In September 2022, I travelled around Britain for a week and a half using an All Line Rover train ticket. This is the ninth of eleven special posts giving a day-by-day narration of my trip. I also wrote an introduction to the trip, discussing my plans and goals, before I left; and will follow up my day-by-day narration with standard posts about the nineteen individual map areas I visited on the trip which are new to the blog. [1]
This post covers what I did on Saturday 24th September 2022.
Interactive map
Here’s an interactive map of my All Line Rover trip! By default, all 11 days of my trip are shown: press the icon in the top left to see the route for individual days of the trip only.
Key to colours: Purple = train, dark blue = metro/underground, pink = tram, green = bus, orange = walking, medium blue = ferry
Day 8: Bishop Auckland & Tyneside
I ended my previous day of this trip by staying the night at a B&B near Allens West railway station, out to the southwestern corner of the Teesside conurbation (Middlesbrough, Stockton etc.). Since it was getting late (and dark) by the time I arrived, I didn’t explore at all, instead settling straight down with some supermarket-purchased dinner and then to bed. I therefore took the opportunity to wander around in the morning, walking down into the small town of Yarm.
Yarm sits in a big bend of the river Tees, and the railway line used by trains from London and the south into Teesside runs right through it, meaning there’s a huge railway viaduct heading right through the middle of town. The river was very pretty at this point, looking very peaceful despite the built-up area on either side. There were also weeping willows along one bank – I don’t know a lot of trees, but this is one I can well recognise due from my childhood, when my parents and I used to a holiday cabin in Stratford-upon-Avon, and would go on trips in little rowing boats, often ending up pushing through willow strands!
Entering Yarm, I proceeded directly to track down Yarm Castle, which is a great little oddity. It’s very much not your usual castle: instead it’s a big garden-ornament-type model castle, about three feet high, sitting on a street of terraced houses – very fun!
I didn’t really know what to expect of Yarm as a town, but it was very nice – the high street and little town square were full of pretty old hourses and also seemed lively and prosperous. In the middle of the square sits the very cute Yarm Town Hall, which I really liked. Apparently until very recently it was still used for council meetings, and is now being refurbished to become a visitor centre.
From there, I walked back up to Allens West and got a train heading westwards, crossing the East Coast Main Line at Darlington to take me up to Bishop Auckland in County Durham. This station is the end of the line for these trains, which run from Auckland eastwards through Middlesbrough to Saltburn-on-Sea, but the line continues as the heritage Weardale Railway to Wolsingham and Stanhope, which I visited back in January! Bishop Auckland station also seems to have a very enterprising ticket office – as well as selling train tickets in the station, they sell tickets online and by phone, act as a travel agency for holidays by train, own the ticketing website nationalrail.com (not to be confused with nationalrail.co.uk), and sell rather nice-looking railway network maps and posters.
Arriving in Auckland, I went straight into the large Morrisons near the station, and had a very nice cooked breakfast in the café. Suitably fortified, I then walked north into the town centre. Bishop Auckland is known for Auckland Castle, one of the estates – and for a while the main residence – of the wealthy and powerful Bishops of Durham.
The castle was closed, and in any case would take a long time to look around, but I did peer through the gates and have a wander around the deer park. The Deer House was fun – I’ve never seen one of those before!
I’d originally been considering doing some or all of the Durham Coast Line on this day – the line from Middlesbrough up to Newcastle via Hartlepool, Sunderland and so on – perhaps instead of Bishop Auckland, or perhaps by getting a bus over to Hartlepool. However, there were no trains running between Hartlepool and Sunderland this day, so instead from Auckland, I got a #6 bus over to Durham, and then a #20 across to Sunderland.
I miscalculated a bit with this journey: getting on the #6, I said to the driver that I was planning to change in Durham to get over to Sunderland, and could I do that all on one ticket. He sold me an Arriva day ticket, telling me to change to a #22 in Durham. Arriving in Durham – which I’ve been to plenty of times before, so didn’t take time to explore – and after first making the uphill trek to the railway station and back to use the toilets, I realised that Arriva’s #22 takes an hour and a half, and there wasn’t one for another forty minutes or so. Go North East’s #20 takes 50mins and was leaving very soon, but my Arriva-only ticket wasn’t valid on it, so I ended up buying a separate single. I discovered later that I could have instead asked the first driver for a Network One explorer ticket, which covers all operators, and would’ve also covered my journeys later in the day on buses and the Tyne and Wear metro in the Newcastle area, which is very nice for £12.70. Oh well!
I was very impressed with Sunderland Interchange, the city’s main bus stop which is also a station on the Tyne and Wear Metro: it seems like Tyne and Wear are doing very well at transport integration.
From there I walked through the town centre – which was fine, fairly unremarkable – then crossed the River Wear to Monkwearmouth.
In Monkwearmouth I aimed straight for St Peter’s Church, which I’ve wanted to see for a while. Monkwearmouth formed one half of the Monkwearmouth-Jarrow monastery, the 7th-century foundation that features heavily in early Anglo-Saxon history and art history, and was the home of the great Bede – since I did a lot of this stuff in my degree, the monastery came up a lot.
I’d been to Jarrow before, but still I’ve wanted to see Monkwearmouth for a long while. While the rest of the church is newer, the tower is original Anglo-Saxon, with the bottom couple of levels remaining from Benedict Biscop‘s original 7th-century foundation, which is extremely cool. The church was closed so I didn’t go in, but still, it was great!
I then walked across to the nearby St Peters station on the Tyne and Wear Metro and got on a train heading up towards central Newcastle. It is fun that the 7th-entury church has given its name to a modern “metro” station – I wonder what Benedict or Bede would think of that!
Though I’d been before, I wanted to visit Jarrow again. Jarrow, a sizeable town and part of the larger Tyneside conurbation, has a metro station, so normally getting there from St Peters would just be a simple matter of changing at Pelaw to the Yellow Line. Unfortunately, the Yellow Line from Pelaw to South Shields was closed for upgrade work that day, so instead I got off at Heworth, and took a #27 bus to Jarrow, which conveniently stops right outside the monastery church!
Jarrow is great ! Though unfortunately I somehow didn’t manage to get any particularly good photos either this time or last. The chancel (east end) is original 7th-century Anglo-Saxon and pretty much intact, which is amazing; one can stand in there and be in the space the Bede stood in. In the wall of the tower is an original, legible dedication stone, which is very cool. Outside the church, there are later monastery ruins, with lots of helpful interpretation boards and so on.
As well as visiting Jarrow monatery again, before heading into central Newcastle there were a couple of odd ocrners of Tyneside’s transport network that I’d been interested in exploring when planning this day. As well as the metro and the buses, Tyne and Wear’s transport authority Nexus runs the passenger-only Shields Ferry between (as you might guess) North and South Shields, and maintains the very cool Tyne cyclist and pedestrian tunnels between Jarrow and Howdon. If the metro had been fully operational, I might’ve walked through the tunnel to Howdon, then metro’d to North Shields, got the ferry, and metro’d to central Newcastle from there. However, with the South Shields metro not operating, this would’ve taken a lot longer on replacement bus services, and the day was getting on, so I decided I’d just do the tunnel, leaving the ferry for another time.
I now had a day ticket for buses and the metro in the area (the third ticket that could’ve been covered by just the one Network One ticket!), and since there was a bus passing, I got on one for the short hop down to the tunnel portal, though it’s only a 15-minute walk. This was a small error – I missed the stop and ended up back at the closed Jarrow metro station, with just as long a walk just from a different direction! Oh well.
The tunnel was very cool. It felt a little like stepping into the past – as well as the pastel tiles and old painted signs, it still has wooden escalators. I know these were common in the past, but I’d never seen one of before!
After crossing under the river, I made the short walk to Howdon metro station, to get a train into central Newcastle. At Howdon, there’s a level crossing in the middle of the station, which is a little incongruous for a place calling itself a metro station – the Tyne and Wear Metro is a little misnamed, not really being a metro in the sense of the London Underground and so on. As well as level crossings, a lot of the track is shared with other passenger and freight trains. Not putting it down though; it’s a great system and I love it – I expect Bristol, Southampton or Leeds would love to have the like, and it and will be even better once it gets very nice-looking new trains in late 2023.
I got off the metro at the end of the line, St James station, where I spent the next forty-five minutes on a wander around central Newcastle. I’d never been to Newcastle before, and didn’t have the time to do it justice, but I really liked what I saw, and would definitely like to come back.
I started off by seeing some of the old city wall, before heading over to Blackfriars, a medieval Dominican friary.
After its dissolution, Blackfriars was used as trade guild building headquarters, and now contains craft workshops, and exhibition, and the very cool Blackfriars Restaurant, which I’d love to come back and eat in one day – while I haven’t evaluated its claim to be the “oldest dining room in the UK”, it does seat guests in the medieval dining hall, which is appealing!
I then just walked through the city for a while; saw the Grainger Market, a big covered market.
And before heading into the station for my train, I had time to take a quick look at the amusingly- but logically-named Newcastle Castle. In a similar vein, the signs pointing to this area refer to it as “Old Newcastle”!
The castle site has been partly built over, with a railway viaduct running through the middle of it, which makes it a bit of an odd experience to explore. Since I wanted to get on, I only looked at it from the outside rather than paying to go in and see the surviving castle keep, but I’d like to do that sometime!
I was also interested by the High Level Bridge, a two-level bridge with a rail deck on top and a pedestrian and car deck below which, as the name suggests, crosses high over the River Tyne, giving an impressive view down to the lower bridges below!
I’d originally planned for the next day, Sunday 25th September 2023, to be the final day of the trip, on which I’d travel back home to Cambridge, before having two rest days and then going back to work on the Wednesday. However, I decided to extend my trip by one day, to stay the next two nights (instead of one) in the quiet town of Haltwhistle in Northumberland. The middle day in Haltwhistle would be a restful one, when I wouldn’t do much travelling and would just enjoy the area. So from Newcastle, I got on my final train of the day to Haltwhistle, there to stay for a whole two nights!
Footnotes
[1] The individual map area posts will duplicate the contents of the special trip posts, but unlike the latter they won’t form a continuous narrative, since they’ll skip things I did in map areas I’ve already posted about. They will, though, newly contain narration of anything I did on previous visits there – since some of these are areas which are new to the blog, but which I visited before starting my blog in 2017.
Visiting all the maps! 
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