The kingdom of the birds

[shewhomust]

samarcand complains that if I don't post about how I spent last week, he can't be expected to know what I've been doing. It's not as if he has my phone number, or an RSS feed for my Flickr account, or anything like that... Oh, all right then, he has both of those things, and uses them, and he still wants me to write about it. How can I refuse?

We enjoyed simply being on the island, doing the crossword by the big windows with the view out aceoss the harbour to Lindisfarne castle - and to Bamburgh beyond. We lingered in the bathroom, watching the house martins who had built their nest above the window, swooping up to it and falling away, taking several tries to enter the nest, and speculated about why they did this. We went for a meal at the hotel with David's family, and ate fish pie and drank muscadet.

Lindisfarne Castle stands on an outcrop of the Whin Sill, rising dramatically from the low dunes that make up most of the island. On the afternoon of our visit, it was gathering black rain clouds to it, to increase the drama. From the outside, all sheer walls and dominant position, it is a Tudor fortress, built to defend the harbour from the marauding Scots. You climb up a ramp which clings to the side of the mound and penetrate onto the Lower Battery, a sun trap with a view out to the Farne Islands, with the circles of the gun mounts still visible in the paving. On and into the castle itself, though, and you find yourself in a domestic Edwardian interior. The derelict castle was bought from the Crown at the very beginning of the twentieth century by Edward Hudson (the founder of Country Life magazine), and he engaged Edwin Lutyens to convert it for comfortable modern living, complete with a garden by his associate Gertrude Jekyll. Despite the massive masonry, the interior is not immense, and the resultant building is very human in scale. Despite the survival of such fetures as the winding gear for raising the portcullis (in the scullery), it feels like someone's home: not a very convenient home, one whose discomforts come as much from the 1900s as the 1600s.

And, since I had promised myself that this year we would visit the Farne Islands, that's what we did. Drove down along the coast to Seahouses, chose our trip from the four or five booths in the harbour, all offering very much the same deal at the same price, booked for the afternoon trip landing on Inner Farne, and then spent rest of the morning in Barter Books (no longer associated with the larger establishment in Alnwick) then took our plunder back to the Neptune Fish Restaurant (as recommended by our boatman), and had fish and chips for lunch.

The boat trip takes two and a half hours, of which one hour is spent on Inner Farne, and a quarter hour is the return trip - so there is a tour of about an hour around the various islands that make up the group (from fifteen to twenty-eight of them, depending on the tide).

I had done the trip before, but at the wrong season, and was hoping that this time we would see some birds - and, yes, i was hoping I might see a puffin or two. But I had no conception of just how many birds we would see: I am slow and myopic, and there is a reason why I find wild flowers easier to identify than birds (they stay put, and you can get close to them). No problem: you could not miss seeing (and hearing, and indeed smelling) the birds. The boat took us in close to crags thronged with one species after another, and lingered around the rocks near the Longhope lighthouse, in the hope of seeing more than the solitary grey seal basking on the rocks: his companions bobbed about us in the water, and refused to come out.

Inner Farne is the island on which Saint Cuthbert took refuge, when the hurly burly of life on Lindisfarne got too much for him: there is a little chapel there, and a tower known as "the Fishehouse". We thought we could probably amuse ourselves for an hour.

We could happily have stayed much longer. It's a small island, with a boardwalk path which makes a circuit from the monastic buildings by the landing stage to the lighthouse at the far end and the cliffs beyond, and then back down the other side of the island, and the route leads you through the territory of one bird after another. Even as you come up the concrete path from the bay, fishing for your National Trust membership card to show the man, there are terns pretty much underfoot. Signs advise you to keep to the path, but in places the ropes which mark the edge of the path loop in, because a tern has chosen to nest too close to the track. There are baby terns everywhere, cute little balls of brown fluff: and I had not previously associated the tern (savagely pointed birds, and the reason why you are advised to wear a protective hat) with the words "cute" and "fluffy".

In the centre of the island, the soil is deep enough for a puffin to burrow, and they do. I could have spent the entire hour watching the puffins, and I tend to anthropomorphise when I talk about them - they seemed shyer than the other birds, more dignified, keeping their distance. I was absolutely charmed by them - but you knew this already.

Beyond the lighthouse you could look vertically down the cliffs, onto the nests of gulls and cormorants: I watched a cormorant (whose nest was a pile of seaweed, not a paper bag), prodding two large fledgelings with her bill, and thought of the medieval belief that bear cubs are born as shapeless lumps, and must be "licked into shape" by their mother. Then back past the crowds of guillemots, smart in their black jackets, hurtling through the air like bullets, as if they doubt their ability to stay aloft, and only velocity will keep them airborne, and running the gauntlet of the arctic terns back to the boat - the hour's already up.

We returned home via Bamburgh, and walked along the beach below the castle, which Malory said was Lancelot's Joyous Gard, and home for an early night.

And on Saturday morning we got up and watched the sun fail to emerge from cloud until it was well clear of the horizon (all of which is traditional). But then we had beds to go back to, and a kitchen to make our own breakfast, which is better than traditional. And the rest of the weekend was the usual tangle of guests and visits - oh, and a visit to Barter Books in Alnwick, since we were passing...