We're back. On balance, there would have been enough time to write the blog, and I rather missed it, but once I'd started then I'd have had to worry each day in case we were going to get back too late for there to be time to post before going out to eat, or to the pub. As it is you will get the distilled highlights of interesting things to do in the north, free of observations on what the traffic on the A1 was like, the weirder foibles of the in-car navigation system, or the difficulties of cooking in a strange kitchen.
The Beamish is a very, very good museum. It describes itself as the living museum of the north, and has a collection of buildings, mostly moved from other sites, that show Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian life and work through a high street, a pit head, a real drift mine, miners' cottages, vintage vehicles, a farm, school and chapel. It is very fully staffed and there is a lot going on. We visited at a weekend to be on the safe side, and all sorts of machines were in steam, including the vast 1855 pit engine, a reproduction Georgian industrial train, a traction engine powering a Victorian threshing machine, and several coal ranges on which women were actually cooking. You can ride on the vintage trams and buses, and go a little way down the drift mine. There are heavy horses, and we saw a demonstration of horse ploughing. The staff and volunteers are knowledgeable, friendly, and astute at working out when you would like to be told more about something, so having commented to each other on the overhead system for moving cash around the Co-op grocery store we were treated by the cheerful woman behind the counter to a demonstration of it actually working. We spent all day there, only leaving because we were tired of walking about rather than because we'd seen everything. Tickets are valid for a year, and if it weren't so far from home we'd certainly be repeat visitors. It is brilliant.
At the other end of the scale is the Morpeth Chantry Bagpipe Museum. I have wanted to visit that ever since hearing on Radio 4 that there was such a thing as a bagpipe museum. It is not very big, and contains mostly glass cases containing different sorts of European pipes, plus photos and memorabilia of famous pipers. The explanations about quite what distinguishes Northumbrian from Uilleann or French bagpipes were not honestly very clear, but after buying the souvenir booklet for £4.95 I more or less got the gist. The museum itself is free, and it has a small but useful gift shop containing CDs of traditional music from Northumberland, probably the most beautiful and distinctive regional English folk music. The museum opens all week, at least in September, though you'd be hard pushed to discover that from their website.
Just up the road from Morpeth is the Woodhorn Museum, which occupies the site of one of the former pits in the area. This one is also free, and there are displays about working life underground, and family and social life above ground. Though pretty bitter about the pit closure, as you'd expect, the displays acknowledge that the tight knit communities were starting to alter by the 1960s, as social mores changed and new industries developed. At Woodhorn I learned how you prove what time your racing pigeon returned to its loft: answer, at the start of the race you are given a sealed timer to take home, and a token that you put on the bird's leg. If and when the pigeon returns you put the token into the timer, which stops it. There is a collection of paintings by the Ashington group or so-called Pitmen Painters on display, none of which stand out as great works of art, but all of which are interesting, for the scenes of life they portray, and the visible influences of famous painters of the day. Amateur art, like TV adaptations of historic novels, reflects the age in which it is made. Also there are red squirrels at Woodhorn. We saw three hanging on a peanut feeder by the kiosk at the entrance to the car park.
Cragside is a National Trust property. The house, a sort of Arts and Crafts cum gothic creation with a touch of Swiss chalet, is a building of quite startling ugliness. It was the home of a Victorian industrialist who made his money in armaments, and was the first domestic house in England to be lit by hydroelectricity. You can go and see the engine house with its dynamos and switches, and various educational toys designed to demonstrate the principles of hydroelectric power. The house clings to an extremely steep hillside which holds a rather wild rockery, and on slightly more level ground a distance away is an immaculately tidy garden with dahlias and some quite good tender and permanent planting for late colour. My favourite bits of the house itself were the plumbing and the tiles. There is a whole suite of bathing facilities, with a conventional bathroom, a steam room, and a plunge bath, first used in 1870 and lined with blue and white Delftware, with a mahogany framed splashback of tiles probably from Utrecht. The upstairs corridors are lined to waist height with cuenca tiles, which have coloured glazes separated by ridges.
I am indebted for the information on the tiles not to the National Trust, but to my Tile Gazetteer, Lynne Pearson's Guide to British Tile and Architectural Ceramics Locations. What do you mean, you don't take a Tile Gazetteer on holiday with you? It is very useful thing to have in your luggage. I got mine at the Ironbridge museum, in the year of the Northern Rock bank run. I am afraid that the National Trust did a rather poor job of explaining the houses in its care, on this trip. We also visited Wallington, ancestral home most recently of the Trevelyans, which was an early gift to the Trust. It is a pleasant house, but the experience of visiting it is frankly bewildering. You enter through a modest door into a medium sized room full of china cabinets, go down a corridor lined with photographs of servants, find yourself in a roofed over central courtyard painted with late Victorian murals, go into another ground floor room that contains a collection of dolls' houses, get to the kitchen, and upstairs are allowed into a bedroom, a room full of toys, and a museum. Laminated information sheets in the rooms give you some information about some of the objects on display, and in the kitchen an eager volunteer guide asked if we'd been around the grounds and seen the ice house. We said that we hadn't, and she told us about the ice house anyway, and then told us about the ice cabinet in the kitchen which we hadn't been showing any interest in, but I had a flavour of how the guest at the wedding feast might have felt as the Ancient Mariner launched forth.
We eventually pieced together something of the history of the house, based on what we could see on the day, some prior architectural knowledge, and a session with Wikepedia afterwards. It was a pretty old site of habitation, with with a hall house built around an ancient Pele tower, which was replaced by a Palladian structure, then remodelled in the nineteenth century to cover the central courtyard and build a grand staircase. The staircase is not a total success, because it is attached to what had become a Victorian atrium, so instead of landing in a grand hall with big external doors leading to a portico it finishes in a rather tight corridor. Looking on the bright side, it means they kept the Georgian facade. The whole thing is grade I listed, and there is some extremely nice and lively plasterwork in two of the older reception rooms. But why couldn't the National Trust tell us that? Likewise, we argued fruitlessly as we walked around the delightful walled garden whether it had been built as a pleasure garden, or was originally productive, and I eventually found out the answer after we'd got back to our flat, once I had access to the internet and half an hour to spare searching. Nor would you know from the National Trust's interpretive material that Capability Brown hailed from those parts, knew the Wallington estate as a boy, and was involved in its redesign early in his career.
We went to Howick Hall Gardens. This was Roy Lancaster's top pick among Northumberland gardens when he visited the plant centre and the boss introduced him to the staff, and I asked his advice on gardens to visit. It has belonged to the same aristocratic family for aeons and they have been keen gardeners, to the extent of collecting seed in the wild in Asia. Howick is the plantsman's choice of garden in the north east. We saw some very interesting trees, and had a pleasant walk around, but it was not quite what I'd expected. While I knew we'd be too early for autumn colour, I was hoping for a few more Sorbus and their coloured berries, but they don't seem as keen on Sorbus at Howick as they were at Hergest Crost, back in the year of the run on Northern Rock. Nor was I expecting quite so much recent planting. In a mature garden there will always be areas that need renewing, but there were a quite startling number of young trees and shrubs at Howick, some struggling among the grass and bracken in wire netting cages, and some in opaque plastic rectangular tubes that made areas of the garden look as though it was littered with cardboard boxes.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we saw high horticulture at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, which we visited by dint of taking the train from Berwick upon Tweed. Every tree at Edinburgh botanical gardens occupies its own immaculately weeded and mulched space, and is labelled, and beautifully pruned. There are some very rare trees, an enormous rockery, and the most wonderful collection of glass houses. For the first half hour I felt quite hysterical with anxiety that I wouldn't be able to see everything in a day, before relaxing and having a marvellous time. Entry to the gardens is free, apart from the glasshouses, which are worth every penny of the fiver they will cost you. If I lived there I'd go every week.
While we were in Edinburgh we visited the recently refurbished Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which is an amazing piece of high Victorian gothick, with murals of medieval romance all over the main hall, and at the moment an interesting exhibition of war paintings by Lavery. It's good, if you're in Edinburgh.
In Alnwick itself we looked at the castle and garden. Tickets are valid for a year, which would be handy if you lived closer than a six hour drive away, since they are eye-wateringly expensive at twenty four quid for a combined ticket. However, both are brilliant and again if we lived closer we'd be regular visitors. The castle has got proper battlements, and a bastion, and all of those castle bits, and while there is some Harry Potter theming it isn't too obtrusive, which is nice for those of us who are not fans of the boy wizard. The State Rooms are an incredible display of bling, but done very well, with more colour co-ordination than you always see in explosions of aristocratic Georgian opulence, and a superb art collection. As we looked at the Titians, and the Canalettos, I thought how interesting it was seeing them in their natural habitat, the home of a rich patron, rather than gathered together in a temporary display in a London gallery. There is a little museum devoted to the Northumberland Fusiliers, and a lot of history of the Percy family, though I found that five hundred years of politics, warfare and the development of the modern British army in one visit was a bit much to take on board in one go.
The gardens are fantastic. We went twice. There is a fashion for dismissing them by saying that they are not real gardens, but a theme park, and that they are vulgar. Indeed, some of the criticisms of the Duchess of Northumberland are positively vitriolic, which I think is deeply unfair. You may if you wish display your credentials in the horticultural good taste stakes by claiming to prefer Howick. The two are trying to do completely different things, so you might as well say that you prefer Beamish. The Alnwick gardens are glorious. The cascade is spectacular and great fun, a great noisy torrent of water, with jets shooting up, and sideways, in an elaborate programme. I defy anybody with even a modicum of fun in their heart not to enjoy the cascade. This is the tenth anniversary of the gardens, and the cascade still looks very new, and I thought it would look pleasant when it had mellowed and weathered, with some ferns, then thought that all cascades were new once, and this was the nearest I was going to get to experiencing the raw power of an Italian nobleman's Renaissance garden. I don't think ferns will grow anyway, as it smells chlorinated. I case of Legionnaires's disease, presumably.
The formal gardens in the old walled garden were by Belgian designer Jacques Wirtz, and I think remain the only example of his work in the UK. They are in the late twentieth century style, internal dividers of hedges and pleaching, rills, no grass. There were still lots of things in flower this late in the season, and lots of birds. I noticed many of the beds were edged with what looked like very recent plantings of Ilex crenata, and wonder if box blight had struck. Also, some small leaved Ilex hedging I remembered from our previous visit was not there, so either that failed or my memory is wrong. We enjoyed wandering around the walled garden a great deal, though if you don't like Alnwick you will dismiss it as mostly being done by Jacques Wirtz's sons, or containing garden centre plants.
The conducted tour of the poison garden was fun as well, and I learnt several new facts about plants, despite knowing more about them than most people to start with, so I should say our guide knew her stuff, plus she didn't tell us anything that I knew for a fact was wrong. Also there is a large collection of stainless steel water sculptures, each occupying its own space in a sort of maze, and each illustrating some physical property of water, surface tension, pressure and so on. They had the slight air of the Duchess having gone mad with a cheque book at the Chelsea Flower Show and bought one of every stainless steel water sculpture on offer, but they were nice. I liked them. Science and big shiny things, what's not to like?
The refreshment area at Alnwick occupies a vast space in the middle ground in front of the cascade, which I think makes a deliberate point, that this is a palace of fun, a garden built for people to use. Equally, from the refreshment area you get a great view up the garden, and if you arrive when the doors open, out of season, on a wet morning, you can have it all to yourself. When the gardens are busy you are faced with timed entry tickets, and the whole experience is probably not so good.
For our final visit we went to a private garden, built over the past 36 years by its owners. Herterton is a small, modest miracle of topiary, stonework and meticulous design. We were the only visitors, and were greeted by one of the owners, so have now met at one remove the great Margery Fish, whose books were one of my formative gardening influences, in reprint and I suspect via the garden where I grew up, whose original owner I believe in retrospect must have been a Fish enthusiast. Herterton looks as though it had been there for centuries, and goes to show what you can do in three decades with box and yew, even seven hundred feet above sea level in the far north of England.
Before disappearing to the north we spent my birthday visiting Orford Ness, a fascinating place, but that is another story. We ate some nice food in our travels as well, but there's no time for that now either.
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