The heavy rain was smearing my glasses so badly as I walked through Barnard Castle that I wondered if I need to get my eyes tested.
I’m sorry, historic Durham market town, for that cheap joke. The infamy will wear off, I’m sure. But, for a few years, this fine place will be associated with former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings’s creative reason for his County Durham road trip during the Covid lockdown.
On a more recent road trip, I paused in the town for a comfortable night and rose at dawn on a day when it seemed as if it wouldn’t ever get light. Gutters were pouring with rain, streets were running with rain and the clouds seemed to sit on the ramparts of the castle built on the river cliff over the beautiful River Tees.
The town was very handsome. The stone told you were in the North, but it also possessed a down-to-earth quality – gorgeous buildings that haven’t been gentrified to impossible perfection – which you don’t find further south.
I walked down to the riverside path where the Tees was boiling – brown and white, menacing water you didn’t want to consider dipping in. I crossed a green and took a track to an old mill, where the water cascaded over a low weir.
The bare trees dripped, mud underfoot. It was a landscape of browns and greys but spring was still there, hiding behind the weather but periodically peeping through the gauze of rain: catkins dangling from the hazel; the see-sawing call of a great tit high in the old sycamores.
How different this landscape must be in summer. The concept seemed a total fantasy. But I enjoyed it in early spring, when the river was not shrouded in leaves but dominated the valley.
Beyond the mill, the riverside path, part of the Tees Way, crossed pleasant pasture, with the water below to my right. A sewage works loomed behind a fence and then more pasture, with a gorse-clad river cliff beyond. Specks of yellow from ever-flowering gorse shone beyond the rain.
As the river burst through a gorge, I took the road that crossed it on a high stone bridge. The boiling tumult below was fearsome. Dippers and other waterside birds were in hiding.
Turning back up the southern bank of the river, I met Egglestone Abbey on a hummock beside the river. Like the castle, it was an impressive ruin. The monks had chosen a fine aspect, with a dinky stream to serve them and a choice of bridges to cross it: a tiny old packhorse bridge and a bigger stone bridge beside it.
I took a diversion to the edge of the Tees and found a beach and miraculously calm black water, while the main current raged and ranted like an angry person on the far side. The fury of the river was something else.
Up the lane and on to a field-edge path high above the river, I disturbed rabbits who scampered into the scrub beside the edge. Here, the wooded river cliff was filled with mossy green boulders.
Further on, the footpath picked its way through the middle of a caravan park.
Inside ‘River View’, all was quiet. Suburban order was installed on the river bank: curtains, roses and neat tarmac driveways. On to a lane and back into Barnard Castle, I crossed a pedestrian bridge into town. In the middle, suspended over the mighty Tees, I saluted the river at the height of its power.
The sky was lightening, dawn had finally arrived and the water still boiled brown beneath me.
*I started from the castle, walked down to the north bank of the river and followed the Tees path east until Egglestone Abbey, returning on the south bank on public footpaths back into Barnard Castle for a two-hour round trip with some uneven pathways
