Kielder Water and Forest Park

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I'm getting quite annoyed with Blogger. I'm only using this site because I couldn't work with my normal blog on my iPad whilst I was in England. I had this post all done and I actually got it published, but the coding got screwed up by the system somehow and all of my text attached with the photos couldn't be seen. I have now sat here for the better part of an hour trying to fix the post to no avail. None of the HTML coding makes sense and I could not get the text to be visible. I then tried a different template with a light background (the caption text was coming out black so it was invisible against my black background), and then the fonts were changing size and type throughout! I'm entirely fed up, so I erased the whole post and am starting from scratch. If this keeps up, Google can shove it and I'll move my blog back onto our website. In the meantime, I decided to change the blog's look.

This blog continues with Day 2 of our motoring adventure. After we left Jedburgh, we made our way to Newcastle. Our route took us through the Kielder Water and Forest Park. Steve wanted to go this way because he remembered reading about Kielder when he was in school. Covering over 250 square miles, Kielder Forest is the largest man-made forest in England. It is home to Kielder Water, which is the largest man-made lake in Northern Europe. Its capacity is 44 billion gallons. That's a lot of water!

After we left Jedburgh, our route took us through a lot of hilly Scottish countryside. Then we crossed the border back into England. I was a bit sad that we had only a few hours in Scotland. At the time, we planned to make a trip to Edinburgh but that was eventually postponed. When we return in April, we'll be hitting England and Wales, so I'm not sure when I'll get back to Scotland.

The temperature hovered around freezing all day. The day and evening prior had been rainy (if you recall from the Long Meg blog), so the scenery for a few miles of our drive had a decidely wintry look to it. I absolutely loved it!

I longed for snow, but this was as close as I got this trip. It's still pretty.


Steve pulled over so I could run around and take these shots. It was so cold, but I loved walking around the winter wonderland.

Shortly after we left the "snow" behind, we caught a glimpse of Kielder Water.

We spotted a sign about a scenic overlook, so Steve followed it to a lookout point. I couldn't resist snapping a photo of this iced over puddle. Can you tell I'm from Florida?

The view was from the top of this hillock. It's a good thing Steve spotted a sign pointing this way because I was headed toward the front of the parking lot.

As I crested the small hill, "Oh my God" erupted from my mouth before I even processed what I said. The view is stunning.

This panorama does not come close to doing the beauty of this place justice.

Even though I knew the lake was the largest in Northern Europe, I was still unprepared for just how massive this body of water actually is.

I spotted this . . . thing way off in the distance. I took this photo with my camera on maximum zoom (10x) zoom. I had no idea what it was, but it looked kind of cool.

It is some seriously beautiful countryside. Steve and I have put a return visit to Kielder on our bucket list. We'll go when the weather is warmer, though.

More ice shots from the parking lot. I liked the pretty shapes our car created when it drove over the icy puddle.

We got back in the car and continued on our way. As we neared the Kielder Dam, I realized that the unknown object I had photographed from the overlook was the water control tower. The tower is over 164 feet tall, which gives you an idea of how deep the water is since you just see the top portion of it. It controls the release of water from the reservoir into the River Tyne below the dam.

Another shot of Kielder Dam. It's not what I expected. I had an image of Hoover Dam in my head for some weird reason.

I spotted this quaint parish church as we made our way through a busy little village just north of Newcastle. I don't know anything about it - I don't even remember the village/town's name - and the info sign is blurry because we were moving. Oh well, it's pretty and that's what matters most.


Comments

  1. M.CoffeeSnobJanuary 11, 2014 at 3:52 PM

    You are such a delight! Thanks for sharing and sorry about the difficulty with the templates.

    ReplyDelete

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