The church at Edrom

 Birds! So many birds!

The Darling family lighthouse

 Puffins - the world's most adorable birds!

 Cormorants or shags - not quite sure which

 Oh, the puffins!

 Happy bird watchers on Farne Island

The eiderducks were cute too

 

Happy seals

 

24th June                  Edrom - Farne Islands - PUFFINS!!!
Robyn writes: This morning dawned cold, miserable, foggy and rainy. Not nice at all! The forecast was for better things though, so we crossed our fingers to hope for a fine afternoon as promised by the Met Office, and booked a cruise around the Farne Islands for 2pm, to give it time to clear (we hoped!)

In the meantime, after putting on a load of washing (must make good use of actually having a washing machine this week), we headed about 15 miles west to the tiny hamlet of Edrom, where some of my ancestors on Dad's side came from (the Purves and Haitlie families). We found it easily with the help of our Tom Tom (who is now a bloke with an Irish accent!) and found the church. Sadly, it was locked up, but we spent quite a while walking around the graveyard to look for rellies. We found several Purves graves (none from the mid-1700s, which is when my ancestors were living there) but a few right into the 1800s so obviously the family continued in the area for some time. It had been raining quite a lot overnight and was still spitting while we were there so the bottoms of our jeans got very wet and grassy. Next time I'll tuck them INTO my boots. Ah, the joy of overgrown, wet graveyards!

We headed home for lunch around midday, I put on another load of washing (wet, grassy jeans) and then we realised time was getting away from us so we headed quickly for Seahouses, where the boat tour leaves from. By now the sky was clearing rapidly and it was turning into a lovely afternoon. All was going very well until we navigated to the postcode address which was on the brochure....and it turned out to be in the middle of a suburb, NOT the harbour! Panic stations - I rang them and the nice lady there guided us back through town and down to the harbour just in time for our boat trip. I raced to get tickets (15 pounds each) while Lex found a park and paid for parking (4 pounds - they don't miss you) and in the end we had plenty of time, as there were so many people lining up for the trip that they put two boats on. The first one was absolutely chockers, ours had only half as many people on board and was very comfortable! Sometimes it pays to be running a bit late.

Well, the boat trip was excellent value. It went for two and a half hours, which included an hour on Farne Island itself. This is National Trust, so we got onto the island itself for free; non-members had to pay six pounds eighty. First though we headed out to the island group - an interesting trip as there was quite a big swell and we were tossed around a bit. Fortunately we all proved to be excellent sailors, no one threw up on this trip! We circled a few of the smaller islands marvelling at the thousands and thousands of seabirds - gulls, kittiwakes, cormorants, shags, terns and of course my favourite, the puffins. The smell was also rather amazing - tons of fresh bird poo....powerful stuff! I uneasily recalled Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" as I looked at the hundreds of beady eyes and sharp beaks staring at us and hoped that none of them had seen it too...

Then we went past the famous lighthouse where Grace Darling and her family lived, and where she set out from to save the shipwrecked folk that made her a legend. (Grace is very "big" here; we passed "Grace Darling Holidays" later and there is a museum dedicated to her as well.) We also saw lots and lots of seals, swimming around our boat and lazing and rolling around happily on the rocks in the sun (it was a fairly idyllic afternoon by this stage).

Finally we landed on Farne Island itself, where we had an hour to look around via the boardwalks that cross the island. We'd been warned to make sure we had a hat - not for sun safety, but for tern protection! They are worse than magpies at the moment, definitely channelling Alfred Hitchcock and unfortunately they nest right along the boardwalk where you have to pass to get up onto the island. So that meant running the gauntlet of angry mummy and daddy terns who were chattering angrily and extremely protective. I got pecked a few times but luckily they're reasonably smallish birds, so it wasn't as bad as a magpie. Anyway, we soon got through the danger area into the foliage in the middle of the island which was filled with hundreds of puffin nests! I finally got to indulge my puffin passion with lots and lots of photos of lots and lots of puffins. When we'd had enough (temporarily) of puffins, the shags and cormorants were nesting right on the side of the cliff next to the ropes of the path, so we could get amazingly close to them and their babies (a very cute fluffy grey, even when they are nearly as big as their parents). We also saw eiderducks nesting and many other birds we just couldn't name. Not to mention several of the biggest camera lenses I've ever seen in my life! Apparently size does matter. There was some serious photography going on today.

All too soon our hour was up so we lined up ready for our boat ride back to port, which took about 20 minutes on a (thankfully) much calmer sea. It was a fabulous cruise; certainly the best wildlife cruise we've taken. When we got back to Seahouses, we wandered up to have a look at the town. I had ideas of a cuppa, but since by now it was 5.15 all of the town's teahouses were firmly closing their doors, so we grabbed a few groceries at the Co-op and headed towards Berwick. We made a stop along the beach near Banburgh to go for a walk over the dunes and onto the beach, where we had a nice rock climb and took photos of the islands and the famous castle, then headed finally for home (only stopping two more times to take photos of the castle!)

We've had tea and it's now 8.42 and the sun is still shining in the sky. It won't get dark until after 10 tonight, goodness knows what it will be like up in Inverness! Lex is enjoying the Wimbledon highlights on TV (it's very strange here - you don't have to stay up in the middle of the night to watch it!) Fingers crossed that the lovely fine weather lasts for a few days....