We first fell in love with this little cottage in 2001, and bought it so we could enjoy country weekends and school holidays with our two children, Jack and Olivia, then aged 7 and 6. We spent so much time here, walking, picnics, board games and picking blackberries. We loved the endless cycle rides up ‘pudding hill’ to the Tankerville Arms in Eglingham for lunch – puddings only for those who managed the steep up hill challenge out of Beanley!
We have vivid memories of foot and mouth disease, being snowed in at Christmas, avoiding a flood by a whisker on the night of my 40th birthday in 2008, taking all the furniture upstairs as the water crept higher. Our gorgeous black Labrador Connie was born next door at Laura’s and we brought her home to the cottage and fell in love with her, taking her on our bike rides in a trailer. We had Christmases here, family and friends to stay, our first mobile phone – but the only signal was at the top of the hill! We watched the quarry being quarried, then transformed into an amazing wildlife park. We saw salmon leap in the Breamish, swallows nest at our bedroom window and deer peep out from trees as we walked our favourite Castle hill near Whittingham.
We started to rent it out after a major refurbishment, and it literally saved the day when redundancy hit us hard. It was rented out most of the time, and we stayed a bit in the Autumn and winter. We brought our third child Ben only a few times, usually in a backpack so we could clean the cottage ready for the next guests! When Ben was 3, in 2011 we reluctantly sold the cottage to our lovely neighbour Laura, so that we could realise our dream of setting up our own Cullercoats Brewery. We missed Branton badly but rarely visited, busy brewing, chasing after teenagers and an energetic pre-schooler.
Fly forward to 2021 and lock down and the pandemic brought our adult children home more often, and we holidayed together now and then. A last minute decision to see if the cottage was free for half term in 2023 brought us all together, including a fiancé and a girlfriend, and our new black Labrador Isla, now 3 years old. We spent a blissful week reminiscing and doing all our favourite things once more, pudding hill included! A throw away comment to Laura as we chatted on the doorstep, about how we’d leap at the chance to have the cottage again, ended with a stream of text messages over the week, and ultimately an agreement at Easter to buy it back from her. So here we are, proud ‘new’ owners of the cottage we have loved for years, full of our old books, furniture, crockery – even wedding presents, that we’d sold ‘all in’, a decade earlier.
We couldn’t be happier and are looking forward to many happy escapes, frequenting our favourite Northumberland haunts, cycling pudding hill, swimming in the north sea at Sugar Sands, inhaling the heather in the hills and watching swallows dive and curlews soar.
We’ll still be renting the cottage out, mainly in the summer, and hoping too that friends and family will join us for happy times in Northumberland. Our family is growing, and we hope the cottage will be a base for us all to come together and make even more Branton memories.
