Northern views too good to miss

The B6305 Allendale road, Northumberland Colours and sights shift across the seasons, all seen from this one road

It's late morning and I'm driving from Allendale to Hexham along the straight road known as the Paise dyke. Cars bowl along here at speed, but to do that is to miss the far views and the birds. There's always something to catch the eye. Ahead, on this warm March morning, starlings swarm like bees across the fields, a rushing wind as I drive under them, about 3,000 birds. The flock is so regularly spaced that I feel a vast net has been cast over me before they settle on a field pocked by mole hills and rich in worms.

There's a farm and a wood called the Paise but the road's name is not on the Ordnance Survey map. In his book published in 1970, Goodwife Hot and Others: Northumberland's Past as Shown in Its Place Names, the historian and farmer Geoffrey Watson thought the name referred to land where peas were grown. Though these are upland fields, he believed they would have been adequate for growing this staple diet. The dyke might refer to a stone wall or a causeway over the boggy moorland.