Last modified on Tue 9 Mar 2021 08.55 EST Tyne and Wear For millions of readers around the world, the image of the country between the mouths of the rivers Tyne and Wear was woven by Catherine Cookson, the region’s most prolific and popular author. Cookson’s was a landscape of collieries, shipyards, rumbling coal trains, sooty-faced kids and the instantly nostalgic tones of pithead silver bands playing Haydn. While fragments of her world remain – mainly in the doughty cheerfulness of the locals – over the past four decades, as heavy industry has receded, a more distant past has emerged. Twelve centuries before Dame Catherine began her career, the north-east’s first great literary figure, the Venerable Bede, was busy writing the histories that would help forge an English identity. Saint Bede (whose story is brought to life at the excellent Jarrow Hall Anglo-Saxon Village) divided his time between the twin monasteries of Saint Paul’s in Jarrow and Saint Peter’s in Monkwearmouth. Today, these Anglo-Saxon sites are connected by Bede’s Way, a 12-mile trail that winds through the countryside between the metropolitan sprawls of Jarrow and South Shields to the north, and Sunderland to the south. Flanked by wide, sandy beaches and jagged cliffs, this is an area of undulating pastures, deciduous woodlands, water vole-populated streams and villages with roots going back to the days of the Historia Ecclesiastica.