The Arts In Berwick -- Other Narratives
Travellers Tales

By mid-16th.Century the building of the Berwick ramparts was well underway. They get their first literary mention in Britannia (1586) by William Camden, who was given special access to official documents by Lord Burghley. Camden's friend, Sir Robert Cotton, also supplied historian John Speed with state papers for him to add a street plan of Berwick to his map of Northumberland (1612).

For the Elizabethan governors, Berwick was not a cushy posting. In 1600 Lord Willoughby de Eresby, a battle-scarred veteran well used to discomfort, wrote:- "If I were further from the tempestousness of Cheviot Hills and were once retired from this accursed country, whence the sun is so removed, I would not change my homelest hermitage for the highest palace there."

Earlier travellers had expressed similar distaste with the region. In the 15th century Italian Enea Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II (r.1458-64), passed though on a diplomatic mission and commented on the uncouth habits of the locals. In 1533 John Leland (1503-52) King's Antiquarian to Henry VIII, toured the nation. He merely noted the existence of Berwick and Tweedmouth and recorded that there was "great plenty of deer and roe bucks" on Cheviot. Daniel Defoe climbed Cheviot to discover a pleasant plain, rather than a dangerous pinnacle and even as late as 1773 Samuel Johnson commented that he was "repelled by the wild expanse of hopeless sterility" that was Northumberland.

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