Museums Around the Border

There weren't actually that many to choose from: at least, not many of the sort of miscellaneous local history museums that I find so much fun. The Museum at Berwick-on-Tweed, based in the old barracks, is exclusively about the Royal Scots Borderers and those regiments of the British Army that preceded it or into which it passed. I used to work for a military museum, but the Royal Engineers were a different matter from most of the Army: every time the forces wanted to test a new technology the Engineers were the guinea-pigs, which is why the collection at the RE Museum included stuff connected to the early days of telegraphy, flying, and tanks, as well as loot from across the Empire and beyond. Most other regiments have been to the same sort of places as one another in the same sort of conditions, and so I'm afraid their museums have a somewhat standard feel to them. At Coldstream, though, the nearest place to where I was staying, the wee museum did cover a bit of the history of the town as well as the Coldstream Guards, including the inevitable, but always welcome, case of chemist's jars and bottles. It makes the lack of a local museum in so interesting a place as Berwick all the more of a shame.

In Bamburgh I found that the museum was devoted to a single person, famous for a single incident - Victorian heroine Grace Darling, who took part in the dramatic rescue of the surviving passengers and crew from the wreck of the Forfarshire nearby in 1838. This doesn't sound promising, but the museum is very smart and the collection is surprisingly comprehensive, including the boat itself in which Grace, her father and brother battled the storm waves that awful night. Of course I failed to photograph that, preferring a display case full of tat.

A little bit down the coast from Bamburgh is Seahouses, where I thought there was also a museum; there isn't, at least now, but in the Tourist Information office there I learned of the existence of the Local History Museum at Belford. Belford is a tiny place, but I had to go through it anyway so thought I would call by. The Museum is based in a house on the main square: it seems to be a completely voluntary effort but at some point recently they've had a grant to produce some quite nice graphic panels and some proper display cases. It's just a couple of rooms, but shows what a community can do with determination and a bit of help.

There was nobody there. I went in, used the loo for which I was most grateful, looked about and left again. To my knowledge that's never happened to me at a museum anywhere.