Field Notes

A coincidence, coming across a mid Nineteenth century travel guide to Northumberland, at the time my partner and I had decided to return to the North East, to Newcastle, after more than thirty five years.
Walter White, in Northumberland and the Borders, writes about the region during that intense period of industrialisation in the mid years of the nineteenth century. He carries introductions, access to the industrial base of the region, but he is also attentive to the lives of working people, the ‘common folk’. He wants to understand, or at least be able to record, something of the lives he encounters on his rambles.
He describes the banks of the Tyne as, crowded with manufactories, for coal is cheap. […] River and shore show more and more signs of trade and labour as we descend: half a dozen steam ships on the stocks-rows of coke ovens all aglow-troops of boiler-makers all raising a deafening clatter-heaps, nay mountains, of slag and refuse ballast-more steamers on the stocks […] while here and there a green field and hedgerow left amid the havoc and encroachment plead with silent eloquence for Nature.

His guide is partial, biased, constantly referring to the backward nature of the region, while also being absorbed in the lives of the ‘common people’. But then he was writing a travel guide at a time of increased domestic tourism. As a reviewer in the Spectator (6 August 1859) wrote , He is teaching his countrymen how and where to look for health of body and mind in out-of-the-way places of their own land, places more foreign to many of them than the Alps or the banks of the Rhine.

White was walking at a time of immense change and upheaval. I’ll follow, but also pick my own path across a very different landscape, the industry that excited him long gone.

So this is my walking journal. Following White’s travelogue, yes, but also describing a meandering path across what should be familiar territory.
It’s curious, but the longer I’m here the more I realise the extent to which I am discovering, as well as rediscovering a local landscape.
White informs but doesn’t limit my wanderings. Suggests routes to follow, which I will inevitably stray from.

Writing is important, but sometimes a photograph in passing is often sufficient.
Lets see.

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