The young German lads only returned from their night on the town at something like 4 in the morning. This woke me up. Given their continued absence had been on my mind as a concern, I felt the punishment fit to the crime was simply to get up at my normal hour and not be terribly concerned about disturbing their slumber as I gathered and packed my clobber.
I rode to beside the Tyne where I picked the trace of NCN (National Cycle Network) and hung a left to follow the river to the North Sea. After a bit the NCN route left riverside and proceeded along a car free trail that I began to suspect was an old railway. I was wrong: it was something far more interesting. It was an old wagonway. Wagonways were a step in the evolution of railways. Simply put, relatively ordinary wagons hauled by horses and gravity ran along wooden and later iron rails. I should have suspected this as the grades were higher than typical for a railway.
(The general Newcastle-on-Tyne area is the birthplace of steam power including railways. I used to think Britain was well placed to have been the local for the development of steam power as it had plenty of the two basic ingredients: coal and iron. I have recently realized that I was wrong. There was a third ingredient in abundant supply: fresh water, a non-trivial thing. Arabia, for example, is unlikely to have been the locale for the development of steam power even if Allah had left clues in the Koran.)
Anyway, the NCN took me past an old Roman fort and its' associated bath. Unfortunately, it was too early to visit the former. The latter had a load of garbage in the parking lot. A dog walker whom I chanced upon was most indignant about the fly-tippers who had left it there.
The NCN routes are frustrating as they can be great and they can be confusing. Also, they tend towards being off-road if at all possible no matter what the added mileage. For the long distance cyclist with high tolerance for traffic this not always needed. Also their signage isn’t as plentiful or clear as it might be. Furthermore, Sustrans (the organization behind the NCN) needs to work on their map design.
However, the NCN got me out of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and onto NCN Route 1. This was at Tynemouth, Newcastle’s sea resort since at least the 1800s. It still is a classic British seaside resort, with the addition of a surfing school and doubtless many other forms of modern entertainment.
I had a light lunch in Blyth. I then skipped a bit of the NCN only to rejoin it at about Lynemouth. Near there I saw a sign for a “Travellers’ caravan site”, (Travellers being a term for the Roma a.k.a. Gypsies.) The route was nicely scenic and there was an assortment of British holidaymakers. Families with children armed with shovels and buckets (the British road sign pictogramme for a beach is a sandcastle), older people out for a brisk walk, cyclists of several breeds, young and old, dog walkers of all ages and many more that I failed to identify.
It had been cloudy for much of the morning and it began to rain. This slowed progress. I stopped for break in Amble, then headed off again in full rain gear. Of course, before I reached the vicinity of Warkworth (no great distance) it stopped.
Around Lesbury, I came upon and stuck to the B1339 as it was a more direct route to Bamburgh than NCN Route 1. I stopped at a garage in Embleton for a snack. The cashier (an older man) assumed I was Dutch after I said I couldn’t tell him how many miles I had ridden since Newcastle as I worked in kilometres. I explained I was Canadian and we had adopted the metric system more than forty years ago. He grumbled about the state of the roads which of course amused me greatly, being from Quebec.
I was getting tired to the point I didn’t want to look at the odometer. It was of great relief to finally see the afternoon sun on Bamburgh Castle as I left Seahouses.
Tomorrow is a short day as I will visit the Castle and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
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