In 2023, a young Geordie poet named Jake Morris-Campbell walked the Northumbrian coast from Lindisfarne to Durham by way of Bamburgh, Seahouses, Craster, Amble, Cresswell, Ashington, Blyth and Whitley Bay on to the Tyne (stop for a breather), before crossing the water at Shields and on to Jarrow, Boldon Colliery and Sunderland to the Wear (Wee-ah), finally veering inland to Durham where the body of Cuthbert, patron saint of the north, lies interred. He ended his walk at the Durham Miners’ Gala, “pulsing with the working-class heart of people just like my great-grandad Nick”.
Two years before, at Christmas, Morris-Campbell’s grandmother turned up at his front door with his great-grandfather’s Davy lamp in a Lidl bag. “I want you to ha’d (hold) on to it,” she told him. So, he put it in his rucksack and took it on a long walk or, as he calls it, on his Northumbrian Camino de Santiago de Compostela, which is the subject of this book.
Morris-Campbell felt the need for a reset. He wanted to find himself by walking the land in which he was born. Between the sea and the shore – between the salt and the ash, you might say – Morris-Campbell takes in great gob-fulls of what that might mean. It was at Lindisfarne (Holy Island) that Aidan founded a monastic community around AD 636, and it was here that, after a life of celibacy and extreme asceticism, Cuthbert was buried in AD 687. When the island was plundered by the Vikings in AD 875, legend has it that for more than 100 years Cuthbert’s bier was carried by the haliwerfolc (“people of the saint”) as a shrine and a rallying point, before being laid to rest at what would become Durham Cathedral.
Morris-Campbell sets great store by Northumbria’s early forays into learning. The illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels were made there in Cuthbert’s honour at the end of the 7th century, and in the early 8th century, the earliest surviving Latin Vulgate Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, and Bede’s first history of the English people, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, were both written in sight of the Tyne.
In the modern age, Northumberland and Durham became heartlands of the Industrial Revolution. There was so much coal, they were almost giving it away. Which is where Morris-Campbell’s great-grandfather comes in. Nick was a true-bred pitman and, along with Cuthbert and the other northern saints, has come to matter to his great-grandson in ways that the great-grandson is still trying to work out. By taking his long walk, Morris-Campbell hoped that:
“… a filigree of northern saints’ tracks ribboning back to the so-called dark ages and now bisecting a place steeped in post-industrial mythology would bring me into deeper touch with the faith of my forbears and provide a greater understanding of the contemporary concerns of the people I live among.”
We all need to belong (belang) to what we call home (hyem). The need is so strong and universal that it has been called an instinct, part of the human condition, although those who believe in a world without borders (a home without walls) seem to take a different view. Morris-Campbell’s journey isn’t so much about the future, although he keeps a wary eye on it, nor is it about the past, despite the incantations. At heart, it’s really about a very precarious present, and how to stay… true, I suppose. I can’t say more. The book is beautifully crafted and gloriously self-centred, but only Morris-Campbell can say whether the walk was worth it.
I can, however, offer some humble observations. In the first place, Northumbria might be “the heart of England’s soul” but the Christianity and coal have ceased to exist, and a lot of what is left Morris-Campbell sees as tat. He generally avoids the caravans and the Southrons (southerners) in search of a gourmet kipper. Only Amble strikes him as a place where he might want to live. The other places make for difficult company, not least because, regardless of his chosen wish to address local concerns, he doesn’t go in search of locals. Secondly, even if he did, the north-east harbours opinions he finds unpalatable – not least what he sees as myopia and jingoism. Thinking of the foreign craftsmen who “traversed
the bounds of statehood to come and enrich life” in the Northumbrian court, he finds Brexit and the Stop the Boats campaign contemptible. For one mad moment, I had an image of Morris-Campbell and friends standing on Cullercoats beach holding placards: “Whitley Bay Anglo-Saxon Lib Dems Welcome Viking Boat People”.
To be fair, this is a deeply personal work – not really political. To his undying credit, Morris-Campbell might be a prize-winning poet, a university fellow and a BBC New Generation Thinker, but he still wants to belong. He wants his children to belong. He wants us all to belong. Geordies say “Where do you belong?” rather than “Where do you come from?” and Morris-Campbell knows it in his bones that this has something to do with populist feelings – homeland, heimat, hyem – which in another life he might prefer to do without. In this regard, he carries his great-grandfather’s miners’ lamp almost as a holy relic. It holds his mission together.
About 150 years ago, it was the fashion for Northumbrian artists and intellectuals to leave the carboniferous capitalism of the coalfield and riverbanks for weekend walks west in search of reveries – reveries which they translated, in turn, into histories, and histories into identities. Now that the old carbon has gone and the new capitalism threatens to put us in search of who we are all over again, Morris-Campbell’s long walk might prove prophetic.
I have a bit of skin in this game. We are both Shields lads. My grandfather and uncle worked at the same collieries – Harton and Westoe – as his great-grandfather, and my first book dabbled in similar questions of identity and loss. Manchester University’s great northern press did us both proud. But I prefer the handrails of history and get uncomfortable when we stray too far. Morris-Campbell, on the other hand, with all his poet’s daring, pitches into the dark with his lamp for guidance.
But be careful, marra. You call your book “creative non-fiction” and I must confess I’m not sure how far the creativity goes. You might want to believe that your great-grandfather worked three miles beneath the North Sea but trust me he didn’t. As for the Davy lamp, it eventually saved lives but for the first 50 years it took them. Your book comes from the heart, but as one of the haliwerfolc yourself it might be that you spent too much of the walk agreeing with people who agreed with you. Pilgrimages need at least one real pain. Remember Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning? “What I want is a good time. All the rest is propaganda.”
Robert Colls is professor of cultural history at De Montfort University. His most recent book is “This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England 1760-1960” (Oxford University Press)
Between the Salt and the Ash:
A Journey into the Soul of Northumbria
Jake Morris-Campbell
Manchester University Press, 312pp, £20
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[See also: The confessions of Justin Welby]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?