Spirit of Place: The Farthest Shore
England's stark, wind-hammered Northumberland coast is one of the least visited and most dramatic in all of Europe.
The hermit Saint Cuthbert came here to get away from worldly comforts and distractions. People still do.
The stark, wind-hammered seacoast of Northumberland County is no place to lie in the sun and get a tan. Here on England’s northernmost shores, chill winds off the North Sea keep midsummer temperatures at or below 60 degrees. Even the Roman conquerors of the British Isles found these reaches too rough to govern. After a century of getting their noses bloodied by Pictish warriors, the Romans finally gave up and retreated south of Hadrian’s Wall.
So have, it seems, most of the tourists. This wild coastline is one of the least visited, yes most varied and dramatic, in all of Europe. From north of Newcastle to the Scottish border lies a succession of sandy bays, rivuleted mud flats, and rocky headlands crowned with ancient castles. Sheep and cattle grave on grassy flats that edge right down to the beach. Just offshore, the Farne Islands play host to over two hundred species of birds, including cormorants, shags, puffins, and terns that come to nest during the summer. But even at the height of the summer season, you can sometimes walk Northumberland’s coastal paths for miles without passing another soul.
None of the many invaders who clambered up these pristine sands every really tamed Northumberland. Even the Scots, who had only to sweep down from the north, failed to get a lasting foothold despite frequent attempts. When the Vikings attacked the coast of England in 793, it was at Lindisfarne on Holy Island—home of the first Scottish monastery in England, where Saint Cuthbert retired to meditate—that they first struck, laying waste to the buildings and killing most of the monks.
Only a few carved stones remain of the original structure, but the famous Lindisfarne Gospels have been preserved and are one of the greatest treasures in the British Museum in London. The Vikings pushed on, and before long the once expansive Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria was reduced to about the size of the present-day county. But it was the aftermath of the Norman invasion of 1066, led by William the Conqueror, that produced much of what a visitor to the Northumberland coast sees today. To consolidate their domination of the region, the Normans built dozens of castles, first of word and later of stone. The wooden structures have long since disappeared, but many of the massive stone castles have been restored, including at Newcastle, Alnwick, and Bamburgh.
One of the most memorable sights on the Northumberland coast is the ruin of Dunstanburgh Castle. I had my first glimpse of it late one afternoon as I combed the beach just north of Boulmer, a half-deserted fishing village. Here the tides have sculpted the basalt shelf into swirls of smooth, spinning rock, all lavenders, yellows, and rusts. Suddenly, as I came around a rocky outcropping, the crumbling ramparts loomed in the distance against the gray sky. The misty outline of these ruins, atop steep cliffs thrust out into the sea, made me shudder as it conjured up images of violence and destruction.
There is no road to Dustanburgh, so the next morning I walked the grassy seaside path from the village of Craster—famous for its smoked kippers and crab sandwiches—out to the castle. At first I circled it slowly, not wanting to break the ominous spell, but finally I passed through the arched entrance between the two drum towers of the stone keep, which looked as if it might collapse at any moment. Except for the keep and vestiges of its walls and towers, little is left of the massive edifice that once stood watch here.
Of course, no self-respecting castle could while away the ages without harboring a legend or two, and Dunstanburgh is no exception. My favorite concerns Sir Guy the Seeker, who took refuge in the castle one stormy night. He was visited by a “ghastly wight” (a ghost) who led him to the crystal tomb of a beautiful maiden, guarded by one hundred sleeping knights. The ghost offered him the choice of a sword or a horn to break the spell. The legend does not specify what Sir Guy was seeking, but if it was wisdom, it appears that he had not yet found it. He grabbed the horn and blew it loudly, waking the knights, and—well, let’s just say that he would have been better off staying in Craster, where he could have had smoked kippers for breakfast.
…let’s just say that he would have been better off staying in Craster, where he could have had smoked kippers for breakfast.
The huge basalt headlands on which the castles at Dunstanburgh and Bamburgh perch, and which make up so much of the Northumberland coast’s distinctive landscape, are actually intrusions of a great shelf of volcanic rock called the Whin Sill. The Whin Sill runs some eighty miles across the north of England, and just before disappearing under the waves it gives rise to the Farne Islands. The island vary in number from 15 to 28, depending on the height of the tide and who is counting.
DURING THE BREEDING SEASON, read the sign next to the dock at Seahouses Harbor, VISITORS TO INNER FARNE ARE ADVISED TO WEAR HEAD COVER AGAINST SWOOPING TERNS. As we headed out to sea in an old fishing boat for the two-hour tour of the islands, I was glad it was September and not June or July, when thousands of nesting birds claim the Farnes as their own. There will still plenty of cormorants and shags floating about, and in the fall gray seals also set up housekeeping around Longstone Island. As we approached, one of them swam out to meet the boat and then dove just in front of our bow. A huge black bull lay in langorous repose on a nearby rock, attended by two smaller speckled gray cows.
As well-known as Longstone Island is for its seal colony, it is even more famous for something else. For it was here that, some 150 years ago, Grace Darling performed her Deed. If you have never heard of Grace Darling, it can mean only one thing: You are not English. The facts, of which every Brit over the age of reason is aware, are these.
Grace Darling lived in the lighthouse on Longstone Island with her mother and her father, William Darling, who was the lighthouse keeper. On the morning of September 7, 1838, the steamship Forfarshire, carrying some 60 passengers and crew, ran into nearby Big Harcar Island in a violent storm and broke in two. Almost everyone drowned, but when Grace looked out her bedroom window she saw nine people alive on the rocks. Grace and her father launched their small boat and rowed to the rescue through the treacherous waves. While Grace held the oars steady, William helped the survivors onto the boat, whereupon they rowed back to Longstone to take shelter.
The story of Grace Darling’s derring-do quickly spread throughout England. “Is there in the whole field of history,” cried the Times of London, “one instance of female heroism to compare for one moment with this?” A song was composed in Grace’s honor, William Wordsworth wrote a poem about her, and Queen Victoria sent her a reward of 50 pounds. When I was back on dry land, I paid a visit to the Grace Darling National Memorial Museum in Bamburgh, where seemingly every shred of Grace’s life has been gathered together: Her schoolgirl copybook, her mother’s tea set, the cape she wore during the rescue, plates and silverware recovered from the wrecked Forfarshire.
The walls are covered with portraits of Grace, some of which, quite fancifully, depict her alone at the oars. It was all a bit much, although I must admit—as I rounded a corner and suddenly beheld, behind a glass enclosure, the very rowboat in which Grace performed her Deed, the oars laid reverently over the wooden seats—that the sight was enough to melt even the most cynical heart.
I set aside my final day on the Northumberland coast to visit Holy Island. Actually, it is only an island at high tide, about six hours twice each day, when the rising waters cover the causeway that connects it to the mainland. I waited until the last possible minute, and as the sea began lapping the road, I drove across. I pulled into the island’s parking lot just as the early morning visitors were jumping into their cars to make the journey back and avoid being stranded.
For the next six hours I had Holy Island virtually to myself, save for the inhabitants of Lindisfarne village. A light drizzle was falling as I strolled past grazing sheep along the quiet fishing harbor and out to the headland on which the quaint but unimposing Lindisfarne Castle is perched. From this pointed finger of the Whin Sill, I could see across the water to the mammoth castle at Bamburgh, a sight that must have put fear in the heart of many a raiding Scot. I rounded the north side of the island, past Emmanuel Head, and finally clambered over the enormous sand dunes to make my way back to the village and Lindisfarne Priory.
Although the Viking raids had cleared the faithful from the original Lindisfarne monastery, in Norman times a new church and monastery were built by monks based at the great cathedral in Durham. The extraordinary ruins of these buildings, the red sandstone skeleton of the church and the gray stone of the monastery, dominate this end of Holy Island. From the priory, a short path took me to a bluff overlooking the islet where Saint Cuthbert spent days alone in meditation.
As the wind whipped at my neck, it occurred to me that Northumberland was a place for that little bit of hermit in all of us.
Note: This story is adapted from one I published in the long-defunct magazine European Travel & Life. My editor was Judy Fayard, a legendary and colorful American expatriate whom all American writers and journalists in Paris knew and loved. I was lucky enough to have dinner with her and some mutual friends not long before she died in 2019, after a long and courageous battle with cancer. This piece is dedicated to her memory.
