June 13, 2022
Day 5
We were up quite early this morning for a lovely breakfast: French raisin toast with Canadian maple syrup for Rosemary and avocado toast with smoked salmon for Paul. Again today’s stage was unsuited for walking, so we said goodbye to our hosts and headed up the hill to the bus station. Our plan was to take the bus to Berwick-upon-Tweed, look around for the day, then take the bus down to our B&B in Fenwick.
We caught the #267 bus at Wooler Bus Station at 10 am and it wandered through the countryside for 45 minutes before crossing the Tweed and dropping us off in Golden Square. Before leaving we went across the street to check the posted bus schedules and find out when we should catch the bus which would take us to Fenwick.
Berwick still has the defensive walls which were built several hundred years ago to protect it. You can walk around them, so that’s what we did. The path along the walls was very wide, not quite what we had expected. There were signs which tell you about the architecture and every so often we came to bastions which were designed to allow guns to cover every part of the wall. This is the only remaining example of town walls with bastions in Britain.
After a while we could see the North Sea, and there were more modern gun platforms pointed in that direction. Far off on the horizon we could see Lindisfarne Castle.
Farther along there were a lot of swans near the mouth of the Tweed, nearly 100 of them by Rosemary’s count. There were a lot of Herring Gulls too, but hardly any other birds on the shore.
After the walls ended we explored some of the city within the walls, finally ending up at the train station. There wasn’t much else to see or do, so we were bored and had a disagreement about our lunch plans. Eventually we walked back to Golden Square and had lunch there, at the Leaping Salmon. Paul had fish and chips and Rosemary had a club sandwich.
We caught the double-decker bus down the highway at about 3:15 pm and got off 20 minutes later at Fenwick Bridge. We had thought that “Bridge” might refer to an overpass, but no, there was no bridge to be seen and we had to leg it across the A1. We then had a short walk to Fenwick B&B.
Once again it was a beautiful house and our room upstairs was very spacious. We chatted with our hostess for a while about the bus, or lack thereof, to Holy Island tomorrow. There were no buses but her friend Howard would be able to drive us over there. There were no places to eat in Fenwick either, and Howard would have driven us to a nearby pub, but having had a late lunch meant we didn’t need to go out for dinner.
After a while the mother-daughter pair of walkers we had already met a few times arrived. Maria, the mother, was quite anxious about getting over to the island before the tide came in. So it was decided that Howard would pick up the four of us at 9 am tomorrow and take us over there.
Next: Fenwick to Holy Island
West Coast Hikers Around The World 