Discover the countryside: Northumberland

PLACE TO EXPLORE: Discover Milfield Plain

CPRE Northumberland recommends the Milfield Plain and Wooler area, one of England’s most overlooked historic landscapes.

Beneath its gentle, open fields lies a rare concentration of history: Neolithic henges and timber circles, Bronze Age field systems, and Ad Gefrin at Yeavering;, a royal seat of the early kings of Northumbria and one of the earliest places in northern England where Christianity was preached.

Above it all rises Yeavering Bell, a volcanic hill crowned by one of the largest Iron Age hillforts in the north, with the whole plain spread below and the Cheviots rolling away behind. A short distance north lies Flodden, where James IV of Scotland died in battle in 1513. Today it is’s farmland with a circular trail.

Wooler itself, sitting at the hinge between upland and lowland, makes a natural base for exploring both.

LOCAL SECRET: Look for the solstice light

Hidden on the eastern flank of Simonside, near Rothbury, is a two-metre standing stone with a hole running clean through it. For a few minutes each year around the summer solstice, the setting sun aligns with the hole and floods light through the rock.

Discovered in 1987 and still not fully understood, the stone is thought to be thousands of years old. No one is certain who placed it there or why, but the effect it creates is impossible to mistake for accident.