Berwick upon Tweed Town Walls

Berwick is one of the few towns in the UK that has retained a full set of walls.  They were built to keep my ancestors out, but these days, the perfectly nice town centre is perfectly happy for Scots to come and buy cuddly toys, boiled sweets and handicrafts.

Public transport, really easy. Parking, lots and lots – if you park just outside the town walls it’s free, otherwise there’s lots of car parks, some with modern payment systems and some still seem to have a certain degree of messing around with those old fashioned disk systems where you have to get a disk from a shop then be honest about when you parked.

Toilets, yes.

Cafes, any number.

One of the best old school sweet shops I’ve seen. I should have taken a photo. That was a major oversight on my part. Sorry.

If you just walked round the walls and did nothing else, it’s 2km and about 45 minutes at a stroll. But there are many short detours to take, so I’d allow about an hour and a half.

Navigation wise, this is easy. You just find a way up onto the walls, walk round the walls, and keep going until you’re back where you started. I barely need to describe that.

However, that would be a very short blog entry indeed. So I am going to assume that you entered Berwick from the A1, southbound from Scotland, drove past the big retail park and parked up outside the walls near the fish and chip shop. 

So, first, walk downhill towards the town centre, and go in through the gate. Then keep going, cross one little road, and stock up on sweets.

You could, at this point, have a small mooch around the gift shops. Step count is step count. When you have finished appreciating the jewelery and painted puffins, turn back the way you came.

Now, you can just go up onto the walls at this point. But if you want a quieter ruin, I’d recommend heading a little further out of town. Turn right and go through the Castle Gate car park, past the old infirmary, and turn left up Low Greens. Keep going until you see a small footpath on your left, which bends slightly uphill.

That takes you to Lords Mount, which was a state of the art military fortress in 1542. If you are a grown up, this is a really interesting ruin where you can imagine living conditions in the army under Henry VIII. If you’re 9 or so, you can invade England, and who doesn’t enjoy that.

From there, walk along the edge of the golf course towards the Brass Bastion, which is the next gun implacement on the walls. You can either climb back up onto the walls, or walk along below them through the rose garden and Flagstaff park. But if you do climb up onto the walls, you’ll get a good view of Berwick barracks. These are an English Heritage property, closed at the time of writing, and 200 years older than the city walls. Different era, same purpose – militarily speaking, a useful base for making sure those pesky Jacobites didn’t get ideas about taking England. They remained a base for the King’s Own Scottish Border’s into the mid twentieth century.

A little further along, you’ll pass above Flagstaff Park. Someone has clearly put a lot of love into the little park recently, and there are wooden sculptures, flowers, and a very passable little playpark for any small invaders you may have brought along. You access it by coming down off the wall, down some stairs, and through a gate that looks really quite locked. It isn’t.

Back up onto the walls, past the allotments and the Lion House, with some of the silliest looking lions committed to statuary ever, you’ll start to see the sea. Take the path off the wall again at pier road, just past King’s Mount, and head out to the pier.

This is our second detour – out to the lighthouse and back. There is a very old sign saying please do not harass any dolphins. I’ve never seen any dolphins here, but if you do, you’ve been told. The pier is actually technically a breakwater, and it’s a great place to see swans, eider ducks, and distant black blurs that may or may not be some sort of interesting wildfowl. If you’re anything like me you forgot your binoculars. Cormorants, maybe? Anyway.

Back along the pier. And this would be a good time to break out your sweets.

Take a little while to mooch about the shore, and then come back up onto the wall when you’re ready to. There are some more nice places to take in the view, and then you’ll get closer to the river proper.

Across the water, there’s a working port. This makes me very happy, because when I was a child, we always found a port. Dad had a knack for it. He found ports 400 miles inland given a big enough continent (canals, as it happens. True story). Forgive me a brief wave to the ghost of my father, and then we will reach another car park, and a little café. They do good cake.

From here, you can see the bridges across the Tweed. Berwick Bridge, also known as Old Bridge, is early 17^thcentury. Behind it is the massive Royal Tweed Bridge – the New Bridge – which is now 100 years old. It was part of the A1 until the 1980s. And behind that, the 1847 Royal Border Bridge, which is the railway viaduct. It’s still the main rail artery between Edinburgh and London, and it’s a magnificent journey in good weather.

From here you can either follow the walls around to the main gate in the north of the town walls, or you can head up through the town centre. And buy more sweets.