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Discover North East England with Alex Iles: From Roman Ruins to Coastal Castles · UK Travel Planning

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Thinking about exploring North East England.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: In this episode I'm joined by Alex Owls of Owls Tours to share why this beautiful and historic region, including the stunning Northumberland coast where I grew up, is such a fantastic place to visit.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: And don't miss the special announcement for podcast listeners at the very end.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the UK Travel Planning Podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Your host is the founder of the UK travel planning website, Tracy Collins.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: In this podcast, Tracy shares destination guides, travel tips and itinerary ideas, as well as interviews with a variety of guests who share their knowledge and experience of UK travel to help you plan your perfect UK vacation.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Join us as we explore the UK from cosmopolitan cities to quaint villages, from historic castles to beautiful islands, and from the picturesque countryside to seaside towns.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Hi and welcome back to the UK Travel Planner Podcast.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: This week's episode is all about a region that is especially close to my heart North East England, where I grew up in a small village on the beautiful Northumberland coast.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Now it's a part of the country filled with a dramatic scenery, centuries of history, friendly locals for example myself and so many special places to explore.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: I love sharing this area with our listeners, and today's guest is just as passionate about helping people discover what makes it so unique.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: If you listen to our recent episode with Deb Harsin, you might recall her fantastic day tour to Bamburgh and Lindisfarne, where she said this tour was a true highlight of her trip, and that tour was led by Alex Iles, founder of Iles Tours.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Now, with a lifelong love of storytelling, alex brings the Northeast past to life, from Roman forts, medieval monasteries to coastal castles and cultural legends.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: His tours cover Newcastle, durham, northumberland, hadrian's Wall, holy Island, and they offer rich and immersive experience for purist travelers.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Now in this conversation, you'll hear how Alex got started, what makes his tours different and why North East England should absolutely be on your itinerary.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: And be sure to listen to the end, because Alex has a special announcement just for UK travel planning, podcast listeners.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: So let's get started.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Let's start with your story, alex.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Where are you from originally and what brought you to the North East of England?
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: So my story actually starts and it's funny that you say this I'm actually a British Scot, so I was born just outside Edinburgh in a place called Livingston, but from a young age my family traveled a lot, so then we went to Canada, then back to Edinburgh, then Liverpool, then Cambridge, went to school in Scotland at an international school from the age of nine and then at 17 moved to Newcastle.
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: My mum's family is from the northeast of England, from an area called Teesside, which is just it was a part of North Yorkshire but then it's sort of also its own independent area within the northeast of England, whereas my father's family he was born down near London.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: So then from there we we traveled a lot, but I always sort of grew up in Scotland and in the north and so that for me always felt more like home.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: When I went to university I was looking around a number of universities, thought I was going to go to a Scottish one and ended up at Newcastle, and when I ended up there I was really lucky, because a lot of students in Newcastle end up and if anyone from your podcast is listening and has gone to school, sorry to.
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: Well, for American audiences school or European and British audiences, obviously university in the northeast of England.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: They'll know that a lot of students in Newcastle end up in an area called Jesmond student.
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: Some people would maybe describe it as a student ghetto, but let's just say it's like it's its own, like region within a region, and it becomes a lot of students who are all around each other.
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: I was, I would say, fortunate in a way that I didn't end up there, and when I wasn't there lots of my friends were locals and so with that they were always like I was immersed in the Northeast culture, I saw the the northeast.
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: I got to do that without having this of like the student experience, if that makes sense, and that really helped because I fell in love with the area and I fell in love with its history, its people and I wanted to make this area home.
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: So that's that was where my love for the northeast really started to develop was when I came here for university and it felt like my extended family.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: In many ways it was familiar, it was that sort of thing but like for me, for instance, like sometimes you know I'll go in a taxi and I'll get asked where are you actually from, and stuff like that, and I used to jokingly sort of say, oh, I'm a plastic Geordie, until one taxi driver turned around and he turned to me and he went.
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: Does that mean you're harmful for the environment?
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: That's so funny I changed because I was just like no, no, I'm an adopted Geordie Because I'm definitely not harmful to the environment.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: But that was an interesting one there.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Definitely.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Well, to be honest, I can hear a little Northeastern twang, so you have picked it up and obviously you know I'm from Northumberland.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: I was born in Hexham and I was brought up in in the northeast until I was 14.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: I have actually lived back there as well for parts of my life, but I get told when I go back that I sound like a very posh Geordie.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: So there you go.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: You're a plastic Geordie and I'm just saying I'm a posh Geordie but we still act that way, definitely adopted.
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought about that afterwards and I was like oh gosh, but that was just obviously because there was a changeover with climate and all of that stuff.
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: But it's really interesting and it's good fun.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: So now you mentioned that you've got love for history and you mentioned on your website which we will link to in the show notes, so we'll talk about that in a bit that you have a passion for storytelling and I think that's really important.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: So I just mentioned before I was a history teacher and I taught history through stories to the kids.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: That's the best way for me to get through.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Some things can be quite boring if you don't teach it in a kind of you know, in a storytelling way.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: So how has that, plus your love of history, impacted what you do now?
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's a really good way of sort of introducing it, because I sometimes struggle because a lot of my customers, a lot of people I talk to at school had a very hard time with history and that's often to do with a lot of the cracks within our education system where, you know, it's unfortunately a lot of the time focused on exams rather than learning or getting a grounding.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: And the way I sort of think about human history is that it is all stories, it's what's been passed down to us, memorized, recorded, all of that sort of thing like that.
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: And so with what I like to do and I think many good tour guides this is, you know, obviously a lot of your other tour guides will do this as well is that we learn these stories so that we can then pass and help people to understand where you fit into the human story, because all of us are looking to connect ourselves into this story and to understand, all right, where do we belong?
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: And as I learned the northeast history, you know, obviously I could see my own familial connections.
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: I looked at my family tree.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: I'd done that when I was um in school.
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: I'd sat down and I paid for an ancestry membership and gone back through my family tree and found out what all the different branches my family came from.
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: And then when I was starting to research, I was like, oh, that that's actually where one of my ancestors is from, that's you know.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: For instance, there's a place in Northumberland called Chillingham and I could trace a branch of my family to there.
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: Another branch of my family was from the Scottish borders.
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: Another branch of my family was from Ireland.
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: Another branch of my family lived down in the southeast of England and so I was looking at it.
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: I was just like, wow, this is.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: I can connect myself to these areas and understand it.
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: And that's why I want to bring across in the tours, because so often it's like you can have, let's say, a tour where you're walking along and someone goes well, in 1842, such and such happened in this building.
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: Well, where's the emotion in that?
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: What were they feeling?
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: What happened?
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: What were all the other dominoes that occurred all around that?
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: To understand and how it connects to today, because I think that's what's really important.
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: A lot of people want to connect their stories back to where we are today, and when I was growing up, one of the things I obviously came into history through sort of a lot of the mythology.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: So I loved stuff like the Norse myths.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: I loved stuff like Roman and Greek myths.
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: I loved Egyptian myths and within ancient Europe, amongst the native Britons and in the wider some people call it Celtic, but the wider sort of world of Gaul and Britain and Ireland and all of those locations there were a group of people called bards and the bards.
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: They would memorize stories, but they were also almost, they had a larger function, which was also that they were the legal.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: They remember the law, they remember the law of by heart, they remember the stories.
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: They had a slight religious element to them as well and they would travel around.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: So similar in ways to the druids, but druids and bards were quite similar and I always said, oh, I want to be a bard when I grow up.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: And, funny enough, I kind of feel, in a way, with my tour guiding, there's that overlap as well where, like, what I'm actually doing is I'm memorizing this history and I'm sharing it with other people so that you get that connection, you get your understanding and you get a little bit more of a puzzle piece on where you fit into the human story now that's brilliant and we do often speak to people who are tracing their family roots and background into the northeast.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: Um, and I know being able to, you know you can, you can do that research and find out about your ancestors and maybe you've got the names and the places.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: But when you actually go and visit and you see those places where they lived, you can, you know, you see the places that they they actually you know a street they're potentially walk down.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: You know, even just seeing the view of the sea that you places, that they actually you know a street they potentially walk down.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: You know, even just seeing the view of the sea, that you know that they would have stood, for example, at sea houses at Bamburgh and saw the castle they went to Holy Island.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: So you have the same experiences.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: So you can walk kind of in the footsteps of your ancestors as well.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: And being able to kind of learn about the stories of what it was like to live in the Northeast, whether it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, however far back you can trace your ancestry, I think that's a fantastic thing to do and I know your love of history kind of goes further back because you're into archaeology as well, aren't you?
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Because you've got your love of history, you've got your ability to storytell, but you've also got an academic background in this stuff as well, aren't you?
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Because you've got your love of history, you've got your ability to storytell, but you've also got an academic background in this stuff as well.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: So you know your history, you know this information, and you've mentioned I think we talked about this last week that you're studying archaeology or you're hoping to do some studies in archaeology as well.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, that's right.
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: So sort of going back a little bit further to give some context.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: So sort of going back a little bit further to give some context.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: I started Isles Tours back in 2013.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: So I started doing guided walking tours in and around Newcastle.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: I was doing two-hour historical walking tours, then half-day walking tours and then, after half-day walking tours, I launched my full-day walking tours and actually last year I stopped doing the one and two hour walking tours and now the shortest tours I do is half day.
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: But now I've really focused the business in on full day and multi-day tours, because that's my real passion, because you can do a lot more nuance than you can within two hours.
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: So that's the one focus.
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: Now that was where I was.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: I was up to full day tours during COVID.
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: Well, up to COVID, then, during COVID, obviously I jokingly say that my business became illegal Because obviously you know you couldn't be in a car with other people, you couldn't be in those areas outside of your own family groups.
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: So, with that being the case, for nearly two years I had to really think about what I was doing and I was able to go back to all of my scripts.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: I went over all of my old books, reread, refreshed, restudied all of that stuff.
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: But one of the things I found was with history books.
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: A lot of the history books were covering the same data, because history is what's being recorded, so when it's being recorded you have to go back to the same documents and a lot of the history books are very similar.
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: Now I just started reading archaeology reports excavations of various sites throughout the Northeast and I noticed that the story was slightly different.
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: And that's not to say the historians are wrong, but the historians have a certain number of documents until new documents are found or stuff like that.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: But it was just the archaeology reports were just slightly different and you could see a different story, because the people who don't normally get recorded in history are the people who you know.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: Obviously, often history is the story of governments, of kings, of rulers, of the powerful in life.
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: You don't get the story of the farmer who's sitting in hillsides in Northumberland.
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: You know just as the Romans are marching through the land.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: You don't get the story of you know the Anglo-Saxon communities who are migrating over the North Sea and settling there and you know the initial villages and their interactions, intermarrying and all the other things that are going on with the native Britons.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: You don't get the story of, you know the medieval farmer who everything looks great, until all of a sudden, unfortunately through a domino effect, you suddenly have a war between edward the first and, uh, robert the bruce.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: You know you.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: Suddenly those people's stories are much harder to see.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: But through archaeology you can look at their household, you can look at, you know what they left behind, and amongst archaeologists it's a very common joke, to the point where it's become a trope and people are just like, oh, my career is in ruins, and so that's the whole thing.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: There, where you have this sort of thing about that.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: You're looking and you're learning about people in a very day-to-day, life-to-life basis, and so it's taking that data that can be very nuanced, very detailed, and then reading lots of those different reports, so you can get an idea of a region and then you tell that story and you go.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: Well, historically, we know this happened.
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: Now, when this is happening, this is the direct effect on the people.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: These are the people who are like you, who live their normal lives, who aren't, you know, in government, who aren't a king sitting or a lord sitting in his castle who is going to go and attack another very similar lord who's sitting in another castle.
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: And actually the people on the ground are a lot more similar on both sides of the English-Scottish border than they would be otherwise, and so we can tell that story.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: We can go into the nuance and we can tell that story.
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: We can go into the nuance and we can go.
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: Well, these settlements, these people, this is how they lived, this is how it impacted them and this is how it actually created England and Scotland, or you know, the Roman invasion.
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: Well, suddenly, land that people have been living on for two and a half thousand years had a bloomed, great big wall built through it.
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: You know, you couldn't visit your cousin, you know, because he just happens to live two miles across and then suddenly someone has built this wall for your land and you're like, that wall was never there before.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: There was no distinction, there was no Northern and Southern Britain, there was Britain.
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: There was well, as they would have probably referred to it, britannia or something along those lines.
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: But, um, you know that that suddenly broke the island in half for the first time and laid the foundations towards this concept of you know what would eventually be the sort of a divide between the two areas.
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: So that's that's also fascinating and really interesting to drag out in a well not drag out.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: So that's really interesting and fun to to bring to life during the tour but you are for me and you know I I grew up, I grew up beside Hadrian's wall.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: My dad was born in Wall's End, which obviously end of the wall.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: So, um, you know, it's, it's just something that I it's always been there my entire life, obviously been there for a few thousand years, and you know what?
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: I've never even thought of it in those terms.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: It's just there, it's just something that I've always seen, but actually thinking of, like the fact that, as you say, people live in an area, the romans turn up and they build a great big wall right between, you know, between between the the well, between england and scotland now, but obviously at that point it wasn't.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: So, you know, yeah, yeah, so like that's another fun one.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: I love doing this where people are just like they think Hadrian's Wall is the English Scottish border.
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: But actually if you do that you cut off pretty much almost all of Northumberland and Cumbria and so the people living there, they definitely feel English.
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: And it's one of the fun ones when I get international travelers Like I remember I had two lovely ladies from California and we did a tour of Bambra and we did the whole eight hour day and at the end of the day one of the ladies turned to me and she said so how long has this been a part of Scotland for?
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: And I turned around and said there was a short period of time when it was a part of Scotland for 40 years during the Middle Ages.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: But no, it's always been a part of Northumbria, which has generally been seen as English.
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: Well, and again, if you want to get into archaeology and history, the debate about when does Englishness actually start and when does Scottishness start, that's a whole kettle of fish and, trust me, I can go off on that.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: But generally and it's like you know, we're talking about lines drawn on a paper by people sitting, you know, during the Middle Ages, let's say in Stirling for the King of Scots and London for the King of England.
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: You know, those are distinctions in international politics that affect the daily lives of normal people, and that's what I love.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to ask you a question now.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: I was born in hexham, right.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: So I was born in hexham right.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: So the the roman wall is not very far from hexham.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: So if I was born in hexham during the time when the wall was built, would I have been classed as being on which side of the wall so kind of like you know what I'm saying.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Would I have been?
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: where hexam is.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: You would be on paper inside the Roman Empire.
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: Now when, when you're looking at this again, it's like we look at lines on the paper and the reality is that the Romans had a lot more influence than people realize.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: So this is where we can get into fun stuff like science.
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: There's something called isotopic analysis, which is where you can take bones or teeth and whenever you eat something or drink something, that puts a signature when you're growing up into your teeth.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: So there's obviously the tragedy of when you have, let's say, a teenager's human remains, skeletons, and that is obviously a personal tragedy for the person who passed away and for their family and all of that sort of stuff.
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: But it provides data Because, let's say, they have their children's teeth and their adult teeth.
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: You can see from their baby teeth where they were growing up, because there's teeth, and the adult teeth you can see from their baby teeth where they were growing up, because there's that signature in their teeth.
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: And then you have their adult teeth coming in and then you can see if they've migrated, moved, changed or anything like that.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: Now we can do the same thing with animals.
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: Now, when you do that with animals, they've analyzed the bones of cattle on Hadrian's Wall, and over half of them are from the Scottish Highlands.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: It's not just a case of the wall was built.
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: Everyone north of the wall was just kept out.
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: To use a modern example, let's think of something like North Korea, south Korea.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: That's a modern example of a hard boundary where, unfortunately, it's heavily militarized.
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: That's not what hadron's wall is.
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: We have people giving tribute or taxation, if you want to think of it that way to the romans and in turn the romans are sending large amounts of silver north and they're giving it to the tribal leaders in what is today scotland and they're giving those to those native britains up there and they're basically paying them with that.
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: And then you have this trade and movement of goods.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: Now you can create all sorts of fun stories with that and go well, did the Romans get a heads up that something was going to go bad when the food supply suddenly dries up and suddenly it's like oh, the cattle shipment hasn't turned up.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: Why is that?
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: But these are the interesting parts where we can use modern science.
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: We can look at migrations of people.
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: We can look at um, ancient dna, adna.
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: We can look at items and artifacts and see, you know where these items travel from in.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: In a lot of the native settlements in northumberland and in southern scotland you find roman pottery.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: The romans are just taking like their seconds and they're flooding the market and you find loads of that stuff.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: So it's really interesting, especially with those movement of people from the North Sea Basin coming across the British Isles and migrating in.
• 20:29
  Speaker 3: There's a whole sort of transformation and mixing and change and new ideas coming in at the same time at the end of the Roman period as well.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: So you get this amazing sort of like ability with archaeology to basically understand the human story, I feel, in a much more nuanced manner.
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: Archaeologists also like to poke fun at historians that historians are basically reading the gossip of ancient times and then writing books about it, whereas archaeologists are actually looking at the daily life of real people.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: I know and it's absolutely fascinating.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: Honestly, I could spend the next hour just talking about Hadrian's Wall and the background of that, because in my head I just had this vision of and bearing in mind I used to be a history teacher this vision of it being, like you know, that hard border that was built to stop the marauding hordes coming down from Scotland and attacking and taking all the things away from the Romans.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: But actually it sounds like everybody is far more integrated than I had kind of imagined.
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so obviously there's connections.
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: But I think just to sort of touch on that, just to sort of give a little sense of it, there is an element of that where there is obviously conflict.
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: But one of the studies obviously I was reading last year and I found really interesting was the idea that you look at different levels of conflict.
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: So you have, like hot wars and cold wars and high intensity conflict, which is like what we'd understand as war today, and then you have low intensity conflict, which is things where unfortunately you have long unresolved problems, and one of the examples of that would be the troubles in Northern Ireland and many people argue that like the idea is that Hadrian's War may have been much more like a low-intensity conflict.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: You know, a Roman patrol goes north of the wall and they chat to a local farmer, they have a drink of water, stuff like that.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: You know they come back, they give information that goes on for six months a year, something like that.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: Suddenly a patrol doesn't come back.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: You know everyone's smiling faces, faces, everyone's chatting.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: Bits of roman pottery are being exchanged, roman artifacts are ending up.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: Then suddenly like something occurs and you know everyone seems friendly until they're not.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: That's one theory, but again, we don't have written records of what's going on, um, and so that's, that's the stuff that I like to bring out.
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: It's the idea of, like, we're looking at a world where, you know, the stuff that's recorded is very much coming from historians and high level and that sort of stuff, but we're now needing to go down into the normal lives of people and try and figure out from looking at these settlements what's actually going on, and that's, yeah, that's the fun of it.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: I hope I bring that across in my tours oh yeah, well, you're bringing that across on this podcast, alex.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Definitely, uh, absolutely fascinating now.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: So you started the tours in 2013 and I know you.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: You started with your walking tours in newcastle and you've grown since then.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: One thing that fascinated me that I read on your website was that you started by reading every book in the Newcastle Library's local history section.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: So that is some commitment.
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I jokingly say that one thing that helped me with my business was unemployment.
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: So I finished university of the year 2013.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: And that's when the first wave, let's say, of our global recessions hit, and so trying to apply for jobs in that period was incredibly difficult 2012 into 2013.
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: And so I was really struggling.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: I wanted to be involved in business development in the northeast of England.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: That was something I was very passionate about.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: I wanted to be involved in investment to the region, showing the region off that sort of stuff.
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: I just couldn't get a job in that region, in that area.
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: It was a very hard time for a lot of people and it was really sort of like a watershed for, I think, a lot of the stuff that we see in our modern age.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: And with that I basically thought I was having a bit of a moan to my family.
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: And when I had a bit of a moan to my family, I just remember sitting there and just go.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: I just want to have a job and, like one of my family members just said, well, why don't you start your own business then?
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: And then from that I then sat down and really thought about what I could do.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: I sort of had a brainstorming session with, with close family members, and then it's just like this.
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: This beginning of what I was tours became came out of the idea of doing walking tours where it could be outdoors, physically fit, meeting people from all over the world, showing them the region that I loved, and just doing something that was strong with my skills, because I've always had a good ability to speak and to be able to take huge amounts of data and then to be able to convey them in a nuanced manner.
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: That's something I really enjoy.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: And so I started off and I just basically if anyone else here has ever started a business and I'm sure there's some people on your podcast who are entrepreneurs, or even yourself yeah, I actually sat down in a in a coffee shop.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: I was one of those terrible people who would buy one coffee and then nurse it for an entire six or eight hours, you know, and just try and get through, because I was.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: I was very much bootstrapping it in those early days and I would go to library, get a pile of books, sit down with my notebook beside me, read a chapter, then write it down, and even if I didn't understand something in particular, I'd take notes.
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: One really good example, and I think if you're from the North East you'll know about this.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: But there was a group of people in the early modern period in Newcastle called the Keelmen, and the Keelmen kept being mentioned their uniforms, the way they dressed, their culture but no one ever explained what a Keelman was in any of these books.
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: I couldn't find any explanation in the early days when I started out, until eventually I found one of my friends who was actually from Sunderland, so there's a sort of a regional thing there.
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: One of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the northeast of England is that we're very tribal, but from Sunderland.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: They also had Keelmen.
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: And he said oh well, don't you know where Keelmen is?
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: I said, no, none of the books tell me, because all the local historians just presumed that whoever was reading the book would know where Keelmen was, and so he explained it.
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: And just for anyone listening, a keel was a special type of flat-bottomed boat that would carry up to about 50 tons of coal.
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: Because the northeast of England was a huge coal mining area from probably around the Elizabethan time.
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: Elizabeth I right the way through until the 1970s or so, with the last Northumbrian coal mine closing in 2008.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: And at the height of the Victorian period the northeast of England was producing 19% of Britain's coal, which is just a huge amount that was coming out of like Newcastle.
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: So, as some of you may have heard and I hear this a lot with international travellers there's an expression saying coals to Newcastle, which means a pointless exercise to the idea of like selling coal to new people in Newcastle.
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: No, they didn't do that and actually we know across in Gateshead, where some of the coal streams so Gateshead was on the south bank of the River Tyne, just opposite Newcastle People were digging their own illegal coal mines, as in like they would have their houses, they would take up the floorboards, they would dig down and they would take up the floorboards, they would dig down and they would create what's called a bell coal mine.
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: So they would have these uh shafts down and it would open up, like if you can think of a big old bell you would see in a town hall or a church, and they would dig a coal mine like that, extract the coal and then fill it in with the family's rubbish, so like, and then they would sell the excess to to local people.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: So that was, that was one of the things that was going on.
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: So, like in the Northeast, sometimes when people build they find unrecorded coal mines because it's been going on, like coal mining that we know of has been going back to the 1200s that's how long people have been mining coal in the region.
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: So sometimes they're just not on maps.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: And I have a friend who's a civil engineer and he's experienced that himself where he was doing a house and they found an unrecorded coal mine.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: So it happened.
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: It's brilliant, that's incredible.
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: He wasn't too pleased about that.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: No, I bet he wasn't yeah.
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: The killmen transported the coal up and down the river past all the medieval bridges, because the big ships couldn't get past the bridges, and so they would transport it from the the the quayside, from the um, from what's called a stave, which is a wooden transport system to take the coal out of the hills down into the riverside and they would bring them along and the keelmen would regularly get into uh conflict with the civil authorities and would be on strike and stuff.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: So that that was.
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: It's a big part of the sort of the history of the the quayside and the industrial heritage of the northeast of england well, no, really interesting.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm a coal miner's granddaughter, so, yeah, I come from a coal mining family, though, uh, on one side, on my mom's side, um, yeah, so strong coal mining uh background, as you say, in the in the northeast, I'm sure most of us have got relatives who were down the mines, for sure.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Um, now I want to talk about, um, how your business has grown since then, because obviously we're talking, we're now 12 years on.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: We've had, we've had the, the, unfortunately a few COVID years, but since, since, uh, two years, the last few years since COVID, you've you've grown and you've started to do, to, say, half day and a multi-day tour.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: So should we talk about those tours that you're offering now?
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: And, um, you know how do they differ from the traditional kind of idea of a walking tour?
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: so I've moved slightly away from walking tours and I do guided full-day tours, as they the core of my business and, with that being the case, what I do is I collect my customers on the morning of the tour, either from their accommodation or from one of the train stations.
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: We then travel out and each tour is themed around areas of the Northeast.
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: So we've talked a lot about my Hadrian's Wall tour.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: So I talk about I take them along and show them the Roman frontier and how the Romans interacted with the natives, and also the other nuances of that as well.
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: But I also have a Bambra and Lindisfarne tour which I take people up to.
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: Bambra, which is one of the capitals of the kings of Northumbria, these Anglo-Saxon kings who mixed and interacted with the native British.
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: And then, obviously, there's the famous story of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, which is recorded in Bede's Ecclesiastical History, bede being one of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity which is recorded in Bede's ecclesiastical history, bede being one of the first English historians and is another North East individual who was a religious figure within the North East of England.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: So we've got these stories and I take people up there and show people where they are.
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: I also offer an Anglo-Saxon Northumbria tour where we go into the Anglo-Saxon sites, the heritage and the history of where the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria was.
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: When people hear there's a modern county called Northumberland, which is the border county, it goes from Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England right the way up to the Scottish border.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: But Northumbria included parts of the Scottish borders Northumberland, cumbria County, durham, parts well, yorkshire and also parts of Lancaster and went right the way down to where modern day Liverpool is.
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: So that was a massive kingdom.
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: It was the kingdom of Central Britain, as some archaeologists refer to it as, and so when you think of Central Britain, as some archaeologists refer to it as, and so when you think of central Britain, you know basically from South Yorkshire right the way up to the Scottish borders.
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: And the reason why it gets its name is because you have the River Humber, the Humber estuary, coming in at the southern part of Yorkshire.
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: So Northumbria was the kingdom of all the peoples who lived north of the River Humber.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: That's how large it was and significant.
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: So I try and take that in in the tour.
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: Then I also have tours of Durham, durham Cathedral, where you have the story of, first of all St Cuthbert, who was a really important Northumbrian bishop and a very important religious figure during the Anglo-Saxon period, but then, after his death, he became a saint and when he became a saint his relics were used to found Durham Cathedral and the Prince Bishops of County Durham were some of the most influential religious figures, but also they had their own kingdom, basically within England.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: They were referred to as Prince Bishops because they were allowed to have independence from the monarchy and basically had their own what's called a palatinate within England.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: So highly powerful and influential figures who controlled huge amounts of land throughout County Durham and also Northumberland and even had influence in one of the famous ones, like Bishop Anthony Beck he actually was one of Edward I's generals and led battles against Robert the Bruce.
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: These guys are very important as one third of the bishops are religious figures, one third are basically military men and one third probably shouldn't have been bishops.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: But that's a good explanation to get your head around it.
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: In the most simplest terms and I mean no offence by that it's just trying to cover some of that history and heritage.
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: And then I also do prehistoric tours.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: I take people out and show them.
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: You know prehistoric places in Northumberland, things like stone circles, ancient Bronze Age burial mounds, hill forts, and so that's more specialist in archaeology, because obviously, when you're dealing with something that is from 9 000 bc so something about 11 000 years old, you don't have structures above the ground.
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: But what you can do is you can take you take someone to a place where the actual excavations happened and say, well, the stone age britons were living right here, this is what they were like, this is their community, this is the landscape they lived in and this is what happened to them.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: And then you go through to the neolithic, the new stone age, and talk what happened to them.
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: And then you go through to the Neolithic, the New Stone Age, and talk about that population who brought farming.
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: Then you go into the Bronze Age, where they were the first metal workers, and talk about them.
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: And those Bronze Age people would eventually become the people we recognize as the Iron Age Britons, who then had the very interesting interactions with the Romans.
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: So you get the precursor to the Roman history.
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: And then, alongside that as well, I do specialist tours covering the two powerful groups within County Durham, which is the Neville family who owned Raby Castle, and also the Bishops of Durham and their palace at Bishop Auckland.
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: So there's a lot more tours than that.
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: Those are the core full-day tours and then I also have the multi-day tours, tours which are when people have a specialist interest.
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: So, for instance, I've done tours based around the idea of faith.
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: So people want to search about the faith in the northeast.
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: So we go from prehistoric and roman beliefs right the way through to the dawn of christianity and other elements like that as well, and so we go into the story of faith in the region, visiting churches, ancient sites and discuss all of that from three to five days long.
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: There's a specialist Roman tour where we go really in-depth into the Romans.
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: I take people around all of the different Roman sites.
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: That again goes from York right the way up to the Scottish borders, and then also I do castles as well, which is more of a medieval tour but digs into the sort of Anglo Scottish wars, the conflicts between, obviously, the kings of England, the kings of Scots and the, the rivalries between both sides there and how, how that basically shaped the region, which is, which is amazing and I can touch on that in a little bit because those wars basically created the landscape that we see today when you travel through places like Northumberland and County Durham.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: I was going to say I'm always very proud of the fact that Northumberland has the most castles in the whole of England.
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: Yes, well, it's a side effect of, unfortunately, what you could describe as 300 years of pure warfare, which you know.
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: You go to places like the midlands in england and you have quite a lot of large to medium to large size towns and cities.
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: You come to northumberland, newcastle in and durham are the two cities and sunderland as well sorry, newcastle, sunderland, durham and then, as you go further north, it's small to medium-sized towns.
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: You know, like, as you mentioned, uh, I think, when we were preparing this, there's a town called morpeth and a town called hexam, which we've mentioned in the podcast already, and there's berwick upon tweed.
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: And then you have the smaller towns, such as places like wooler, core bridge, um prudder, places like that um amble.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: You know these are smaller towns.
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: We don't have the medium-sized towns.
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: The reason why is because of this long-term conflict.
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: You go to the Scottish Borders as well.
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: You'll find a lot of their towns are of a similar size to the ones in Northumberland.
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: It's because they never got that chance to develop.
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: You know, you talk about these heroes of the Scottish Independence Wars, like William Wallace and Robert the Bruce In Northumberland they ain't heroes.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: They are not our heroes at all, because Northumberland had a population of 120,000 before the Anglo-Scottish wars.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: At the end it had 18.
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: Many people were being driven out and stuff like that, and Bruce harrowed the area.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: But at the same time I want to be clear.
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: I'm not saying Edward, I was a saint and he was the good guy in this.
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: He did equal stuff to Scotland.
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: That was just as horrific.
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: But I do sometimes wince when you get people going.
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: Oh you know, wallace was this pure-hearted, amazing guy like you see in Braveheart and I'm like no, neither was Bruce.
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: These guys were opportunists and they saw a way of of getting into power just as edward the first did, and they.
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: They went out of their way to carve kingdoms, to carve lands, to wealth and to inflict horrible things on normal people.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: So I was gonna say I was just about to say, in the normal people, the everyday people are kind of stuck in the middle of all of this.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: Well, all this kind of power games is going on and with it, and we do forget, don't, with that, there are just normal, ordinary people living their lives or trying to live their lives at this time, in these periods of history, don't we?
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: And I know you're very, very passionate about all the different um times eras that you've talked about, and you know you talk about romans and anglo-saxons, medieval themes.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: Do you have a favorite or are you happy to do just the whole?
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: the whole spectrum it's.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: It's really hard because some people there's two sides to this question.
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: Some people sometimes ask me do you ever get bored doing the same tours and you know delivering the same information?
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: But I think what really I love is when I'm doing a tour and I can make it personal to the people who are on the tour.
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: So everyone has their own interests.
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: I've had people who are medical professionals on the tour and they want to know about medicine in the past, so I know about that.
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: Some people you know have another interest entirely.
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: It's family history.
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: Some people are interested in, you know, as I've mentioned, the Anglo-Scottish wars or stuff like that.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: So every tour is different because of who's on it and you bring your own life experiences to the tour and then it's connecting those life experience and going well.
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: This is the way it was in the past and this is also what it means for us today and how all ties together In those ways.
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: I my favorite period, I think, is I love periods that are quite tumultuous.
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: So the end of Roman Britain is one where we don't know much about it.
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: We're starting to get a better and better image because of science advancing and archaeology advancing, but that sort of period from 400, well, 350 AD right the way through to probably around about the 700s is a period I find absolutely fascinating.
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: And I love In the same way the Norman conquest till about 1200.
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: I find so just for anyone who doesn't know English history 1066 is generally considered with the date of the Norman invasion and then the period after that was a very conflicted period in British history.
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: So I find those sort of periods amazing because you have these new formations, these transformations, the changes, anything like that, especially the Roman invasion of Northumberland, and even like the Bronze Age migration where we have a new population coming into the British Isles around 2500 BC.
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: That's the stuff that gets me really excited because it's like that pioneering, that mixing, that change and transformation.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: Those things I think we can learn a lot about the human experience.
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: We just get a sense of what's happening as people create new stories in those times, either legitimizing some horrific stuff or getting through and having their story remembered through oral or recorded traditions, and that stuff I think is just it gets me going, oh no, it's fantastic.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: Now we'll'll move on a bit of practical tour information.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: So if you listen to the podcast and you're thinking, yeah, I, I want to go out on a half day or full day or multi-day tour, uh, with alex, and and why wouldn't you?
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: I tell you what, when I'm coming back, I'm gonna book a tour with you, alex, because there's some stuff I want to find out about.
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, I grew up in the area and and just talking to you now I'm kind of like, oh, I know I can chat to you about, about some of the things that I'm interested in and wanting to know that I feel like I've never actually thought about before.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: So about if people want to book your tour, how many people can you cater for from minimum to maximum?
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: so I normally do tours.
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: My own vehicle is a six-seater so I can take up to groups of six in a vehicle at any one time.
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: So that can be a mixed group of you know, free twos or whatever works well.
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: On occasion I have done solo tours and I take people out by themselves, but it just depends on the day and who's actually booked on.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: Though I have organized larger groups where a group has they're already booked, their coach or they would like me to access an intermediary there.
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: So I've done groups of 70, 80, 90.
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: Um, I remember a few years ago I did a group of 160 for a dutch university and last year I did a tour of 540 where I brought on to my freelance guides and it was a larger group and we did it over the course of three days with different groups having tours at different times.
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: That was a really lovely experience and it was good fun there.
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: So I don't know if your listeners will probably have a group of 540, but if they can give me a bit of a heads up.
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: That one just took a wee bit of logistical work as you understand, um, but, like, I like to keep the group sizes slightly smaller.
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: So, like, even a group of up to you know, 80 can still feel intimate because you can bring on two or three other guides who work with me, who I know have the you know, they are also, uh, archaeologists, professional archaeologists or have an experience in history and storytelling.
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: And there's about three or four close people who I work with who I think are absolutely amazing, and so that's why I employ them as my freelancers.
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: And then we could do a group tour like that, where it's a larger group and we focus in on stuff like that.
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: Those are often multi-day tours in their own right, or if you just have, like, this is a few of you and you want to go out together, I can work that as well, and it'd either be me or one of my freelancers who would deliver the tour, um, normally up to a group size of about anywhere between three and six, depending on, uh, which one of us is doing it and which vehicle is in use.
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: So those are the sort of things I do with my, with my tours, and obviously, as the business is growing, I'm always looking to do more.
• 43:42
  Speaker 3: I'd love to expand with small buses and involve a sort of it's still that high-end bespoke nature of the tours, so that when groups are coming on board it's comfortable, it's enjoyable and we're doing the route there, that's always good fun.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: Anna, that sounds brilliant and are all tours suitable for all ages and fitness levels?
• 44:04
  Speaker 3: yes, I would say that with children on tours.
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: I generally say that, um, I am good at working with kids and a lot of my guides also have experience in historical education or have worked in museums and schools.
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: Just with the information and length of, I often find that 10 plus is a good rule of thumb, just because younger children sometimes find it a bit more tiring or stuff like that, especially if you've done a few days in advance.
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: And I don't see as an up age limit of the tour, because even if we're doing a Hadrian's Wall tour, there are areas of the wall that are accessible.
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: It's not all pure up and down cliff faces.
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: If you type Hadron's Wall into Google, let's say, you'll suddenly see these very dramatic sceneries of these cliff faces and the wall on the top of it.
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: It's not all like that and you can make it to a bespoke and I always want to make sure that customers have the best experience.
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: I had a tour about I think it was four years ago now, and this is one where I came away buzzing at the end of the tour.
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: It was a challenge but it was really good fun to do it, because I had a visually impaired group and I was doing a walking tour of Newcastle.
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: Now they didn't tell me that they were visually impaired until the tour started, because they had had experiences where people had cancelled the tour on them because they said oh, you're blind, so therefore we don't want to take you on a tour.
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: And they hadn't said that.
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: But you could tell that there was an element of probably discrimination, because the guide would just go I don't know what I'm going to do with them.
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: And so suddenly you have to change the whole tour because you can't go.
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: Look over there, it's not possible.
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: So what you do instead is you say what you're standing in front of now is a Georgian building in Newcastle.
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: The sandstone is a golden yellow colour.
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: You feel the sandstone here it's quite a strong sandstone, but it can be worn down over time.
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: And sandstone here it's quite a strong sandstone, but it can be worn down over time and a lot of the bricks have been replaced.
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: In the 1990s onwards, because of the fact that Newcastle had so much industrial heritage, and the burning of the coal around here meant that this golden yellow sandstone had gone black with coal soot and the whole city was generally black, and it's been clean since the 90s with heritage, lottery money, and so you do that storytelling where you paint the picture in someone's mind.
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: And by painting the picture in someone's mind you can do a tour where, yes, for two hours I suddenly had to go.
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: All right, I can't say, look, what I have to say is I have to describe it, I have to do physical, the senses that are there and work from that.
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: So if a group tells me, you know, we have people who have mobility issues and stuff like that, we will do our best to modify it.
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: Some things, for instance, like if you wanted to do like an off-road wheelchair tour of Hadrian's Wall, I might say that another provider might be better suited than myself.
• 46:58
  Speaker 3: But if there was like a, you know, you say, oh, we just need to go a little bit slower.
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: Because, you know, just this week actually, I had a lady who contacted me and she said, look, my foot is in a boot because I broke my foot beforehand.
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: Can we go a bit more of a different pace or can we make it a bit more comfortable?
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: And I was able to modify the tour for her.
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: So I don't want anyone ever to sit down and go oh, because of this reason I can't do a tour, we'll work the tour around it, because the thing is me and my guides, we know our region, we love it and if we can't do a place, like going back to Hadron's Wall again, there's a place called Halsteads, one of my favourite forts.
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: But Halsteads is on a hill slope.
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: Its Roman name, veracovium, literally means the settlement on a hillside, so for some people with impairment that's not suitable.
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: But there are sites that are much flatter and so you can modify the tour and take people to a Roman fort.
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: You can take people and still tell the same story, which is to the archaeology and the information in that area.
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: So I hope that makes sense when I'm saying about, like you know, group sizes and also alongside that as well, like how you modify a tour, because you know I have my on-the-shelf tour, I deliver, but it doesn't mean that that can't be changed to make sure that you know people who are visiting get the best experience possible now they just have to contact you and kind of let you know what, what, what it is that they're after, and then you can, yeah, have that conversation it's on the morning of the tour and you suddenly say something to me.
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: I can try and make small, small changes, but it is best to have, you know, some knowledge.
• 48:35
  Speaker 3: And I know that's hard because I mean, I had a tour earlier in the year where the lady had been in York the day before and she'd stepped off a curb and she'd broken her foot and she didn't know.
• 48:45
  Speaker 3: She actually messaged me afterwards, about a month later.
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: Um, she was really lovely, she'd done a review and sent me a bit of feedback and she said I was just, you know, I thought I twisted my foot, I had a stand and I broke my foot in York and she had done a whole tour around the region and she'd been limping the whole way because she thought she'd sprained it.
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: And I just, you know that was one where we did modify the tour for her and make it much more comfortable, but she obviously thought she had a sprain and she had a broken foot, which I mean, that's just a you, you're someone's vacation, it's uh yeah, that's not, that's right.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: I've got a friend of mine who does that every time she goes on holiday.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: She's done it three times now.
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: So the joke is, none of us want to go on a trip with Melissa, but anyway.
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: So, if, how far in advance do people need to book?
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: If they're going to book with you, I mean, is it busier?
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: Obviously in the summer months, I'm guessing.
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: Um, so, and obviously I'm going to put a link in the show notes to your website, um, but you know, if, if somebody's thinking, um, they wanted to in the next month or two, is it too late, or you know how, how soon should they get in touch with you?
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: so I would say, um, anywhere between uh one to three months at the start of a season is always a good rule of thumb.
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: It's really good to sort of get that in the diary and start working and that means I have time to.
• 50:05
  Speaker 3: If you wanted a more bespoke route or anything like that, I can plan that.
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: If you contact me on the week of the date you wish, I can still probably get you in on a tour or contact one of my guides.
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: There is occasions where you might be a little bit disappointed, just because you know pre booking and the routes are already in place and let's say I might have all Bamber and Lindisfarne tours and one Bishop, I might have four Bamber and Lindisfarne tours and one Rabian Bishop, auckland and you would like to go to Hadrian's Wall and I can't fit you in.
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: But what I can do is tell you what I do have running.
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: So you know, there is always elements where I can say, oh, this Tuesday you could join the tour and we've got two spaces or stuff like that.
• 50:48
  Speaker 3: But it is that as you get closer to the date, unfortunately, the more bespoke nature of the tour and the availability will become less, less for you, which is just one of the side things, but if you give me plenty of time I'll be able to work out things for you and your group and make it work as best as possible.
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: And that's always good, and I work throughout the year.
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: I do take Christmas off and Easter off, which are my times where I like to take some time off and occasionally a book of time in the summer, but that is, that's all my times.
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: But I've had people who've come and wanted to do stuff in December and January and February and that works just as well, though obviously I always say you know, prepare for any sort of weather.
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: We do sometimes get nice long summers, but the one thing that is always takes people by surprise is that the region can be quite windy.
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: So I think a lot of international travellers when they think of the British Isles, they think of rain.
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: Now that has been heavily informed by the Atlantic coast of Scotland, of the north west of England, so the Lake District and Devon and Cornwallwall, which as well get exposed to the Atlantic temperatures.
• 51:59
  Speaker 3: The east coast of Britain is actually remarkably dry, but we get a lot of wind.
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: So sometimes when people come on tours, what surprises them is it could be a lovely warm day, but there's always a wind in the background.
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: So I always suggest, when you're coming, pack so that you can, you know, obviously have layers, but also to have something that will protect you from the wind, because that's always something that I think people don't always think about.
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: Um there, and I mean I had some ladies at the start of this week from florida and when they came, uh, they obviously are used to much warmer temperatures.
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: It was, in my opinion, a warm day.
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: It was around about uh 24 degrees celsius, which I'm trying to work that out in fahrenheit, um, I want to say 60s to 70s fahrenheit I think it's about 60 something, yeah yeah, yeah, um, to them, it's still far too cold for me.
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: It was, you know, a great day.
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: I had my t-shirt, uh, short sleeves, all of that.
• 52:54
  Speaker 3: I was having a great time.
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: They, on the other hand, felt that they needed to have their jumpers on, which uh did make me chuckle.
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: But I understand that.
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: You know the northeast of England isn't Florida or Texas, or you know even the south of France, because, trust us, you know those places have got, you know, much nicer or warmer climates.
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: Well, I have to say, as you know, I'm from Northumberumberland.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: I was born and brought up in Northumberland, but the one thing that drove me away from Northumberland was, I'm afraid, the weather and the wind, um.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: So I have to say I I don't miss the the the coolness of the weather up there, because obviously I live in, live in Brisbane, um, where we have warmer temperatures, so I probably would have found it a bit chilly as well this week, I have to say one thing I will say I'm just gonna, I was gonna say alex one thing I'm gonna say that I do miss of the, of those long days of just daylight that you get, um, which gives you far longer to go out and explore.
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: It really does, uh, gives you the county on a plate, I think, because you just have so much time you can go out and enjoy, enjoy, exploring it.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah, so just two points on that.
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: So at the moment we're in July and it's becoming light around about five in the morning and it's still light until 10 o'clock at night.
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: So we're getting long, long days in July and stuff like that.
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: So even after your tour, you know you can go back to your hotel, you can enjoy our warm weather I wouldn't say warmer weather but you can sit outside, you can, you know, go to a restaurant and it'll still be light, and so you get that experience where you know your days are longer and you can really enjoy other things as well.
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: So it's basing yourself in places like Newcastle, annex, places like that.
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: Since COVID we've actually started moving more towards outdoor dining and stuff in summer and we really enjoy it.
• 54:44
  Speaker 3: So that's always good there, and most hotels and restaurants actually do outdoor seating with blankets.
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: So for customers who do find that wee chill, you can just have a blanket and still enjoy your glass of wine or beer or whatever you're fancying in the evening and have a lovely time, and that's something that is proper class or really good oh, you see, you make it.
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: You make me homesick now, because I just can see myself going to holy island and sitting in a, in sitting on the uh pub garden there with a with a drink and enjoying the, the warmth and the, the summer sunshine.
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: That would be really nice.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: Maybe I'll get to do that in a few weeks.
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: I never know.
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: Not know.
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: You've guided people from all over the world, um, are there any standout kind of stories or moments from your tours over the last sort of 12, 13 years?
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: Alex?
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: I think, um, each tour has its own moments, which is really lovely.
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: So, like I, as you say, over the past 13 years met so many different people and I think that what's lovely for me is seeing their response to two different parts of Northumberland, to or to places in County Durham and stuff like that.
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: So I, for instance, have done a tour, for this was just last month, actually for a confirmation group, so as a part of the Anglican Communion, you can do a confirmation course before you do your confirmation, and so this was a group from North America who came across for it, and I just remember we were at Lindisfarne and they stood in the location where the Shrine of St Cuthbert had been and they just had 20 minutes of silent prayer in Lindisfarne Priory, which was.
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: So it was a wonderful, beautiful spiritual moment, spiritual moment For other customers, like for them.
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: They want to travel through the landscape and they love going, when I say off-road, off the main road, so you're onto the smaller A roads and B roads of Northumberland and you get to see the hills and the landscape, but then that is their space.
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: I often talk about something this is an idea that you find a lot in um scottish and irish culture, but there's something called fin space and it's the idea of where heaven touches earth, uh, the idea of some place where you feel close to heaven, and I love helping people on your tours just to experience their own little thin space during their vacation.
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: So you know, sometimes it's coming over the hills and seeing the cheviots for the first time with you know the, the millfield valley, which is a lovely, um fertile valley in northumberland, surrounded by big hills on either side, and they see that for the first time.
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: They're like wow and stuff like that.
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: Or going inside durham cathedral and being able to say, look, this was built in 40 years and was you know this amazing cathedral and it's three times older than the United States.
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: Or like going around and being able to show you know where some of the first human settlers lived on the coastline.
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: Or to go inside Newcastle's castle and say, well, this is the castle that gave the city its name.
• 57:58
  Speaker 3: You know, each of those things are really special in their own ways.
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: So it's really hard for me, because each tour has their own lovely moments, to pick out one or a story where I can go.
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that was it that I really remember as well, as there have been plenty of funny moments as well, which I definitely remember.
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: It sounds like all of them.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: I was going to ask you what your favourite thing is about being a guide, but you can hear it just in your voice when you talk about it the passion and the enjoyment and your love for what you do and showcasing the north-east of England.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: It's lovely to hear.
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: What about future plans, alex.
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: Have you got any ideas for new tours or kind of what are you hoping to kind of expand to?
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: So I'm working on my Scottish Borders tour in a minute.
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: So that's me wanting to sort of develop that history and heritage of the area of wider Northumbria, the old kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, but also talking about the Anglo-Scottish borders and stuff like that and connecting that in as well.
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: So that's something I've been working on at the minute and while I've got some downtime I've been researching that in quite a lot of depth and that's something that I'm really enjoying.
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: But in the next few years I'm really looking to try and work with other guides in locations like the Lake District, like Yorkshire, like the rest of Scotland, who are also archaeologists, so that I can take the learning I've had and then say, right, let's develop tours for these regions and branch out isles tours.
• 59:36
  Speaker 3: Now, obviously that takes time, that takes partnerships and it's not something that I'm going to be launching in the next month or two.
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: But my long-term goal is to work with those people to develop the Isles Tours tour, guiding across probably northern Britain and in other areas as well, and tell those stories that can really bring bring the region to life.
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: So that's something I'm hoping to do in the future.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: Oh no, it sounds very exciting.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: Now, I know, I know we've got an announcement, you've got an announcement in a moment to make.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: So if you're listening to the podcast and you're thinking about booking with Alex, hang on, because he's got some exciting news to share.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: But before we do that, there's always one question I ask at the end of the podcast, and that is what would be the number one tip you would share with anybody visiting the northeast for the first time so my tip would be to choose a theme for your first visit.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: So, for instance, in the northeast we have beautiful coastlines, so you could choose coasts, or you could choose market towns.
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 3: You could choose hill walking and go out into the hills of the north pennines, the cheviots.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 3: You could choose, uh, the fact you want to try out newcastle and durham and see city life here and experience those ancient towns and cities.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: And when you choose a theme, build your visit around that theme, because the problem is is that if you came here and just try and do everything at once, you're going to get overwhelmed.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: It's like visiting any other region.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: You have to be quite specific in your first visit, because you'll do what you love to do and you'll figure out what your love is.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 3: And even if you didn't work with me, let's say, as your tour guide and you just decided to go with other guides, there are so many amazing guides, so many amazing attractions, so many amazing things to do in this region that I think you would have a great time no matter what.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: Because, for instance, I can't take you out on a nature walk, but there are companies that do nature photography in the region.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: There are people that take you out in a boat, so Billy Shields Boat Company they take you out and you can see seals and orcas and puffins and travel around the coast of the Northeast.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: You can go and do a pub tour.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: You know I don't do pub tours, but there are some amazing guides who can take you on a pub tour or a food tour of the Northeast, and you know those are things that I don't do.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: But if you choose what you want, your theme for your visit, I don't think you'll be disappointed whatsoever.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: And, uh, that would be my.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: My sort of statement to anyone who who wants to visit here is figure out what you love and then focus in on that, and when you do that you're going to have the best time, because I think the people here are open, welcoming, friendly, communal.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: The landscape, the history, the culture it all brings it together.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 3: And I don't like when people say you're an undiscovered gem or stuff like that, because we are here but we're just not on the main beaten track.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: And when we're not on the main beaten track track, it's.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: One of my dreams is to help us to become that, but in a way that's sustainable, brings people here and develops a love for the region, rather than it being sort of like, um, a tacky tourist item that you pick up in a in a wee corner shop.
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: This is something that I want you to cherish for the for the rest of your life.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of, there's a huge amount of depth, and I'm going to talk about Northumberland.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: So.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: So my tip and I'm going to I'm going to chip in on this one.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: I really am, alex, so I'm from Northumberland, proudly from Northumberland, and if you listen to this podcast and you are visiting England and you're planning to travel which many of you may do from London to York, and then you're thinking I'm going to go from York and I'm going to head up to Edinburgh, do me a favour, please, please, do not just go from York to Edinburgh.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: There's a massive amount of beautiful countryside and history and culture to experience in the North East of England.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: So do me a favour and promise me that you will stop off and spend some time exploring the beautiful northeast, and with Alex as well as your guide would be absolutely perfect.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: So, alex, you have a surprise for our listeners, so would you like to share what that is?
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: Yes, so I would like to offer to the listeners of the UK travel planning podcast a discount of 10% on a direct booking with me.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 3: So when you contact IELTS, either contact me directly by email and just quote the UK travel planning discount code of UKTP10, or you can also do it through a direct booking on my website, which is wwwisletourscouk, which is Isles, spelt I-L-E-S.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 3: Unfortunately, one of my ancestors lived on land that belonged to a Norman knight and so because of that, we have the French spelling of the word Iles rather than anything else, which causes a great deal of confusion.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: But yes, as I said, it's wwwioles I-L-E-S tours T-O-U-R-Scouk and the discount code is UKTP10.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 3: And if you would even quote that through the contact us page, if you want to do something more bespoke, or if instead you would just like to get one of the tours off the website and just book that way, then put that in on the promotional code section of the booking and then from there you'll get a 10% discount which you can enjoy on the tour.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: And that's valid for tours booked in 2025, Alex.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: That is yes.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: Anyway, alex, it's been absolutely fantastic to talk to you this week.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: It's always a joy to talk to somebody about Northumberland anyway, but it's just your love for it and passion for it, and your tours sound amazing, so I am so pleased that we are able to work together and come on the podcast today.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: So thanks very much.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me and it's been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to hopefully speaking again in the future and also hopefully hosting some of your guests, thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of the UK Travel Planning Podcast.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: As always, show notes can be found at uktravelplanningcom.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: If you've enjoyed the show, why not leave us feedback via text or a review on your favourite podcast app?
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: We love to hear from you and you never know, you may receive a shout out in a future episode.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: But, as always, that just leaves me to say until next week.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: Happy UK travel planning.