We set off down to the North Shield Fish quay more out of Nostalgia than wanting fish, I went to the top of the High lights bank, this looks down onto the fish Quay, the high and the low lights are used by ships entering the Tyne, you line them up high above low and you know you are in the deep water channel, this works very well except in fog and as often happened the Black Middens a group of rocks just inside of the mouth are waiting to entrap the unsuspected. I remember well one foggy day the Leda or it may have been the Venus going aground, these where the 2 Norwegian liners that traveled between the Tyne and Bergen/Götenborg back in the 70s.
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| The North Shields Fish quay with the Low Lights and the Black Middens visible behind, these are covered at high tide |
We then went to some of my old drinking haunts at Tynemouth and along the coast to Cullercoats, Whitley Bay and Hartley, we went up the road to a pub that had not changed a lot in the 55 years that I know of its existence. It was and still is on a road that has no bus service so it is either, car, bike or shank's pony. We had a nice traditional lunch of and then traveled on our way through the mining villages of North East Tyneside. A real trip to my youth as this is where I biked and hiked all of the tracks and byways in my youth.
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| The Bee Hive on old Hartley road |
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| The table d'heute |
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| Liver, onions and mash with loads of gravy (Linda making a chip butty in the back ground, boy does that lass have class) |
We eventually arrived at the Mining Museum and Northumberland Archives, as I was aiming at doing a bit of family heritage tracing later the next week, we just went around the museum and the old pit yard and winding houses. This really sent me back into my time as a school boy as we went through just so a pit yard on our way to and from my Primary School. I thoroughly enjoyed this. The centre itself is a mine (holding ones side with mirth) of information.
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| The winding shed with the pit wheel behind |
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| One of the mighty winding engines |
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| A memorial to all those that made Britain Great and often paid with their lives |
We then went back to my sisters via a round-about route, taking in the village where the mining disaster took place back in the 1860s that changed the safety regulations about pit shafts, this was the Hartley pit disaster. I then went to get my fish and chips fix, this was in al probability the worst fish and chips I have had the pleasure to eat (well what I could eat) the fish batter was saturated in oil, the fish inside was of an uneven thickness meaning that the thicker part wasn't too bad but the thinner was dried out. But the worst part were the chips, they had been boiled in oil, yes boiled, flabby, anemic, disintegrating lumps of potato. Not nice at all, bloody diabolical even to call them chips!
Alas that chippy will in future be given a wide berth!
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