Even More Pretentious, moi?: Saturday 18th August Morpeth

The B&B host Sharon also has a lodger I discovered this last night but did not meet her til this morning. Sharon had gone off to do her home help duties of an elderly lady. I am not sure how the lodger feels about Sharon's B&B activities judging from her response to my good morning. Oh well, no skin off my nose.

I drove into the town centre of Morpeth & it is a nice little market town, well over 10,000 I think. I found myself a book to read in a charity shop for 50p & investigated M&S, the readymade food range in there is incredible, these people must never cook from scratch.

This delaying tactics were necessary as the place I wanted to visit was not open til 11am, this makes it a bit hard to squeeze more than one of these places a day.

Destination was Cragside, so named I presume because it was built into the side of the hill using the rock as the foundation. Anyway originally it a was a 10 room shooting shack belonging to a Lord Armstrong who made his money with engineering works in Newcastle during the industrial times of the 1800s. Story goes that his workforce struck for 6 months to reduce the working day from 10 hours to 9 & when this was over he retreated to his hunting lodge & dealt with things at arms length. SO of course 10 rooms was not enough & he made 3 additions over the years. He also made hydro electric plant to operate lights in the house long before this was around. Improvements were also made to ease the burden of the dozens of staff required to run the place, ie a lift to take the coal upstairs for the fires & other bits & pieces, very interesting. He also purchased Bamburgh Castle for his wife to operate as a residence for genteel ladies who have fallen on hard times, but they died before it eventuated.

Cragside is apparently the most visited National Trust property & it is easy to see why, it really is beautiful & the gardens are different to usual formal gardens at these places, down the side of a hill, so rockeries & meandering paths are the go.

The most beautiful William Morris stainedglass windows at Cragside, they were on either side of a large hearth

Side entrance of Cragside

Cragside, original house was expanded 3 times

Lord A & the wife did not have any children, so the property passed to a grandnephew & then by the 4th Armstrong owner, it went to pay death duties. They did however keep Bamburgh Castle & the family operates that one, so I headed off there, about 40 minute drive on the coast, closer to Scottish border.

Now Bamburgh Castle is a real stone castle, probably dating from 600ad, don't quote me. It is a real defensive castle , as most were, & it is thought that it was a throne seat due to the discovery of graves of larger size people, rationale being that only royals would be that size having access to good nutrition all their lives.