Colsterdale Pals

Today started very early at the Youth Hostel. We knocked back a quick breakfast and then it was very much home James and don't spare the horses. A five and a half-hour drive is always tackled sooner rather than later.

On our way back down the A1, I managed to fulfil the ambition of visiting the beautiful Colsterdale Moor, home to the Leeds Pals monument, which marks where that particular battalion trained for a year and a half before heading off to France. It's the monument which the Pals themselves wanted, and attended on November 11th every year until there were none of them left. One assumes they weren't interested in a monument at the spot where many of them had died. They wanted to gather at the place where they'd lived: the last place they'd all been together. And it's really very moving to think about it in those terms.

The monument itself is very lovely. Gleaming and white and, today, stretching up into a sky so blue it looked almost purple. Colsterdale wraps itself around the monument in a most pleasing manner. The fields looked like a patchwork quilt, and I stood for sometime, somewhat transfixed by the shadows of clouds in the sky chasing sunlight across the fields.

More moving than the monument, however, were the ruins in the field opposite of the buildings the men had built and lived in. This is where the Pals slept, endlessly practiced military manoeuvres and bayonet drill, and transformed themselves from citizens into soldiers. It was the remnants of the old wash houses which Sam and I found most moving. The area is nothing but a few foundations these days, some broken porcelain pipework and a few ancient plug-holes with butterflies darting about, but it was somehow enough. I think we both imagined the men lined up in rows, quickly washing their faces in the bitter cold of winter. The moor is plainly not a place anyone would want to live in during heavy wind, rain or snow.

Our companion throughout most of the journeys this week has been the voice from Google Maps' satnav system. She can be really rather insistent bordering on irritating. Sam thought it might be nice to humanise her by giving her a name, so, somewhere on the Northumbrian cost, "Chlorrhoea" was born, and for the next few days she took us on many adventures and always delivered us safely... Until today.

Today Chlorrhoea failed us spectacularly! Chlorrhoea obviously thought we might like to end our lovely holiday by utterly trashing the car. She took us down a dirt track. It was terrifying. It got worse and worse, and then the bottom of the car started banging, scraping and sounding like a layer of metal was being peeled off. We had no option other than to turn back. Sam got out of the car so there was less weight inside and I reversed, constantly repeating a mantra to myself: "please let this be okay... Please let this be okay..." At one point I passed through a massive cloud of flies, many of which flew into the car. It was absolutely hideous.

Back on sturdy Tarmac we checked the car, and it looked okay, and got us back to London well enough. Just to add something surreal to the mayhem of the day, as we finally made it onto a proper country lane, a number of very fluffy black kittens ran across the road in front of the car. They looked like weird teddy bears. They must have been wild cats. There wasn't a house in sight. 

As we passed through Bedfordshire, I noticed they were tearing down the caravan behind the "Adult Pit Stop" which I visited a number of times when I was making A1: The Road Musical. The caravan belonged to a 90 year old woman who had run the Happy Eater in the building where the roadside sex shop now stands. She was a brilliant old bird who told me that the cafe had once been a brothel for American soldiers in WW2, so she was not at all phased about the fact that it had become a sex shop. The knocking down of her home tells me that she must have finally shuffled off to the Happy Eater in the sky, and that there's another reason to assume that the A1 has become a shadow of its former eccentric self. Back in North Yorkshire we saw that they'd also knocked Quernhow Cafe down, which was a proper trucker stop with a great deal of character. It's where we filmed a lad called Wayne talking about the death of his brother Danny on the road. It's also where my cameraman went off to explore and found 100 dead rabbits strung up in a nearby barn!

I got home at about 5.30pm. It apparently took Sam a further 2 1/2 hours to get himself back to South London. He must have wanted to curl up and die.

My day wasn't over, however, as I had a date to meet Christopher from the Rebel Chorus, down on the beach by the Tower of London to film him singing a sequence from the Pepys Motet for our little film. We were really very speedy. He was well prepared, and, because it was just me, him, a candle and a torch, there was a limit to what we could achieve. After he'd finished, I took myself on a little walk around the city of London, filming a few cutaways to represent what Pepys' London looks like today. I had a lot of fun at the sign for Pudding Lane...


I got back to find someone (a human being) had laid a steaming turd in our alleyway. A wholly unacceptable end to a throughly pleasant day.

A sunset adventure

It's been the last full day of our holiday and, all day, I've been gearing up for a return to London. I did some admin in the youth hostel this morning whilst everyone wafted about around me. I've officially reached the place now where I need a bit of space away from noise. I adore young people, but, after a while, their boundless energy can drain me of mine.

After lunch, we were met by a few old friends of Raily's and we all went off to the place where we'd found the amazing network of natural stepping stones underneath a bridge in a local ravine. It was a brilliant decision. Everyone had a great adventure, inching ever-further along the river, daring each other to jump onto stones which seemed preposterously small, or slippery or were balancing beneath fast-moving water. It was like a lottery. One wrong step and you're on your arse in a pool of water!

The sun came out and shone on the river like a spot light wrapped in a straw gel. The water surging over the stones was brown. So brown, in fact, that the kids called it the Coca-cola river. The sun caught the surface of the water and it suddenly looked as though someone had sprinkled Jersey Milk bottle tops everywhere. A foamy sediment had gathered in some of the slower moving sections of the river and I was instantly reminded of a Coke Float from the Wimpy in 1981!

From the river we headed to Allen Banks, which ought to have been a walk along another river but, due to winter erosion, all the paths had been rerouted into the hills and we didn't get to go anywhere near the river itself which we could hear roaring along in the valley below us. I'm not altogether surprised about the winter erosion thing. When I made 100 Faces back in 2012, we used to drive along the A69 from Newcastle to Carlisle. I remember looking down from the road onto the very river where we were today and thinking how swollen, angry and terrifying it looked. The lack of river walk wasn't a big deal today. We've walked along a lot of rivers on this holiday and I t was great to stroll beneath the dark pines. Rather fortunately, we were under the trees during the one rain storm that briefly came our way.

We picked wild raspberries and then headed back home. One wonders how raspberries end up growing by a river in Northumberland!

This evening Tanya and Paul cooked an early curry for tea which we managed to finish eating by about 7pm. At that point, a little group of us jumped into two cars and sped up to Sycamore Gap, which I think has officially become my favourite place in the North of England with the possible exception of Spurn Point. It had been my plan all week to kidnap Hilary (who'd always missed going there on our previous trips) and take her to he magical place as the sun went down. The heavens were providing us with a glorious treacly light that I felt certain was going to sink into a glorious sunset. I was right.

We walked all the way along the top of the cragg where Hadrian's Wall travels majestically in the direction of Newcastle. The light was beautiful: yellow, then orange, then red. The grasses on the top of the wall were glowing like little flecks of fire.

Sycamore Gap is a thirty-minute walk up and down the ridges, and we arrived there as the sun was about to set. It looked rather stunning against the darkening sky, and I took photos of everyone silhouetted like little Lowry matchstick figures. The sun seemed to go down rather rapidly, and we watched it disappearing behind a hillside from underneath the tree and then again from the top of the hill next door, racing up the steep footpath like maniacs to catch the last red rays for a second time.

As we walked back to the car park, Nathan phoned from Riga in Latvia. It seemed so strange to me that I'd walked down that very path with him less than a week ago, and, whilst for me very little has changed, he's been back to London on a train, taken a plane to Paris and then flown to Latvia! The world we live in gets smaller by the minute, doesn't it?

At the bottom of the cragg, there's an amazing echo. The kids had a fabulous time shouting, and Hilary sang some opera...

Little Tomas and Lily were immensely keen to see bats for the first time and we were utterly blessed with a proper fly by when we arrived at the car park. I swear one bat was looping the loop for us! The kids got very excited. I don't know whether there are more bats about these days. As a child I was absolutely desperate to see a bat and never caught one flapping about.

It was the journey home, however, which got the kids almost hysterical with excitement. We went across the moors and must have done an emergency stop for almost every animal in carnation. I think the end tally was several rabbits, a silly number of hares, two lambs, three pheasants, a weird bird which seemed to be nesting in the middle of the road, a sheep and a hedgehog! We were screaming with laughter by the time we pulled up outside the Youth Hostel. I'm proud to say I didn't hit a single animal.

Lindisfarne

We went to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne today which has to be one of the most magical places in the world. I first went there in about 1985, when I was ten, which is the age of my Godson Will who was with us today. It had a massive impact on me back then and I fought incredibly hard to get the entire group to brave the long drive to come there with me today. 31 years ago, my family stayed in a guest house on Lindisfarne and I was really inspired by the idea of a causeway from the mainland disappearing into the sea at high tide and creating an island.

It was a long old drive from our youth hostel and we decided to break the journey at Bamburgh, which was a revelation to us all. Mile upon mile of white sandy beach and stunning grass-covered sand dunes underneath a perfectly preserved Norman castle. It's very difficult to imagine anything more perfect if I'm honest! The kids had a whale of a time surfing the waves and building enormous sand castles. Will and Tomas dug a very deep hole which they named the "Pit of Doom."

The Northumbrian coast in that part of the county feels incredibly isolated somehow. I can't really explain why. The North Sea is never more than a few miles from the A1 road, but visiting any of the little villages scattered along its intricate inlets and headlands is like stepping back to the 1980s. As a result, it seems to attract a rather genteel type of tourist. The parking is free, the shops are curiously old-fashioned and the beaches are largely empty.

Driving a car across the causeway to Lindesfarne was every bit as exhilarating as it was in 1985. I still felt that frisson of fear, wondering if the tide times were wrong and my car was likely to be swept away into a tidal abyss. I'm pretty sure, when I came here as a child, rusty cars and vehicles were strewn along the side of the road, left, perhaps, as a warning to have-a-go-hero drivers that the tides move in very fast. If deserted cars WERE there back in 1985, they weren't there today, but there were posters all over the place displaying the image of a half-submerged Land Rover with massive letters spelling out the words, "check the tide times!"

We parked up and bought lollipops from an ice cream van in the corner of the car park. Meriel noticed that he sold cups of tea, and, because she was feeling a bit car sick and frozen solid from her swim in the North Sea at Bambrugh, asked if he sold mint tea. It was one of those cringingly middle class requests, and it fell on rather dead ears: "look, love, I'm an ice cream man stuck in the corner of a field on Holy Island... Now what do you think the answer to that question is?!"

I was instantly reminded of the occasion I took my celiac, somewhat brassy American friend to a greasy spoon in Leeds and was forced to hide behind a pillar whilst she brusquely asked "what have you got that is wheat free and dairy free?" The question was answered with a long pause and two simple words, "chips, love."

At 3pm, I left everyone at the priory on Lindesfarne and drove Hilary to a dentist in Berwick-Upon-Tweed for an emergency appointment. Her tooth has been killing her since we arrived and, as she arrived at Bamburgh this morning and knocked back a pain killer like some sort of addict, I could tell she'd reached the end of her tether. I spent an hour or so phoning round dentists in the area, begging them to offer us an emergency appointment.

It's funny how, when you reach Berwick, you suddenly start hearing those wonderful Scottish accents, despite technically still being in England. The woman in the pharmacy was particularly chirpy and sounded like something from Balamory, or Lorraine Kelly on helium: "have you got a wee abscess?" She asked. "Now I'm only going to give you enough of these for three days as they can get a wee bit addictive..." Like a little bird, she was.

By the time we'd arrived back in Holy Island the majority of tourists were leaving, so I encouraged everyone to come down to the castle with me, and we hung about for some time as the light faded, sitting by the crab nets, and clumps of poppies and houses made out of upturned boats in a somewhat rundown little harbour. It was a really still, peaceful moment. I looked around at the kids playing on the mud flats and wondered how many of them would take the memory into their adult years. A number of similar long summer evenings from my childhood have lodged themselves very firmly in my brain.

We went home via the wonderfully named seaside village of Sea Houses, which I kept wanting to call Sea Horses. All of us sat on the harbour wall eating chips from Pinnacles, which the Hairy Bikers have apparently hailed as the best chippie in the UK. A rather brave baby starling and a gaggle of seagulls watched us eating and waited for the leftovers.


We drove home along the A1, past signs for the unfortunately-named village of Shilbottle, which some local comedian had doctored to read "Shit Bottle." As we drove, we became aware of an astounding sunset brewing and, over the course of about half an hour, and with the aid of a little rain and a strategically-placed hot air balloon, the sky went from impressionist through Turneresque to apocalyptic! As we turned onto the A69 at Gateshead the entire experience became mesmeric. We were listening to the Concerto for a Rainy Day from ELO's Out of the Blue album and it was as though the sound track and visuals had been edited together for some kind of Hollywood epic. At one stage Sam gasped, "oh my God, there's a rainbow" and, sure enough, behind us, a giant golden rainbow was filling the sky. And when I say golden, I mean golden. The sun by this stage was crimson red and so the rainbow appeared in sepia. The only thing that was more perfect than the symbiosis of music and sunset was Sam's running commentary describing, in deeply florid terms, what he was looking at: "It's like lilacs softly blushing," he said at one point, and then later, "it's a burnished bronze..."

Durham

We went to Durham today. It's about an hour away from where we are. Everything seems to be about an hour's drive away from where we are. This is because we are very much in the middle of nowhere, which is something I discovered to my great chagrin when I ran low on petrol this afternoon and discovered the nearest petrol station was 20 miles away! Flying. By. The. Seat...

It's rained through most of the day today but it turns out that Durham in the rain is not such bad place to be. There are plenty of shops and covered markets to duck into, and the mother of all cathedrals to shuffle around.

We spent some time in the Woolley Workshop, Durham's premiere yarn store. Nathan chatted to the lovely owner and we asked if she had many male customers: "Oh yes!" She said proudly, "we have a lot of students. In fact, one of our regulars is a maths PHD student." My mind instantly did a shedload of processing. "Is his name Matthew?" She looked confused, "yes..." "does he knit animals?" "Yes, he knitted the spider hanging above your head..."

Matthew Elliot-Ripley was in the first cast of Brass. I knew he was a PHD student at Durham, and a very keen knitter, so I instantly Facebooked him a photograph of the spider and asked if he could think of anyone warped enough to knit it! He immediately responded, "are you in Durham?" And to cut a long story short, he dropped everything, met us for lunch and it was incredibly lovely to see him...

Lunch was at the Jumping Bean vegetarian Cafe. I had a toasted sandwich with veggie sausages, Marmite and cheddar cheese. Looking through a menu in a veggie restaurant is always catastrophic if you're vegetarian and not used to any form of choice. The words start swimming about on the page as you try to locate the little green v sign, and when you realise there isn't one, because everything on the menu is fair game, there's nothing for it but meltdown!

We walked along the west side of the river, deep in the ravine underneath the castle and the cathedral. It's such an extraordinary place. The river flows over a weir and then gently meanders around the castle mount. It's so still and green down there and today, perhaps because of rain, huge fish were jumping clean out of the water, diving back in and creating enormous ripples which stretched in ever-increasing circles all the way to the river banks.

We crossed the ancient foot bridge to the castle side of the river, and wound our way up the cobbled streets to the Cathedral, which is an utterly stunning building.

I was very moved to see the "Butte de Warlencourt" Battlefield crosses, which date from November 1916. The three crosses are made from wood and were placed on one of the Somme battlefields to mark the spot where 200 members of the Durham Light Infantry were killed. The crosses were brought home in 1926 when the Commonwealth Grave Committee standardised the way that the graves of those who had fallen in the Great War were presented. One went to Durham, one to Bishop Auckland and one to Chester-le-Street but they were brought back together in Durham Cathedral for the 100th anniversary of the Somme.

I think we were all a little surprised to find the Venerable Bede's tomb in the cathedral. I was so surprised, in fact, that I decided to light a candle to his memory. I wish I hadn't bothered, really, because in the process of doing so, I managed to drop mine on the floor, and put several other candles out. It was really very embarrassing. I felt like Terry from Terry and June.

Down behind the alter was a very stirring wooden sculpture called The Pietà by Fenwick Lawson. I didn't know the word Pietà, but I think it's a thing which has something to do with Mary the Muv, and her son, Jesus after he'd be brought down from the cross. The sculpture was enormous and very definitely carved from two simple tree trunks. I wasn't that fussed about the Christ, but the Mary figure was incredibly moving. It had that somewhat crude, 1970s primitive vibe which I've always rather enjoyed. And if that sounds pretentious, I apologise. I can't think of another way to describe it. Anyway, it turns out that the sculptor is the godfather of one of Sam's friends, so I was rather please to be able to report that it had moved me so much.

The sculpture was apparently in York Minster when it went up in flames in the mid 1980s, and it got spattered with molten lead. I think everyone was a little surprised when the sculptor said he felt that the disaster had added something quite important to the piece.


At just before 5pm I drove Nathan to the train station where he headed back to London. He's singing on a cruise ship next week and had to get back home to sort things out. I keep calling the cruise ship a ferry by mistake. I'll confess: I didn't much like saying goodbye to him. I'd like him here for the rest of the holiday, please.


Sam and I drove back to Nine Banks together, which was when the petrol incident happened. It was also when I ran over a pheasant. They are, without question, the stupidest creatures. As we drove up to the hostel, one of the silly things flew up from the road and proceeded to fly just in front of the windscreen for about 50 meters, seemingly not at all aware that if it flew just a metre higher, it would be out of our way. It was royally shitting itself out of fear as it flew. A desperate, somewhat tragic sight!

Wallington

We took ourselves off to Wallington today, which is a National Trust property out towards Morpeth. It's an unassuming sort of a place which doesn't have the grandeur or pretentiousness of some of the NT's other properties. It is, nevertheless, a deeply charming place, and well-worth a little visit if you're ever in the area.

The house itself is fairly standard in terms of these sorts of places, with lots of Victorian and early 20th century tapestries, a few William Morris paintings and a couple of rooms set out to look like they would have looked in the olden days. There were a couple of charming architectural features including a "cabinet of curiosities" on a mezzanine floor where all sorts of curios including a wall of stuffed bird were stored, and a room full of enormous dolls' houses which had a tiny little attic space where adults were only allowed if "accompanied by a responsible child."

My responsible child was little Jeanie, sister of my godson Will, whom I very much view as one of my own (as it were!) Jeanie was great company and we spent an hour or so searching for the ten small toy squirrels which the National Trust staff had hidden in various rooms around the house.

We had a picnic in the garden. It's been a nice day, good and warm when the sun was out but a bit chilly in the shade, but friends in Leeds and London have told me it's been mega-hot elsewhere, which is not necessarily what I wanted to hear. This is our ninth camping holiday with this particular group of friends and we've never been lucky with the weather. Generally speaking it's always lovely the day we arrive and the day we leave!! The forecast for the rest of the week is dreadful...

Wallington has a beautiful walled garden which is planted in the English cottage garden style, with glorious flowers of every colour of the rainbow shambolically bursting from the beds.

We had ice cream at 5pm, and then jumped into cars to head back to the Youth Hostel.

My car-share companions for the week have been Meriel, Sam and Nathan and we're all child-free and fancy-free, meaning it's possible to drop everything and spontaneously stop-off anywhere on any of our journeys. On many occasions I've told Nathan to stop the car so that we can get out to sample a view, and on our way home today we crossed over a river which I thought might be a good place to get out for a wander. My instant was good. Underneath the bridge the river was shallow and ran over a series of giant, flat stones which stretched like a granite chess board as far as the eye could see. The stones created an almost perfect maze of natural stepping stones. Some were above water. Others were slightly under the surface, so that, as you stood on them, you could feel the water rushing over your feet. There were fresh water rock pools, tiny waterfalls, and little platforms where you could sit in the middle of the river without getting anything but your feet wet. It was a truly magical experience. The sun was low in the sky, painting our faces orange, glinting like copper on the water and casting long shadows towards the river banks. The trees in the ravine above us were the darkest green, the sky was blue, peppered with brown clouds and the tall bridge over the river glowed like honeycomb.

Tonight's communal food was cooked by Raily and Iain. Mexican. Tapas. Re-fried beans. Rice. Delicious.

We went for a night walk at 11pm to look at the stars on the first clear night we've had since coming here. We walked for about a mile along the country lanes with the bats fluttering about above us, and the stars getting brighter and brighter. At that sort of time, all the senses seem to sharpen. We could hear the sound of people talking across the valley, the sound of a stream from half a mile away. We could smell the aniseed-meets-Germolene scent of Meadow Sweet in the hedgerows and feel the dew forming in our moustaches. As we returned to the Youth Hostel, the stars started glowing like never before. We could see the great cloud-like mists of the Milky Way, and then, as a reward for staying up late, nature presented us with a little meteor shower. Meriel saw her first shooting star! Perfect.

High force. Low force. Medium force?

We went to a very special waterfall called High Force today. I'm not sure if it's in County Durham, Northumberland or Cumbria as we seem to be in an area which straddles all three counties.

The day started at Low Force, which is a slightly less impressive waterfall down stream from his similarly-named brother. There's a rather charming visitors' centre there which is funded by the European Union. It's got a very charming cafe, and a little art gallery selling prints and paintings by local artists. I bought a very beautiful print of an inviting-looking stile for £25, which felt like a bargain. The stiles in these parts often look like the entrances to Neolithic tombs. Two great slabs of stone which you have to squeeze yourself through. This particular painting made me want to find the stile, if for no other reason than to see what what behind it, which seemed so inviting in the picture. Imagine my excitement, therefore, when I left the visitors' centre and immediately found myself passing through said stile. The print hadn't lied: Beyond the stile was an ancient pedestrian suspension bridge, and from the bridge the views of Low Force were quite remarkable. It was a rickety old thing with wooden foot boards which seemed to bow and bend as we made our way across. Our minds weren't hugely put at rest by the sign post on the bridge which suggested we could only cross one at a time.

When we returned to the bridge later in the day we witnessed a family scattering the ashes of a loved one. The ashes billowed like a giant, beautiful cloud and disappeared into the wind. It made me feel a little sad.

The earth in these parts is incredibly peaty which means all the rivers round here are the colour of copper. The water frothing, foaming and bursting over the rocks at Low Force seemed to stripe. Fluffy white, then tea brown, then a bright orange which looked like a Tartrazine-infused Sodastream!

We walked along the winding river for two miles. Nathan and I fulfilled our Godfathery duties by creating a magical treasure hunt for the two little girls in our group. I had bought them both a little glass bottle with a number of tiny rubbers shaped like bees inside. As we walked along the river Nathan, Raily, Sam and I would periodically run ahead and chalk little clues on gates and large stones. The girls were brilliantly enthusiastic and entranced by the stories we concocted. I even managed to get complete strangers to deliver cryptic clues to them!

High Force itself is a hugely impressive waterfall which is actually 21 meters tall. It's certainly the highest waterfall I've visited in the UK (although, I'll be honest: I've not visited a great many!)

On our way back, we went wild swimming and paddling in a gentle stretch of the river. I paddled. Nathan swam. It was, he said, the coldest water he'd ever swum in. Drying himself with a towel afterwards was apparently like running sandpaper across his body.

We have identified the birds which we've seen en masse around our Youth Hostel. They're pheasants. I'm told that, at this time of year, they release scores of juvenile pheasants into the fields so that there's loads of them to kill when the hunting season begins. They're plainly bred to be stupid, or to have a mega death wish. The ones we saw plainly haven't yet understood that cars don't feel very good when they hit you. There are pheasant carcasses all the way along the road to the hostel. In fact, all the roads around here are road-kill heaven. Bunny massacres.

Sycamore Gap

The young people in our group have opened a massage parlour in one of the Youth Hostel dormitories! It costs 50p, and for that you get a ten-minute shoulder rub. It's a very professional concern, right down to the John Grant music they were playing in the parlour. I'm trying to encourage them to branch out into aromatherapy!

This morning we went to Vindolanda, a Roman fort very close to Hadrian's Wall and a site of enormous archeological importance probably best known for its "letters", a set of wooden tablets with all sorts of material handwritten in Latin on them. The letters were obviously thrown out and partially burned on a bonfire before a rainstorm put the fire out and no one bothered to light it again. They are particularly important because they're real letters which give us a genuine sense of what ordinary Roman people were saying and thinking. The most famous, and my personal favourite is a birthday invitation from a woman called Claudia Severa to a female friend: "I send you a warm invitation to come to us on September 11th." It's particularly important because it is the earliest example of a woman's handwriting in Roman history.

Perhaps even more fascinating is the fact that a shoe belonging to the woman she was writing to has also been dug up, and it is almost perfectly preserved even down to the maker's stamp! More than that, it is incredibly pretty. The leather work is stunning, and would not have looked out of place on a modern woman's foot.

Going to Vindolanda gave me such a strong sense of how advanced the Roman civilisation actually was. These people weren't just surviving. They were aesthetes. They wore highly intricate items of jewellery. They painted glasses with extraordinarily colourful scenes. They were fastidiously clean. They even had birthday parties!

From Vindolanda we went to Sycamore Gap, that wonderful spot where Hadrian's Wall plummets down one hillside, and sharply ascends the next with the most perfectly shaped sycamore tree sitting in the ravine between the two. It's best known for having appeared in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, and, as a result has taken on an almost mystical significance. We'd all been there before - together, in fact - but the walk along the crag from Steel Rigg is breathtaking and worth doing any number of times. You can see for miles from up there. Hadrian's Wall clings proudly to the landscape and, on the tops of the wall, thousands of wild flowers and grasses billow and rustle in the wind. It has to be one of the most magical places in the world.

I lined up the sound of random singing on my iPhone to encourage young Jeanie that the tree at Sycamore Gap had magical powers. If only I could rediscover that childhood sense of awe in the world. Watching her wide-eyed expression as she pressed her ear to the tree trunk and listened for the singing was infectious and highly moving. Everyone, in my view, should remain open to the possibility of magic in the world.

The crag also provides a rather special echo, which we spent some time exploring with whistles and shouts. We did the same the last time we visited. The experience never grows old!

This evening Tanya, Paul and their kids arrived at the Youth Hostel, and Sam cooked us all a wonderful stew for tea, followed by strawberries with cream and meringues.

And that was the end of the day, really. Meriel has made herself a little window seat from where she can look out over the valley opposite. The sun shone brightly this evening and the fields on the side of the hills started glowing golden yellow and lime green. We may well sleep well tonight!