The Trip Home from Edinburgh

The return try from Edinburgh was along the seashore. We made a brief stop in the market town of Berwick -- a place that has changed hands between England and Scotland a number of times in various wars, but has remained for the last couple hundred years on the English side. We walked along fortifications built in anticipation of a northern invasion by Napoleon in the 1810s.

Next we got off the beaten track to take a closer look at the Holy Island and the castle/monastery of Lindisfarne. This is supposedly the place from which Christianity was first introduced to Britain by Saint Cuthbert, a monk in the Saxon period (although Christian artefacts dating to Roman times are fairly abundant from many sites around Britain). It was also home to the famous Lindisfarne Gospels which now reside in the British Library in London. We wound up getting a closer look at the island than we’d imagined.

Holy Island is only an island at high tide. At low tide there is a road across the tidal marsh that will take you there. People plan their visits to Holy Island very carefully around the tide tables, but we just happened to hit there at low tide. We drove to the island, snapped a few photos, and drove right back. The tide was already starting to come in, and once it does, one can to stuck on Holy Island for five or six hours.

After getting safely off the island we scouted things out at Alnwick Castle, a place Luther groups have gone before us, and home to both the Duke of Northumberland and family, as well as to a study program run by Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. We learned that it's good to be the Duke, but probably not a bad thing to be a student there, either. We also learned that (in the usual British manner of omitting consonants, it's pronounced Anick.

We detoured next to a couple of sites along Hadrian’s Wall (a fortification built to keep the unvanquished Scots from invading the northernmost reaches of the Roman Empire). The first and most impressive was a place called Vindaloo, where a Roman fort and extensive trading village outside the fortress walls have been excavated. They number of Roman artefacts in the museum here is truly astounding, but some of the “historic” recreations of things are a little hokey. All in all, however, it was better than the English Heritage excavations a few miles away.

Online we had discovered a country B&B about 6 miles south of Durham that was reasonably priced. When we first drove in we were afraid we’d made a terrible mistake, but it was quite nice on the inside. It seemed as though the entire population of Kirk Merrington had come to the village’s only restaurant that night, so no wonder the service was pretty bad, but the food was OK. Our B&B hosts had also recommended a pub in town, but we didn’t find it our sort of place and stayed only briefly.

Durham Cathedral was wonderful, though Mary found the side chapel with the tomb of The Venerable Bead to be “kind of creepy.” Unfortunately the castle was closed for extensive renovation, so we could not visit that portion.

Our last stop we almost skipped because we were tired, but Fountains Abbey, the ruin of a major monastic site abandoned after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the abbeys, was well worth the time. It’s quite an amazing site, but a long way from anywhere.

All in all, our Edinburgh trip was one of the best -- not only the destination, but also the sites along the way.