21km
Stonehaugh – Watergate – Whitchester – Snabdaugh – Greenhaugh
We
had been planning on visiting the Poems in the Air ever since hearing about the
project. It involved walking to specific
places within the Northumberland National Park following a route on a phone
app. On arriving at the end point, the
app would unlock a poem, written and read out by Simon Armitage, about the
particular location. It was an area I
was unfamiliar with, which made it an interesting proposition. There are six sites and at first I tried to
plan a route that would link all locations in a continuous walk. However, the distances between them made this
impractical so I settled for three one-day walks, each one linking two
poems. Jill would come along to visit
the poems too, using the short walks described by the app, and driving between
them. She would also act as my lift from
my walk’s end to the place we were staying that night.
The
first stop was a long drive to the back of beyond, a village (of sorts) called
Stonehaugh, which mostly seemed to consist of campsites and groups of holiday
chalets. The proximity of the Pennine
Way perhaps explains this. The car park,
with its handy composting toilet, was empty when we arrived, though another car
soon turned up. Other people visiting
the poem, I wondered, but no, they went a different way.
It
didn’t take long for us to lose the way, being a bit casual about the
directions. We ended up at an apparent
dead-end in a wood. It was here I
finally checked where we were to discover we had gone astray. Luckily there was a way of sorts, though
hardly a path, stumbling over a cleared line through the plantation. It was drizzling intermittently which meant
the long undergrowth soon soaked our legs and went through our boots. After dodging brambles and nettles, and
clambering round a fallen tree, we made it back to the official route. This didn’t get any better as it twisted and
turned through more overgrown vegetation, over muddy, narrow paths. It was slow going, which meant the clouds of
flies danced around our heads and crawled over any exposed skin. Thankfully they weren’t the biting kind.
After
a slippery descent and a climb over a stile, we suddenly came to the first poem
location, the Weaver’s Cottage. It was a
very dilapidated ruin, slowly turning back into woodland, perched a little
above a churning, dark pool in the river of Warks Burn. As advertised, the phone app burst into life
and started playing Armitage’s soothing tones.
The poem talked about the line of families who had lived in the valley,
stretching along the river to pool at this point. Somewhere downstream were ‘stags and hens’,
hinting at future populations. The poem
also described the setting, with a mossed-over hearth, a holly tree bearing
down on the gable wall and three tall spruces between the cottage and the
river.
Jill
turned back after this, using the proper route this time but finding it little
better. I climbed up and along to join
the Pennine Way north for a stretch. The
paths were decent but I was surprised by a loose dog at Linacres that crept
right up behind me before unleashing its bark.
Just beyond this I regretted my decision to keep on to Hunt Hill before
turning to Watergate. The ‘path’ was
just an area of cleared forest. Like earlier,
I had to trip over stumps and fallen timber, along boggy, wet grass. The flies, without a breath of wind,
clustered around my head again and I flapped vainly at them, waving my hands
around like Mad Jack McMad. When I
finally reached the far side and a proper path I was wet and exasperated. A sign on the gate hilariously suggested the
swamp I had just navigated was a bridleway.
After
this I hit a road, which was some relief, though the shelter of trees meant I
hung onto my gang of flies until the gentle climb took me onto open
ground. I popped up to Watch Crag to bag
the trig point before continuing over Whitchester Moor. The path disappeared again into a huge zone
of tall grass and tussocks. Again it was
slow going and hard to see where the path, if it existed, lay. After much grumbling I made it to the track
up to Whitchester farm. It felt like a
strange, isolated place, given the arduous approach I had made. A Wild West farmstead, up on the plains, a
long way from civilisation. It was
deserted as I crossed the yard, not even a dog barking. Mud and detritus was scattered everywhere, as
if it had been ransacked by an invading army.
I passed through quickly, keeping my head down.
I
lost the path again getting to Snabdaugh and was thankful again to find a
road. House martins perched on the phone
line by Cliftonburn Bridge until a Royal Mail van scattered them. I was getting near the next poem, a little
way beyond the River Tyne. A variety of
pleasant paths took me to the edge of some woodland by Tarset Burn. Checking the app I found the poem was
unlocked. It was called ‘Hey Presto’ and
was a series of similes for the sight of a kingfisher flashing along the
river. Each line took the form, ‘I give
you the X of the kingfisher.’ From ‘the
azure streak’ through ‘the ambulance light reflected in the blank windows of
the charity shops on the esplanade’ to a final admission that there is nothing
to compare it to, ‘I give you the kingfisher-like kingfisher of the
kingfisher.’
With
a grin, and a raised eyebrow at not finding Jill, I made my weary way uphill to
Greenhaugh. It’s a very pretty village,
built of low, cream-coloured stone buildings.
The pub we were meeting in, the Holly Bush, was just another building in
a terrace. Inside the small, dark bar I
found Jill and a couple of local blokes.
It was a relief to sit down and drink a very good pint of Nel’s Best
(famously pulled by Prince Charles, by the looks of a photo above the
fireplace). Time was getting on, so we
sadly left it at that and headed to Rothbury.
In
Rothbury we had pleasant rooms in the Springfield guesthouse. We didn’t hang around there long before
following the landlady’s recommendation of going for dinner at the Queen’s Head
Hotel next door. The specials were fishy
– whitebait then hake for me, squid then salmon for Jill – and were very good
indeed. The kitchen seemed a bit
chaotic. Jill asked for a sparing amount
of butter on her salmon, but it came swimming.
A girl at the table next to us asked for lasagne with vegetables on the
side, and got vegetable lasagne. An
Italian family got beans with the kids’ meals when they asked not to have
them. The barman was apologetic and
accommodating.
Tired
from a long day, we were in bed early.
