Rothbury to Guyzance

Walked by Sally and Richard, Wednesday 3rd August 2016

15.7 miles of walking, about 15 miles on route of St Oswald's Way (sometimes not quite on the official route!)

Click here for all our photos of this walk.

Katerina's Guest House in Rothbury is slightly quirky, but in a nice way, and before we left, Cath cooked us a lovely breakfast (including delicious home made bread) and we chatted with both Ian and Cath, verifying that Rothbury does indeed have no petrol station (not, you would rightly surmise, particularly relevant when on a walking holiday and travelling entirely by public transport, but we were caught out by this when heading for a holiday cottage further up the Coquet valley a few years ago). Rothbury has an excellent range of other shops, especially given it usually seems to be described as a village not a town, and before leaving we bought provisions for lunch and our evening meal, as well as replacing our antihistamine cream with some that hadn't passed its best before date. I needed this to treat various insect bites, in particular the one on my ankle which had been exacerbated by my walking boots.

It was almost exactly 10 am when we left Rothbury, initially crossing back over the River Coquet to regain the route of St Oswald's Way on the southern bank. Today's walk followed the river valley downstream, but if that leaves you with the impression of a gentle walk by the river, you'd be wrong. It was a fiddly route, with frequent little climbs out of the valley and back. The sun was shining as we left Rothbury but there had been heavy rain in the night and it drizzled on a couple of occasions later in the day. The rain didn't come to anything, but the path was very slippery in places, and muddy in others, so our progress was slow. On the plus side, the walking was delightfully varied, with long-distance views interspersed with views down to the river through trees, and occasional river crossings on attractive bridges.

The nature of today's walk means that I can't possibly describe it in detail, so I will concentrate on the most memorable bits. We climbed out of Rothbury with views to the wooded hillside on the other side of the valley; this is Cragside, the home of the industrialist Lord Armstrong in the 19th Century and now owned by the National Trust (certainly worth visiting if you haven't been before, though possibly not in August; it was very busy last time we were there). We reached a dismantled railway line and followed this for a kilometre or so as it ran though attractive cuttings; at one point a horse and trap came towards us, a lady taking her young granddaughter out for a driving lesson and taking the dog for a run at the same time!

We came down towards a bridge and the hamlet of Pauperhaugh, but we didn't cross the river. Instead we climbed steeply to the top of a ridge, then dipped down into a little wooded valley and up the other side. We reached a farmhouse at Middleheugh, now a kennels and cattery, and climbed steeply, with the wooded Coquet Valley to our left. We caught occasional glimpses of English Heritage's Brinkburn Priory, but we couldn't see if properly, and if we had hoped to visit we'd have been disappointed since the priory is on the northern bank of the river whilst we were on the southern bank, and there is no obvious short route around.

We stopped for lunch on a grass verge at the entrance to Thistleyhaugh Farm (appropriately named, there were lots of thistles about). We had to move legs and rucsacs from the farm drive to let an agricultural vehicle past, and just as we finished eating it started to rain. This was the most rain we had for the entirety of our week's walking holiday and we rightly put on waterproofs. However, walking in waterproofs on a warm August day is not much fun, and I wasn't feeling great. Then, just after descending on a difficult narrow slippery path, Richard realised that we weren't on the route shown on the map. We climbed back up the path but couldn't find anything better, so back down we went. We knew we weren't on the right route and we were struggling - it was something of a low point! However a man on a quad bike with a dog asked if we were looking for St Oswald's Way and very gently put us right. And I was able to shed my waterproofs and immediately felt better.

Then, south of Felton Fence, we went wrong again. We can only assume that we missed a St Oswald's Way sign down by the river; we were certainly misled by the mowed paths emanating from the fish farm at Felton Fence and we climbed too high. We decided to keep on up to Felton Fence and to look for a marked path from here back to our route. This time we were advised by a man on a sit-on lawnmower that we had strayed from the path and, after taking his advice and some running around by Richard (I'd had enough and was sitting down to recover) we found the correct route.

There was a lovely section from here, on woodland paths above the river. We passed under the A1 and emerged into the manicured Felton Park, with an attractive estate church. As we walked into Felton itself, we passed a bizarre church building; I can only imagine that the nave was once higher and/or that there used to a tower. We passed the Running Fox, a tea shop that remains open until 5 pm and gets rave reviews, so I felt really sad not to be able to stop, especially since it was "only" 4.30 pm. But we had several miles still to walk and we had given our B&B an arrival time of 5.30 pm. We'd had quite a conversation with the owner, because she had to attend a funeral, and I'm sure she wouldn't have minded if we were late - but we are usually really good at estimating our walking speed and, even though we give all sorts of caveats about not knowing our speed of walking, we don't like arriving substantially earlier or later than planned.

From Felton there was an easy section of riverside walking, followed by a steep climb up what looked an inland sandstone cliff.. Once on the top of the cliff we left the river and meandered along tracks through cereal crops. They appear to have some problem with illegal vehicles in the area, but we were somewhat amused by the frequency of signs warning us that the police were monitoring the area. Then there were the signs for private parking for the Northumbrian Anglers' Federation (NAF!).

We walked off OS Explorer Sheet 325 and onto Sheet 332 and almost immediately left the route of St Oswald's Way and walked down to Guyzance. We passed Acklington Park Farm and descended through woodland (with signs alerting us to the presence of red squirrels, but we didn't see any) to a bridge over the river. We took a minor road signposted to Guyzance Hall and fell into conversation with a man out walking his dog (Percy). In fact, neither we nor Percy's owner had much choice but for us to walk along together because Percy, who has had an operation so is not allowed off the lead on his usual walks and finds walking along the roads on a lead boring, wanted to be with us rather than his owner and sat down in the road if we tried to do anything else!

Percy and his long suffering owner had got slightly ahead of us when we reached Mill House, the former mill-workers' cottages (we'd passed the derelict mill slightly further back). Karen was ironing but immediately came to show us to our delightful room on the first floor, then made us tea and cake. The B&B has all sorts of awards, including being TripAdvisor's top B&B in the Morpeth area, and we could immediately see why - a beautiful house with a friendly owner for whom nothing is too much trouble, despite the fact her father is ill and she'd just been to the funeral of a good friend. In fact we were lucky; this was Karen's first night back in operation after a short enforced break as a result of her father's health. After a good soak in the bath, we ate the salad that we had brought with us, then we closed the shutters and had an early night in this delightful peaceful spot.

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