Geograph - photograph every grid square

"There is an attraction in these billowy uplands which increases the better we know them; beauty in the mighty stretches of green pasture sloping upwards and backwards, as often as not vanishing into grey mist in the acres of waving brake, the many-coloured rocks and boulders, the flashing streams and burns, the flowers and wild birds, less wild here than in the peopled lowlands. Then there is the silence and all-aloneness of the Borderlands. You may walk all day and see no one except some solitary fisher, or a shepherd and his collies on the fellside; above all perhaps, there is the consciousness that you are treading on historic ground, where each hill could tell of some fierce conflict, and where each valley and stream is associated with the loves, the passions, and the death-throes of buried races".
Cheviot Mountains Lone. Field, October 3rd 1885 quoted in Upper Coquetdale by David Dippie Dixon (1903).

Today up here, the colours were like chocolate. The dark brown heather on peaty soil which gave Black Hag its name, contrasting with the bleached white of the Cheviot grasses. White Law to the north takes its name from these.

"Heather land and bent-land,
Black land and white,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land of my delight.

Land of singing waters,
And winds from off the sea,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land where I would be.

Heather land and bent-land,
And valleys rich with corn,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land where I was born."

'Northumberland' by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Hexham's People's Poet (1878-1962).