May 25th, 2020. It’s Goodbye to Durham and the North East. We’ll be back before too long, I hope. We find ourselves again undertaking a long journey on a Bank Holiday Monday. What have I done, I cry, to deserve this? From the heavens, there is no answer.
For one moment of waking in the night, I entertained the quixotic notion of taking a route which avoided motorways. This didn’t survive long when I quizzed Google Maps at breakfast. It turns out the A1, the Great North Road, is so obviously the best route, that avoiding the motorway sections involves so many twists and turns to follow A-roads running almost parallel, and then to rejoin the A1 when it stops being motorway, that it’s not worth the trouble. Anyway, when the pilgrimage is over you just want to get home as fast as you can.
So it’s ‘Fastest route, the usual traffic, via A1(M) and M1’. 4 hours 11 minutes, 250 miles; though of course it always takes longer because you need to stop for a comfort break, a drink, and a sandwich, to say nothing of giving the back a rest and stretching the legs.
This time I resist the thought of stopping Somewhere Interesting we’ve never been to en route. We’ll press on and get a takeaway in the evening when we’re home.
It’s been a good Virtual Pilgrimage. But it’s good to be virtually back inside our own four walls, for a change.
Sunday, May 24th, 2020. In our Virtual Pilgrimage we are blessed with a leisurely Sunday morning, attending the Eucharist at the Cathedral where the Dean preaches, and the Cathedral Choir sing.
Then we get in the car and head out for a roast Sunday lunch at Finbarr’s Restaurant off the Dryburn Road (quite near to where our Tom was born in 1977).
After lunch we take a gentle stroll along the River Wear, timing our walk so that we arrive at Crook Hall in time for a cream tea in their café, and that gives us time to get back to the Cathedral for Evensong.
Then back to our guest room in St John’s for a quiet evening with a bottle of wine. We’re planning an early night before our long drive tomorrow.
It’s been a tiring business, writing about this journey, and I’m ready to move on to another project when we get back home.
Waking up in Durham, on the morning of Saturday May 23rd, 2020. We dress and go out into the quiet brightness of South Bailey and walk down to the Cathedral for Morning Prayer in the Cathedral. Then back to College for breakfast.
We are treating ourselves to a day in and around the most wonderful Cathedral in England. Sure, we say that about Oxford, St Albans, and Canterbury, while others have their own lists. But surely, Durham must come at or near the top of everyone’s list. As we exit the front door of St John’s College for the second time this morning, we turn left instead of right and walk down to Prebends Bridge. Is it possible to ever tire of this view, or of taking photographs of it?
View from Prebends Bridge
The River Wear, with the great Norman cathedral standing on top of that rocky outcrop around which the river sweeps in a tight bend. Crossing the bridge we walk down the path along the west bank to cross over Framwellgate Bridge and then up the path on the other side. As we walk through the cut alongside the Music School, I pay my usual homage to the commemorative plaque to John Meade Falkner (1858-1932), who spent the last years of his life there, when it was called Divinity House. Then we enter the Cathedral by the great north door. When I was studying Theology in Durham in the closing years of the 1970s, I would walk this way every morning from our little rented house in Atherton Street to St John’s College, taking this short cut through the Cathedral and the Close. It’s astonishing how you can become so accustomed to a place’s grandeur and sanctity, that you almost don’t notice it, almost take it for granted. Almost, you have to revisit it to remind yourself of what it truly means. That’s why we’re taking our time today. We walk around slowly, reminding ourselves of the things that were once so very familiar. The Frosterley marble of the pillars in the Nine Altars chapel, the massive pillars of the nave. We spend time praying at the shrine of St Cuthbert, and the shrine of St Bede.
I quietly say to myself the words above Bede’s tomb, which I’ve blogged about before:
Christus est Stella Matutina, qui nocte saeculi transacta lucem vitae sanctis promitit, et pandit aeternam.
(Christ is the Morning Star, who when the night of this world is past, gives to his saints the promise of the light of life, and opens everlasting day.)
We’re surprised to find it’s nearly lunchtime, so we go out into the cloisters to enjoy a leisurely lunch in the Undercroft, followed by a visit to the Cathedral Shop (of course!) and then the library and the Open Treasure exhibition.
By this time we need some fresh air, so we got for a wander around the city, including the two addresses where we lived during our time here over 40 years ago. Then it’s time to return to the Cathedral for Evensong, sung by the Cathedral choir.
Where shall we eat this evening? A quick Google search and we opt for Restaurant 17 on Elvet Bridge, that promises “Upscale European meals & global wines are the draw at this intimate eatery with a romantic ambiance.” What’s not to like about global wines, intimacy and romance? Bon appetit! And, Cheers!
Today the retreat ends, our pilgrimage draws to a close, and we begin our journey homewards. After Morning Prayer in St Mary’s, and breakfast, we say Goodbye to The Open Gate and to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and drive over the causeway to the mainland. When we reach the A1, I’m so accustomed to following the signs to The North that I almost turn right, until Alison reminds me that, actually, we now need to look for The South.
We’ve decided that we’re going to take a few days on this journey, rather than trying to do it all in one. We’re going to start with a visit to a town we’ve never been to before: Chester-le-Street in County Durham. When the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne Priory, the monks fled with St Cuthbert’s body and travelled with it to several destinations in the north of England. For 12 years it rested in the church in Chester-le-Street, until the saint indicated that he wanted Durham to be his final resting place.
The Journey. Sculpture in Millennium Square, Durham
The Church of St Mary & St Cuthbert, Chester-le-Street, is remarkable in that it contains an anchorage or anchorhold, which was occupied between 1383 and 1547 by six anchorites. These were hermits, each of whom would be walled in to the anchorage for life, able to watch services through a squint into the church which looks down onto a side altar, and fed through another slit to the outside. The most famous anchoress of the Middle Ages is Julian of Norwich, but the story of Chester-le-Street shows that there were other such holy hermits in other English towns.
We eat lunch at the Lambton Arms before visiting the church and then the remains of the Roman fort of Concangis (not a lot to see here), then take a walk in Riverside Park by the River Wear. Then it’s time to drive on to Durham, one of our favourite places in the whole world, were we lived from 1976-79. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to book a double guest room in St John’s College (all things are possible on a virtual pilgrimage), which includes the use of a parking space on South Bailey.
May 21st, 2020. Ascension Day. Today’s retreat topic is how Merton’s contemplation drove him to a life of activism, as he wrote and spoke advocating peace and social justice. In chapter 37 of Seeds of Contemplation he writes:
God does not give His joy to us for ourselves alone, and if we should possess Him for ourselves alone we would not possess Him at all. Any joy that does not overflow from our souls and help other men to rejoice in God does not come to us from God. (But do not think that you have to see how it overflows into the souls of others. In the economy of His grace, you may be sharing His gifts with someone you will never know until you get to heaven.)
Merton’s first calling was to be a contemplative; for years he struggled against what his monastic superiors were asking him to do – like being the novice master of the monastery – and fought hard to be allowed to move into a hermitage in the woods, away from the community. But at the same time his contemplation gave him a passion for justice and peace, so that his writings in books and articles were a prophetic cry against much of what he saw in the world around.
He was against war, but also against the violent protest which he saw in the United States, directed against the Vietnam War. Instead, he argued for a Gandhian non-violent protest and resistance. The problem is, in a world where non-violent protest has a poor track record of overthrowing war, tyranny, and injustice, most people who are passionate about justice have little patience for the Gandhian or Christ-like approaches. However much I sympathised with the aims of Extinction Rebellion, I found the violence of their protests hard to accept, in their interference with the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people, many of whom also would agree with XR. Merton may have been anti-violence, but could his writings have been partly responsible for the violence of the anti-war protests?
In the end, Merton is right that true contemplation, true knowledge of God, must lead us to hate all forms of injustice, violence, and oppression. But the question of how to turn that hatred into proper action has no easy answer.
With a guilty feeling I opt out of the afternoon’s session which is to be more interactive and conversational about the balance (if that’s what it is?) between contemplation and action. I feel I’m not interested / have little of use to contribute / won’t find it particularly helpful. I’m afraid that some of my fellow retreatants will want to spend the time agonising about how age or ill health or frailty prevent them from being as active as they would like to be, or about how the protest and action of individuals seems so ineffective. Why can’t we change the world? Why can’t we right all its wrongs? And why can’t we do it now?
So instead I walk on the North Shore again, reflecting on how I may become more contemplative in my own prayer. I confess with alarm (I won’t call it shame) that my faithfulness in praying the Daily Office has often felt like going through the motions. Saying the words because I had to – and wanted to! – but often in a distracted way. The words progressed from the page into my eyes and out of my lips, without engaging much of the conscious brain. That’s to say, I would often be running an inner dialogue about How much more of this was there? What were the pressing things I must do when I was done here in church? How could I deal with the problem of how to manage X or Y? How soon can I stop this and get on with the things I’m really looking forward to?
Lord, teach us to pray
It’s as well that the intention to pray is more important than the depth or quality of our praying. I hope. And perhaps the process of prayer over the years has given God the opportunity to help me as I’ve thought through some of the questions in that internal dialogue. But still, I would like to concentrate more, and be more whole-mindedly conscious, of the content of the psalms and prayers I’m saying. What I seek and pray for now is greater mindfulness as I pray the Office: to be present to what I am doing, with my whole mind as well as my body. I wonder how I can possibly have reached my advanced age without knowing all this and having sorted it long ago. It’s a good job we have an extraordinarily patient (long-suffering!) God who knows that his children have always been slow learners at best.
Let’s head back then, it’s nearly time for Evening Prayer. Back to the prayer desk, and we’ll give it another go.
Wednesday, May 20th, 2020. The Holy Island retreat on Thomas Merton continues with its second day.
Here’s the problem I have with the whole concept of contemplation. It is either presented as, or is often perceived as, a superior way of prayer, and those who practise it (‘contemplatives’) are perceived as a superior class of Christian. So the incentive is for people who aspire to go further in their Christian life, to read books about contemplation and seek to ‘do’ it. But we are also told that it’s impossible to achieve or attain contemplation – it can only ever be a gift of God, which presumably may or may not be bestowed according to God’s inscrutable purpose. But then again, we can’t receive this gift unless we practise it. And then again again, contemplation is not only for some special high caste of Christians, but for everyone.
I speak from personal experience as one of those who at one time wanted to make spiritual progress and thought I must do that by ‘practising contemplation’. The proposed ways of doing that emphasised such techniques as Centering Prayer (“Centering Prayer is a method of silent prayer that prepares us to receive the gift of contemplative prayer, prayer in which we experience God’s presence within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than consciousness itself. This method of prayer is both a relationship with God and a discipline to foster that relationship,”) and also the method proposed in The Cloud of Unknowing. (“For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.”) They are similar in their effort to still the mind and focus on God, ceasing to have any ‘thoughts’, and when thoughts rush in as they inevitably will, returning to the repetition of the single-syllable prayer word.
I’ve tried this stuff, and it defeats me. I’ve had much better results at approaching to something that may (or perhaps, may not) be contemplation, with techniques like the Rosary or the Jesus Prayer, stilling my mind by constant repetition of a simple prayer, which I find a better help at moving beyond thought.
And then, the mainstay of my prayer has always been the Daily Office and a reading of Scripture that I would like to make much more like Lectio Divina. I’m pleased to see that the Centering Prayer website says, “Like Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina cultivates contemplative prayer. Unlike Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina is a participatory, active practice that uses thoughts, images and insights to enter into a conversation with God. Lectio Divina also is distinguished from reading the Bible for edification or encouragement, Bible study, and praying the scriptures in common, which are all useful but separate practices.” But I would add that Lectio Divina often leads from ‘thoughts, images and insights’ to that imageless ‘being with God’ to which Centering Prayer aspires – which is, perhaps, pure contemplation.
Well, those are my musings on Contemplation.
Thomas Merton
When we meet up with David Cole today, his theme is what Thomas Merton has to say about The True Self and The False Self. The aim of prayer, as of the whole Christian life, is to discard the False Self which sin and the modern world favour, and to discover the True Self as we discover God, or discover God as we discover the True Self.
So long as we are in the world, it’s impossible to leave the False Self entirely behind. In fact, we may never discover the True Self until we die. So there’s a lifelong task for us. That’s what I like. I’d hate to run out of things to do.
Tuesday, May 19th, 2020. One of the things I love most about staying on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne is the opportunity to join in prayer at the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, beside the remains of the ancient Priory. Morning Prayer is offered every day at 7.30 a.m., Evening Prayer at 5.30 p.m. This much isn’t unusual for any parish church where the clergy take seriously their commitment to saying the Daily Office. What is less common is that the attendance at these times of prayer may be 20 to 30 people. Some of them will be people staying at The Open Gate, perhaps, or other pilgrim visitors to the Island. But some will also be parishioners who are drawn to this holy practice, day by day. When I was a working vicar it was always a bonus when one or two others joined me. For 25 years I was most often alone in the chancel. Twenty or 30 others was a figure beyond my best hopes. Yet it says something about just how much Lindisfarne is experienced as a ‘thin place’ where the presence of God can be clearly felt.
The Church of St Mary the Virgin, Holy Island
So we begin our day with Morning Prayer together, before breakfast at The Open Gate, and an opportunity to get to know some of the other retreatants better. For our pilgrimage is also now a retreat, led by David Cole of Waymark Ministries, on Thomas Merton, and Contemplation. I have doubts and questions about the whole idea of Contemplation and Contemplative Prayer. Perhaps I will have an opportunity to explore them during the next three days, though I’m anxious that I may offend, or perhaps, even worse, be jumped upon by any of the others who are True Contemplatives. (Though I suspect that a True Contemplative wouldn’t jump on anyone who disagreed with them.)
This morning’s session draws on Merton’s own writings, especially in New Seeds of Contemplation, which is a 1962 revision and expansion of the original Seeds of Contemplation (1949). My edition of it is a 1972 edition called Seeds of Contemplation, which bears on the title page the information, Originally published as New Seeds of Contemplation. Are we confused yet?
The opening two chapters are What is contemplation? and What contemplation is not. They provide what you might call a thorough taste of the enigma and paradox of this way of prayer – or is it, way of life?
The afternoon session allows more discussion, feedback, questions and sharing of experience, while touching on the theme of The Life of a Contemplative.
Thomas Merton’s writings have had a great influence on my Christian growth and thinking. It seems he was not universally liked by all his Trappist brothers at Gethsemani Abbey. And I’m left wondering whether I would have liked him, or found him rather unnerving or even terrifying? I would like to have liked him, and to have been able to call him a friend. But we can’t always choose, can we?
Monday, May 18th, 2020. Today we arrive at the principal destination of our pilgrimage. It is an island off the Northumbrian coast, connected to the mainland by a causeway that is passable twice a day at low tide. There are frequent tales of motorists taking a chance of getting across at the last possible moment, forgetting that the water comes in very fast. There are refuges built up on stilts at intervals, where the unlucky drivers can sit out the next four hours contemplating the fact that, though they will get back to their car when the tide goes out, their car won’t be going anywhere quickly.
The reason for our overnight stay in Bamburgh was to allow us to make the crossing well before the latest time of 11.25 a.m. You can always check the crossing times on the Holy Island crossing times website.
Holy Island gets lots of visitors in the tourist season. It is at its loveliest during high tide, when many of them have hurried back to the mainland, leaving a quieter place for those who are lucky enough to be staying. We are staying at The Open Gate, the main house of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, who run retreats and conferences there, and provide accommodation for visitors at other times. When we’ve checked in, found our rooms and taken up our suitcases, we head off for a walk to the north shore.
The Holy Island of Lindisfarne is shaped like an axe, and legend has it that when there was war in heaven (Revelation 12.7) and Michael and his angels fought against the dragon – that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan – and the devil’s battle-axe was struck from his hands and fell into the North Sea, forming this holy island as a constant reminder that the evil one is defeated.
It is one of those sacred places that draw down the presence of God: ‘thin places’ they are called, like Iona, Skellig Michael, and Bardsey Island. Here St Aidan founded Lindisfarne Priory. And here, on June 6th 793, one of the first Viking raids on England took place. The raiders were astonished by the monasteries they found scattered along the coast in sparsely populated places. Full of wealth and extraordinarily precious works of art, and inhabited by peaceful people who bore no arms and were unable to resist.
Lindisfarne North Shore
Walking on the sand, we reflect on how our 8th century Christian forebears must have thought about these events. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records:
In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, [a scribal error?] the ravaging of wretched heathen men destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.
And St Alcuin wrote: Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race … The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets.
A new unknown terror was unleashed upon them. Perhaps it seemed to them something like 9/11 has seemed to us, or the numerous terrorist attacks of our times, or the COVID-19 pandemic. For the monks of Lindisfarne, the arrival of the Vikings was not a looming uncertain anxiety about what might happen. It was about certain death: perhaps even more terrifying than the experience of the most seriously ill patients of our own times when they are rushed into hospital, treated by masked and gowned strangers, intubated and sedated and attached to ventilators.
I have wondered often, during these days, about what it is like to face death so immediately, to know that one is dying. And I come back to what I think is one of the most brilliant imaginings of it (for none of us can know) in Christian writing. It’s in C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 31. The devil Wormwood’s Christian ‘patient’, serving as an air raid warden, has just been killed in a World War Two air raid. The senior devil Screwtape writes in rage, threatening the most terrible retribution and describing the patient’s experience of death, as his eyes are suddenly opened and he sees not only his angel guardians, but also Christ his Lord:
Did you mark how naturally – as if he’d been born for it – the Earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! ‘Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?’
As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degradation of it! – that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy. But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange. He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realised what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time’. All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered. Recognition made him free of their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet. Only you were left outside
He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man.
We wake up on Sunday, May 17th. The Fifth Sunday After Easter, and Alleluia. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia.
We’re going to be driving further north today, but first we plan to join the congregation of St Paul’s Jarrow for their Sunday Eucharist. To receive the Sacrament in this place where Bede and all those other Anglo-Saxon and later monks, and congregations of Christians ever since, have received it, gives this time of worship an extra dimension. It is bread and wine, yet shared with the sense of all it has meant and means to all the believers who have gone before us. It colours the words we say, that we join in worship and praise of God “with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven”.
After the service we return to the car and leave The Old Rectory behind us. We haven’t given much thought to lunch, and a Google search of ‘Best Sunday roasts along the A1 north of Newcastle’ doesn’t shed much light. So we stop at The Jolly Bowman in Wallsend, which has a carvery. I’m still not sure whether it was the best choice, but it’s done.
Skirting the north-eastern edge of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (and being careful to call it Nyuhcassell, not Nyoocarsell – that’s what you get from marrying a lass who was born in County Durham) we pick up the A1 which we follow as far as the B1341, where we turn off for the final stretch to Bamburgh. We are booked for one night only at the Sunningdale Hotel, so after checking in and finding our room, we set off for a short walk around Bamburgh.
On this virtual Sunday afternoon there is plenty of time to visit the Castle on its commanding height, and then walk back to St Aidan’s Church in time for Evensong. Before entering the church we look at the grave of that great Victorian heroine Grace Darling.
Grace Darling is buried here
St Aidan’s Church, Bamburgh
According to Bede, St Aidan died close to this place, and his shrine in the church is another reminder of our fellowship in the communion of saints with those great Christians of the early British Church.
Saturday, May 16th, 2020. Today we are thinking about a man you could claim was the most significant Englishman of the first millennium: the Venerable Bede. Though it’s thought he hardly ever travelled outside of his native Northumbria, his fame spread throughout Christian Europe. Two centuries after his death, a Swiss monk wrote “God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the fourth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the world, has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the world.”
Bede was born around 673 A.D. on the lands of the monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. At the age of 7, he became a boy scholar there, under the founding abbot Benedict Biscop, and his successor Ceolfrith. His education and studies there went on throughout his life, and scholarship was so important to him that, though it is thought he should have become abbot in turn, he insisted that his primary calling was study and writing.
His most famous work is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, or An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, still widely read today. It is a primary source of much of our knowledge of Britain in the first eight centuries, on the strength of which Bede has often been called ‘the father of English history’. But he was far more than just a historian. He wrote numerous biblical commentaries, saints’ lives, and hymns. He was also a man of science, and wrote a treatise called De Natura Rerum, which had chapters on
1. De Quadrifario dei opere (on the fourfold work of God) 2. De mundi formatione (on the formation of the earth) 3. Quid sit mundus (what the world is) 4. De elementis (on the elements) 5. De firmamento (on heaven) 6. De varia altitudine cœli (on the differing height of the sky) 7. De cœlo superiore (on the upper sky) 8. De aquis cœlestibus (on the celestial waters) 9. De quinque circulis mundi (on the five circles of the earth) 10. De plagis mundi (on the climes of the earth) 11. De stellis (on the stars) 12. De cursu planetarum (on the course of the planets) 13. De ordine eorum (on their arrangement).
He understood the influence of the moon on the tides, he knew the world was round, not flat, (though I’ve always believed the idea that people of the middle ages believed the world was flat is a complete myth), he invented ‘A.D.’: Anno Domini,the system of dating years from the Birth of Christ.
The first time we really realised the extent of Bede’s Europe-wide fame and influence was when we visited Melk Abbey, and saw proudly displayed in its wonderful, wonderful library, a manuscript of De Natura Rerum. But in fact his works were sought after even further afield, and can be seen on display as far away as St Petersburg, where they were in the possession of monasteries. One of these is thought to contain the earliest example of a portrait within an illuminated capital.
Our first visit this morning is to St Paul’s, Jarrow, the site of the Jarrow monastery.
St Paul’s Jarrow
St Paul’s Jarrow. The Nave, looking towards the Chancel
Much of the church building is later than the time of Bede, but the chancel is the original chapel of the monastery, dating from 681. It’s one of those special thin places where you can reflect that Bede himself prayed the Offices there, and though separated by centuries of time, we are united with him and his eighth century brethren in the communion of saints.
For lunch, what could be a more fascinating sounding place than The Viking Tandoori? Alas, it is ‘only’ an Indian restaurant, rather than one with a peculiarly Nordic flavour. Curried pickled herring, anyone? Not a chance.
After lunch we visit Jarrow Hall, the Anglo-Saxon farm, village and Bede Museum. Anglo-Saxon fun for all the family, with reconstructions of 8th century houses, people in costume weaving baskets, children dressing up as monks and practising their illuminated letters.
Later we go for a drive as Alison has a hankering for the sea, and we take a stroll along Marsden Beach.
Marsden Beach
Tomorrow we head further north. It’s a long road, and somehow The North is always beyond you, so that you wonder whether you will ever actually arrive… Perhaps that too is a parable of Life.
Godspelled 