A Homecoming of Sorts
Five days healing in the Cheviots
By Trevor H. Smith
August 2023
Part Six: Rothbury to Tosson
In my early twenties I lived in the Heaton area of Newcastle. Much of Heaton is carpeted in ‘Tyneside Flats’. Red brick Victorian Terraces whose outside lavatories may be long gone, but whose tiny back yards and shoulders-width alleyways remain. Over a five-year period, I lived in half a dozen Heaton addresses, from Biddlestone to Mowbray Street with infinite iterations of friends, my sister, her boyfriend, my girlfriend, and my best friend. Eventually settling on just me and my girlfriend > fiancée > wife. The names given to the terraces on which we lived were lifted straight out of the map of my homecoming landscape: Warton, Tosson, Rothbury, Simonside, Trewhitt, Cartington, and other locations among the nearby surrounds of Cragside, country home of Lord William George Armstrong. Born in 1810 just half a mile from Heaton, Armstrong was an eminent scientist and inventor, he pioneered hydroelectricity and went on to acquire large tracts of this corner of North Tyneside, transposing the names of the hills, towns, and villages of Northumberland onto his brand-new street maps of Heaton. I learnt to drive on those streets, passed my test nearby, and within a week of doing so I was driving through Northumberland spotting the place names with which I had only ever associated tarmac and traffic.
I headed out of the market town of Rothbury (its eponymous Terrace being the first built of Armstrong’s new industrial suburbs) and up through green pastures towards the purple hills of Simonside. My pack had somehow crept up to 17kg – the most I had carried since my first Pennine Way attempt in 2007 – but the adrenaline made light work of that. Mostly flagstoned, the path up Simonside is a well-worn trail of fern-edged peat and moss and exposed limestone. I smiled as I felt the clean air against my cheeks. I felt my heart swell with every step as my lungs puffed in support of my legs. Minor incidents such as climbing over a stile or picking through muddied drainage at the field’s edge filled me with joy. This would become my routine over the coming days, where everything would be geared to one objective: reaching the day’s end point before sundown.
Where the path crosses the day’s final road and climbs up to the Simonside Hills, I spotted a person and their dog fussing around a large rock formation. This turned out to be Birky Hill, site of one of the clearest of the many Cup and Ring Marked Rocks in this region. I had, until now, been looking for them to no avail. This stone was set apart from all others, and from my vantage point on an iron age hill fort to the east I could see a path that led down towards it and around what looked like a nearby information board. A second path led through a car park and over my final road crossing of the day. I had not been looking far enough ahead on my map to notice that for all its perceived remoteness, this area was by no means the middle of nowhere. The information board told me that the cup and ring marks on the Simonside rocks can also be found in Scotland, parts of Ireland, down the French west coast and into Northern Spain and Portugal. A longitudinal cultural alignment that shows the world was not always divided into the territories that today we call countries. I read that all knowledge of the purpose of these marked stones has long been wiped from history. That they may even belong to a pre-prehistory, and that in these stones we may be witnessing a second phase of such marking, one which reinterprets the purpose of earlier markings into decoration, their original usage having been lost even to the people of the Later Neolithic Age. I wondered whether they might be maps showing hills (cups) and springs (rings) in the landscape, but there is literally no mention of this online, and the chances of me figuring out within twenty minutes of seeing one are pretty slim. Whatever their purpose, their beauty and mystery will outlive us all. As I crossed the car park I gave the person and their dog a brief hello and began my ascent to the Simonside Ridge. Its crags and cairns calling me ever upwards, they pulled me along the trail as a light diagonal rain dotted my cheeks. I considered donning my waterproof jacket, but as quickly as I could think it, the rain had passed, off to follow the course of the Coquet, seawards. I scanned the western skies for rainclouds, and then north west to the Cheviot horizon. In three days from now I would be up there, in amongst the permacloud. Perhaps there my waterproof clothing would justify its inclusion.
My intended destination for the day was Simonside, on whose summit I would pitch for my first ever solo wild camp. My search for trailside areas sufficient in flatness or scale on which to pitch even my tiny one-person tent were fruitless so onwards I pressed, to Tosson (on whose likenamed street my sister lived, back in ’96). The highest summit in the range, Tosson was predictably every bit as inhospitable as its neighbour, and even more windswept. Disheartened, I set down my bag and started scouting further afield for a place to camp. To save myself from aimless wandering, I held dead against leaving the path unless I could make out an obvious clearing. I could not, so found myself giving serious consideration to a tiny gap beneath a craggy outcrop that looked like it could accommodate my sleeping mat, so maybe I could bivvy out in my sleeping bag for the night. My goose feather bag would not have enjoyed the morning dew, much less the following evening, already moistened, but my desperation was rising. I found a last resort – backtrack a few hundred yards, at the dogleg where the ridge widened – I could camp inches from the trail. I reassured myself that if the light started to fade and I had no option I would camp right here and set an early alarm to avoid first light’s dog walkers and fell runners. In one last desperate throw of the dice, I hiked back to the trig pillar at Tosson and huddled down inside its tightly rounded walls, opened my phone, then YouTube, and searched ‘Wild camp Tosson Northumberland’. It brought up two middle aged Geordie blokes, not unlike myself, heading out on an overnight excursion to this very location. I skipped ten seconds, I wasn’t interested in their kit or their stories of the legendary beasts that lurk within these hills (though it might be interesting to catch up with that later), and another ten seconds, and another. I dragged the video on until they pulled out their tents. ‘I’ve managed to find this spot here, and my pal is over by that crag just there.’ Said the one who had been doing all the talking to camera. I scanned the landscape and found his friend’s crag. Then I found the spot he was standing in whilst filming. That’ll do me. Knowing it had been done, I felt far less intimidated by the necessity of having to do it. I’ve always been able to rationalise away my irrationality, from learning to drive (look how many people are doing it) to university lecturing (It’s only an hour out of my life, then I’ll have done it – every single time) and so it was with this, my first ever wild camp. These guys did it, so there’s no reason why I can’t. I romped (carefully) over the heather and stood on his pitch. The crag – his camera rest – offered shelter, and while I had to pull apart the heather to reach the earth beneath it, that earth was at least firm enough to take a tent peg. And so, after the very mildest of perilous moments, up went my tent, out came my stove, and on went a cup of tea to accompany the quiche and cake I had bought from the Rothbury bakery moments before it had closed earlier that afternoon.