The East Coast Mainline: London to Edinburgh

An iconic journey from the heart of London through the Chilterns and home counties up through the flatlands of Peterborough and Grantham, into the North via Retford and Doncaster, across the levels of the Trent plain and then pretty York and the orderly farmsteads of the Vale, the North York Moors and Penines closing in. Then the north east though Darlington, Durham, skirting Gateshead and over the Tyne and up the crabbed land of Northumbria until it opens out into the marshy bottoms and vistas and the painted houses in the river mouth town of Alnmouth, the silhouette of Lindisfarne and the Holy Isle before rattling into Berwick-on-Tweed on the border.

Then the train begins to climb. First up onto and along the red sandstone cliff tops with glimpses down into tight bays and the same old farm surrounded by mud and sea each time. And then up the valley into the hills and woods, playing hide and seek with A1 and its truck traffic climbing up tharough Penmanshiels Wood before starting the descent onto the braw, open, windswept coastal strip of red soils and too-open wavy hills past fields of sprout and cabbage and oxide-red roofed farmsteads and squat single-storey houses backed into slopes and trees from protection from frigid easterly winds.

The strange lump of Berwick Law signals the run in to Waverley, Authur's Seat rising beyond Cockenzie power station and the sweep of Dunbar, Musselburgh, Portobello, Leith, the Bass Rock and Inchkeith in the Forth and the distant hills of the Kingdom of Fife. And then the train is wedged into the steep walls of Calton Hill and the towering hotels of North Bridge Street and the Old Town itself.

The redundant Anglican St Andrew's Church, at Woodwalton, in Cambridgeshire

St Wulframs Church, Grantham, home town of Margaret Thatcher

The British Sugar factory at Newark-on-Trent producing 230,000 tonnes of granulated sugar from 1.5m tonnes of sugar beet annually. In front the Trent Navigation which carried 230,609 tons in 1933

Drax Power Station, Yorkshire - the biggest coal-fired power station in Western Europe

Waterlogged fields and Lombardy poplars between York and Doncaster

Lynemouth Aluminium Smelter, Northumberland about to close (2013)

Manmade hill from mining waste near Lynmouth, Northumberland

Red brick barn, white field, Northumberland

Bleak farm in sodden fields in March 2010

Mouth of the River Alnmouth, Northumberland

Sheep and Farm between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Alnmouth

The town at Berwick-upon-Tweed ((pop.11,665, 2001) sitting on the Scotland-England border

Surf at Berwick-upon-Tweed mole (from the Latin moles meaning large mass - same root as molecule)

Estuary netters cabin on the Tweed just upstream from Berwick-upon-Tweed

Ayton Castle, Berwickshire designed by James Gillespie Graham, Scotland’s leading Gothic revival architect in 1845.

Characteristic single-storey houses near Reston

The Torness Nuclear Power Station commissioned in 1988 and expected to run to 2023. in 1978 4,000 people marched from Dunbar to occupy the site to protest its construction

Farm toun with characteristic oxide-red roofs

The sprout and cabbage fields of the rich River Tyne plain between Dunbar and Edinburgh, East Lothian

Farmtoun on the Tyne plain where the agricultural revolution transformed one of the least modernised systems of farming into the most modern and productive system in Europe

This poem is about the train from London King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverley. My photos taken from the train of the same journey are here on my site at London to Edinburgh Train.

Edinburgh, mainline,

East Coast, England,

Kings Cross, Chiltern,

Flood, river, freeze.

Fruitfarm, snow-bank,

Ouse, lamb, sugarbeet,

St. Andrews, Grantham,

Woodwalton, lees.

Thatcher, Wulfram,

Newark, Trent, fen, church,

Navigation, hedgerow,

Oak, ash, keys.

York, Drax, bricks, dale,

Woolly, Donny, dirty,

Moorland, combine,

Durham, hills, wheeze.

Barn, wood, sheep, boy,

Gateshead, weather-gauge

Falling, down, harvester,

Nose, tickle, sneeze.

Allotment, terraces,

Cathedral, silhouette,

Brick, red, bottomland,

Smelter, stone, frieze.

Alnmouth, airports,

Sodden, swans, Lammermuir,

Stream, spate, netloft,

Northumberland, Tees.

Swollen, ship, Sage, squall,

Lynmouth, Holy Isle,

Thaw, bridges, mouth, sky

Berwick, bleak, seas.

Lindisfarne, Grantshouse,

Peat, mole, border, top,

Tweed, marsh, salmon, salt,

Estuary, ease.

Burnmouth, Linton East,

Farmtoun, Penmansheil,

Pine, haven, headwater,

Gale, blow, breeze.

Dunbar, Reston,

Sandstone, stony, wall,

Dyke, Torness, Ayton,

Longniddry, name, tease.

Abbs, head, A1,

Winter, spring, wood, surf,

Gillespie, James, Graham, Scots,

Pine, heather, trees.

Berwick Law, bell, sprouts,

Parish, field, saint, eye,

Castle, council, cabbage, stead,

Waverley squeeze.

Edinburgh, Edinburgh,

Next station stop is Edinburgh,

Bags, scarves, wallet, hats,

Mind the gap please.