Ar Reet

I left you in Amble so I will pick up from there. "Ar reet" is the common greeting around these parts, being Northumberland for “all right?” We ended up spending five days in this lovely marina because we wanted a rest and the weather was "pooh" a nautical term for not nice to go sailing in.

On Sunday we had a pleasant walk to Warkworth Castle after a lunch at the yacht club. For £8 we had a pile of food, roast meat, mash and roast potatoes, carrots, cabbage, roast parsnips and a Yorkshire pudding ("because my wife the chef is from Yorkshire, so you get Yorkshire pudding with everything!" said the man serving us).

Warkworth is a medieval castle, once owned by the Percy family, the powerful Earls (later Dukes) of North Humber Land (the lands north of the Humber.) The Great Tower is a masterpiece of medieval English architecture and is still very much intact. and several of the rooms were refurbished in the 1850s and still used up to the early 1900s.

Tuesday we caught the bus into Morpeth and explored this charming market town with a good range of shops, which I was happy with! On the bus ride (via the prison) we saw lots of small wind farms everywhere. A common site is to see a green field with sheep and lambs grazing  happily while one wind turbine elegantly wafts is blades overhead like some giant tree that has sprouted out of the middle of the field. The sheep take no notice.

Our friends Darren and Louisa with pirate Sam and Freya came over for dinner on the boat that evening, which they loved, so hopefully some future young sailors in Sam and Freya. The Amble yacht club are looking for more cadets as they only have three at the moment. We did talk to them about the lack of young people in sailing, it seems to be a common problem, I guess they are all in their bedrooms playing on computer screens, not experiencing real life, which is sad. If we can get out and have sailing adventures in our 60’s let’s hope there are some young people out there who want to do the same. 

Amble, like several of the other old fishing ports we have been to, are reinventing themselves by building marinas to attract the profitable leisure industry in sailing (yachts and motor cruisers) and fishing. The locals told us that Amble used to be a coal port, and the ghostly carcasses of large coal barges are still to be seen in the estuary. A raised railway used to bring coal out to the river mouth and tip their loads straight into the into the barge's holds. They would then be taken by sea to London and other ports along the coast. It was not a tourist destination, Warkworth with its castle and quaint village was. Now it is almost the other way around. There are expensive marina side flats in the new development - Harbour Village- opened in 2015 has individual retail pods for up market shops selling art, crafts, gifts and artisan foods. The Old Boat House has been turned into a fish restaurant and there is a new fish market built in a designer building with fancy sea inspired mosaics. So Amble is trying to reinvent itself and go up market to attract tourism and it is succeeding to some degree, but the old Amble is still there in the High Street and pubs. It holds an annual Puffin Festival so all the shops had pictures of puffins as drawn by the local school children and brightly coloured puffin banners. We will miss the festival as it is the May Whitsun bank holiday weekend. However we did see some puffins when we left Amble at 4.30am on Wednesday bound for Eyemouth, our first port of call in Scotland. It was sad to say goodbye to Northumberland and we wish Amble, the friendliest port, "Ar Reet."