Day 1: Home to Hexham

Another bank holiday, another trip to Northumberland It feels like we've been to Northumberland quite a lot over the course of the past year, but it's a really lovely part of the country and - most importantly for a bank holiday - it's quite remote and (hopefully!) going to be a bit quieter than holiday hotspots like Cornwall.

We made a reasonably prompt start from home this morning, but ran into a bit of traffic on the drive north. Some of the delays seemed to be caused by people travelling to Leeds for a festival, so the congestion eased up a bit once we were past the junction for Leeds.

I'd planned for us to stop en route to Northumberland at a place called Fountains Abbey. I'd wanted to stop here on previous trips north but hadn't been able to, because it's a National Trust property and during the pandemic it was mandatory to book a 30 minute slot. Home to Fountains Abbey was a journey of about 136 miles and with a distance like that it's almost impossible to predict when you are going to arrive. So I'd always had to find other alternatives which didn't require prebooking to visit. We'd actually driven past Fountains Abbey earlier this year when we visited the nearby Brimham Rocks. One advantage of "Freedom Day" having passed is that it's now no longer required to prebook for the National Trust. So today I was quite excited that we were finally going to get to visit Fountains Abbey

It was after 1pm by the time we arrived and parked. Initially the car parks looked quite full, but it turned out there was a large overflow car park with plenty of space. Phew! Before long we had our first glimpse of the abbey.

The abbey was founded in 1132, as a very enthusiastic National Trust volunteer explained to us at the entrance.

It survived until 1539, at which point it was dissolved by Henry VIII.

As you can tell from the pictures, the abbey is quite a popular place to visit and there were certainly plenty of visitors today!

Once we left the main lawn behind and started following some of the paths around the grounds, we got some quieter views though.

The ruins were really impressive; it was clearly an enormous monastery in its day.

I knew that this National Trust property was a World Heritage Site, but what I hadn't realised until a National Trust volunteer explained to us is that it's not because of the ruins of Fountains Abbey, but because of what's located next to it.