A Camino is a Spanish word, toughly translating to pilgrimage and in this work, Jake Morris-Campbell, takes us on his own pilgrimage into the soul of Northumbria, from Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral, echoing the journey of St Cuthbert’s body after the Viking invasions of the 8th and 9th centuries. On his way, Jake takes Nick, the old miner’s lamp that belonged to his great grandfather, as a symbol of his own connection to the regional identity. Towards the end of the journey, he also retraces the steps taken by Wearside poet Bill Martin.
And the salt and the ash? What do they represent? Well, the salt refers to salt panning which was undertaken around what is now Amble on the Northumberland coast originally by monks, but which really got going in the 17th century. The ash can refer to the Ash path, which is found in South Tyneside and Sunderland, between Cleadon and Monkwearmouth and the scattering of poet Bill Martin’s ashes in 2016. More about Bill Martin later….
Camino
On his way south, Jake meets an interesting mixture of creative people on his Camino, with the link between identity and creativity firmly established. Accordingly, there is a healthy appreciation of public art on the route, including a herring gull taking flight in five stages at Sunderland.
Jake also mentions Networked North; a community of artisans, harking back to the development of the stained-glass windows of Bede’s time, while now sadly the National Glass Centre in Sunderland is closing. The book is a timely reminder that Northumbria is a place of music, poetry, literature and art.
The author clearly shows links between the past and the present
He poses important questions about what we take forward from our heritage as we build a new Northeast. This is something I have been wrestling with for a while. Without the coal industry in the region, the population of the Northeast would surely be only about 1 million, as opposed to 2.6 million.
We would be like East Anglia, largely rural and agricultural, but with some port activity at the mouths of our major rivers. Newcastle might be about the same size as Norwich and Sunderland about the same size as Ipswich.
Mining
However, for all the huge importance of the coal industry in the past, we know that we have to keep the coal in the ground now, as we face the challenges of the Climate Crisis. What we can take with us into the future, is the spirit of community and innovation that was wound up with coal in our heritage.
As the author states on p. 110: “The coming together of these artists to elevate the prosaic nature of their work, habitation and leisure might offer us helpful clues as to how, to quote the writer and thinker Dougald Hine, ‘a living culture carries its traditions, the only way it keeps them alive’. Paraphrasing Hine, as we ‘make good ruins’, we might start by asking what values and morals can guide us forwards. The former miners’ institute in Cambois, three miles away, is a good place to start looking.”
Mining will be an important part of our heritage for an awful long time to come.
Our heritage isn’t just about mining and nor is this book
The author expertly shows how the region is made up of layers of history, identity, work etc., and the way that sculpture, art, poetry etc. can represent the region and its identity. As part of the identity element, there is an interesting use of dialect words alongside more academic language.
Jake also presents us with a poetic view of the Northeast. Or rather two Northeast’s – the pretty, but slightly false one north of Amble, complete with second homes and Air BNB’s and the real, gritty one from Amble south where work is done. As a South Shields lad, Jake seems to be more at home in the land of work, than in the land of moneyed leisure to the north.
The importance of migration into the region going back to Roman times in forging our identity is also mentioned and how we need to be internationalist now, all exemplified by the renowned peaceful coexistence in South Shields, between the Yemeni community and local people.
Jarrow
The author also looks to the future. Speaking about Jarrow, Jake had this to say: “a place which went from the cradle of the Northumbrian enlightenment to the grave of industrial decline” and going back to the past, to go forward, “but the absence of a bigger cause does feel notable. Might we, emerging from the alienating effects of neoliberalism, put some faith in the values espoused by the monks of Jarrow?”
Jake also touches on the way that the Northeast has often been at the forefront of social movements and rightly mentions that Durham Aged Miners homes were the forerunners of government-led social housing.
Sunderland’s naval history is explored, including sailors as well as ship building, including Jack Crawford and William Elliott.
Remembering Poet Bill Martin
Part of the reason for the book being written is remembering the Wearside poet Bill Martin. Bill’s son, a friend of Jake, walks with him to Durham on the last leg, and offers his father’s remains to St Cuthbert, while the rest go into the Wear. Bill Martin wrote about the strike in 1984/5, and the author rightly points out that this history is largely hidden from the young people of Northumbria:
“At school, nobody taught us about the coal industry, nor about George Stephenson’s pioneering works of engineering, and we certainly didn’t learn anything about the 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Then again, attending a comprehensive school in South Tyneside from 1999 to 2004, when the Labour heir apparent David Miliband was our local MP, it seems clear why a Blairite vision of a North East secondary school curriculum would want to avoid our recent, embattled history.”
This is something that some of us are trying to change. From my experience, school children in the Northeast love hearing about their regional history; something that they can relate to and be inspired by.
Ending at the Durham Miners Gala, the author sees the link between the art of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the miners’ banners, both featuring elaborate artwork and often Christian themes. In so doing he neatly weaves two major strands of Northumbrian history together.
How heritage can be kept alive
Perhaps most of all, the author encourages us to think of what has been lost and how heritage can be kept alive. This is something that I have considered a great deal, about what makes the Northeast, the region that it is. Just as the image of a dead gannet found by the sea at one point on the journey, can be linked to Cuthbert’s love of birds and sea creatures and conservation – laws etc, so we can find inspiration from the past to help us over come the sadness with which we often look at our region today. Northumbria was a great kingdom, and our Northumbria can be great again.
This is an excellent and thought-provoking book, which encourages us to think about what we see as the soul of Northumbria and who we really are. It is also very accessible and an easy read.
Between the Salt and the Ash, by Jake Morris Campbell is published by University of Manchester Press
Peter Sagar in Conversation with Jake Morris-Campbell
What is your background?
My background is as a poet. I started writing poetry seriously about 15 years ago and through the process of doing a PhD in Creative Writing. My first manuscript was published in 2021. I was writing about the Northeast coast , South Shields where grew up, politics, sport… Poetry is my first love, but I felt I needed to do more
How did Between the Salt and the Ash come about?
One of the poems, which was popular was called ‘Davey’ which was about the conditions and status of a coal miner in the mid-20th century. I became obsessed with items in my nana’s and grandad’s house including nana’s pit lamp, which had it belonged her father legacy of his work on the mantelpiece.
So many traditions: shipbuilding and industry and now all that world is gone but I have gravitated towards it. I wanted to do more, and I was able to perform the poem at the Sage in 2021 and I was asked to bring along the lamp. Poetry is one way of responding to this; narrative nonfiction was the way to answer the questions of coming up brings us towards the remembering the past.
William Martin
Since 2016 I’ve been doing a pilgrimage aware of finding the landscape past present and future in memory of the poet William Martin, who walked from Silksworth in Sunderland to Durham Cathedral every summer solstice retracing the footsteps he took in the 1980s at the time of the Miners’ strike.
His poetry documents a much older journey, that of St Cuthbert’s entourage on their way to what became Durham Cathedral, so that when you go into Durham Cathedral you are walking into two separate pasts: the industrial heritage with the Durham Miners Gala etc and an earlier past. I realised that we could recreate through travel log I could recreate a version of the journey of St Cuthbert’s body. This is what instigated it.
Once I had realised that a key area was around Jarrow and Wearmouth in the middle, I travelled down the Northumberland coast, and you think you know it well; actually, there is much more complexity to it. I found people to take me through those places.
Catherine, who is an artist using natural materials, was one of them and was a really good guide. I was able to explore differences in Northumberland such as class differences between Amble and further north as well as things like the second homes and Air BNBs up the coast that have become really a bit of a problem.
How important is a sense of identity and Heritage to People In the Northeast?
To attempt to answer, there is a very strong sense in the Northeast, which is not shared by everybody, but by many of having a good sense of where they’re from, be it parish town city or whatever and the quite longstanding past riven by conflict with a geography of being placed between Scotland and the North Sea and the rest of England. People feel that the Northeast is slightly separate.
The problem with that is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you think that way, a small, minded mentality can occur and sometimes people don’t want to look beyond the Northeast.
Dan Jackson talks about the fault line between Tyne and Wear and that it is not very helpful. It is more helpful to think about what we have in common. many people understand the cut apartness. What I wanted to do in this book was to concentrate on cultivating unheard voices such as poets and novelists, singers and songwriters, in the book, some of which are dead, but many are also alive and are sort of spirit guides.
In North Shields there was a singer, who goes under the stage name of Hector Gannett, and he walked with me from Tynemouth to North Shields. He embodies a longstanding spirit of the region, understanding traditions of community coming out of the fishing community and he is trying to work out what it is to be a young man in the in the region in the 21st century not giving in to the cliched view of regional identity.
‘People feel passionate about where they’re from‘: Heritage
People really feel really passionate about where they’re from and have a sense of understanding history and histories, that we care about. It is important that in the last 20 to 25 years we are getting a sense that you can be a novelist on Tyneside or in Middlesbrough.
There’s more access to education, or there was before Tory cuts. There is Arts North, and you can proudly say I’m a poet from the Northeast. You don’t have we don’t have to look to London.
People like David Almond, who gave me a lovely endorsement of the book, didn’t get those opportunities but now there are lots of writing developing opportunities with New Writing North, who have just been given £5 million, which should allow them to open a centre at Bolbec Hall in Newcastle.
It is about planting something and seeing what grows out of it and saying if you want to be a writer we have a centre here for you. Also, there are the studios developing at Pallion in Sunderland and it is really exciting that screen development and writing are coming out of our two biggest cities. It is really interesting
How can we go forward as a region in the future?
We will have to overcome our petty differences and try to see more of what we have in common and remain internationalist and outward looking. As progressive people, we need to commit ourselves more strongly to Europe. It was an awful day when we decided to leave the EU. Local monasteries in the North East had artisans coming from all over Europe to work in them in the early Middle Ages yet we were never taught about this at school. Northumbria was such an influential kingdom, and we need to take that spirit develop again into a really outward looking place.
Jake is promoting Between the Salt and the Ash at The Common Room Newcastle (with Dan Jackson) on the 19 March and Redhills Durham (with Emily Webber) on 11 April.
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