After a day of wandering around the town, we were ready for a bit more of an excursion. I started mapping waypoints in our GPS with optimistic abandon. We were tracking the Oliver side of the family history:
- Cresswell: Philip Septimus Oliver (Dave’s grandfather) who came to Canada in 1927
- Alwinton(1860) to Longhurst(1907): Anthony Oliver (great-grandfather)
- Whittingham(1833) to Allendale(1910): Anthony Scorer Oliver (great-great)
- Newcastle (1803) to Whittingham (1882): Anthony Oliver (g-g-g)) married in Alnwick in 1857
- Morpeth (~1760) to Newcastle (~1805): John Oliver (4G)
- Morpeth (1753): Anthony Oliver married Margaret Marley (5G)
Morpeth was first on our path. A lovely lady in the market assured us that Oliver was a very common name ’round there, and then pointed us to this don’t-miss spot: Bamburgh Castle.
Wow! We toured the grounds, admired the archaeology dig underway, and viewed some excellent artifacts inside the tour.
We also stopped in Alnwick: the castle there was used for exterior shots in Harry Potter, but we declined the chance to part with even more money for another tour. Next, we found Cresswell, which has a nice, quiet, COLD beach on the North Sea, but is a very small village. We scoured the graveyard in the local church without any luck.
Despite being less than an hour from the Scottish border, I decided to wait until our next UK trip for that treat, and we turned around to find the last spot of the day: any remnants of Hadrian’s Wall. Hmmm, they appeared to have torn it down at some point! We saw signs of it in the fields, and had to be satisfied with that. We were just about out of daylight, even this far north, and had a 2-hour drive left!