Marvels of Engineering

On the journey up to Northumberland was very fast, faster than I remember it in the past but the roads are much better and we were already part of the way there.  I had planned to make two stops at some marvels of modern engineering or perhaps art.

The first was the Angel of the North.   It was cold and blowing a bit of a gale but we got out of the car and went and had a walk around anyway.

That's my mum at the bottom of the sculpture just to give you a rough idea of scale.  we were lucky that we had mostly sunny weather but it was very cold on this day and we certainly needed layers on as it was so windy and bitterly cold.

There is a new attraction not far on from here called Northumberlandia. There is a sculpture here on a massive scale "human landform sculpture of a reclining lady. Made of 1.5 million tonnes of rock, clay and soil, she is 100 feet high and a quarter of a mile long." we walked around it and my pictures hardly do it justice.  There is a good idea of what it looks like from the air here.  My pictures just show the ground level view:

It is on an amazing scale and was only open at the weekend as it is about to be officially opened later this month.  I was most impressed with the scale of the vision but you don't get too much of an idea even climbing the viewing areas. 

It was good to see them though and broke the journey up but we were still 4 hours too early to get into our Apartment so we visited a Garden Centre not far from here and then stopped at a lovely Inn for lunch which we found to be just 10 minutes drive away.  It had fabulous views over the local countryside out to the faraway hills and over towards Holy Island.  The Cat Inn - nice food and nice staff too.

And so we arrived at the Apartment a little too early but there was a parking place further on overlooking the sea and we sat in the car for about 30 minutes and were then able to get into the Apartment and unload the car.  A few hours later it was time to collect Mrs. F. from the train station and then we did some shopping and settled into for the night.