Northumbria [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION When I was seven, and supposed to be asleep, I would sit at the bedroom window in our house in Newcastle and look out across Northumberland to the Cheviot Hills and to what is now the Northumberland National Park. This, I knew, was the real North. Now, fifty years later, I sit and write in the upper room of a farm cottage above Macclesfield in Cheshire and look out onto the Peak National Park whose boundary Is the next lane. This, I tell visitors firom the South, is the North. Bede, sitting in his cell in Jarrow, would have agreed. For him the most important frontier in the land did not lie between the Tyne and the Solway where the Romans had put it, nor between the Tweed and the Solway where the Middle Ages were to leave it, but between the Humber and the Dee. That was the North-South divide. To the south of the Humber lay the kingdom of the southern English, sometimes called the Southumbrians. To the north of the Humber lay the kingdom of the Northumbrians, and Bede knew which he preferred. For him as for me, the North is that part of England which is dominated by the Pennines. The South is the rest. The Pennines are the North. Northumbria is (or was) everything to the east of them and quite a lot to the west of them, Carlisle, for instance, and even Chester, on occasion. And for more than a century Northumbria was the centre of European civilization. The Vikings put an end to that when they sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in AD 793 and Northumbria has shrunk since then in almost every sense. It is now confined to the geographical counties of Northumberland and Durham, with perhaps a foothold in what we used to call the North Riding. Anyone writing to Bede at Jarrow would now have to add to the address the designation Tyne and Wear, and who would dare to assert that it is still the centre of European civilization To appreciate Northumbria now, all that is necessary is to revel in its landscape and to revere its past. It helps if you go there in person and this book is meant to encourage you to see it for yourself. The landscape of Northumbria is there to be looked at. To enjoy it, it is not essential to know the difference between Silurian rock and Andesetic lava or that the Great Whin Sill which stretches from Bamburgh to Greenhead is an Igneous intrusion. I once heard a girl at the youth hostel at Bellingham ask innocently about the ingenious rock. Too many guide books to Northumbria confront the readers with a geological intrusion which causes them to read no further and they never get to know about Oswald and Aidan. But it does excite the mind to know that Cheviot is the stump of an ancient volcano. Miss Eggie told us that in the reception class at Pendower Elementary School, which is why I used to sit at the bedroom window on a summer's evening in the faint hope that Cheviot would erupt again. Not that it needed to for it is an enchantment in itself. The Cheviot is 2,676