A long weekend on Lindisfarne – Friday
We’ve just got back from a long(ish) weekend in a cottage on Lindisfarne, just off the coast of Northumberland.
We drove up on Friday and planned to get to the island just before the causeway shut at 2.15pm. I somehow managed to get the maths wrong so we ended up leaving for the three hour drive at 9am-ish. We fought with the GPS most of the way – it didn’t seem to have the island in its village/town/city listing and when we tried to browse it like a normal map, the whole of the north-east was underwater for some reason – but we didn’t really need it: the directions were pretty much “get to the A1. Drive on that for a while. Then turn right. Drive for a little bit. Turn left into the cottage.”
We nearly had a car crash on the later part of the A1 bit (a sudden traffic jam on the wet, downward slope of a hill, with a heavy lorry with dodgy breaks unable to stop behind us) but aside from that, it was a pretty clear run so we got up to the island for around 12.30pm. We picked up the keys from a house in the village then retraced our (driven) steps to the cottage which was back near the end of the causeway.
We were staying in Skylark Cottage – which is at the causeway/visitor car park end of the village, and backs onto the fields in the centre of the island, looking out towards Lindisfarne Castle. The “cottage” is a very nice two-bed bungalow that I found somewhat randomly on the internet but it was great. The living room alone was as big as a single floor of our house and it was such a novelty to have space to move in the kitchen. But the best bit as far as we were concerned was the conservatory – as big as our living room, looking out over the private garden (with the Castle and harbour in the distance) and with the world’s biggest, comfiest sofa. We spent a lot of time on that sofa. Everywhere felt light and open – and it was such a novelty to have more than one door and windows on more than one side of a house!
We threw our stuff inside and had a quick collapse on the sofa then went back into the village for lunch at the Ship Inn. I had thought about staying at the Ship before I found the cottage but they didn’t have internet access for guests (the cottage has ADSL) and in the end we decided that we’d like the space of a cottage rather than just a room. For the holiday that we wanted – just hanging around, relaxing and doing our own thing, we definitely made the right decision – the space in the conservatory and garden were awesome for that. Anyway, so lunch at the Ship – I had a cheese ploughman’s (or monk’s tucker as they call it) and John had a ham and mustard sandwich – thick slices of homecooked ham for him and enough cheese to induce an instant heart attack for me (I gave some to John to share the clogging). John also had two pints of Holy Island Ale – the local (but probably not as local as it makes out) real ale. He loved it and Dathan very nearly got a text message ordering him to “get up here now, it’s only three hours drive, I’ll get them in”.
The pub closed around 2 and we were done there anyway so wandered back up to the cottage for a read/snooze on the sofa in the conservatory. Around 4, we went out for a walk towards the causeway – by then, it was high tide so it was completely flooded. I’d heard the character of the island changed a lot once the causeway shut – the steady stream of tourists heading to the castle, priory or Lindisfarne Centre instantly vanish and the 162 usual residents of the island breath a sigh of relief – but I didn’t expect it to be quite so severe – it was great :) Anyway, we hung around on that beach for a while then headed up through the village to the back of the Priory (where we met the world’s most excitable soon-to-be guide dog), and out onto the Heugh at the bottom of the island. The Heugh caused us to jump quite a bit (in honour of various old first person shooters that use that noise when you hit the jump key) and the wind, which was by then really rather windy, caused us to swear a lot in amazement – but fitting swearing given we were on Holy Island (all naughty words were either blasphemes or preceeded by the world “Holy”). We stayed up there for ten minutes but it was really too windy to enjoy it properly so we went to the other pub on the island, the Crown and Anchor, for quick drink before heading back to the cottage again. (The Crown and Anchor, incidentally, was alright but it felt like we were drinking in a hotel bar – there was something about it that seemed a bit odd. Not exceptionally so – we had planned to return there for a lunch, although never got around to it – but we didn’t feel completely comfortable there.)
The wind kept rattling the house all night so we stayed in the conservatory reading, then after a short soup-and-bread break, we retired to the living room to watch a film.
Pictures (click for bigger ones)
- Top: The view over the fields to the castle and harbour from the cottage’s garden
- Lower: Me looking out over the Heugh and/or to the excitable doggie down field, behind the Priory,
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