Thursday 30 April 2015

Old and New

We have had a fascinating visitor attraction on our doorstep for over 2 years now, yet it has taken all that time to actually make the effort to go there despite driving past a couple of times a week for all of those two years!

The attraction in question is called Northumberlandia and is a wonderful piece of public art in the form of a landform sculpture in the shape of a female created from the clay, rock and soil of an adjacent opencast coal mine. Northumberland being the county of England in which the sculpture is set.

The various elements of the sculpture only become apparent as you move around the site. You can see the face above, and can perhaps see the scale of the site with the very small human perched on the forehead!

And here's the view from that self same forehead :)

The sculpture is 100 feet high at this point and is in total a quarter of a mile long. If only this had been here when our boys were younger, it would have been the perfect place to bring them to burn off some excess energy :)

You can just see in the background here, the opencast mine from which the material for the original structure was taken. With its constant movement of large trucks and machinery, the mine and the viewpoint from the top of Northumberlandia is a big attraction for boys young and old!

Equally impressive, but from a very different era is another local attraction, Belsay Castle, the original part of which was built in 1614.

and the plaque to prove it is still there!

As is this intriguing carving in an outhouse wall.

Graffiti, do you think? Certainly superior graffiti if it was :)

It makes you wonder what modern buildings will look like in 400 years time doesn't it?

And speaking of time, there is still time to link up to this month's Ho, Ho, Ho and on We Sew Link Party before it closes tonight


Link up at SLIK stitches to be in with a chance of winning this great pattern.


Linking up to
 Live A Colorful Life


8 comments:

  1. I would love to run my hands over that old castle. Amazing to still be there. You are blessed to live amongst all that history

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  2. Such beauty on our door step and we haven't been either. Thanks so much for the prompt, added to our list for summer x

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  3. Such beauty on our door step and we haven't been either. Thanks so much for the prompt, added to our list for summer x

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  4. How wonderful to live so close to such a beautiful attraction. Of course I think it is always the attractions that are closest to us that we are least likely to visit, or put off visiting because they are so very close and accessible and sure we can go there any time. We live right at the foot of the Jura mountains. There is a funicular up the hill behind us four doors down but it took close to 10 years to actually take that funicular up and go enjoy the views from on high. It was a lovely afternoon out and a trip we should do more often but it could honestly be another 10 years before we do it again as we tend to day trip further afield when we have the time for an outing.

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  5. Really interesting place to visit, I think my boys could have burned off some energy there when they were younger too.

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  6. I wonder how many modern buildings will still be standing in 400 years time...but I expect these two will still be there. The face sculpture is amazing. It reminds me of all the chalk horses and people but even more wonderful in that it's three dimensional :)

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  7. It's like us and Windsor castle - about 4 miles away, I drive past it on my way to work, as local residents we get in free, but we only ever go if we have visitors who want to go

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  8. I would love to visit your castles, Fiona. There's no buildings in our country that are that old. There's a trend over here to knock down old (30+ years) houses to be replaced with huge new ones. Not a trend I see as environmentally sustainable.

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