The ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle cast a melancholic spell over one of the emptiest, most beautiful stretches of the Northumberland coast, where a spur of the Great Whin Sill ridge tapers into the sea just south of the Farne Islands. Rising from a headland protected on two sides by sheer cliffs and on the other by a deep ditch hewn from solid rock, the fortress was erected in the fourteenth century, ostensibly to ward off marauding Scots, but also as a symbol of the power and rank of its redoubtable creator, Thomas Earl of Lancaster.
Thomas Plantaganet, as he was also known, was the wealthiest baron in England at the time. This was his main power base and its awesome size reflects not merely the omnipresent threat from the north, but also the earl’s long-standing rivalry with his cousin, King Edward II of England.
Today the crumbling gatehouse, towers and ramparts barely hint at the building’s original proportions, but they stand as a perfect complement to the heart-stopping vista of windswept dunes and rocky coves that unfurls from their base.
The finest view of Dunstanburgh, as featured on innumerable magazine covers and postcard racks, is to be had from Embleton Bay, to the north of the castle – a huge sweep of golden sand and crashing surf backed by a freshwater lagoon.
Starting at the fishing harbour of Craster, where you can steel yourself for the walk ahead with a plate of locally smoked kipper, our route winds across Embleton Bay to reach Low Newton-by-the-Sea, a tiny cluster of stone fishermen’s houses overlooked by a coast-guard’s post. The pocket-sized pub at Low Newton’s heart, the Ship Inn, has to be one of Britain’s most delightful watering holes, cowering out of the wind next to the green. The perfect turning point for our route, it serves its own home-brewed beer, and fresh lobsters caught by the landlady’s son-in-law.
This is a walk that should ideally be saved for a bright, windy day, when the sea colours are at their most vivid. Bring a kite, and pair of field glasses to spot the seabirds that congregate here in impressive numbers – Embleton ranks among the northeast’s top birding hotspots. And if you’re lucky you might even catch a glimpse of a basking seal.
Recent archeological digs have yielded evidence of settlement at Dunstanburgh stretching back thousands of years, but it was in the early fourteenth century during the lifetime of Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, that the site became the region’s main stronghold.
The castle owes its ambitious scale primarily to the troubled relations between the Earl and his cousin, King Edward II of England. Although close in their youth, the two fell out over Edward’s fondness for one of his young courtiers, Piers Gaveston – a man of inferior rank on whom the Prince and future King lavished favours, privileges, titles and land – despite furious attempts by his family to separate the pair.
Historians have long considered the two were gay lovers. However, the civil strife that erupted after Edward’s accession to the throne was sparked not by disapproval of the king’s suspected bisexuality, so much as by his companion Gaveston’s knack of putting powerful noses out of joint.
When Edward departed to France to marry twelve-year-old Princess Isabella in 1308, he appointed his favourite as Regent. This outraged some of the older barons at court, who considered the choice a breach of protocol. Lancaster and his allies – the so called “Ordainer Earls” – eventually lost patience and raised an army to attack the king at Newcastle. Edward and his friend managed to slip away from the ensuing siege (leaving the young Queen Isabella behind to fend for herself), but Gaveston was eventually captured at Scarborough and, after a mock trial, beheaded in 1312.
Dunstanburgh was intended as a response to castles built by Edward’s father in Wales a generation before. Several wars with the Scots made little impact on the structure, but it suffered a terrible pounding in the War of the Roses. Among the few buildings to survive the Lancastrian cannonades were the huge twin-towered gatehouse, which John of Gaunt later re-modelled into a keep, and three-storey Lilburn Tower, a medieval skyscraper propped up on basalt pillars.
The lords of the manor in this area were for centuries the Craster family, descendants of Earl Thomas based at a fifteenth-century tower house which still stands on the outskirts of nearby Craster. The same branch of the dynasty was responsible for the village’s little harbour, on which a plaque records a dedication to a brother killed in Francis Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet in 1906.
Part of the family’s wealth derived from same durable stone that Earl Thomas chiselled out of the Great Whin Sill to create Dunstanburgh. Rock from several quarries hereabouts used be transported via a network of overhead cables and bins to the jetty, where it was shipped to London for use as kerb stones. Craster’s elderly inhabitants can still recall the dismantling of the aerial railway at the start of World War II. It was said at the time the measure was to prevent the installations being used as a navigation aid by enemy bombers, but in truth the quarry buckets interfered with a secret radar post hidden on the ridge north of the village.
Our route takes you right past the station’s surviving concrete bunkers, from where a great view extends over Dunstanburgh Castle and out to sea. Amid the wooded slopes just below them on the west flank of the hill, amateur archeologists recently uncovered terraced gardens made by Italian PoWs held here in the 1940s, along with huts decorated with murals showing nostalgic scenes of Mediterranean life.
Another vestige of the trawler industry that formerly flourished along this coast is the pretty enclave of cream-washed cottages at Low Newton-by-the-Sea, 6.5km/ 4 miles north of Craster at the turning point of our route. Ranged around a little green, the terrace of eighteenth-century houses faces a natural harbour shielded from the waves by an off-shore reef. Most of the boats moored here these days tend to be leisure dinghies, but a couple of local fishermen still work out of the village, supplying its pub, the heavenly Ship Inn (see “Eating & Drinking”), with fresh lobster. Before leaving Low Newton, take a stroll north up the hill above the village to the coastguard lookout station (reached via a path turning right off the main road just north of the pub). The view from its little terrace back over the beach to Dunstanburgh is magnificent.
Another short but worthwhile detour from our route is to the Low Newton Nature Reserve. Centered on a freshwater lagoon surrounded by fens and scrubwood, the site attracts birdwatchers from all over the region; from a pair of hides (one of which is wheelchair accessible) you can sight rare waders and wildfowl including pochard, teal and warblers. Keen birders should explore the cliffs below Dunstanburgh Castle, which shelter one of Northumberland’s largest seabird colonies, with large numbers of nesting kittiwakes, fulmars and razorbills in the summer months. Finally, keep your eyes peeled, too, for grey seals basking on the rocks.
Craster Kippers - You can’t go far in Craster without being assailed by the unmistakable aroma of smoked fish. The source of the village’s trademark smell is L Robson & Son’s famous smoke house – the last of four such factories which, at the height of the herring boom in the nineteenth century, kept a fleet of twenty boats and hundreds of “herring girls” busy here. Overfishing and pollution have decimated North Sea herring stocks, and today the salmon and herring filets smoked by the Robsons over oak sawdust has to be imported, but the produce remains as succulent and fragrant as ever.