How did Auden first see the North Pennines?

A basic question with some unclarity. How did Auden first see the North Pennines? A Certain World made it clear it was a childhood dream to come here. The knowledge of the locality was acquired long before the visit. Two evidence streams (a 1972 conversation and Amor Loci (which Edward Mendelson says Auden wrote in a diary was the Rookhope Poem)) leave little doubt that Auden first came to the North Pennines by coming to Rookhope in 1919 aged 12. Now see https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.405389936201434.95437.100001912940850 and http://robertatforsythe.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/rookhope-in-auden.html .


That all says a lot more about Rookhope but the question how did Auden first come here is still open. Two recent days spent around Rookhope and Blanchland may help answer the question. I have been out on a sunny 23rd and 29th November. Hitherto we have tried to examine how Auden could get to Rookhope and who the family might have known to stay with. Perhaps the answer was staring me in the face and it required me to drive from Blanchland to Rookhope (15 minutes) on the 23rd to see it. We know Auden became very familiar with the Lord Crewe Arms, there is no need to be detained about that. But what if (as the only decent hotel for miles and relatively close to the Dere Street (A68)), that this was where the family first booked in in 1919? The Derwent lead mines around Blanchland would have already had it on his map.

But is there more evidence in this writing for this? Perhaps there is. At the outset of Selected Poems I have long argued there are three poems each for one of his favourite Pennine Valleys. 1) The Watershed is all of Wear/Tyne/Allen by being around Killhope Nenthead. 3) The Secret Agent by name suggests Teesdale. 2) The Letter I have previously placed in Rookhope by a discussion about "A solitary truck, the last of shunting in the autumn", a specific reference to a grouse shooter's track known to have existed (more about this is in the URLs above).

As I dropped down into Rookhope, a precipitious descent with hairpins, I was driving directly into the winter sun. Suddenly the line flashed into my brain "From the very first coming down into a new valley with  a frown because of the sun and a lost way". Should this be literally understood? If so clearly Auden did not come up the valley from Stanhope. He does have four choices if not the main entry road. They are a north west facing entrance on a hill road from Stanhope which descends steeply into the village. A north facing entrance past Lintzgarth (Paid on Both Sides) from Middlehope. The east facing descent from Allenheads (and the Allenheads Inn which he also used but which for a first visit is much more off the beaten track, relatively speaking Blanchland is a cultural and historical centre which would appeal to the antiquarian father). This leaves the south facing descent from the North from  Blanchland.

No proof then but a suggestive argument and the invitation to the reader to go and try it all out for themselves armed with a battery of Auden texts and maps (I can suggest and do in various places).

Rookhope in Auden

I was in Rookhope on Monday, went up Bolt's Law and then met a Rookhope resident on Wednesday. It made me think that I should share this. There follows my Rookhope entry (matched illustrations here) from my part completed An A-Y of Auden's Pennine Landscapes: “The valley of the Rookhope Burn, a northwestern tributary joining the River Wear at Eastgate, is the site of the earliest reference to metal mining in the Pennines in medieval records. In 1153 an iron mine and  a lead mine in ‘Rykhup’ were granted by King Stephen to his nephew the Palatine Bishop Hugh de Pusiet of Durham...............I first became acquainted with Rookhope mining in 1929.................In addition to the big water-wheel another feature of the industrial archaeology was still intact at the time. This was the smelt mill, beyond the west end of the village. The hearth was still intact and an arch carried the great stone-built flue over the road and up the valley side for over a mile. This mill had been in use until 1919, the last of the traditional mills to operate”[1]. Those are not the words of W. H. Auden though one feels that they easily could be. He, however, would only have needed to substitute 1919 for 1929 and so indicate that at his arrival the great smelt mill and its matching railway system with its incline ascending Bolt’s Law from the village was just about operational.

The quotation is by Sir Kingsley Dunham F.R.S.[2]. It is profoundly ironic and fascinating that two of the great intellects of the 20th century both found the experience of inter-war Rookhope seminal for their lives. Rookhope is not on the tourist trail, it is not the subject of a large popular literature. The vast majority of Auden’s readers have probably either not known of its location or still worse but quite plausibly, assumed that it is an imaginery location. In the 1930s, a view gained currency, which is still repeated today, that Auden’s play Paid On Both Sides was set in the mill communities of Northern England. Nothing could be further from the truth (by about 100 miles). It is explicitly said to be set in Rookhope. The mill of Paid On Both Sides is not a Yorkshire textile mill but the wholly different structure of Rookhope smelt mill located beside the still surviving Lintzgarth house, itself named in Paid on Both Sides.

Sadly, neither Sir Kingsley nor Wystan ever met. Wystan possibly never even knew of Sir Kingsley whose recognition really followed after Wystan had left England. Sir Kingsley was a Durham undergraduate studying geology when he first came to Rookhope in 1929. Essentially Sir Kingsley and Wystan were of the same generation. Rookhope’s mineralogical fame brought Sir Kingsley and both Wystan and John Auden (the Boltsburn Flats had a reputation for great riches amongst miners and were being worked between the wars). Sir Kingsley went onto post graduate study into the origin of the lead, zinc and fluorspar deposits of the North Pennines. As such he became a mining apprentice with the Weardale Lead Company in Rookhope in 1930 and the proud owner of a secondhand Morris Cowley. His studies eventually took him to almost every hole in the ground in the Pennines north of the Craven fault (Auden’s Craven Ladies in Age of Anxiety).

Sir Kingsley’s first published work on Rookhope appeared a few years after Wystan’s. His literary debut was in 1934. From 1939, Sir Kingsley was back in the area, this time on urgent war work assessing the contribution the mines could make. This led in 1949 to the first edition of his magnum opus the Geology of the Norhern Pennine Orefield, a work which was thoroughly revised and re-issued in two volumes in 1990. In the meantime Sir Kingsley had become Professor of Geology at Durham in 1950 and then Director of the British Geological Survey between 1966 and 1975. In 1961 Sir Kingsley’s most famous research project came to fruition when the Rookhope Borehole reached granite. Throughout these years Sir Kingsley retained close connections with the companies working Rookhope, a connection he retained into the 1990s.

He saw in the millennium in retirement in Durham, Sir Kingsley’s recollections of the North Pennines were then as vivid as ever. A few days before I first wrote this Sir Kingsley came with friends from Durham to what was probably the first ever reading of Auden’s Pennine poetry in the North Pennines, at Allendale Library. When the Auden’s Pennine Landscapes exhibition opened at Nenthead Mines in 1999, Sir Kingsley was one of the guest speakers and represented Wystan’s generation.

It might seem odd to be devoting so much of this account to a summary of someone else’s career but a key point follows. Sir Kingsley’s career might have been Wystan’s or with just a tiny change in fortune John Auden’s -Wystan’s brother whose life was spent with the Indian Geological Survey. Rookhope was a place of great intellectual potential. Sir Kingsley’s career shows that. Here you have two men for whom the physical accidents of location (its bleak, apparently unpromising and unfashionable nature) became trivial compared with its real potential. Both men explored Rookhope in depth, both had started with the same agenda, an interest in geology. One fulfilled that agenda, another took the same bedrock and turned it into a poetic landscape, one capable of articulating the deepest concerns and dilemmas of the human condition. Each offering is a quite stunning achievement.

Yet there is a hint of sadness in this relationship, one that speaks of the separateness and division in human affairs that so drove Wystan. Poetry and geology are not often conjoined. Sir Kingsley could lead almost all his life unaware of Wystan’s interest. When late in life, he learnt of Rookhope’s poetic importance, he was taken aback. That is the point, it is a measure of the failure by English learned society to interpret the correct location and significance of Rookhope that Sir Kingsley knew nothing of the matter.

I too have to add my own ignorance. For in 1978-83, I was exploring the industrial archaeology of Rookhope with passion. I was also studying theology at Durham University with a supervisor ensuring that I bought my first Auden. I never made the connection then; no one at Durham (despite the award of Auden’s D.Litt. and the accompanying oration in 1962), whether in the University or in the County, was making anything of the Pennine Auden. Had I bought Carpenter’s biography published in 1981, the penny would have dropped. That treat had to wait until 1987 and it is to Carpenter’s credit that the Pennine Auden spoke loud in his biography. Carpenter speaks clearly of the importance of Nenthead, Alston Moor, and the Pennines to Auden. Specifically Carpenter gave some prominence to the quotation of the In Rookhope I was first aware of Self and Not-Self, Death and Dread:..... segment of New Year Letter. At that point, I began to realise that Auden’s relationship to the Pennines was out of the ordinary. How on earth had he got there? That was an issue not well addressed by Carpenter and it remains an issue full of mystery.

Before working through the Rookhope material in the Auden canon, it is worthwhile providing a simple list. In chronological order it is ((N) indicates that Rookhope is named):

The Old Lead Mine 1924

The Old Mine 1924

Rookhope (Weardale, Summer 1922) 1924 (N)

The Letter 1927

Paid on Both Sides 1928 (N)

New Year Letter 1940 (N)

England Six Unexpected Days 1954 (N)

Amor Loci 1965.

The chronology of this material does not directly unlock the datelines. Indeed it is necessary to turn to the final poem to answer the leading question: when did Auden first visit Rookhope? Amor Loci or Love of Place describes Rookhope but not by name and it speaks to the seminal importance of the place to Auden’s vision. Three reasons allow us to conclude that its subject is Rookhope. Edward Mendelson in New York confirms that Auden’s pocket diary of the time refers to Amor Loci as the Rookhope poem. Granted this fact, the key line becomes not (as perhaps at twelve I thought it) of Eden. Next in the jigsaw are the memories of Auden’s hosts at his Newcastle Reading in 1972 as narrated by Alan Myers[3]. The key conversation took place between Auden and the author Sid Chaplin. Chaplin who knew Rookhope asked Auden when he had first been there. Chaplin noted the answer as 12. This ties in exactly to Amor Loci and leads to the conclusion that Auden’s first North Pennine visit took place in 1919. And then only in 2014 did I find myself listening to Wystan recorded reading Amor Loci and he says directly to the audience "the place is Rookhope"!

The complications of chronology certainly do not end there. From Auden’s own material, the only other dateline that we might add comes from the title of the poem Rookhope (Weardale, Summer 1922). Additionally the two well known visits to nearby Allenheads (September 1926) and Blanchland (Easter 1930) almost certainly account for other visits. This suggests that Auden was in Rookhope on at least four occasions, but probably more often, before World War Two. None of this really accounts for how Auden got there. Carpenter simply said “At some time during his schooldays, probably when staying with friends, he began to visit a stretch of country in the north-western part of the Pennine range.....”[4]

Since the first visit to the Keswick area appears to be in 1921 (see Wescoe), we are left with having to explain how a twelve year old child from Birmingham reached Rookhope in 1919, an apparently unlikely event. Several people have tried to unearth more by speaking to Rookhope residents without any real success. I have been told that Auden stayed “at the doctor’s house in Rookhope” but presently have nothing more than a local oral tradition[5]. Other sources suggest Rookhope had no resident doctor. Any link that there may be to a possible friend of Auden’s father deserves examination. Doctors were amongst the earliest groups of people in Britain to obtain cars and such a linkage may help explain how Auden became so familiar with such an inaccessible area far from home.

Granted that he got there in 1919, what did he find? “The Little Nut” (illustrate) might have made an impression. This was a 2’ gauge saddle tank locomotive which worked around the Boltsburn Mine in the centre of the village. Boltsburn was the hub of activity and remained at work until 1940. Its closure was far from the end of the story. Grove Rake, Frazer’s Hush,  Stotfield Burn and Redburn Mines were all functioning in Rookhope at various time since 1945. Physically dominating the village was the Bolt’s Law incline. This was Rookhope’s (freight only) rail link to the outside world. It had opened in about 1846 and would work until 1923 and thence lie derelict for many years. Most traffic had to be hauled up the incline’s 2,000 yards of 1 in 12 track. At the top and 1650’ a.s.l. was a huge steam worked winding engine, a chimney on the skyline, engine sheds and a small railway community.

I turned and travelled quickly down the track

Which grass will cover by and  by

Down the lonely valley; once I looked back

And saw a waste of stones against an angry sky.

That is Auden description’s in The Old Lead-mine (with a variant in The Old Mine). It comes after the stanza that describes the initial stone down the shaft incident which develops through Rookhope (Weardale, Summer 1922) to its climax in New Year Letter’s In Rookhope I first knew self..... Within New Year Letter I shall argue that the incident took place at Sikehead Shafts. The present point is that is congruent with a return to the village along the old trackbeds which linked the two locations. This makes perfect sense of track which grass will cover by and by. The railway was newly derelict. Thence he is walking down the incline, which is certainly Down the lonely valley. It is precise description that turning around on this descent a waste of stones against an angry sky would be seen. That is still the case where the ruins of the railway buildings at Bolt’s Law incline head and a rock cutting come together on the skyline.

Back in the village and railway tracks led south in which direction lay further mine and limekiln remains at Brandon Walls. West of the village the tracks led past the old smelter at Lintzgarth (both names are in Paid on Both Sides) and on up to the most remote of the mines towards Allenheads at Wolfcleugh, Grove Rake and Frazer’s Hush.

These details and timelines are important in order to substantiate the argument that The Letter represents Rookhope and thus the Wear element of the 1979 Selected Poems’ opening triology that seem to describe the North Pennine landscape. For his American audience in 1954 Auden described Rookhope , the most wonderfully desolate of all the dales in England Six Unexpected Days. That desolation had become for Auden the sacrament within this landscape that was able to reveal agape, the vital conclusion to Amor Loci.

Few Americans are likely to have followed Auden’s 1954 itinerary. Until very recently few Auden enthusiasts have made the journey to Rookhope (some have, in 1988 his literary executor Edward Mendelson and Katherine Bucknell the editor of Juvenilia made the trip). However unless the reader of Auden hurries, it will be too late to see a working mine. Perhaps to the surprise of many, the Grove Rake mine was still functioning in 1999 (but closed in 2001). As Sir Kingsley has suggested, there is still likely to be plenty of minerals beneath the dale, the point is that the foreign competition  Auden noted in The Chase has, in all likelihood, finally extinguished the industry.

Grove Rake in 1999 looked straight out of Auden’s poetry. True, there was no waterwheel or steam engines, but there was rusting machinery by the ton, gaunt headgear and hoppers, cages poised in rust above their shafts, numbers of battery locos in varying stages of decay. The one engine that was working was posed on track in front of a windowless stone building from the old days, beside it in fading red on yellow paintwork a truck was marked “Explosives”, behind which there was a backdrop of sheep and cattle grazing the fell. It seemed poignant that the final workings accessed the mine by an inclined adit (not present in Auden’s time) which rejoiced in the thoroughly apt name of the Firestone Incline. Named as a consequence of geological fact but capable of revelatory allegory and symbolism, it is an effective summary of what Auden had found in Rookhope".

---

[1] “Rookhope in Retrospect” by Sir Kingsley Dunham F.R.S. in Out of the Pennines, editor Bryan Chambers, Friends of Killhope, Killhope, 1997. Sir Kingsley (1910-2001) died 5th April 2001, an obituary appeared in the Hatfield Record 2001 from which many parallels with Auden can be discerned. Les Turnbull’s volume states “the smelter remained in operation until 1919 when it achieved fame as the last of the 28 smelt-mills in the northern orefield to be closed”.

[2] Born 2nd January 1910.

[3]

[4] Carpenter p22

[5] Peter Wilkinson to Robert Forsythe. Peter is quoting a Rookhope resident. An oral tradition to this effect appeared in a paper published during the preparation of my own work. ‘My Great Good Place’; W. H. Auden and the North Pennines by Leo Gooch published in The Bonny Moor Hen: Journal of the Weardale Field Study Society No. 10, 1998 editor Dr. Leo Gooch, Wolsingham, Co. Durham. Leo is quoting two ladies Mrs L. Aberdeen and Mrs J. Crosby. His independent research faces the same challenge: no resident doctor is known of for Rookhope. He resolves this by concluding that the doctor who served Rookhope in the relevant years was a Dr. R. C. MacLennan from St Johns Chapel in the main valley of Weardale, He is known to have had one of only two motor cars in the upper dale at the time.

The John Martin Festival 2011: at The Garden Station Langley

The title is The John Martin Festival 2011: at The Garden Station Langley. This is a page which will be a work in progress so keep checking back. Just got back home from a fascinating morning and the sun even came out. By 0830 I was casing the joint at Haltwhistle preparing for a Hadrian's Wall Heritage event.

At 1000 I was arriving at The Garden Station, Langley. This was to plan an event for the 2011 John Martin Festival. It is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Our heading picture shows the old lead smelt mill flue in the woods. Clear as a path but actually all collapsed, imagine an arched roof covered in earth and with the arch now fallen into the flue. Some bits are intact however.

The date for your diary is Saturday 14th May from 1000 to 1600. John Martin was a painter heavily influenced by the industrial landscape and when a child growing up in Haydon Bridge, the nearby lead smelt mills at Langley would have been fully operational. Today Langley is a quiet hamlet and the evidence of its intense industrial past is cloaked in woodland. Seemingly innocent fishing lakes were once at the core of its power system. Our day will start in The Garden Station which last saw a train in 1950.

The draft timetable is:
1000-1020 Arrival and welcome.
1020-1120 A presentation by myself about Tynedale and Langley's industrial past and John Martin's industrial associations.
1120-1230 A walk to the old brickworks and Langley Dam lake.
1230-1330 Lunch available for you to purchase from The Garden Station's café.
1330-1530 A walk in the old smelt mill area seeing the remains of the flue and on up to the chimney.
1530-1600 Tea and wrap up.

Mention of wrap up: come well shod! And if the weather looks as if it might rain, make sure the waterproofs are in. The walks are not heavy grade but do require care about where to place your feet! The walk to the chimney on the moor is an ascentand is roughly a two mile round trip. The old chimney has been restored and those of you who follow my Auden interest will know that he was another artist who took inspiration from the industrial landscapes of the North Pennine dales. He certainly came to Allendale and wrote about the lead smelt mill, its flue and chimney at Allendale Town. He could have got there by train through Langley before the passenger service ceased in 1930. We can document that he visited Allendale before then (see 1924 poem Allendale).

Find out more about John Martin here.

Details about bookings will follow.

Reached 50 and reached Killhope Cross

(PICTURES, done in reverse, first two Killhope Cross, next two coming to Cowshill, last yours truly (left) with Chris Phipps). Yes, folks, the long held ambitions of certain members of the erstwhile DUGIA (Durham University Group for Industrial Archaeology) were fulfilled on Saturday 31st October 2009. Despite many hours over the 1970s/80s/90s being spent chasing and occasionally riding Weardale Motors Leyland Titans, not one of us had managed a Leyland Titan ride over Killhope Cross between Weardale and Alston. This punishing climb has only occasionally enjoyed stage service. My 50th birthday (1st November 1959) bash and the co-operation of Dreadnought Coaches enabled this to happen. The original intention had been to use Bristol Lodekka XSL 228A of 1961. A before dawn hiccup meant this had to be replaced by 1952 Preston Corporation Leyland Titan PRN 761. Both are detailed at http://www.dreadnoughtcoaches.co.uk/main/index.php/gallery/fleet . The Titan was very similar in outline to Weardale Motors vehicles like ex Warrington BED 732C. Heads were turned in Weardale. The Lodekka would have been my sentimental choice as I grew up in East Anglia. Previous posts outlined the route we followed. Granted a 30 minute late start at Newcastle Central, everything else went to plan. Weardale put on its autumn best. The climbs from Cowshill, up the Killhope Burn to the Cross are punishing and the bus did it with extensive use of first gear. We were not utterly fully laden and there were numerous children. This was perhaps just as well. A breather was taken at the summit 2056' ASL. Auden's The Watershed was read beside the stone cross to which it refers. It was then onto Alston for lunch and South Tynedale Railway train rides behind Helen Kathryn. More tough driving followed in the dark over Whitfield Moor and the hairpins at Staward in Allendale. A good singsong took place with Hot Asphalt, Jerusalem and I Vow to Thee My Country along with The Wheels on the Bus being belted out. Thank you Andy Clarke and Rod Donaldson for bringing along the guitars. Two hours were enjoyed with a Pennine party tea in Stocksfield Institute catered for by the ladies of the Snod's Edge Church Hall Sunday Afternoon Teas. Our chosen charities were Tiny Lives, Sarnelli House and Tynedale Hospice, all benefitted (to the tune of £783). Thanks for all who turned out and especially Mr and Mrs Fuller of Dreadnought for looking after us on the day.

The Newcastle Journal have written the day up at
http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-news/2009/11/02/birthday-is-a-real-busman-s-holiday-for-robert-forsythe-61634-25068330/ . Two nice photos are in the printed version.

Here's to the next hire!

Nearing 50

This bit of blogging has not seen much activity lately. That has been concentrated on http://forsytheonthenrm.blogspot.com/ . The more personal bit of our lives has not been idle though. We are in the countdown to being 50. What a bind especially when the medics tell you it is a good time to start taking insulin for Type 2 diabetes. All the cream cakes of youth catching up with one. However "To Drive the Cold Winter Away" (Loreena McKennitt, how I would like to meet her (although the three of us did meet other musical heroes a fortnight ago when we heard Gaberlunzie perform in a Kirkcudbridght pub - they were good, 21 years older than when I had booked Robin and Gordon at the Scottish Maritime Museum, they are now practically old but they can still sing, Gordon did a stentorian unaccompanied rendering of Burn's Such a Parcel of Rogues, quite different to what they've recorded and quite brilliant)), we've arranged a 50th bash. I apologise for the double brackets in the foregoing. Not brilliant English but did you ever read F. D. Maurice's theology? One of my heroes. He had sentences which exceeded a page in length. I do tend to offer something like a Ronnie Corbett Shaggy Dog Story when let loose. I remember I could never ever listen to an entire one of his as they physically made me sweat.

Back to the main thread. We are nearly fifty. I am an autumnal child. It was Bishop Richard Holloway, himself a November child, who spoke of the Gentle Melancholy of Autumn. I think a lot can be understood in my own life by remembering that I am a Scorpio born in November in Norwich in the old Norfolk and Norwich Hospital (not the new one which has a worrying reputation and to all intents and purpose saw off my beloved mother by not diagnosing Peritonitis within three days). And when all the details of my birth on 1st November 1959 are appreciated even more is understood. For whilst we may not be able to describe the exact moment of our birth, I have no doubts we remember it well. And the conversations we have had with our own daughter Clare born very premature in 2000 confirm this for us.

We digress yet again. I wanted to put down here what we've arranged for the 31st October. We have very many friends and acquaintances. Sadly we could not invite everyone. If you've not received the invite, sorry. But in three respects you can still join in. Those who wanted to chase the antique bus on its jaunt through the Pennines could. Yes, that's what we're doing, hiring a bus. Google Dreadnought XSL and you will find it. We're also having a ride on the South Tynedale Railway on public trains so we could see you. However access to the bus itself and to the party is strictly controlled. We have no room for gatecrashers and will spot any a mile away!

So here is the broader information. It is a for charity do and generous hearts who are prepared to donate to the good causes even if not coming on the bus or getting to the party will have their heavenly reward! Those who know me well will get all the "connections". Durham, the North Pennines, Auden, old railways and buses (a Lowestoft Lodekka (childhood)), Tynedale, Churches and the spirit & Farmhouse/Chapel Teas. Heavenly.

Robert Forsythe at 50 update and Boarding Instructions master

Dear

An update about the 31st October / 1st November Robert reaches 50 party. Bookings have come in well and 57 out of 60 seats are spoken for on the bus for Saturday. Some folk are additionally booking to shadow the tour in private vehicles and/or just attend the evening party. Hopefully some worthwhile photos of the tour will result from the shadowing parties.

Some reminders about joining:
The bus will start and end its day at Dreadnought Coaches Alnwick depot. Some individuals have elected to join the vehicle between Alnwick and Newcastle. This must be arranged between those involved and the bus company direct.

The tour will officially start at 9am outside Newcastle Central Station. A big red doubledeck half cab bus labelled Dreadnought should be obvious.

Those travelling into Newcastle from the Tyne Valley are recommended to use the local train service leaving Prudhoe at 08.24 (and other Tyne Valley stops). The connection off the local train will be held. Purchase your own train fare.

The route will be via Chester Le Street, Durham, Willington to Stanhope. Certain pick ups have been negotiated along this route.

We hope to be in Stanhope main street for 11am and a one hour coffee stop. After which we will process past Killhope and onto Alston for an extended afternoon stop allowing lunch and an optional South Tynedale train ride at either 14.15 or 15.30.

The South Tynedale Railway has been approached and have offered a group booking rate payable on the day. They say:

Adults £5.00, Children(3-15 yrs.) £2.25. Valid to two return journeys. Payment on the day is perfectly acceptable by cash , cheque or card (not American Express ).

They also say a steam engine is "quite possible" and, too, a visit to the sheds, suitable tough footwear recommended.

Alston will be left promptly on the return of the 15.30 train. The destination will be Stocksfield Institute. The ladies of the Snods Edge Church Hall Sunday Afternoon Teas have agreed to cater for the party. They will donate their profit to the Tynedale Hospice. A Pennine Chapel style high tea with lots of corned beef pie and scope for kiddies games. This is from 6pm-8pm. The bus will leave the venue at about 8pm for Newcastle Central. Any trains running commencing from the 8.47pm (South) should be connected with. We will check the timetables nearer the time but would intend that options from Edinburgh to York could be covered for those wishing to be home on Saturday night.

May I stress that the costs of the bus hire and of the catering for the party will be met by myself and Fiona. If you receive this email, it will be because we have understood you to have committed to come along. If for some reason you change your mind, please let us know immediately, so that seats can be re-allocated. Your booking is presently allocated ______ seats. The party venue is not dry and we invite guests to brings drinks of all types. You could stock up during the day. We will provide tea, coffee, squash.

Sunday arrangements will be low key and arranged on Saturday. Church attendance at Roman Catholic, Anglican or Baptist venues should be possible and a Sunday lunch meeting in one of the local hostelries like the White Swan at Ovingham. For those not wishing to go to Church (I would quite like to thank God for making it to 50), there is a recommended walk up Whittle Dene in Ovingham.

A present is not necessary. We want for nothing aged 50. A donation of timetables to the Forsythe Collection is always welcome. We will solicit donations by cheque to one of two charities. Tiny Lives, the Newcastle Hospital's charity for premature births and Sarnelli House, an orphanage in Thailand which our friendly neighbour Davina Radford works with (she will be on the bus). Please make any donation out to either The Tiny Lives Fund or Sarnelli House Orphanage.

Finally, we shall be incommunicado the Friday-Wednesday before the 31st October making a little excursion to Eurospoor in Utrecht.