Alnwick, pronounced Annick, is the town of a great castle and a great bookshop, and the combination seems entirely right. The castle, seat of the Percy family, the Dukes of Northumberland, for seven centuries, is the second-largest inhabited castle in England, with massive walls and towers above the River Aln. It has stood in for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films and appeared in Downton Abbey, but its real history is of border wars with the Scots, and Hotspur, Henry Percy, the hot-tempered knight of Shakespeare's plays, was of this house.
The town below is a handsome market place of stone buildings, narrow lanes called wynds, and an old gateway, Bondgate Tower. The Alnwick Garden, created by the present duchess, has cascades, a treehouse restaurant and a poison garden with deadly plants. And Barter Books, in the old Victorian railway station, is a huge secondhand bookshop with open fires and model trains running overhead, where in 2000 the owners found a copy of the wartime poster Keep Calm and Carry On in a box of old books, sparking a worldwide craze.
The roads around are the draw for riders. The A1068 runs along the coast through Alnmouth, Warkworth and Amble, with views of dunes, castles and the North Sea, while the inland routes toward Rothbury and the Cheviot Hills are more twisting, over moorland with big skies. The Northumberland 250 route passes through. Traffic is light, apart from summer weekends at the castle, and the surface is generally good, though some of the hill roads are narrow and patched.
Alnwick has fuel, supermarkets, pubs and cafes, and it is the best base for the area. Shilbottle and Lesbury, nearby, are small. The best months are May to September, with long days, though the North Sea coast can be cool and misty, and sea fog, called a haar, rolls in without warning. Autumn is crisp and bright. In winter, snow closes the high roads, so choose your season. Sheep on the road are common, and the speed limits on moorland roads are strictly enforced.