Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  We started our recording on the edge of the Cotswolds but, for some reason, our production coordinator decided to book us all into a Travelodge on the ring road in Oxford. I know there are hundreds of wonderful B&Bs throughout the area, but no, far better to drive in crawling rush hour to a car park on the ring road to stay in what amounts to a collection of cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other. When I got to my room I removed the plastic undersheet (you have to do this straightaway, because when you are dripping with sweat at 2 a.m. you will be too tired to work it out) and tried to draw the curtains. They were broken.

  On the faux-wooden sideboard, there was a packet of Pringles, a Tracker bar and a can of Diet Coke. I was taken aback, as I didn’t think they did that sort of thing.

  ‘They don’t,’ Amber the production assistant said when we met in the pub for a drink. ‘I put them there to try and liven the place up a bit.’

  She was gold dust, was Amber. She came from Devon and spoke with the West Country burr that is my favourite accent, mainly because it’s one I can really do. Every conversation had to be sprinkled liberally with ‘All right, my lover?’, which made us laugh. It’s pathetic, I know, but when you’re on the road trying to ride a 1950s bike with gears you can’t change and a crossbar so high you get groin strain every time you climb on it, you need silly things to laugh about.

  Our crew for Britain by Bike was me, Amber and Alison, who was a self-shooting director, which means she did all the filming and all the directing. She basically ran the show while Amber and I said, ‘All right, my lover?’ to each other. Exploring the countryside by bike, even a bike that I hated, is much faster than walking it. You can still stop and enjoy the view and you can throw the bike down (always a temptation) and walk off track to see, for example, Offa’s Dyke or Broadway Tower.

  We worked from sunrise until it was dark every day because we were packing a lot into a very short space of time, and we got along beautifully. Our only problem was that we were being organized from afar, so hotel bookings were never great and transport arrangements always caused confusion. The worst example was when we were on the Isle of Wight and Alison wanted to film me on the ferry from Yarmouth to Lymington because it was on that journey that Tennyson wrote ‘Crossing the Bar’.

  Amber phoned the production coordinator, who was in an office in Glasgow, and asked her to book the tickets.

  Three hours later we had a text message: ‘Can’t see any ferries from Yarmouth to mainland. Can only find superfast ferry from Yarmouth to the Netherlands. Will that do?’

  I would have quite enjoyed a trip to Amsterdam, but as we were in Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, not Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and I quite wanted to get home, it wasn’t the most helpful suggestion.

  Luckily, Lucy had actually looked at a map to work out where we should stay for St Oswald’s Way. Our first stop was at the B&B in Bamburgh, within sight of the castle, which had been King Oswald’s royal headquarters when he was King of Northumbria.

  The castle is built on nine acres of the same rock type as the Farne Islands, Whin Sill, which means it is in no danger of slipping into the sea, but it is not immune to attack and holds the distinction of being the first castle to be destroyed by gunfire during the Wars of the Roses. It stood as a ruin and was used as a hospital and a coastguard station until Lord Armstrong, engineer, inventor and arms manufacturer, bought it in 1894.

  Armstrong spent a million pounds (more than £60 million in today’s money) renovating the castle and ensuring that it had the benefits of his latest inventions, like central heating and air conditioning. He died a week before the work was complete, but the conversion of the castle into a home has lasted: the Armstrong family still live at Bamburgh Castle. It’s open all year round and I would thoroughly recommend a visit. You can even get married in the King’s Hall, should the desire grasp you.

  I would love to have wandered round the castle for hours, but I was shattered. We headed to our B&B, left our mud-caked boots by the front door and repaired to our rooms. All I wanted was a hot bath and to peel off my damp clothes, in whichever order happened most easily.

  We had supper in a local pub, thrilled that we could order pie and mash without fear of calories. There is nothing better than a really good meal when you know you deserve it. The only problem was finding the energy to raise the fork.

  I was in bed by ten o’clock and fast asleep by one minute past. I woke up the next morning in exactly the same position. I had a few seconds of confusion as I worked out where I was and which sport I was covering. But then it came to me: I was walking. My only concern would be blister plasters and snacks. There is a huge joy in paring back life to the bare essentials.

  It felt as if we’d only just had supper, but you must take food when it’s available, so Lucy and I tucked into a full English breakfast. My shoulders were a bit sore, but my legs felt good. Lucy insisted on walking in jeans, which I thought would chafe, but I wasn’t going to argue. We had five more days of walking together so it seemed better to let her get on with it. I would say ‘I told you so’ on day six.

  The second section of St Oswald’s Way is fourteen miles from Bamburgh Castle to Craster, all along the coast, but we tracked back a bit to do a section we had missed the day before. We started inland at Spindlestone Mill and walked through fields and woodland in the company of Iain Robson, who is in charge of maintaining the Northumberland Coast Path, and Tom Cadwallender, who was the Natural and Cultural Heritage Officer for the Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Butterflies danced around us as the two men explained the balancing act for those who work in the tourism trade of maintaining the very thing that people come for – the solitude and the space – while promoting the area so that the local economy can benefit.

  After a couple of miles we reached the coast at Budle Bay and could see back to Holy Island.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem very far away.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Iain sensed my despair. ‘It looks closer than it is and you can’t walk directly there because the sea is in the way.’

  Tom and Iain were both in shorts and I’d thrillingly zipped off my trousers again to let the sun see my legs. I lived in hope that, by the time we finished, they would be vaguely bronzed. I was to be disappointed.

  We had to cut along the edge of a golf course (there are eight in total on St Oswald’s Way) and, as an enthusiastic but erratic golfer, I felt as if I was a gamekeeper turned poacher. Walkers don’t like golfers and golfers certainly don’t like walkers, but Iain insisted we should all exist happily together as long as we respected each other’s rights. I put my finger to my lips to tell him to shush as a man in a pale-pink-and-yellow diamond jumper was about to tee off twenty feet away from us.

  ‘Good drive,’ I said helpfully as he sliced the ball off the tee. He glared at us.

  Bamburgh Castle was looking magnificent in the early-morning sunshine and, as the tide was out, we cut down to the beach to walk on the compacted sand.

  ‘Look at that.’ Iain pointed to Harkess Rocks, jutting out into the sea.

  They are known locally as Stag Rocks because of the bright-white stag painted on to the rock side. Apparently, it was put there in honour of an albino stag who was chased by hounds to the point of the cliff and, rather than be caught, jumped into the North Sea. Either that or it was painted by Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War. You would think someone would know. It’s quite a thing to have appeared overnight, but it remains a mystery.

  As well as the castle, Bamburgh is the home of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution Grace Darling Museum. Grace Darling was the first woman to be awarded the RNLI Silver Medal for Gallantry, for her part in the rescue of survivors from the SS Forfarshire, a luxury paddle steamer that was wrecked off the rocks near the Farne Islands in September 1838.

  The boilers of the steamer had been giving trouble and as the captain tried to navigate the sixty-two on board to safety, he got caught in a terri
ble storm. He made the mistake of sailing towards Longstone Lighthouse, where Grace’s father, William, was the lighthouse keeper, and crashed into the rocks from which it was meant to warn him away. Some crew members escaped on the only lifeboat but, when the ship split in two, those left behind had little chance of survival. A small group of nine swam to the nearby Big Harcar rocks.

  Early in the morning, Grace spotted movement through her telescope and persuaded her father to take out the rowing boat to attempt a rescue. She had to keep the boat steady in the stormy waters while her father climbed on to the rocks to help people to safety. The rescue of the nine survivors was a success.

  That bit of the story is very well known. What is less discussed is what happened to Grace Darling afterwards.

  The press loved the unlikely story of survival against the odds and the young woman at the centre of it all. The letters pages of The Times were full of admirers, with one correspondent writing, ‘Is there in the whole field of history, or of fiction even, one instance of female heroism to compare for one moment with this?’

  Grace Darling became a celebrity. People sent her letters and presents, and even the young Queen Victoria sent her fifty pounds, which was a fortune to a girl who lived in a lighthouse. People hired boats at Seahouses to come out to Longstone to try to catch a glimpse of the famous sea heroine. It all, frankly, got a bit weird.

  Artists arrived to paint her portrait, there were mugs, jugs and chinaware with her image on them and her fame spread around the world. A circus owner tried to take advantage of her popularity by asking her to appear at his show in Edinburgh, but the prospect of her being used to pull in the punters appalled some of her fans, who wrote to her urging her not to lower herself by appearing at Batty’s Circus. Grace got upset and decided to give the circus a miss. She was offered a part in a stage play at the Adelphi Theatre in London called The Wreck at Sea, in which she would play herself. She turned that down, as well as most public appearances and the many proposals of marriage from men she had never met.

  Not long after the rescue, Grace and her father were presented with medals by the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. The Duke offered to become Grace’s guardian to help her handle the attention and the funds that were coming her way, but even he couldn’t contain or control the interest. Poems were written about her, novels based on her, ballads sung for her and endless letters written to her.

  All Grace wanted to do was live quietly at Longstone Lighthouse, but that would be like David Beckham deciding he wanted to play for a village football team. William Darling was conscious of his daughter’s reluctance. He wrote in a letter turning down yet another request for an appearance, ‘You can hardly form an idea how disagreeable it is to my daughter to show herself in public … You cannot believe how much she has been annoyed by it all.’

  Grace Darling was the first media icon of the Victorian age, and hated it. In 1842, four years after the rescue, she picked up a virus and couldn’t get rid of a cough. Her family moved her to the mainland so that she could get proper attention, but it was too late. She was wracked with guilt about the requests she had turned down and began to have visions of people staring at her. She was weak and fading fast. The Duchess of Northumberland asked her own doctor to examine Grace. He diagnosed tuberculosis.

  Grace died in her father’s arms on 20 October 1842. She was twenty-six years old. Thousands came to her funeral at St Aidan’s Church in Bamburgh, and the country mourned. A black iron fence surrounds a memorial to her, which looks like a Gothic four-poster bed with her stone body lying beneath the canopy, an oar by her side.

  She is still famous today, and my nephew Jonno has just been learning about her at school. As recently as 1974, a song by The Strawbs was called ‘Grace Darling’. The first verse goes like this:

  You have been my lighthouse in every storm

  You have given shelter, you have kept me safe and warm

  And in my darkest nights you have shone your brightest lights

  You are my saving grace, darling, I love you.

  I find her story desperately sad. We think of uncontrollable, unwelcome fame as a purely modern plague, but the story of Grace Darling proves otherwise.

  We walked on to Seahouses, crossing a massive stone-step stile and approaching the town not from its prettiest side. Seahouses is a fish ’n’ chip paradise, and the seagulls love it. The town grew from the early railway tourists coming out of Newcastle, and it’s bustling. My shoulders were hurting from the rucksack and I was starting to whinge.

  ‘Do belt up,’ said Lucy. ‘We’re staying somewhere really nice tonight.’

  We pushed on through Seahouses to Beadnell Bay, where I kicked off my boots and socks and thought I’d do what Dad used to do when racehorses had sore shins – bathe them in cold water.

  My, oh my, the North Sea is cold. It was a gorgeous late-summer’s day, warm evening sunshine persuading people to go windsurfing and jet-skiing. Children were splashing, their screams dancing down the bay. A woman and a Parson Russell terrier were playing tug of war with a rope of kelp, him snarling as he tried to win the prize. A man was checking his lobster pots and, on the horizon, I could see a tanker out at sea. I stood trying to distract myself with all of these sights as my legs quietly froze in the water.

  ‘What’s good for the horses is good for me,’ I thought.

  When I couldn’t feel my lower legs any more, I walked back up the beach.

  Thankfully, Lucy hadn’t been lying about the quality of our accommodation. St Cuthbert’s House is a renovated Presbyterian church and went instantly to the top of my ‘best ever B&Bs’ list. In fact, I would describe it as a luxury small hotel with a family feel, but that might not fit on the signs.

  Paradise came in the form of fresh linen sheets and a three-course home-cooked dinner in the galleried dining room.

  Our next day’s section was meant to be from Craster to Warkworth, but when we woke the wind and rain were lashing the windows of St Cuthbert’s House. It was the tail end of Hurricane Bill, which had wreaked havoc along the east coast of Canada and North America before hitting Ireland and the UK with heavy rainfall and strong winds.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I asked Lucy over our steaming porridge.

  I was quite happy to hang about all morning drinking coffee and reading the papers, but we had to go out at some stage. We were due to meet an artist and a photographer in Boulmer (pronounced Boomer) to discuss the visual glory of Northumberland.

  ‘I’ll call them and discuss our options,’ said Lucy.

  One of the reasons that Lucy and I get on so well is that we are both up for having unusual adventures but we are also quite pragmatic in our outlook. Years ago, when we’d done about ten series of Ramblings together, I said that we should choose walks that we wanted to do and live the experience for ourselves.

  That way, the programmes would be authentic, better to listen to and our lives would be enhanced. With only a few mistakes – the opera singer who was far too aware of being on the radio (‘Gate closing,’ she said, as the gate closed), the tour guide who spoke in that tour-guide voice, the ramblers who wouldn’t stop to look at the view, the trainee producer they gave me who I was supposed to help educate (terrible idea) – we’ve done pretty well at sticking to our ethos. If we are discovering new things and are genuinely excited by them, the listener will be, too.

  In this instance, the new experience I was keen to have was an easy morning. Day three of a long-distance walk, it starts to hurt. You are over the feeling of invincibility and the novelty has worn off.

  ‘Right,’ said Lucy, who had made her phone call. ‘We’re going to meet them in Boulmer and walk for as long as we can without this getting soaked.’

  She pointed to the recording device hanging round her neck. Lucy had refashioned a see-through washbag into a plastic cover for the recording kit and hoped that would keep it watertight. She needed to be able to see the screen and the red light that told her we were recording, so
she couldn’t hide it under her coat. I was happy to use the safety of the recording kit as an excuse to cut our walk down to the bare minimum, but my one regret in skipping south to Boulmer was that we would miss Dunstanburgh Castle.

  I had walked there before, and I recommend the route from Craster up to the castle and back again, though it’s often quite busy. There are some holiday cottages on the clifftops that I fancy – even if it was stormy, you could sit and watch the North Sea whipping up a lather. I do love a good storm.

  Dunstanburgh Castle was built by the 2nd Earl of Lancaster, a grandson of Henry III, but he had his head chopped off by Edward II in 1322 for leading a rebellion a year earlier, before he could enjoy the luxury of his fortified retreat. It was designed on a massive scale, far bigger than Bamburgh Castle, and even the ruins stretch across eleven acres. It is isolated and exposed to the North Sea. J. M. W. Turner visited in 1797 and painted the coastline being ravaged by waves, the castle ruins forming a haunting backdrop.

  Turner would have loved this kind of a day on the Northumberland coast; the artist I was meeting, Sue Fenlon, was similarly moved.

  ‘I find it’s a very emotional coastline,’ she said. ‘Growling grey skies, muddy, olivey-green seaweed and always throwing up different shapes with the stones and line of seaweed coming up towards sand dunes. There’s so much atmosphere with the sounds of the birds and the seals.’

  We couldn’t hear that much because it was raining so hard, but I got her drift.

  Boulmer is a tiny fishing village which was the smuggling capital of the north. Smugglers and pirates from across Northumberland and Scotland would meet in the Fishing Boat Inn to trade their stash of stolen goods. The most famous was William Faa II, King of the Gypsy Kingdom. He owned an inn in Kirk Yetholm (now a tourist attraction at the end of the Pennine Way) from where he would smuggle whisky over the border into England and take tobacco and Dutch gin or brandy back with him.