The sun comes out as I near Tyne Green, saturating everything in olive-gold light; the trees on the bank, the arches under Hexham Bridge, the billowing plumes of steam from the chipboard factory. As I slow down, I become aware of Sunday morning sounds. Bells are being rung in the abbey on the hill. A women’s eight slices upriver with a rhythmical dipping of oars. Chattering mallards are grouped hopefully by the waterside steps. A double note from a train, traffic on the dual carriageway, the muffled flow of the weir.
Minutes from town, this linear park is busy with dog walkers, runners and golfers thwacking balls among undulating grassy tumps. On the river alongside, parallel lives are lived on the safety of the water or within its thick fringe of willows. A goosander scratches its cheek with an orange-red foot, before taking off, straight as an arrow to skim the surface. A cormorant holds its head up, watchful as a cobra. A shaggily white-chested heron stands motionless by a the calm of an inlet.
Through binoculars, it feels as though I’m watching a wildlife documentary, the rippled surface blue, the smooth areas golden, flicked water droplets sparkling as a pigeon has a winter bath on the far bank. Little grebes suddenly appear, bobbing up, plump and fluffy, before splash-diving down again. Yellow triangles flash signals from tail feathers as male teal swing round in the current. Moorhens potter about in the reeds.
There are a number of different gulls: the bright white of a common gull, the solid bulk of an immature herring gull, a noisy cluster of black-headed gulls, one still retaining its chocolate-brown face mask where the markings of the others have retreated to a dark spot behind the eye.
Close by me, a goldcrest fossicks through an elder bush, picking at insects with needle-fine beak.
A treecreeper silently works its way up the trunk of a lime tree, before, with an explosion of sound, a dozen magpies set up a racket. “Twelve for wealth” the rhyme says, for the wealth of birdlife in this edge of town setting.
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