Camping in Northumberland

Northumberland is the least densely populated county in England, and that emptiness is the point. The beaches are the equal of anything in Cornwall and you will often have them to yourself; the night sky is the darkest in the country by a considerable margin.

It is also two very different landscapes — a castle-studded coast in the east and a huge expanse of forest, moor and Roman frontier inland — about an hour apart.

Hadrian’s Wall

The central section between Housesteads and Steel Rigg is where the wall runs along the Whin Sill crags and looks the way everyone imagines it. Housesteads is the most complete Roman fort in Britain; Vindolanda, a few miles south, is an active excavation and produced the writing tablets that are among the most important Roman finds anywhere.

The Hadrian’s Wall Path runs 84 miles coast to coast and takes most walkers six or seven days, with campsites spaced conveniently along it.

The coast

Bamburgh Castle stands directly above a mile of open sand and is the most striking coastal view in England. Dunstanburgh, reachable only on foot from Craster, is a ruin on a headland with almost nobody there.

Boats run from Seahouses to the Farne Islands for puffins and a large grey seal colony, and from Beal across the causeway to Lindisfarne — check the tide tables, because the causeway floods twice a day and cars are stranded on it every single year.

Dark skies at Kielder

Northumberland International Dark Sky Park covers around 580 square miles and has the lowest levels of light pollution in England. On a clear moonless night the Milky Way is obvious to the naked eye and the Andromeda galaxy is visible without optics.

Kielder Observatory runs public events year-round and books out weeks ahead. Otherwise, pitch away from site lighting, give your eyes twenty minutes to adapt, and use a red head torch so you do not lose that adaptation.