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Hart Village and Crimdon Dene
May. 13th, 2009 09:46 pmWe've been out this evening at a meeting of the City of Durham Trust; and arrived home by twilight, at 9.30 - and still six weeks off midsummer. The long summer evenings are one of the best things about living where we do.
Living near the sea is another. Periodically I get the itch to walk along the coast, and when I do, it's easily arranged. We didn't walk at the weekend: the weather was showery, we had an overnight visitor, and deadlines to meet. But Monday was bright, and - thinking that exploring the coastal denes would meet my desire for the sea, and might also allow us to enjoy the height of the bluebell season - we found a route along the coast by Crimdon Dene.
It wasn't a long walk, but it was full of surprises - plus one overall surprise, that it was surprisingly pretty. Hart Village is not at all the usual 'East Durham village' (which means a mining village, whose mine has closed): it has a Saxon Church, and a pub with a figurehead proudly displayed on the wall. The fields are green and lush, the hawthorn is just coming into bloom, and almost from the first the sea was visible ahead of us.
We crossed the Hart to Haswell Walkway, a former railway track and now nature reserve (one to bear in mind for the winter) and came down to the coast just at the mouth of Crimdon Dene. This is a nature reserve too, but a very well-groomed one: the sides of the valley are steep and wooded, but the floor is closely mowed lawn, with a metalled path running up the centre, up to the viaduct. And the upper edges of the dene are ringed with caravan sites.
We found a comfortable seat for our picnic, then returned to the sea, and walked along the beach, steering well clear of the Little Tern breeding area - I've been harrassed by terns before, and like them better when they're made of wood (two sculptures, one above either end of the beach. The steps up from the far end of the beach brought us up among the caravans, but at least this gave us the satisfaction of picking up the last fragment of the Durham Coastal path we had abandoned on our previous attempt.
The final section of the walk was just hard enough work that we discussed whether it might have been better to reverse polarity and take the whole circuit the other way round: a solid stretch of roadwork, and all uphill: past the Hurlevent Cattery (Wuthering Cats?), then across farmland, down into the dene, where the odd bluebell was outnumbered by a starry carpet of wild garlic, and a few water avens clustered by the beck, and up and down and up again, and then a long metalled farm track - and just at the point where I felt sore-footed and yes, this has been fun but I'm ready to stop now - just then, in a field of stubble, a family of lapwings, two adults and three babies running along the ground.
And back in Hart, where the route back into the village revealed to us the car park behind the church where we should have parked, next to the ruined Brus Wall, part of a Norman building "said locally to be the birthplace of King Robert the Bruce." Like I said, full of surprises...
Living near the sea is another. Periodically I get the itch to walk along the coast, and when I do, it's easily arranged. We didn't walk at the weekend: the weather was showery, we had an overnight visitor, and deadlines to meet. But Monday was bright, and - thinking that exploring the coastal denes would meet my desire for the sea, and might also allow us to enjoy the height of the bluebell season - we found a route along the coast by Crimdon Dene.It wasn't a long walk, but it was full of surprises - plus one overall surprise, that it was surprisingly pretty. Hart Village is not at all the usual 'East Durham village' (which means a mining village, whose mine has closed): it has a Saxon Church, and a pub with a figurehead proudly displayed on the wall. The fields are green and lush, the hawthorn is just coming into bloom, and almost from the first the sea was visible ahead of us.
We crossed the Hart to Haswell Walkway, a former railway track and now nature reserve (one to bear in mind for the winter) and came down to the coast just at the mouth of Crimdon Dene. This is a nature reserve too, but a very well-groomed one: the sides of the valley are steep and wooded, but the floor is closely mowed lawn, with a metalled path running up the centre, up to the viaduct. And the upper edges of the dene are ringed with caravan sites.
We found a comfortable seat for our picnic, then returned to the sea, and walked along the beach, steering well clear of the Little Tern breeding area - I've been harrassed by terns before, and like them better when they're made of wood (two sculptures, one above either end of the beach. The steps up from the far end of the beach brought us up among the caravans, but at least this gave us the satisfaction of picking up the last fragment of the Durham Coastal path we had abandoned on our previous attempt.
The final section of the walk was just hard enough work that we discussed whether it might have been better to reverse polarity and take the whole circuit the other way round: a solid stretch of roadwork, and all uphill: past the Hurlevent Cattery (Wuthering Cats?), then across farmland, down into the dene, where the odd bluebell was outnumbered by a starry carpet of wild garlic, and a few water avens clustered by the beck, and up and down and up again, and then a long metalled farm track - and just at the point where I felt sore-footed and yes, this has been fun but I'm ready to stop now - just then, in a field of stubble, a family of lapwings, two adults and three babies running along the ground.
And back in Hart, where the route back into the village revealed to us the car park behind the church where we should have parked, next to the ruined Brus Wall, part of a Norman building "said locally to be the birthplace of King Robert the Bruce." Like I said, full of surprises...
