Newcastle upon Tyne; Sunday, 27 September, 2015

Quite an early start to get out of the hotel and into town to pick up a train just after 10 to head up North to the top of Northumbria at Berwick. In the end I made the train without too much difficulty, but as the train was running late there was a real risk that I might miss the connection I had planned in Berwick to start my journey south.

Thankfully, due to fortuitous positioning on the train meaning the door I stepped out of was by the exit steps, and for two people asking the bus driver quite a complex ticketing query, I made the bus with a couple of seconds to spare.

The bus itself was heading all the way back to Newcastle (taking 4 hours rather than the 50 minutes the train had just done the journey in), but I was only going part of the way down to the coastal town of Bamburgh and its spectacular cliff top castle

I had a good explore round the castle including the state rooms and taking in the stunning views over to both Lindisfarne and the other Farne Islands, before having a bit of a wander through town and back over to the bus stop to continue my journey south.

The next bus was only going to Alnwick, but serving more of the small towns along the coast so it made for a very interesting ride, with the amazing ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle drawing my attention and making up my mind to leave the bus at Craster to go exploring

I walked through the small, but very pretty, little harbour side and headed on out across the fields, following the large number of other visitors, towards the ruins of the castle.

With their position on the cliffs overlooking this stretch of the North Sea coast, and with the stunning barrelled walls of the gatehouse still standing, the ruins are spectacular, with a fair amount to see – though little in the way of information boards or guiding to know quite why the castle was built or how it ended up the way it did.

Back in Craster I headed over to a café near the bus stop for a late lunch and a coffee before the bus came in and I picked that up back into Alnwick before changing there for a bus back on into Newcastle.

I arrived back into Newcastle quite late, but feeling very peckish, so I found a restaurant near the bus station and had a quick dinner there, before catching a late Metro back to the hotel.