Exploring Northumberland (Index)
Land of singing waters,
And words from off the sea,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land where I would be.
— Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
Home… Berwick-upon-Tweed, February 2025
In early 2024 Helen and I uprooted ourselves after half a lifetime and moved from a small, but growing, village outside of Glasgow to England’s most north-easterly town, Berwick-upon-Tweed. While I’d like to say that the move was years in the planning, the reality is that we took the decision very quickly. Once we’d had the initial idea the combination of location and proximity to family meant that everything fell into place very quickly.
Since then we’ve been busy exploring. We’ve also been busy getting the new house straight, getting settled, going on holiday and dealing with family stuff. In other words, the stuff of life. Despite the many distractions we have, however, been able to get to know the surrounding area and I’ve been out and about with the camera a reasonable amount.
Over the following pages I’ve put together a few words and pictures about the places that we’ve enjoyed. There aren’t many words and the style of the photographs, in the main, could be described as ‘documentary landscape’. They’re not finely crafted landscapes (see below), but rather a representation of the scene taken during the daytime in ‘normal’ hours. They hopefully give you a flavour of what to expect on any given day if you happen to fancy a day out…
The Locations
I’ve created a Google map with links to most of the locations. There is a link here to the map.
Berwick-upon-Tweed to Lindisfarne
Berwick-upon-Tweed
Spittal
Cocklawburn
Cheswick Sands
Norham
Ford and Etal
Holy Island of Lindisfarne
Bamburgh to Howick
Ross Sands
Budle Bay
Bamburgh
Seahouses and the Farnes
Beadnell
Alnwick and Coast
Alnwick Castle
Hulne Park
The Alnwick Garden
Hadrian’s Wall
Hadrian’s Wall
Further South
Newcastle
Scotland
St Abb’s
The Photographer’s Guide
There are many photographic guides to Northumberland (I’ve linked to what I think is one of the best below). I originally started this blog not long after we’d moved to Berwick and it quickly became clear that I was in danger of trying to reinvent the wheel. This was problematic for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if the wheel is a photographic guide to Northumberland, then it certainly doesn’t need reinventing. Secondly, even if it did need reinventing, that’s not really what I’d want to do.
By the middle of last year I’d reached a point where I wasn’t really enjoying my photography, largely because there was a mismatch between the photographs I was trying to take and the images I enjoyed viewing. In short, I’d created a false expectation of what I was trying to achieve and, bluntly, set myself up to fail. At some point I plan to waffle on at length in a separate post on this topic; I found that there was a fair amount to unpack and the exercise has been quite cathartic… Also expensive.
I have nothing against sunrise and sunset shots, golden hour, slow shutter speeds and ultra wide-angle lenses. I’ll still take those photographs if the opportunity arises (in honesty, probably not the ultra-wide angle ones), but I’m starting to derive far more pleasure from a more under-stated style of photography. Images shot when most folk are up and about, from head height (which is generally where we keep our eyes) and using relatively ‘normal’ focal lengths. I’ve described this as ‘documentary landscape’ above and that’s my intent; to document the aspects of the locations that bring me pleasure.
I’ve enjoyed taking all of the images presented over the next few posts; if you’ve stumbled across these pages I hope you derive some pleasure from these small observations.
The Book Landscape Photographers Should Buy
If you’re interested in Northumberland as a landscape photography location (and if you’re excited by landscape photography, you should be), then I can’t recommend the fotoVUE book by Anita Nicholson highly enough. It gets five stars from me and if you click on the image that should take you to fotoVUE’s website where you’ll find all of their superb guides.
It’s clearly a labour of love and contains a body of work that stretches over many, many years. The locations are well researched and explained, directions are clear and the imagery stunning. Even if I had wanted to produce a landscape guide, I’m not naïve enough to think that all I need to is shake the camera and images of this quality and this storied would come aflowing…
Hopefully I can offer something complementary.
