Northumberland beaches can be very beautiful, as beaches go, they tick quite a few boxes that good beaches need; they can be long and curved, they possess fine and clean sand, very few rocks (unlike the breakwater beach in brixham, for example) as you head towards the sea you have the good, compacted sand, ideal for sand castles and the day we went yesterday it also had glorious blue skies and a day of sunshine. Yet, oddly, this beach (and the others I have been to so far, also), it was pretty well deserted. Certainly not too busy at all (compare this to the Grockle heavy Devon coastline in summer). All these boxes above have been ticked and were this; Devon, Dorset or Cornwall the beach would be standing room only for large, burnt red English men with beer bellies and comparing their tattoos with the wife or girlfriend. But not here, not in Northumberland and that's for the other box it ticks; ferociously high winds from the east coming across the north sea! In full effect, a wind that acts like a mobile freezer at rapid speed. It is called 'Baltic'. The beaches may look great and lively but in Easter with high winds it had a chill factor of about -5. It plays tricks on your mind as you are playing/walking on a beach wearing; Jeans, walking boots, one layer of a hoodie and also a coat and a woolly beanie hat and your still feeling the wind as it goes through you!
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| The warm and inviting Northumberland beaches |
Here, rests the flaw then. It is visually gorgeous, it just happens that most of the wind comes from Siberia. Not that the kids were bothered by this (strangely they will play in this but then complain a bedroom is too cold?). It was to them, still a beach. You do wonder, or I did, what the beach would be like on a beautifully warm summers day (idyllic). This also begged the question, would they have a 'warm' summers day to discover this. Even on the days it seems a not particularly windy day, the moment you approach the sea then, 'boom', the wind begins to whip up and starts to attempt to deposit you off the nearest headland or into the sea!
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| Yet, the beaches have such a dramatic beauty |
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| This, with a 90 mile an hour gale. |
To be fair though, they've do seem more hardy up here. As my family trudged wrapped up in coats, jumpers, gloves and hats. Up rolls, one presumes a local family with two kids, who are then rapidly undressed down to a pair of pants and then sent off into the sea (I would imagine the temperature was in single figures), but in they went, the hardy, ill advised fools. Ridiculous really, I guess they breed them tough up here by doing mightily odd things like this to their children. Character building I think the Victorian's called it. Like a sponsored 'tough-athon' for children under 16. (As I rammed my hands even further into my coat pockets to extract as much heat from the pocket as scientifically possible, I was left wondering at what point these kids would be diagnosed with hypothermia? or whether you could develop an immunity from it).
It in no way removes the actual beauty of the places. Which as shown in these (rather arty pictures, I think!) really can be, at times, mesmerising!
In all honesty, enjoy the beaches of the North East, but always, always, pack a few (if not 6) layers! (I'd also take a thermos flask of a thick vegetable soup of your choice if your planning to be there for a fair few hours), maybe even another face you could change into once the original has been blown off through attrition (like Worzel Gummage could do).
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