Heritage Open Days

[shewhomust]

As last year, we spent some time at the weekend visiting properties participating in the Heritage Open Days scheme. For a variety of reasons, I was less satisfied with our plan of campaign than I had been last year: I seemed to stumble more across places that were open, but only on Friday afternoon, or only by guided tours, or not at the same time as the other place nearby. The list of possibilities has grown very long, but I suspect this is not because more properties are open than because more properties signed up in order to publicise what are in fact their normal opening hours. Despite these grumbles, we eventually put together a list of visits we were happy with:

• Saint Laurence's church, Pittington is a small village church not far from Durham, and to my eye there is nothing remarkable about its exerior. Inside, though, its long history is clearly visible. The original 11th or 12th century building - a rectangular box - has become the nave of a larger church, its walls knocked through in the late 12th century to open onto ailes on either side. The north wall has particularly elegant round arches, at one point cutting through the arch of an earlier window, on which traces of wall painting are still visible.



• Saint Andrew's, Roker is a much grander church, sometimes described as "the Arts and Crafts cathedral" - and this description had created an image of my mind of gothic arches, rich decoration, cpmplex design. So the spaciousness and simplicity of St Andrew's came as a surprise. The great curved arches form the walls as well as the roof, as if the nave were a huge overturned boat. Only the chancel is bright with a painted mural, a tapestry behind the altar. I've wanted to see this church for ages, and I wasn't disappointed.


• Of all the places we visited, Bothal Castle was the genuinely special opportunity. Approached from the village (and the village itself was the first surprise, another pretty nineteenth century estate village: cf Ford and Etal) it looks as if all that survives is the great gatehouse. Walk through the arch, though, and a private house nestles inside substantial remains of the medieval walls. The garden is on a domestic scale (and while we were there was rather encumbered by a team of men dismantling a large marquee with unexpected speed, which spoiled the atmosphere somewhat), and outside the walls there is a little orchard, some of the trees growing right up against the stonework, others in the field bwelow framing a vista of Northumberland farmland.
  (Pictures of Bothal here).


• Our next planned stop was Newbiggin, but since we were passing the Wansbeck Business Park, we stopped in to see Irene Brown's Paperwork sculpture, because we had enjoyed her Fleet in South Shields.


• We lunched at Nevin's Nibbles, a cafe on the seafront in Newbiggin which had been enterprising enough to get itself listed as an Open Day venue. Its specialty is scones - 99 different varieties, to which they had added a 'Heritage scone' for the occasion - it was apple and Wensleydale, and very tasty, though not necessarily part of the Northumberland heritage. Also, the scones we bought to take away, and which Candy warmed in the oven, were even nicer than the ones we ate in the café, which must have been microwaved.


• I wasn't much taken with Woodhorn Church / artists' studios. I'd have liked either to be able to engage with the artists about their work or to move the artworks out of the way and look at the church itself. Instead there were activities on offer, which I wasn't interested in but which got in the way...


• We ended our tour on a high point with Blyth Battery, a First World War artillery battery built to defend the coast from attack, a group of structures, not large but massive in their solidity, now painted in pastel colours and scattered over the dunes above the sea. I hadn't realised that Blyth had such a fine beach - not to mention the beach huts and a spectacular new lifeguards and amenity building. (There will be pictures, but I haven't sorted them out yet).

And on our way home called in on samarcand and Candy and Max for tea and scones, and some overdue catching up.

D., who accompanied us on our Saturday afternoon heritage sampling, departed on Sunday to visit some different but not very open properties: he has posted his pictures of Chernobyl on Flickr.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Saint Andrew's? Oh, I haven't done it justice - it's much better than that!