A Peninsula; Jolly Nearly An Island: In Which Sam Is Nearly Stranded

 

"And for another thing," said Edmund, "Cair Paravel wasn't on an island."
"Yes, I've been wondering about that. But it was a what-do-you-call-it, a peninsula. Jolly nearly an island. Couldn't it have been made an island since our time? Somebody has dug a channel." 
--Prince Caspian

"I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying."
--Sea-Fever by John Masefield

 

Hello wonderful peoples of the internet! I'm here with a jaunty little short post (both because I don't want to bore you and because I'm on a deadline) about my doings last weekend. 

Last weekend's adventures fall under the category of "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley" and also the category of "sometimes when Sam assumes that everything will work out for her, she's right but not in the way she expects". 

Because, you see, my plan was to go to Lindisfarne, aka Holy Island, of the Holy Island seals on behalf of which Maddie went to war (Code Name Verity again, for those of you who aren't as intimately familiar with it as I am) and see not only the seals but also the castle and the ruined abbey (home of St. Aidan of Iona, yes that one, like from The Secret of Kells) and the gardens and all that. 

The only kink in this lovely plan is that Lindisfarne is a peninsula at low tide and an island at high tide. Thus, there's a bus service twice a day, at low tide, which would be the only way for me to get there (unless I wanted to walk for four hours, which I sometimes do but that wasn't going to work on this particular day). And yet it wasn't until I was on the train to Berwick-upon-Tweed (a four hour journey, I might add, as Berwick-upon-Tweed is where the Scottish-English border used to be...now it's a bit farther north) that I realized that the bus I'd been planning on taking from there to Lindisfarne was the second bus of the day, and thus my options were as follows:

a) Ride the bus round-trip so I saw Holy Island but didn't stay on it
b) Get stranded on Lindisfarne for the night
c) Stay in Berwick-Upon-Tweed and see what I could see there 
It honestly was lucky I figured this out on the train at all and didn't just get stranded. Guardian angel was on that one.

I decided that I didn't like the first two options, so I elected to make what I could of my day in Berwick-upon-Tweed. And honestly, it was quite lovely. 

Right after you get off the train, by the train station, there's a little park where you can walk down and see the estuary, and the remains of a medieval castle that was built by the Scots, and the old railway bridge, which is a beautiful long arch-built bridge that looks like it belongs in a movie. 

If you come up out of that park and walk down through Marygate, the main street of the town (which leads right down to the road where the Catholic church of Sts. Mary and Cuthbert sits) you go under an old town gate from the Elizabethan era, and then come to an entrance between two buildings that lets you walk out along another set of walls that overlooks the seashore. From there, you can walk along to the Ness Gate where the road out to the beach starts and walk out all the way along the river--or in this case the bed of the river, covered in washed-up kelp, since it was low tide--to the beach and then along the massive breakwater at the mouth of the river to the lighthouse.

I did all of that walking, and as I was doing it, the clouds were rolling in. It was a very sunny day when I got there, but by the time I got to the lighthouse it was overcast, grey, and starting to drizzle, so I headed back up, took a short break at the beach (and saw one of the famed North Sea seals) and then walked up into the town for lunch, browsing of the book shop, and a smoothie. 

On my way out of town, back to the train station, I walked back down to the walls to look out over the sea one last time, which at this point was grey and blue and cloudy all the way out to the horizon, with a few seagulls breaking up the monochrome.

As fun as it would have been to get to Lindisfarne, I delighted in exploring Berwick-upon-Tweed, and seeing the sea for the first time since I got here, and reciting sea-going poetry, and looking at (but not collecting, as it's illegal) shells on the beach, and taking copious amounts of pictures, and buying far too many old books (because they're so cheap if they're not a first edition! it's ridiculous, you can get beautiful cloth-bound books for 3 pounds or less!) and eating haddock chowder and reading Newman's Apologia pro vita sua on the train. It was a very good day. 

(I hope you enjoyed this little anecdote, and my plan is to be back on Monday with my Remember, O Thou Man post for this Lent! :))