irony is the people complaining about the hordes of shuffling dole zombies roaming former industrial regions are often the same people profiting from the transition.
Tynemouth
The mouth of the Tyne is guarded by the imaginatively named Tynemouth Castle, one of the largest fortified strongholds in England.
So big, it's got its own 7th century priory.
This was the home of Tostig Godwinson, Earl of Northumbria and brother to King Harold, and of course, doomed bad guy at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. By all accounts, the man was a heavy-handed twat, indelicately governing the volatile local blend of Norse and Saxon warlords to the point he was eventually banished by his father, King Edward the Confessor. Part of the problem was he came from a markedly different culture in the south, with a distinctly arrogant method of rulership compared to the more egalitarian north. The North-South Divide existed even then. Indeed, this is probably where it began.
Tostig burned my home town to the ground in 1066. He and his Grima Wormtongued conspirator, King Harald Hadrada of Norway (who quite honestly deserves a book of his own. Harald was a bad motherfucker in the Conan mould), came ashore with 300 ships at Scarborough on their way to York, seeking allies among the colonial Danes. They were met with defiance, so responded by pushing bonfires down from the clifftops onto the fortified fishing village below, cutting down anyone trying to escape.
(It's worth noting Tostig may have been otherwise motivated: Falsgrave Manor was one of the holdings of his earldom before banishment, then a separate village half a mile inland, now part of Scarborough proper.)
Blythe
The only thing I knew about Blythe was a lazily browsed TV documentary/reality show about people out on the piss in the town. If the programme is to be believed, the place is packed with blank-eyed twentysomething alcoholics conga-twerking between the gym, tanning bed and dance club. The kind of person, if I accidentally fell into conversation, I couldn't guarantee I wouldn't stab through the heart with a hiking pole. So I deemed it wise to breeze on through, but stopped in at the Morrisons. Feeling adventurous, I gathered the ingredients for a curry, concentrating on the value brands. I bought the cheapest tin I could find of beef madras, along with fresh augmenting vegetables (onion, carrot, garlic, ginger, and chilli pepper).
Cambois
I dismissed the fear of irradiating my testicles and camped under an electricity pylon just outside of Cambois, breaking out my hatchet Bumpkinslayer for the first time, to slaughter some perfectly innocent roots and saplings to make way for my tent. So this is what politics feels like.
Cooking up the curry took a while and I was shocked how much fuel I used in the Trangia. And it was quite mediocre. I'd made curry the same way before, but always with a premium brand, and they turn out much better. Duly noted.
Cambois is a curiously French-sounding name for an English colliery village. The unfounded rumour is it was formerly some kind of French colony. It's pronounced 'Cammus' by the locals, and probably derives from 'camus', which means bend or crook in Gaelic, likely referring to the shape of the bay. 'Cambion' is another Gaelic word, referring to a place of trade or exchange. The portmanteau 'Cambois' began to appear on maps around 1700. Before this it was spelled more phonetically.
Gaelic? I sense Scottish, Irish and Welsh readers gasp, in England?! Why yes. These places predate our respective antipathies.
The next day proved why the 'Coast and Castles' route is so named. I had no idea there were so many. I mostly cycled along coastal paths, alternating between remote and tiny villages, broad expanses of sheep-speckled coastal wilderness, and spectacular stone fortresses to remind of Britain's supremely violent (and therefore supremely interesting) past. I passed through Lynemouth and Cresswell, and lingered for a time in the very fetching Amble, with its small marina and port.
I stopped for a butcher's at the impressive Warkworth Castle, and while passing through the
quaint village below bumped into one of the MG rally guys from a few days ago. He beeped his horn and yelled across the road to me, 'You're going very slowly!' as he drove past. Downhill, I might add. I chastised his combustion-powered wimpery with some unnecessarily obscene body language.
Alnmouth
I stopped for the night in an empty field next to a lay-by just outside the very posh Alnmouth, overlooking their expansive golf course.
I cooked up some chow mein noodles to accompany a bag of prawn crackers, and got on with Battlestar Galactica, which was beginning to come to a head. I was impressed by the multilayered themes being explored, especially the integral links between patriotism, nationalism, and racism. This is the beauty of sci-fi: it can address complex and controversial issues coded in allegory, thereby sailing over the heads of the declawing censors, dumb-it-down advertisers, and offended internet commenters. Whenever someone says they don't like, or get, fantasy and sci-fi, especially after I've pointed them to the good stuff, I can't help but forever label them a fuckwit.
The next day I rose late and was on the road by 9.30 am.
I rode ten rough coastal path miles to Craster, having to navigate a frustrating number of hikers' gates, each one specifically designed, it seemed, to make passage with a bike trailer as inconvenient as possible. I was forced to unhook and haul over every time, like a Naval Gun Run for the Increasingly Unmotivated.
In the great scheme of things, these gates don't particularly rankle me that much because I've chosen to travel this way, but in the moment, many sheep, cattle, and elderly ramblers have heard the countryside echo with 'OH COME THE FUCK ON YOU CUNT!!'
And while we're on the subject of bike paths, these 'anti-horse' gates certainly don't seem to keep the horses out, and horses shit a hell of a lot more than dogs. We have all these rules in place about picking up dog shit with plastic bags, with special bins dotting pedestrian areas specifically for their disposal, but no one says a word about horse shit. We're talking a volume factor of fifty here, at least. I've mentioned this to more experienced cyclists, and they've dismissed horse shit as the price of cycling bridleways. Apparently it's less sticky and smelly, consisting mostly of grass or hay, so doesn't stick to your tyres so much, and sprays off far less readily. Very important, this, especially when hill-climbing around a corner with your mouth open.
Howick
Howick's coastal mesolithic remains are fascinating. Excavated in 2000 and 2002, archaeologists found remains of a 7,800 BC tepee-style hut, which they reconstructed at the time to get a better idea of the process.
Photo from: research.ncl.ac.uk/howick/
Recreation. Photo from: megalithic.co.uk
Today
They also uncovered an early bronze age (around 2,000 BC) cist cemetery containing five stone-lined graves, four of which were sized for infants.
The remains showed their diet consisted of pig and fox, nesting birds, shellfish and hazelnuts. Seal and fish were also likely. The cliffs supplied them with the ever-important flint for tools. At the time, of course, the sea was a couple of hundred yards further out.
Craster
Craster is a coastal fishing village allowing only residential traffic, with a large car park for everyone else on the single road in. This seems very theme parkish, but the place is lovely to look at and surprisingly lacking in bouncy castles, obesity, garish carnival lighting and the inbred. (Mind you, I was here early in the day so don't take this as gospel. It is a cul-de-sac, after all.)
Built on modest volcanic cliffs a mile or so south of the 14th century Dunstanburgh Castle ruins, themselves sited atop iron age remains, it's famous for its oak-smoked kippers, widely proclaimed as the best in the world.
Dunstanburgh Castle
Disappointed to discover this was a natural volcanic formation
I bought a cup of tea and sat for a while on a bench overlooking the tiny harbour to bask in the sun and demolish a packet of chocolate digestives. I didn't try the kippers.
Gotta be aliens
I checked in at Dunstanburgh campsite for a couple of days to clean myself up and get some work done. It has a great view of the castle and the staff could not have been more accommodating, allowing me to use their office to recharge all my electronics before I set off again. Alas, I couldn't afford the time to get down to the beach or castle or explore the nearby pub because of a looming 5,000 word deadline. My entire time at the site was spent typing furiously away, stopping only to sleep, eat, shower and do laundry, and they even allowed me to stay well after my check out time to get finished. I can't recommend the place enough.
Comments
Post a Comment