Lost in Time in England’s Northeast - New York Times

For real Anglophilia, I thought, you should be driving from the Durham railway station, just before twilight, up North Road, Potters Bank and Elvet Hill Road, narrow, green, damp, mysterious, arriving at the top in time for one last look at the ancient world that still lives in the landscape there.




Durham Cathedral seen from a hill overlooking the town. Andrew Testa for The New York Times 

As you walk down Grey Street to the quayside, admiring the mix of old buildings and new, sharply delineated in the northern light, you may not recognize conversations you hear as English: Newcastle is famous for its local Geordie accent, said by linguists to be as close to original Anglo-Saxon pronunciation (that is, intransigently unaffected by Norman French or Viking Scandinavian) as any dialect in Britain.

To read the artcle by Jane Smiley’s new novel, “Some Luck,” will be published in October.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/travel/lost-in-time-in-englands-northeast.html?_r=1

READING LIST
The three books listed here explore some of the history and the local predispositions that I touch on: Bede and St. Cuthbert help us visit the Anglo-Saxon period, Seumas Milne writes about the end of coal mining (and therefore prosperity) during the Thatcher era, and George MacDonald Fraser wittily explores the love of fighting and defiance along the untamed Scotch-English border.
Bede, “Ecclesiastical History of the English People: With Bede’s Letter to Egbert and Cuthbert’s Letter on the Death of Bede” (Penguin Classics).
Seumas Milne, “The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners” (Verso).
George MacDonald Fraser, “The Reavers” (Random House).

A version of this article appears in print on June 8, 2014, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lost in Time.