Tag: https://www.visitnorthumberland.com

Geordies are oft tagged Scots with their heads bashed in… now add to that their claim that the world’s oldest check tartan really is English.

The back story is that we’ve just spent International Women’s Day with The Scary One and her mum in their English homeland.

In Alnwick in Northumberland, only an hour and a half from our North Berwick home on Scotland’s south-east coast.

And learning about how fluid our stories are, with Northumberland having changed hands countless times in Borders skirmishes.

Which must explain how check tartan plaid first showed up in the third-century AD before more northern peoples took it on.

On track in Alnwick

It has in truth been a two-way street between Scotland and the north-east English county.

And our venture into the Alnwick institution that is the repurposed train station and now bookshop/cafe, closed after the war, Barter Books … and which reveals all.

With iconic Scots Oor Wullie and The Broons showcased on the shelves and Billy Connolly to the fore.

Read all about it

Barter Books is of course, more than a second-hand bookshop.

One of the biggest in the country and expanded since it first opened 35 years ago.

With its most notable addition its renowned buffet from a room they never even knew they had but fell upon a dozen years after first opening.

And which we sit in today by an open fireplace and historical pictures from Northumbrian yore with The Top-Hatted Station Master purveying the scene.

It is here that we sit eating our roast beef and onion gravy sandwiches, recommended as indeed Barter has been by Daughterie, and coffee stout.

Everybody screams for ice cream

And if that doesn’t fill you up you can reward yourself with ice cream, cakes or speciality coffees from Paradise, the former Stationmasters office.

We are glad to have got a table at all as Barter Buffet can become busy and visitors have been known to queue to get in.

Perhaps it is because regulars to BB, 45 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, clearly linger over their food, with a good book from the shop.

Of course, in the best company, it would be rude to read although when the conversation drifted I took in the artefacts, the top-hatted lamp shades.

And the pictures of what look like Scots but are really Northumbrians in those 3rd-century black-and-white check tartans.

Wham bam Bamburgh

Now you can easily spend the whole day, and Barter is open every day but Christmas Day, but any day tripper must take in the dramatic Bamburgh Castle before heading home.

Of course, we haven’t left ourselves enough time, and anyway we must always leave ourselves another reason to return and we will.

But before we go we take in the celebrated wooden-panelled Copper Kettle cafe in the quaint village.

And high teas with pots of tea that would sate any hungry hiker and scones and jam reserves or cake treats.