Berwick. A walled town, with a personality.

Berwick Upon Tweed. Arguably the strangest town I have ever visited. Mainly via the fact that everyone speaks oddly. Unable to speak in either purely English or Scottish. Berwick, like its people, are a product of its rather chequered history.

Berwick is essentially a town that has frequently been kidnapped in its entirety and dropped into a new country. One day an English town, then the following day they wake up to Scottish overlords and repeat, for a few hundred years. No wonder it seems an amalgamation of two personalities which makes it difficult to pin down.

It was therefore a little treat to finally visit the walled town.

Neither the biggest of towns, nor the prettiest, Berwick has nonetheless a certain charm to it that makes it a place I very much enjoyed visiting. You can’t really put your finger on it but there it is, a quintessential charm. Berwick has something about it. Some quite gorgeous architectural gems pepper potted around the town and its river side. The riverside terraces, particularly, would befit any city. Parts of it felt like mini- Edinburgh. The Scottish influence I suppose?

As a walled town, the wall itself is rather impressive in a monumental way. Elizabethan in origin, which surprised me, but then seemed quite an obvious fact. It surrounds the town and you can navigate the ramparts from bastion to bastion, drinking in the scale and ambition of the original purpose of this mighty wall, from end to end. At the time of its creation this was the largest building project of the Tudor times. It would be called an expression of ‘hard power’ now. A statement of intent to the Scottish, watching it grow from the ground upwards.

The other monument that really does take one’s breath away is the Royal Border Viaduct. Built by Robert Stephenson, this Viaduct spans the river Tweed. It is another example of how the Victorian engineers would innovate to solve a problem but solving the problem was never enough, it would also need to serve an aesthetic function. It needed to look good too. Comparing Victorian civil engineering to modern constructs shows up how far apart they are. We have lost this sense of aesthetic pleasure by pursuing the cheapest solution. Value for money has ensured that instead of building the future iconic images we still go back to the Victorians in the main who littered the UK with their enterprises. We now make the mundane appear mundane.