Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

As we pressed on the weather severely worsened. The air filled with swirling particles of ice that hit the skin like razor nicks. By the time we neared Three Tarns the weather was truly menacing, with thick fog joining the jagged sleet. Ferocious gusts of wind buffeted the hillside and reduced our progress to a creeping plod. The fog cut visibility to a few yards. Once or twice we briefly lost the path, which alarmed me as I didn't particularly want to die up here apart from anything else, I still had 4,700 unspent Profiles points on my Barclaycard. Out of the murk ahead of us emerged what looked disconcertingly like an orange snowman. It proved on closer inspection to be a hitech hiker's outfit. Somewhere inside it was a man.

'Bit fresh,' the bundle offered understatedly.

John and David asked him if he'd come far.

'Just from Blea Tarn.' Blea Tarn was ten miles away over taxing terrain.

'Bad over there?' John asked in what I had come to recognize was the abbreviated speech of fell walkers.

'Handsandknees job,' said the man.

They nodded knowingly.

'Be like that here soon.'

They nodded again.

'Well, best be off,' announced the man as if he couldn't spend the whole day jabbering, and trundled off into the white soup. I watched him go, then turned to suggest that perhaps we should think about retreating to the valley, to a warm hostelry with hot food and cold beer, only to find Price and Partridge dematerializing into the mists thirty feet ahead of me.

'Hey, wait for me!' I croaked and scrambled after.

We made it to the top without incident. I counted thirtythree people there ahead of us, huddled among the fogwhitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker the idea of three dozen English people having a picnic on a mountain top in an ice storm and realized there was no way you could explain it. We trudged over to a rock, where a couple kindly moved their rucksacks and shrank their picnic space to make room for us. We sat and delved among our brown bags in the piercing wind, cracking open hardboiled eggs with numbed fingers, sipping warm pop, eating floppy cheeseandpickle sandwiches, and staring into an impenetrable murk that we had spent three hours climbing through to get here, and I thought, I seriously thought: God, I love this country.

I WAS HEADING FOR NEWCASTLE, BY WAY OF YORK, WHEN I DID another impetuous thing. I got off at Durham, intending to poke around the cathedral for an hour or so and fell in love with it instantly in a serious way. Why, it's wonderful a perfect little city and I kept thinking: 'Why did noone tell me about this?' I knew, of course, that it had a fine Norman cathedral but I had no idea that it was so splendid. I couldn't believe that not once in twenty years had anyone said to me, 'You've never been to Durham? Good God, man, you must go at once! Please take my car.' I had read countless travel pieces in Sunday papers about weekends away in York, Canterbury, Norwich, even Lincoln, but I couldn't remember reading a single one about Durham, and when I asked friends about it, I found hardly any who had ever been there. So let me say it now: if you have never been to Durham, go at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.

The cathedral, a mountain of reddishbrown stone standing high above a lazy green loop of the River Wear, is, of course, its glory. Everything about it was perfect not just its setting and execution but also, no less notably, the way it is run today. For a start there was no nagging for money, no 'voluntary' admission fee. Outside, there was simply a discreet sign announcing that it cost .700,000 a year to maintain the cathedral and that it was now engaged on a .400,000 renovation project on the east wing and that they would very much appreciate any spare money that visitors might give them. Inside, there were two modest collecting boxes and nothing else no clutter, no nagging notices, no irksome bulletin boards or stupid Eisenhower flags, nothing at all to detract from the unutterable soaring majesty of the interior. It was a perfect day to see it. Sun slanted lavishly through the stainedglass windows, highlighting the stout pillars with their sumptuously grooved patterns and spattering the floors with motes of colour. There were even wooden pews.

I'm no judge of these things, but the window at the choir end looked to me at least the equal of the more famous one at York, and this one at least you could see in all its splendour since it wasn't tucked away in a transept. And the stainedglass window at the other end was even finer. Well, I can't talk about this without babbling because it was just so wonderful. As I stood there, one of only a dozen or so visitors, a verger passed and issued a cheery hello. I was charmed by this show of friendliness and captivated to find myself amid such perfection, and I unhesitatingly gave Durham my vote for best cathedral on planet Earth.

When I had drunk my fill, I showered the collection pot with coins and wandered off for the most fleeting of looks at the old quarter of town, which was no less ancient and beguiling, and returned to the station feeling simultaneously impressed and desolate at just how much there was to see in this little country and what folly it had been to suppose that I might see anything more than a fraction of it in seven flying weeks.

I took an intercity train to Newcastle and then a local to Pegswood, eighteen miles to the north, where I emerged into more splendid, unseasonal sunshine and hiked a mile or two along an arrowstraight road to Ashington.

Ashington has long called itself the biggest mining village in the world, but there is no mining any more and, with a population of 23,000, it is scarcely a village. It is famous as the birthplace of a slew of footballers Jackie and Bobby Charlton, Jackie Milburn and some forty others skilled enough to play in the first division, a remarkable outpouring for a modest community but I was drawn by something else: the once famous and now largely forgotten pitmen painters.

In 1934, under the direction of an academic and artist from Durham University named Robert Lyon, the town formed a painting club called the Ashington Group, consisting almost exclusively of miners who had never painted in many cases had never seen a real painting before they started gathering in a hut on Monday evenings. They showed an unexpected amount of talent and'carried the name of Ashington over the grey mountains', as a critic for the Guardian (who clearly knew fuckall about football) later put it. In the 1930s and '40s particularly, they attracted huge attention, and were the frequent focus of articles in national papers and art magazines, as well as exhibitions in London and other leading cities. My friend David Cook had an illustrated book by William Feaver called Pitmen Painters, which he had once shown me. The illustrations of the paintings were quite charming, but it was the photographs of burly miners, dressed up in suits and ties and crowded into a little hut, earnestly hunched over easels and drawingboards, that stuck in my mind. I had to see it.

Ashington was nothing like I expected it to be. In the photographs from David's book it appeared to be a straggly, overgrown village, surrounded by filthy waste heaps and layered with smoke from the three local pits, a place of muddy lanes hunched under a perpetual wash of sooty drizzle, but what I found instead was a modern, busy community swimming in clean, clear air. There was even a new business park with fluttering pennants, spindly new trees and an impressive brick gateway on what was clearly reclaimed ground. The main street, Station Road, had been smartly pedestrianized and its many shops appeared to be doing a good trade. It was obvious that there was not a great deal of money in Ashington most of the shops were of the Price Busters/ Superdrug/Wotta Loada Crap variety, their windows papered with strident promises of special offers within but at least they appeared to be thriving in a way that those of Bradford, for instance, were not.