Today’s weather guess was not great with a 60-80% chance of rain from about 11:00. Not wishing to sit in Frodo all day getting stir-crazy we donned suitable clothing, including waterproof jackets, packed umbrellas and set off on our familiar path back into Berwick.

We began by calling into one of the Northern Edge coffee roaster shops to top up the caffeine levels and help kill time before the lunch gong rang. Their coffee is excellent though I find the company logo/artwork something of an intrigue – a skeletal arm with its pinkie raised holding a cup of coffee.

To kill more time, Francine wanted to revisit a wool shop. When we entered, the lady proprietor was sitting at a treadle spinning machine, which she said hailed from New Zealand, spinning wool from ‘stuff’ supplied directly from the mills. She spins all her skeins herself. Francine bought a skein of a colour that appealed to her for a knitting project at home.

Jennie’s wool studio stocks a whole array of tweeds and we had wondered if the term tweed was associated with the River Tweed. Apparently not; it was originally a misspelling/misreading of the Scottish tweel (meaning twill) and the name caught on.

We had almost killed enough time for our intended restaurant to open for lunch at 12:00, so made our way there slightly circuitously to kill the extra few minutes. Our target was a Turkish restaurant called Mavi, right opposite Atelier at which we had eaten yesterday. Here our choice was easy – they did a Mavi Platter to share which came with your choice of a bottle of house wine, either white or red. We chose the Pinot Grigio white and very decent it was too. The food was good as well, and did not let us down. The platter was essentially a mezze mixture including, humus, cacik (like tzatziki), falafels, a beetroot salad called pancar, some sausage and something resembling spring rolls. It was perfect for lunch.

Spits of rain began as we were in Mavi eating lunch. We started back and the light rain was little trouble so we returned to Frodo unscathed. Once inside, though, the rain began in earnest at 15:00. We had timed our trip well, or had simply lucked out.

Today’s forecast expected a largely dry day with some brighter spells happening. It’s just a spit over a mile on an interesting walking route from our campsite into the town centre of Berwick itself, so after a casual breakfast of yogurt and fruit, off we set.

Berwick’s Elizabethan bastioned town walls remain completely intact, are 1¼ miles long and can be walked around. [There are fragments remaining of older walls dating from Edward 1.] We started by crossing Old Bridge over the Tweed into the town. Old Bridge is two way for pedestrians but is one way to traffic, being open only to those driving out of the town. This pair of pedestrians was intrigued by an old sign which seemed to refer to pedestrians as “foot passengers”.

Having foot-passengered our way across the bridge we hung a right onto part of the town walls. We soon came across another sight of interest in the Main Guard, an 18h c. guard house. It contains an officers’ room, soldiers’ room and a “black hole” for miscreants [that has to be one of my favourite words]. What was most interesting about it was that it had been moved in 1815, just 10 years after the Battle of Trafalgar. Moving an entire stone building manually back then must have been quite some undertaking.

Berwick has what seems to be an iconic rather striking lighthouse – it’s red and white – out on the end of a long pier, originally constructed as a breakwater protecting the mouth of the river Tweed, We were heading for the walk out along the pier. More interesting to me was the collection of Eiders swimming about in the estuary itself. [Phone camera completely inadequate.]

‘T was time to scout out a lunch location. This is always a bit of a trial when you are unfamiliar with the establishments. We briefly flirted with a bistro which initially looked as if it had tapas but didn’t. We spotted a Dean’s Deli but that is now permanently closed. We ended up, rather luckily, at Atelier:

… a unique café, bar and restaurant … serving a range of British and European charcuterie, cheese and antipasti paired with craft beverages

We were lucky in that Atelier is very popular, modestly sized and busy. After a small round of musical tables we ended up sitting at the bar, which was actually quite entertaining, to destroy our sharing Seasonal Platter of charcuterie and cheese.

Beside the Atelier café itself is Atelier’s deli including a range of cheeses which, of course, I couldn’t resist. If you get a chance to sample some Doddington cheese, made at Wooler in Northumberland, do try it.

On the afternoon of our arrival, Francine had wandered down to the local Spittal Beach and found a wonderfully minimalist line up of that iconic Berwick lighthouse which she snagged on her phone camera. Having failed to get a long exposure of the water and rocks with Dunstanburgh Castle in the distance, I fancied a go at this lighthouse increasing the minimalism by smoothing the sea with the Big Stopper. We eventually left Atelier and foot-passengered our way back across Old Bridge in very pleasant sunshine.

We got back to Frodo to collect camera and tripod, then walked back downhill to Francine’s vantage point for the lighthouse.

Being red and white, Berwick lighthouse really needs sunshine on it to bring it alive. In shade, it looks as flat as a pancake. Enter landscape photographers curse: exactly as I arrived at the beach and extracted my tripod, in went the sun, covered by an extensive dark cloud. The lighthouse was transformed into a dull pancake. “Bother”, said Pooh, crossly. I got my kit set up, nonetheless, then sat down on a tuft of grass and waited, hoping for a break in that bloody cloud.

Some of the beach walkers, often with a dog, were gracious enough to pause, having spotted the tripod and camera. We thanked them and waived them through since nothing was happening. Francine kept an eye on the cloud, my back being turned, and, after about 30 minutes thought that a glimmer of hope might be approaching. Fingers firmly crossed, we began watching a sunlit patch work its way along the pier leading to the lighthouse. The patch of light finally hit the lighthouse itself and the red and white came alive. [CLICK: 20s @ f16] Not really being able to see quite what I was getting, I took several adjusting the settings and picked the best.

There were some old groynes a little way along the beach. With the tide now ebbing, these gave me a chance to have a go with my camera’s built in neutral density filters to slow down the water’s backflow. I didn’t know what I was doing but it was a bit of fun. I did it handheld and it would certainly have been better tripod mounted. The effect was interesting, though.

This had been a much more successful photographic experiment than Dunstanburgh, happily.

Today we were moving on to Berwick-upon-Tweed. Earliest check in time for our new site is 13:00 and we needed to leave our Dunstan Hill campsite by about 11:00, So, with about a 1-hour drive, we’d need to kill some time somewhere.

First, though, we occupied ourselves before departure time by lugging my camera bag and tripod bag down to the beach at Embleton Bay, once again, thinking that mid-tide [about 10:30] might give us water sloshing around the rocks. However, when we arrived the flooding tide was still way short of the rocks. Francine, however, found me a photogenic formation of green shelves pointing out to sea to play with. I got what I think is one decently illuminated shot before the light faded and the shelf became rather dull. Still, one is all you need.

We wound our way back once again into a headwind and packed up Frodo getting him ready for the road. Taking the slower coast road, since we were not in a hurry, we picked our way through Beadnell followed by Seahouses, failing to find a decent stopping point. Eventually we found a decent roadside parking area with a few cars and spaces available. We bailed out. A style led over a fence, through some long grass and down onto the beach just opposite Inner Farne. We were just a spit south of Bamburgh Castle.

On the beach we had a good view of Inner Farne and some of the rock formations on the coast made for an interesting photographic subject. We meandered up and down the sand for half an hour or so, occasionally being sandblasted as the now familiar wind whipped the grains up into a storm. We were here once before many years ago and I well remember the sand blowing across the shore then.

We’d killed almost enough time so we returned to Frodo to continue our short journey. Bamburgh itself was heaving, not unexpectedly. I’m going to make myself very unpopular by calling Bamburgh Castle an ugly lump of a building. Attractive it ain’t so I was quite happy to keep driving straight through but we noted that there were a few parking areas that accepted motorhomes had we wanted to stop. Bravo!

Eventually we ended up in Berwick itself where, to use a little more time, we called in the the local ASDA which had a handy-dandy fuel station. We’ve driven 300 miles all the way from home and still had 3/8ths of a tank, which was quite pleasing. Topping up the fridge after topping up the tank completed our stop.

We checked-in shortly after 14:00 and chose our pitch. Our neighbours were absent and their caravan awning was doing its best to be absent as well. Two of three poles were down and the canopy was flapping alarmingly in the strong wind. I reset the two naughty poles and tightened the guy ropes. One pole remained upright but the middle pole once again collapsed. Our neighbours finally returned and wisely decided to take the awning down altogether.

The winds in these parts really have been brutal for the week that we’ve been here.

Frodo’s grey water drain tap is completely blocked yet again. We’d bought a bottle of motorhome-friendly grey waste tank and pipe unblocker and poured some in before driving up here. My suspicion is that it has started to break crusty bits off the inside of the tank and that those bits are now flowing into and blocking the pathetically narrow drain tap. Once again, I was lying on the ground manually draining the waste tank. JOY!

Waste tank duly drained, we decided on another coastal walk to, surprisingly enough, another pub. This time we headed north from our campsite on the coast path up to Low Newton to visit the Ship Inn. The route took us mainly around the Embleton golf course but we managed to avoid being hit on the head by a golf ball. Francine, having a thing for beach huts, was distracted by some in the sand dunes surrounding the golf course. They are actually Embleton Links bungalows and were erected by golfers wishing to stay in the area. They’ve now been gifted to the National Trust.

After about three miles we arrived in Low Newton-by-the-Sea where we found a very attractive setting for the pub, a sort of courtyard affair surrounded by white cottages. We wandered up to the pub which was manically busy where I joined a very slow-moving queue for the bar. I do wish people wouldn’t keep ordering coffee – it’s labour intensive and takes far too long. I very nearly gave up; life is too short. I did eventually get served and ordered a couple of crab sandwiches to go with our drinks.

There are far too many dogs on this planet and most of them seemed to be here at the Ship Inn today. One particularly hyper King Charles Spaniel seemed intent on barking at anything that moved and set off the rest of the pack in a raucous cacophony. Nothing a hefty tap on the head with a shillelagh wouldn’t fix, I’m sure.

With what seemed like more dogs than people, and there were too many of those, after our drinks we made our way back along the coast path again to return to the relative sanity of Frodo. It was blowing a friggin’ gale again, which I am finding very tiresome.

When we returned we found that we had been joined by another amusing camping unit. This one was a clearly elderly caravan but oh my what a colour. I couldn’t quite work out whether this was the original colour or whether it had been given a respray. If it had been a respray then it was a plum crazy choice of colour. What really amused me was putting a wheel clamp on it, as if anyone would want to nick it. {Maybe it’s a collectors item.]

There was another interesting arrival but this one actually looked quite cute. I didn’t get close enough to find out what it was/is. That tow car wouldn’t even know it was there.

Well, it is that time of year, even this year which has seen record-breaking heat and drought in many parts. Whereas pretty much all the grass down south is crispy brown, it is noticeable up here in Northumberland that the sheep in the fields have green grass to eat. Some of what kept it green arrived mid morning in the form of some moderately heavy rain.

So, our morning was spent keeping Frodo company and staying dry. The highlight of the morning was seeing the back of the unsociable wood burning stove and tent as it pulled out and moved on. We’d be able to breathe easier.

Our afternoon was forecast to be drier and a little brighter and so it turned out. We went to stretch our legs with a walk along the road to Embleton, a shade over a mile away. There is a route through the adjacent woodland, complete with treacherous, slippery tree roots, followed by a footpath through a field. Given the morning’s rain, though, dicing with that was unappealing so we dodged traffic instead.

We had a quick exchange with the waiting campsite staff as we prepared to walk out. Given the weekend exodus we thought they’d have a quieter day. Not so, they were expecting 45 arrivals. Yikes! Camping in France really quietens down half way through September with about 50% of the campsites closing down and here we are still as busy as ever.

There’s a village farm shop in Embleton that is open on a Sunday until 17:00. That gave us a little interest, as well as a reason for the walk, on what would otherwise have been a closed kind of day. We invested in a pot of Grey Poupon mustard, just in case I ended up making one of Frodo’s Stroganovs, and I couldn’t resist a pack of Bamburgh Bangers – good sausages are so hard to find and these just may fit the bill.

On the entertainment front of an otherwise dull day, we’ve had an amusing VW Campervan turn up. The red pop-up roof surround atop a blue van was bad enough but when the windscreen cover went on …

There are bus stops right outside the entrance to our campsite. Buses to and from Alnwick are more or less every 2 hours. We decided to go for the bus at 09:30 which would get us in at 10:15, planning to return on the 14:10 departure from Alnwick bus station. Quite what I was going to do in a town for four hours remained a bit of a mystery.

Modern bus travel, in some areas at least, is interesting. Francine was able to watch our intended bus making its way along the coast road towards our stop on a (mostly) live map on her phone. I’ve managed a similar trip from my favourite Norfolk campsite to ride into Norwich. The bus, a double decker, duly arrived and we got an upstairs front seat to watch the countryside go by.

The bus called in to Craster, which was an interesting side trip. It’s a there-and-back route requiring the bus driver to perform a 3-point turn at a junction of roads in Craster so that he can drive back out the way he came in. Once in Alnwick itself, the bus turned left to avoid the attractive low archway in the old town walls. We duly arrived at Alnwick bus station right outside a Morrisons supermarket.

Francine was familiar with Alnwick. Our first port of call was walking back to Barter Books which we had driven past on the way in. Barter Books is described as:

A rambling, quirky, secondhand book store with open fires, armchairs, model trains and a simple café.

Barter Books is built in what was a grand old railway station – grand due to the presence of the Dukes of Northumberland and Alnwick Castle, apparently. Much of the premises is built on what were the old station platforms, now enclosed. We headed for the “simple café” to top up our caffeine levels following our morning bus ride.

I’m not a great one for browsing endlessly at books on shelves so this was, for me, something of a very pleasant but alien environment. There were two computer terminals provided for searching if you knew what you were looking for but other than that wandering aimlessly browsing would appear to be the way forward. I did have an aimless wander and spotted a 2-volume set of books on British Beetles dating from, I think, the late 1950s. It was selling for a cool £120 or so. I wasn’t tempted but, being two volumes, it did put me in mind of the old adage that “God had an inordinate fondness of beetles”, there being almost 400,000 species worldwide.

What to do next? We left Barter Books and began our return walk back through the archway on the town walls. A market was on in Market Square. Other than a fruit and veg stall, I saw little else to entertain me, however.

I was intent on looking at the various hostelries in search of a likely lunch venue. Alnwick has a local brewery so I was keen to avoid the endless parade of ubiquitous Eurofizz pumps – Peroni, Moretti, and the like, along with one of the more recent marketing cons,  Madri – “El Alma de Madrid”. It was developed and is brewed by Molson in the UK having never seen anything of Madrid. Molson does, though, have a stake in a Toledo craft brewer, La Sagra, and I believe that two of their brewers may have had some input into the recipe.

For lunch, we eventually settled on The Market Tavern which had its own label Amber beer brewed by the Alnwick brewery and very good it was, too. The kipper paté for a light lunch was also very good.

Well fed and watered, we eventually made our way back to the bus station via a somewhat disappointing Morrisons supermarket. Failing to find any ingredients that appealed, we invested £6.99 in a ready roasted chicken, clearly not free range, to save on the cooking later. It’s amazing how being lazy makes you lower your standards. Unlike most French rotisseries, there was no free range option.

Our bus ferried us back to the campsite via another 3-point turn in Craster. We even managed to spot the correct bus stop on unfamiliar roads, though clearly seeing the array of camping units from the vantage point of the upper deck helped.

I found more on the accursed wood burning stove in the tent, of which there are a distressing number available. One piece of splendid advertising bollocks includes the claim:

… and the long flue helps to transport smoke and fumes away from the cooking area.

That’s as maybe; it may well transport the smoke and fumes away from your cooking area. What it certainly does is transport the smoke and fumes into the cooking and living areas of your neighbouring fellow campers. Even being several units away we could smell it inside Frodo for much of the evening. Talk about anti-social.