Far north, old things

In the still green silence of Northumberland, England’s biggest sky, we find fragments of the past at every turn.

A tiny road heads dead straight, almost due north, from somewhere small and not known to an equal point. The road is pitted and bumpy. It ends at a t-junction that is, in fact, a crossroads, for the road continues ahead. The Devil’s Causeway is still here. It’s not hidden, it runs for 50 miles or more, and is marked on maps. Here it runs through a grassy field. I put my hand into the grass – clumps of stone, roughly shaped. A Roman Road, but north of Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps someone can explain to me how that worked.

Later it becomes clear the village we turned right at existed as a crossroad between the roman road and the path that monks travelled between Holy Island and Durham. And Iona too? A junction of obscurity. Were they the only traffic? Was it a highway of celebrity monks, Aidan, Cuthbert and their like? Just up the road is Ancroft, with a sign pointing to an 11th century church. Remarking that we’ve never stopped there despite driving past 20 times we do, and discover something. Squat and ageless, it predates Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Crusades, and is barely younger than England itself. Ancroft. Aidan’s Croft. The strange monkish atmosphere. It may account for all the silence.

On another day we go looking for the road again, further south, near Chillingham’s haunted castle. We find a ford, crossed also by a wonderful wooden bridge, and a standing stone, marked out presumably to stop a farmer ploughing into it. Winnie tells us here that ‘the Romans used wee to wash their hair’. After a mile or more the countryside drops away towards the Cheviot Hills, and a dramatic bridge carries the causeway away again.

It is hot and it is a strange sensation to be seeking ways to cool down in a place where you can look south to Scotland. We are wedged up against the border but free to wander over, usually via the Union Bridge. Once across there is the lovely River Tweed, and the chance to swim. The water is perfect and the river is broad. The kids splash in the shallows while Imogen and I take turns to swim part-way across, never quite brave enough to complete the international swim, but enough into disputed waters to be able to say we’ve done it.

A friend puts in our heads seeking out Twizell Bridge, a mighty medieval span which carried English and Scottish soldiers across the Till. Just down the road, Wark Castle guarded a section of the Tweed. Today it’s a pile of rubble that appears to sit in a few people’s back gardens who aren’t that happy to see us drive into their bit of town. It may be the place where Edward III first got the idea of the order of the garter, greeting hooting partygoers who mocked a lady who’d removed hers by putting it on and saying ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘evil be to him that evil thinks’. This phrase is so famous now it appears on the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. And here’s Wark Castle, a forgotten pile of old stones. Perhaps it wasn’t here. No-one knows to say it wasn’t. We all make remains and words and gestures live on.

On our last night thunder and lightning cracks the weather open, as if we’ve started something with what we’ve turned up.