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Discover the series inspiring visitors to flock to the North East

Claire Webb - 21 January 2020
The detective series inspires visitors to flock to the North East to follow in the bootsteps of Brenda Blethyn.

 

Over the past ten years, Brenda Blethyn’s detective drama Vera has visited the North East’s wildest and most beautiful corners. It’s been credited with significantly boosting visitor numbers and there are even Vera tours of the Northumberland and Newcastle locations. The latest series has taken Blethyn to Britain’s highest pub, a tiny Scottish fishing village and a gigantic slag-heap sculpture. It’s sure to inspire followers in DCI Vera Stanhope’s footsteps, says executive producer Phil Hunter.

 

Admire the Lady of the North

A huge land sculpture some ten miles north of Newcastle is glimpsed briefly in this week’s Vera. “The slag heaps of an old open-cast colliery have been recultivated with greenery, and they’ve carved an enormous woman who’s called the Lady of the North,” says Hunter. “There’s a shot of Vera driving past, and you’ve got Northumberlandia looking down the lens.” The Lady of the North is 100 feet high and a quarter of a mile long. She’s the centrepiece of Northumberlandia park, and visitors can walk the four miles of winding paths that mark out her reclining figure.

 

Head for the hills

The remote village in this week’s Vera is Alwinton, a one-street village surrounded by hills on the edge of Northumberland National Park. “It’s an amazing place. There’s a shot towards the end and it looks like we digitally enhanced those enormous, rock-clad hills because they’re so vivid,” says Hunter. A popular five-mile walk from the village to the River Alwin follows one of the many drove roads in the border hills that used to be frequented by whisky smugglers as well as shepherds, cattle drovers and pedlars.

 

Go for a seaside stroll…

Whitley Bay is the home of Vera’s creator, crime writer Ann Cleeves, and regularly has a cameo. In this series, look out for Seaton Sluice, a tiny fishing harbour north of the seaside resort. “It’s a beautiful little harbour,” enthuses Hunter, “which we’ve shot a number of times from different angles” – though you wouldn’t know it. “From there, you can walk round to St Mary’s Lighthouse, which we’ve shot in the past – an elegant white tower that you can walk out to at low tide across a causeway. Follow the path round to the heart of Whitley Bay, then along the promenade and sea wall to Tynemouth Priory, which featured in the very first episode.” If you’re in need of a pitstop, stop at the art deco Rendezvous Café or Spanish City, an Edwardian palace housing restaurants and cafés – both have appeared in the drama.

 

…or a wild cliff walk

Episode two of Vera’s new series was filmed in a Scottish fishing village, Burnmouth. “Just after you get over the border, you hit this amazing coastline,” says Hunter, “which is where we found Burnmouth harbour. When we shot the scene where Vera attends the crime scene, it was just stunning – beautiful skies and the North Sea was a millpond. The next day, you could only see a hundred yards out to sea and the whole coastline was getting battered!” The harbour is reached via a road that winds down a steep cliff and ends at a little row of whitewashed cottages and brightly painted houses. For more dramatic scenery, walk a stretch of the 30-mile Berwickshire Coastal Path, which wends north from Burnmouth to Cockburnspath and south to Berwick-upon-Tweed.

 

Have a pint in Britain’s highest pub

The lonely tavern in episode one is 400-year-old Tan Hill Inn, which sits atop an exposed hill in the Yorkshire Dales, 1,732 feet above sea level and almost five miles from the nearest village. “It was one of those serendipitous moments,” Hunter explains. “The director, Paul Gay, said to me, ‘I’ve found a pub that’s perfect. The travelling distance is a bit of a killer, but it sounds exactly like the one in the script.’ When we told the writer, Paul Logue, about it, he said that was the pub he’d based it on!”

 

Originally the Tan Hill Inn served coalminers, but now walkers warm up in front of its roaring log fires because the 268-mile Pennine Way meanders past the front door.

 

Retreat to Holy Island

Vera’s cottage is on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a tidal isle off the Northumberland coast that you can drive to at low tide. “We’ve got to plan the cottage scenes meticulously,” Hunter says, “because if you get stuck there, you’ll be waiting four or five hours or so to drive back across. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s been close.”

 

The Irish monk who converted Northumbria to Christianity, St Aidan, founded a monastery on the island in the seventh century. Today you can visit the striking ruins of 12thcentury Lindisfarne Priory and a 16th-century castle with a walled garden, which is looked after by the National Trust. Although the island only has a population of 160, the village has plenty of places to stay, a couple of pubs and cafés, and a winery that makes mead.


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