Alnwick and The Wall

On our drive south we wanted to go to the beach. Rachael was navigating so took us to what looked like a sandy beach on the map but was actually Lindisfarne causeway, which was a massive salt pan at low tide. After looking it up we thought about driving across to Lindisfarne Castle but it was really foggy and we didn’t really know how fast the tides are so thought it was best not to in a rental car.

It felt really familiar though, and I realised it was the island from the second episode of the Vikings TV show which I had only just watched before leaving Australia. We drove to a beach a bit further south and tried to see Lindisfarne Castle from there, and could make it out but the weather was still really foggy so not very good views.

We went to the next beach south though and saw Bamburgh Castle, which was really impressive. The beach itself was actually surprisingly good compared to what I pictured for England. It kind of reminded me of Farnborough, but foggy and cold.

The little village our AirBnB was at was really nice, and there was a field of rapeseed (canola oil) across the road.

We walked up the road to an indian place for dinner, and we were pretty much the only ones there (was a bit early) but was probably one of the best Indian restaurants we’ve been too.

We stayed at Alnwick because I saw the poison garden on atlas obscura and we thought it would be interesting, but it wasn’t actually that exciting. It was mostly just vegetables and spices, like Rosemary and Lavender which we have in our garden. They did have some interesting one’s like monkshood and deadly nightshade but nothing was flowering at the time. They also grow drugs there, but they weren’t out while we were there as they keep them locked up most the year.

The Alnwick Garden’s themselves were pretty nice though. The highlight was a section with heaps of different water fountain designs.

Tom Scott did a video on it about a month after we were there:

The castle next door looked pretty cool also, although we didn’t go in.

After Alnwick we were heading to the Lakes District on the other side of the country, but we wanted to drive along Hadrian’s Wall. It was a great drive in general, with lots of rolling green hills with sheep. The wall was impressive in that something nearly 2000 years old is still there. We went to a museum showing some of the roman history although we could have just done free stuff they implied you had to pay to walk up to the wall (which you don’t for most of it).

The latrine was most impressive showing they had plumbing back then.