Scenic Point in Tyne and Wear

Craster is a small fishing village on the Northumberland coast famous throughout Britain for its traditionally oak-smoked kippers, produced by the Robson family in the smokehouse that has operated in the village since 1906 and which continues to supply what many consider the finest kippers available anywhere in the country. The village also provides the starting point for the two-mile coastal walk to Dunstanburgh Castle, one of the finest short coastal walks in northeast England combining the character of the Northumberland coast with the dramatic ruins of one of the most remote of England's medieval castles. The Robson kipper smokehouse is the principal industry and the dominant identity of Craster, its traditional method of cold-smoking whole herring over oak sawdust producing kippers of an intensity and quality that have developed a national reputation. The kippers can be purchased directly from the smokehouse and from the village shop, and the combination of the quality of the product and the directness of the purchase from the producer in the working village provides one of the most authentic food heritage experiences on the northeast coast. The walk from Craster to Dunstanburgh Castle passes along the rocky foreshore and through the coastal grassland of the Northumberland coast path, the profile of the castle appearing progressively more dramatic as the walk develops. The castle ruins, managed by English Heritage, provide the destination for a round walk that returns across the fields behind the coast in an excellent circuit of about four miles.

Sycamore Gap on Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland is the most photographed section of the Wall, a dramatic dip in the wall's course on the Whin Sill escarpment where a single sycamore tree stood for over a century in the hollow between two high sections of the Roman curtain wall in a composition of tree, wall and Northumberland sky that became one of the most recognised natural heritage images in the British Isles. The tree achieved international fame through its appearance in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and its felling by vandals in September 2023 created an outpouring of national grief quite remarkable for the loss of a single tree. The Sycamore Gap tree was the most beloved single tree in England, a position recognised by its victory in the Woodland Trust's Tree of the Year competition on multiple occasions and confirmed by the enormous public reaction to its destruction. The young sycamore now growing from the root stock of the original tree, protected in place while the remaining trunk was removed for preservation, provides the basis for the next chapter in the story of this extraordinary location. The section of Hadrian's Wall through which Sycamore Gap runs, between Housesteads and Steel Rigg, is among the most dramatic on the entire Wall route, the Whin Sill escarpment providing the natural defensive advantage that the Wall's builders exploited in placing their barrier here. The walking on the Wall path in both directions from Sycamore Gap provides the finest experiences of Hadrian's Wall in a landscape of considerable power and beauty.

Warkworth in Northumberland is one of the finest small castle towns in England, a village dominated by the ruins of a great medieval castle whose combination of the castle, the fortified bridge, the medieval street running between them and the hermitage cut from the rock of the riverside cliff creates one of the most complete and most atmospheric medieval townscapes in the northeast. English Heritage manages the castle and the hermitage, and the combined visit provides an excellent half-day of medieval heritage in a beautiful Northumberland setting. Warkworth Castle was the principal seat of the Percy family, Earls of Northumberland, whose power in the medieval north of England was second only to the crown. The magnificent keep, built in the late fourteenth century in the unusual form of a cross within a square, is one of the most ambitious and most architecturally sophisticated castle towers in England, its multiple levels of accommodation designed to house the household of one of the most powerful magnates in the kingdom. The castle features in Shakespeare's Henry IV as the seat from which Hotspur departs for the rebellion that ends at the Battle of Shrewsbury. The hermitage, carved into the sandstone cliff above the river a short walk from the castle, is one of the few surviving medieval hermitages in England, its small chapel and living room cut directly from the rock providing an intimate and atmospheric reminder of the religious eremitic tradition that existed alongside the great military and aristocratic establishments of the medieval period.