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Summer Holiday 2012 - Part 2: Lindisfarne
Emily and I went on Holiday last week! We visited Edinburgh from Sunday until Wednesday, and the tidal island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland from Wednesday until Saturday.
Wednesday
A bus service between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Lindisfarne, the 477, runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There are just two services: one in the morning and one in the afternoon, the exact times being based around the tides.
We took the 12:20 bus, the second service of the day, which took about 40 minutes to get to Lindisfarne, and arrived on the island about half an hour before the causeway closed at 13:35. At the Lindisfarne bus stop were a lot of tourists waiting to get back to the mainland before the island really did become an island.
Lindisfarne is connected to the mainland at low tide by two routes, neither of which are fjordable at high tide. One is the main tarmac causeway road, and the other is the much longer Pilgrim's Way, merely a set of wooden poles at intervals guiding travellers across the sandy plain. Both routes include tall refuge huts for anyone falling foul of the tides; the water reaches the top of the ladders to them at the water's peak.
After arriving at the main village area on the island, we checked into our accomodation, a new Bed and Breakfast above the island's Post Office, which we'd chanced upon after being recommended it by another sold-out B&B. It was really nicely decorated with a luxury bathroom.
After checking in we walked down to the beach by the causeway to watch the tide coming in. The causeway quickly went underwater with little warning:
While we were watching the tide sweep in across the beach, we had our first taste of the island's speciality food: crab sandwiches, packed up for us by the lovely people at the Post Office, which doubled up as a corner shop. We had crab sandwiches every day on Lindisfarne.
Like in Edinburgh, we had fantastic weather on the first day - and, in fact, on Thursday too. We popped into the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory while having a quick look around town to find somewhere for dinner. In the second photo below, you can also see Lindisfarne Castle rising from the ground, a common theme on this holiday.
We ate an early dinner at the welcoming and rustic BeanGoose restaurant, whose specials that night included fresh-caught wild Sea Trout, which I had and which was delicious. Afterwards, we decided to take advantage of the long evenings further North in the summer, and went out hiking to the North of the Island where there were two geocaches.
The walk took us through vast empty expanses of grassy sand dunes, along beautiful deserted beaches, amazing natural rock formations, disused quarries, and we even came across a stone beach hut that seemed to be in present use! Additionally, one of the caches was on the site of Greenshiel, the remains of a 9th Century village, possibly the first to fall during the Viking invasions.
We learned to watch out for pirri-pirri bur, an invasive species from Australasia, which was instantly recognisable by its spiky red seed pods. They were fascinating to behold to begin with, but they they start insisting on coming along for the ride, sticking to every bit of clothing you might brush them with!
By the time we finished the geocaching, it was after sunset, and the grass plains began feeling more desolate as we walked through them with the wind howling in ghostly voices around us. Fortunately, it wasn't a long walk back to the village and the warmth and comfort of our room.
Thursday
When we got up, Emily had realised that this morning was the best time to walk Pilgrim's Way, the 3km route taken originally by pilgrims to the Holy Island before the road was built. Knowing that the tide would start coming in later that morning, we raced out to the beach we'd watched the tide come in from on Wednesday, and Emily jogged along the windy road to the far end of Pilgrim's Way, and began to walk back. She made it back in a comfortable amount of time, and I was surprised at how many other people were coming along before and after, since I had assumed it was something maybe one person did per month.
As for me, it was a warm morning, so I sat on the Lindisfarne beach listening to my audio book while I watched people walking the final third of the way from the second refuge hut.
We had our crab sandwiches, and then caught the short shuttle bus to Lindisfarne Castle, which is on a hill at the South East corner of the island, and which gives a view of practically the whole of Lindisfarne, including the town in the South-West. The driver was very jolly, and pointed out some seals off the south coast coming in with the rising tide.
Outside the castle, being used as cloakrooms, were three sheds made from upturned herring fishing boats. Apparently these were used as inspiration for the design of the Scottish Parliament building. The castle was renovated in the first decade of the 1900s, and is managed by the National Trust, and it doesn't really feel like a castle inside - or, at least, a medieval castle - which is odd. However, one item of interest was an wall-clock style anenometer above a fireplace in the entrance hall, which apparently still works, although the wind was coming due South all the time we were there, so we had to take the Trust's word for it.
The castle's property also included a small walled garden, which used to be used as a vegetable plot by soldiers until the 1900s. It's quite far from the castle because the area immediately around the castle was marshy and not arable. There's also one of the country's best preserved Lime Kilns. These were used during the 1800s to process the stone from the quarries in the North of the Island.
The kilns themselves are cavernous and must've been rough places to work when all the pots were full of roasting coal and limestone. As it was, they were noticeably chillier than the outside air.
Having popped into the grounds of the priory the day before, today we paid our moneys so we could go inside Lindisfarne Priory itself. It was closed by Henry VIII in the 1500s, and was left to ruin until (if I recall correctly) the mid-late 1800s.
In the visitor's centre, we spotted a necklace on display made from St. Cuthbert's beads, fossilised fragments of "circular crinoid columnals", which I thought meant a plant of some kind, but reading the wikipedia article again now, seems not to be the case. The quarry geocache we had found had mentioned that they could be found in the quarry, but we hadn't had any luck there. Emily asked the English Heritage volunteer about them, and she told us that she'd collected them from a beach nearby when she was a child, and gave us directions there.
Armed with that knowledge, we pottered down to the sea front, where the tide was beginning to go out, and dug through the sand to try to find some, to no avail. I decided I'd take a look along the water line, where small waves were churning the sand and small stones, and, I suspected, sorting them a little for us. A couple of minutes later I spotted the first bead, maybe half the size of my little finger's nail, and once we knew where to look and roughly what size the beads were (most were smaller) we found a good number of them. Emily has them for safe-keeping.
On the way back we saw a little field mouse hiding in the grass. It was super cute.
I finally got my fish and chips - a really good battered haddock and lovely thick crunchy chips - at the local Crown and Anchor pub. Their restaurant area had run out of seating (all the restaurants on the island advertised themselves as "Reservations highly recommended") but we sat in the fairly quiet main pub area at a table instead, which had a great atmosphere, and chatted to a few of the locals, who were very friendly and happy to tell us what life was like on the island. Practically everyone works in the tourist industry, since the tidal nature of the causeway to the mainland makes a regular commute anywhere impossible.
Afterwards, we decided to take a short stroll along the coast to walk off dinner. The evening sea mist had closed in by then, and we happened to find ourselves opposite St Cuthbert's Island, which at high tide looked like a small island off the coast but at low tide, as it was coming up to now, was obviously joined to the mainland similarly to Lindisfarne itself.
We coudn't resist walking out to it. There were mussels growing in the causeway to the island and the geology had provided some rocky steps from the sand onto the island.
On the island there were a few remains of what we think was a small hut, along with a modernly maintained wooden Christian cross standing several feet tall inside it. The combination of the ruins, the soft grassy covering on the islands, and the silencing sea mist made the whole place seem magical and isolated.
Friday
We started off the day with a great breakfast from the B&B - they'd prepared us a fantastic fruit salad to go with our muesli and toast. Afterwards we bought our sandwiches for lunch, and set off towards The Snook, the spit of land that the causeway stretches along. We had planned to do two of the walks we'd seen on a Natural England display board on the causeway. I can find no hint of on their website now I've looked, which isn't surprising considering there was little trace of the paths on the ground either!
We improvised a bit, and the expedition, as it shall now be known (and I did have what some people have called my jungle hat with me, at least) took us along the causeway to near the end of the snook, and then we cut across the West end of the Snook, over sand dunes, through the lush green dune 'slacks' (the damper hollows, and they were damp), and back up more dunes until we happened upon a colossal beach. Also there were six-spot burnet moths.
The beach must have been around 3km long, and once I'd stopped worrying that the tide was going to zoom in and leave us stranded, standing on lone rocks with seagulls competing for foot space for six hours, I enjoyed taking in the vast sandscape. We ate our sandwiches here, and some of the Post Office's rocky road slabs, another thing their in-house cook excelled at.
By coincidence (or, well, as much coincidence as you can get when exploring such a small island), at the other end of the beach was Greenshiel, the ruins of a pre-Viking settlement. The remains of the town were a lot easier to spot in daylight compared to the twilight of the first night we'd seen them on.
Since we we were now at the far end of the island, we decided to finish off the walk by doing the rest of the island's main nature trail, which would bring us back to the Post Office via the castle. On the way there we came across a bridge with a moat (it had rained heavily here while we were in Edinburgh), a bird-watching hut (although the birds seemed to have the wrong idea and were nesting inside it), and lots of sheep (they are still looking at me).
Near the castle, there were a lot of rock stacks along the edge of the beach. Emily added one to the landscape. It was still standing when we came back the next morning after heavy rain overnight.
We went back to the B&B to shower and clean up before going out to the Crown and Anchor again - this time with reservations. The dining area was more formal than the table we'd grabbed the previous night, but the food was just as good. This time Emily had the fish and chips, and I had a pretty decent lamb shank.
Saturday
This was our last day on Lindisfarne, but we had until 1500 before the last bus off the island left, so we decided to do the last few things we hadn't yet done.
We'd missed off one corner of the Nature Trail the previous day, where an old stone obelisk stood at the North East corner of the island, presumably as some kind of guide for ships. We walked up to that after checking out of the Post Office, and found another beach to explore after reaching it.
We got back to the town in time to have a quick look around the Lindisfarne Centre (there solely for the day tourists, we concluded), get a slice of excellent chocolate cake and some (instant) hot chocolate from Stables Café, explored the last couple of shops we hadn't been into, then picked up our rucksacks and a last round of crab sandwiches from the Post Office before catching the bus back to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where we jumped on a very quiet train back to Kings Cross.
Sitting opposite us on the train home was Lindisfarne, the little tiger we had rescued from the gift shop on the island.
Well, that's a wrap! I thoroughly loved our stay on Holy Island; it was beautiful and peaceful, and while we were there I didn't have a care in the world.
You can browse all my holiday photos (and videos, although I only seem to have the HTML5 magic working in Opera and Chrome right now) if you're feeling brave here.
Wednesday
A bus service between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Lindisfarne, the 477, runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There are just two services: one in the morning and one in the afternoon, the exact times being based around the tides.
We took the 12:20 bus, the second service of the day, which took about 40 minutes to get to Lindisfarne, and arrived on the island about half an hour before the causeway closed at 13:35. At the Lindisfarne bus stop were a lot of tourists waiting to get back to the mainland before the island really did become an island.
Lindisfarne is connected to the mainland at low tide by two routes, neither of which are fjordable at high tide. One is the main tarmac causeway road, and the other is the much longer Pilgrim's Way, merely a set of wooden poles at intervals guiding travellers across the sandy plain. Both routes include tall refuge huts for anyone falling foul of the tides; the water reaches the top of the ladders to them at the water's peak.
After arriving at the main village area on the island, we checked into our accomodation, a new Bed and Breakfast above the island's Post Office, which we'd chanced upon after being recommended it by another sold-out B&B. It was really nicely decorated with a luxury bathroom.
After checking in we walked down to the beach by the causeway to watch the tide coming in. The causeway quickly went underwater with little warning:
While we were watching the tide sweep in across the beach, we had our first taste of the island's speciality food: crab sandwiches, packed up for us by the lovely people at the Post Office, which doubled up as a corner shop. We had crab sandwiches every day on Lindisfarne.
Like in Edinburgh, we had fantastic weather on the first day - and, in fact, on Thursday too. We popped into the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory while having a quick look around town to find somewhere for dinner. In the second photo below, you can also see Lindisfarne Castle rising from the ground, a common theme on this holiday.
We ate an early dinner at the welcoming and rustic BeanGoose restaurant, whose specials that night included fresh-caught wild Sea Trout, which I had and which was delicious. Afterwards, we decided to take advantage of the long evenings further North in the summer, and went out hiking to the North of the Island where there were two geocaches.
The walk took us through vast empty expanses of grassy sand dunes, along beautiful deserted beaches, amazing natural rock formations, disused quarries, and we even came across a stone beach hut that seemed to be in present use! Additionally, one of the caches was on the site of Greenshiel, the remains of a 9th Century village, possibly the first to fall during the Viking invasions.
We learned to watch out for pirri-pirri bur, an invasive species from Australasia, which was instantly recognisable by its spiky red seed pods. They were fascinating to behold to begin with, but they they start insisting on coming along for the ride, sticking to every bit of clothing you might brush them with!
By the time we finished the geocaching, it was after sunset, and the grass plains began feeling more desolate as we walked through them with the wind howling in ghostly voices around us. Fortunately, it wasn't a long walk back to the village and the warmth and comfort of our room.
Thursday
When we got up, Emily had realised that this morning was the best time to walk Pilgrim's Way, the 3km route taken originally by pilgrims to the Holy Island before the road was built. Knowing that the tide would start coming in later that morning, we raced out to the beach we'd watched the tide come in from on Wednesday, and Emily jogged along the windy road to the far end of Pilgrim's Way, and began to walk back. She made it back in a comfortable amount of time, and I was surprised at how many other people were coming along before and after, since I had assumed it was something maybe one person did per month.
As for me, it was a warm morning, so I sat on the Lindisfarne beach listening to my audio book while I watched people walking the final third of the way from the second refuge hut.
We had our crab sandwiches, and then caught the short shuttle bus to Lindisfarne Castle, which is on a hill at the South East corner of the island, and which gives a view of practically the whole of Lindisfarne, including the town in the South-West. The driver was very jolly, and pointed out some seals off the south coast coming in with the rising tide.
Outside the castle, being used as cloakrooms, were three sheds made from upturned herring fishing boats. Apparently these were used as inspiration for the design of the Scottish Parliament building. The castle was renovated in the first decade of the 1900s, and is managed by the National Trust, and it doesn't really feel like a castle inside - or, at least, a medieval castle - which is odd. However, one item of interest was an wall-clock style anenometer above a fireplace in the entrance hall, which apparently still works, although the wind was coming due South all the time we were there, so we had to take the Trust's word for it.
The castle's property also included a small walled garden, which used to be used as a vegetable plot by soldiers until the 1900s. It's quite far from the castle because the area immediately around the castle was marshy and not arable. There's also one of the country's best preserved Lime Kilns. These were used during the 1800s to process the stone from the quarries in the North of the Island.
The kilns themselves are cavernous and must've been rough places to work when all the pots were full of roasting coal and limestone. As it was, they were noticeably chillier than the outside air.
Having popped into the grounds of the priory the day before, today we paid our moneys so we could go inside Lindisfarne Priory itself. It was closed by Henry VIII in the 1500s, and was left to ruin until (if I recall correctly) the mid-late 1800s.
In the visitor's centre, we spotted a necklace on display made from St. Cuthbert's beads, fossilised fragments of "circular crinoid columnals", which I thought meant a plant of some kind, but reading the wikipedia article again now, seems not to be the case. The quarry geocache we had found had mentioned that they could be found in the quarry, but we hadn't had any luck there. Emily asked the English Heritage volunteer about them, and she told us that she'd collected them from a beach nearby when she was a child, and gave us directions there.
Armed with that knowledge, we pottered down to the sea front, where the tide was beginning to go out, and dug through the sand to try to find some, to no avail. I decided I'd take a look along the water line, where small waves were churning the sand and small stones, and, I suspected, sorting them a little for us. A couple of minutes later I spotted the first bead, maybe half the size of my little finger's nail, and once we knew where to look and roughly what size the beads were (most were smaller) we found a good number of them. Emily has them for safe-keeping.
On the way back we saw a little field mouse hiding in the grass. It was super cute.
I finally got my fish and chips - a really good battered haddock and lovely thick crunchy chips - at the local Crown and Anchor pub. Their restaurant area had run out of seating (all the restaurants on the island advertised themselves as "Reservations highly recommended") but we sat in the fairly quiet main pub area at a table instead, which had a great atmosphere, and chatted to a few of the locals, who were very friendly and happy to tell us what life was like on the island. Practically everyone works in the tourist industry, since the tidal nature of the causeway to the mainland makes a regular commute anywhere impossible.
Afterwards, we decided to take a short stroll along the coast to walk off dinner. The evening sea mist had closed in by then, and we happened to find ourselves opposite St Cuthbert's Island, which at high tide looked like a small island off the coast but at low tide, as it was coming up to now, was obviously joined to the mainland similarly to Lindisfarne itself.
We coudn't resist walking out to it. There were mussels growing in the causeway to the island and the geology had provided some rocky steps from the sand onto the island.
On the island there were a few remains of what we think was a small hut, along with a modernly maintained wooden Christian cross standing several feet tall inside it. The combination of the ruins, the soft grassy covering on the islands, and the silencing sea mist made the whole place seem magical and isolated.
Friday
We started off the day with a great breakfast from the B&B - they'd prepared us a fantastic fruit salad to go with our muesli and toast. Afterwards we bought our sandwiches for lunch, and set off towards The Snook, the spit of land that the causeway stretches along. We had planned to do two of the walks we'd seen on a Natural England display board on the causeway. I can find no hint of on their website now I've looked, which isn't surprising considering there was little trace of the paths on the ground either!
We improvised a bit, and the expedition, as it shall now be known (and I did have what some people have called my jungle hat with me, at least) took us along the causeway to near the end of the snook, and then we cut across the West end of the Snook, over sand dunes, through the lush green dune 'slacks' (the damper hollows, and they were damp), and back up more dunes until we happened upon a colossal beach. Also there were six-spot burnet moths.
The beach must have been around 3km long, and once I'd stopped worrying that the tide was going to zoom in and leave us stranded, standing on lone rocks with seagulls competing for foot space for six hours, I enjoyed taking in the vast sandscape. We ate our sandwiches here, and some of the Post Office's rocky road slabs, another thing their in-house cook excelled at.
By coincidence (or, well, as much coincidence as you can get when exploring such a small island), at the other end of the beach was Greenshiel, the ruins of a pre-Viking settlement. The remains of the town were a lot easier to spot in daylight compared to the twilight of the first night we'd seen them on.
Since we we were now at the far end of the island, we decided to finish off the walk by doing the rest of the island's main nature trail, which would bring us back to the Post Office via the castle. On the way there we came across a bridge with a moat (it had rained heavily here while we were in Edinburgh), a bird-watching hut (although the birds seemed to have the wrong idea and were nesting inside it), and lots of sheep (they are still looking at me).
Near the castle, there were a lot of rock stacks along the edge of the beach. Emily added one to the landscape. It was still standing when we came back the next morning after heavy rain overnight.
We went back to the B&B to shower and clean up before going out to the Crown and Anchor again - this time with reservations. The dining area was more formal than the table we'd grabbed the previous night, but the food was just as good. This time Emily had the fish and chips, and I had a pretty decent lamb shank.
Saturday
This was our last day on Lindisfarne, but we had until 1500 before the last bus off the island left, so we decided to do the last few things we hadn't yet done.
We'd missed off one corner of the Nature Trail the previous day, where an old stone obelisk stood at the North East corner of the island, presumably as some kind of guide for ships. We walked up to that after checking out of the Post Office, and found another beach to explore after reaching it.
We got back to the town in time to have a quick look around the Lindisfarne Centre (there solely for the day tourists, we concluded), get a slice of excellent chocolate cake and some (instant) hot chocolate from Stables Café, explored the last couple of shops we hadn't been into, then picked up our rucksacks and a last round of crab sandwiches from the Post Office before catching the bus back to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where we jumped on a very quiet train back to Kings Cross.
Sitting opposite us on the train home was Lindisfarne, the little tiger we had rescued from the gift shop on the island.
Well, that's a wrap! I thoroughly loved our stay on Holy Island; it was beautiful and peaceful, and while we were there I didn't have a care in the world.
You can browse all my holiday photos (and videos, although I only seem to have the HTML5 magic working in Opera and Chrome right now) if you're feeling brave here.