Stockton and Darlington Sunday
Apr. 6th, 2011 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomust('Darlington and Stockton' would be more accurate, but doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly...)
On Sunday morning we went to Darlington to talk to the conference of the Crime Writers' Association about their website: conference being in Darlington, just half an hour from here, was too good an opportunity to miss. We were scheduled at the very end of the conference, just before lunch on Sunday, and we knew that inevitably the people who most need to attend a session on what the website can do for you are the people least likely to turn up, and so it was. But we had a respectably audience, and some very useful feedback, and were able to put faces to people we knew only by e-mail. So it was worth the trip, even before Tom Harper, retiring Chair of the CWA, got up and made a very nice speech of thanks, which he ended by presenting us with a Red Herring. This is the CWA's internal award, and a thing of legend, and we are quite thrilled with it (and I've written a bit more background in the company blog, complete with picture).
After this, we were pretty hyper, and it was a bright blowy April day, so since we were in Darlington we decided to go and look at the train:
We had it to ourselves, and thought it was looking good, not overgrown or neglected as I had feared, barrelling out of its hillside in a great cloud of redbrick steam. There were cowslips on the grassy banks below it, and all was generally satisfactory.
Then off to Stockton in search of lunch. One summer long ago we walked the length of the Tees from mouth to source, but when we parked by the riverside in Stockton we found ourselves in completely unfamiliar territory (I took a whole lot of pictures, and I'm in the process of sorting and uploading them). They built the Tees barrage, for one thing (it was opened in 1995), and transformed a dirty, industrial tidal river into a great sheet of gleaming water (possibly the sun wasn't shining on our last visit). Development has followed: bijou housing in the old docks, and a shiny new campus of Durham University, the whole linked with walkways and water and pedestrian bridges, and the occasional view downstream to the distinctive silhouettes of the Newport Bridge and Roseberry Topping.
It probably doesn't qualify as going walking (I hadn't brought my boots) but we ended up walking from the Millennium Bridge to the barrage and back, with a detour to the replica of the Endeavour, and came home windblown and well entertained.
On Sunday morning we went to Darlington to talk to the conference of the Crime Writers' Association about their website: conference being in Darlington, just half an hour from here, was too good an opportunity to miss. We were scheduled at the very end of the conference, just before lunch on Sunday, and we knew that inevitably the people who most need to attend a session on what the website can do for you are the people least likely to turn up, and so it was. But we had a respectably audience, and some very useful feedback, and were able to put faces to people we knew only by e-mail. So it was worth the trip, even before Tom Harper, retiring Chair of the CWA, got up and made a very nice speech of thanks, which he ended by presenting us with a Red Herring. This is the CWA's internal award, and a thing of legend, and we are quite thrilled with it (and I've written a bit more background in the company blog, complete with picture).
After this, we were pretty hyper, and it was a bright blowy April day, so since we were in Darlington we decided to go and look at the train:
We had it to ourselves, and thought it was looking good, not overgrown or neglected as I had feared, barrelling out of its hillside in a great cloud of redbrick steam. There were cowslips on the grassy banks below it, and all was generally satisfactory.
Then off to Stockton in search of lunch. One summer long ago we walked the length of the Tees from mouth to source, but when we parked by the riverside in Stockton we found ourselves in completely unfamiliar territory (I took a whole lot of pictures, and I'm in the process of sorting and uploading them). They built the Tees barrage, for one thing (it was opened in 1995), and transformed a dirty, industrial tidal river into a great sheet of gleaming water (possibly the sun wasn't shining on our last visit). Development has followed: bijou housing in the old docks, and a shiny new campus of Durham University, the whole linked with walkways and water and pedestrian bridges, and the occasional view downstream to the distinctive silhouettes of the Newport Bridge and Roseberry Topping.
It probably doesn't qualify as going walking (I hadn't brought my boots) but we ended up walking from the Millennium Bridge to the barrage and back, with a detour to the replica of the Endeavour, and came home windblown and well entertained.
