Of Castles, Walls and Lobsters

ST LUKE'S: On the Sunday morning we drove south towards Newcastle stopping off for a peak at Lindisfarne, the Holy Island accessible only via a tidal causeway. There are numerous religious sights on the island and a crumbling castle that can be glimpsed in the distance. However after a perusal of the tide times we decided not to attempt a crossing. I've seen enough of the pictures on the noticeboard at the pub in Rainbow Beach.

Then we stopped at the crumbling ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, yet another of these mighty stone fortresses glaring grimly out at the North Sea. Unlike Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh is crumbling ruins which, for my money, provides a far more evocative location to wander around. It's accessible by a twenty minute walk that cuts across a golf course (out of bounds - in the ocean) and through some fields of sheep. We spent ages exploring the ruins, there's not too much left aside from a couple of towers, a large chunk of the keep and the perimeter walls.

Leaving the castle we kept on the coast road going south until we found a lovely little country pub, again on the ocean, and tucked into cut price seafood platters and bottles of Newky Brown. Mmmm.... lobsters. After lunch it was a peak at Harry Potter's castle and then an inland diversion in search of Hadrian's Wall, built by the Roman Empire of the same way to keep the maurading barbarians out.

The road actually follows the road for a fair distance and it's quite fun trying to work out what used to be part of the wall and what is just the natural lie of the land. We eventually arrived at the remains of an ancient fort, parked our car, traipsed up and down some hills through a sheepfield en route to said fort before finally arriving at an intact section of the wall. It was extremely windy but quite amazing to muck about on this wall built centuries ago.

History lesson over, it was on to Newcastle for a drinking lesson.