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| Bunty |
As we had an ‘adult’ day yesterday we
thought we would ask Tom what he wanted to do today – guess what he said…’a train
ride’ well who would have forecast that?
Luckily there is a little 15 inch gauge railway not far from us so we
spent the day on that. It is called the
Heatherslaw Light Railway and was built in 1989 purely for leisure purposes to
get the tourists to the area. It
works. We parked up at Heatherslaw, had
tea and a bun (border tart: a pastry tart with gooey currant bottom and a thick
icing top – 1,000s of calories, but you have to try the local specalities don’t
you?)
We got the 11am train to Etal. The ride takes you along the river Till (one
of the cleanest in the country and supports otters although we didn’t see any)
to Etal which is 1.8 miles away. The
journey took 17 minutes going at a top speed of 9.2 miles an hour, but an
average speed of 6! It wasn’t built for
speed, but it was very pleasant.
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| Castle |
At Etal we went to look around the ruined
castle – we are in borders territory here, and the castle has changed hands a
number of times (Etal was the location of a bridge across the river). There wasn’t a lot of castle left, but there
was a good museum where Tom showed some interest – mainly in the weapons, but
he learnt something of the local history (although to be honest my history of
that period of time (1500s-1700s is pretty abysmal!).
Tom made some friends at the castle and
they all went loopy running up and down,
playing hide and seek etc etc. He
certainly enjoyed himself and got a good deal of exercise into the bargain.
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| Do not lean out of the window |
One he had tired a bit we walked into the
village in search of lunch and found it in the tearooms there. A very pleasant place. Tom had the children’s menu: sandwich,
crisps, drink etc, but instead of being served on a plate / in a box, it was
served in a cardboard car. Very
inventive, in fact very Japanese! We
wondered back to the railway and got the train back to Heatherslaw.
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| Duddo Standing Stones |
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| A very old stone |
We then drove to Duddo where there was a
stone circle. We found it without too
much trouble, walking through 3 fields to get to it. We don’t know anything about it, but there were
5 stones which were shell shaped and had groves in them (almost like
hands). They were pretty big and quite
interesting. We spent a good half hour
larking around them, but the wind and rain caught up with us so we made a hasty
exit and walked back to the car before we got too wet.
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| It was cold! |
We drove home, had some down time and then
decided to go out for dinner. We had
heard that a nearby pub was good, looked it up on the internet when we were
somewhere with wifi earlier – it said it was open all day. We rocked up at 5.30 to find it didn’t open
until 6pm so we headed into Alnwick and went to the first place we could find
was open and serving. We were really
lucky and came across a very lovely bistro with lovely staff and atmosphere and
lovely food. There was no children’s
menu so Tom ate some of ours (when I say some, I mean half – I ordered some
tagliatelle which was very good, but he thought so too and plundered
mine!) We also had pudding, which was
served with flavored sugar glass (never seen that before!) to help fill us up.
It has been a cold, overcast and then rainy
day, we are hoping it is nicer tomorrow…
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