A bit of rain again overnight, but nothing to get too excited about and a mostly sunny albeit breezy day – so we are happy enough. Inspired by our walk yesterday and knowing that today we are encroaching on territory that we intend to cover from our next site we still fancied a beach walk, so set off to pick up where we left off yesterday, on the other side of the river Tyne (not the Newcastle Tyne – at least I don’t think so!). We parked up in a lay-by (dodging the £2 charge in the car park!) at the end of Limetree Walk and set off in search of the Tyne!

Now Tyne Sands were largely underwater but we found a nice little spot for a bit of a play before venturing on around the headland.

From the headland (St Baldred’s Cradle)

we had a fabulous view of Bass Rock..

Continuing around the headland we came to Ravenheugh Sands..

A lovely long stretch of sand, albeit mostly covered by the high tide.

Surprisingly, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves so Poppydog was able to chase the odd stone I could find, as we made our way along. At the far end, the beach opened out to the rather glorious Peffer Sands.

Though at this point, as the tide was so high, there was no way across the Peffer Burn so after a final play we headed inland to make our way back.

Now looking at Mr OS it looked like a simple cut across farmland back, however… At some point the footpath (ok farm track) ended and we had to cut across a very underused footpath down the side of a field which led us to a never used track running in between a 5ft stone wall and a barbed wire fence! We waded through waist high grass, nettles and brambles for about half a mile, until we found a bit of broken wall we could climb over into quite dense woodland.

Eventually making our way through to a track on the opposite edge of the wood.

Which in turn led us out to Limetree Walk – at last! Not our finest return and my knees are still stinging now but a pretty glorious beach walk don’t you think? 6 miles round trip.

Two thoughts of the day:

Stinging nettles keep on stinging for hours – how mean!

I do wonder sometimes how literal is the Scottish ‘Right to roam’ ?