JAMES ARMSTRONG was a Northumberland poet who may not have got out much. Or if he did, not far. It is he, nonetheless, who is thought to have bequeathed to the nation – the northern half of it, at any rate – the phrase about the Wilds of Wannie, a byword for bleakness.

The Wilds of Wannie – spellings vary – symbolise the back of beyond. Newcastle folk thought them impenetrable, like Victorian sermons. On the grounds that things were bleak enough down here, we set off last Wednesday to find them – a Wilds goose chase, as it were.

It’s best to head up the A68, through West Auckland and Tow Law and places and coincidental because, when last the Wilds of Wannie were mentioned hereabouts, Tow Law shared the same breath.

It was 2006 and we’d been headed to a football match in Tow Law. “Oh, the Wilds of Wannie,” said the bus driver and, since it was April, it snowed.

The referee called a halt. “Soft bugger,” someone shouted, “it’ll have stopped by Monday.”

Though the snow hadn’t arrived, Tow Law last Wednesday seemed remarkably similar. The hymn line about the morn being dark and cheerless came to mind. The Wilds of Wannie were to prove the Sunlit Uplands by comparison.

Oh Wannys, wild Wannys, they scene it is grand

On a clear summer’s morn on thy summit to stand,

The hills o’ the Carter and Cheviot to view

An’ listen to the lapwing and lonely curlew.

James Armstrong, 1860

ANYWAY, continue up the A68, past Consett and places and northwards after the road to the Borders briefly shares territory with the A69.

There’s a farm shop. I wonder if they sell OS maps. “I doubt it,” says the lady of this house, “but they have very good strawberries.”

The Wilds are about 15 miles further north – “in winter dark, desolate and ALWAYS windy,” says a website.

It’s the area where the River Wansbeck rises, or perhaps not so much rises as opens a cautious eye, pulls the blankets over its head and decides to go back to sleep.

There’s Wanney Fell and there’s Great Wanney Crag, popular with climbers. The lady at Kirkwhelpington post office describes the crag as looking like an old man’s face, ponders and qualifies. “An old man with a beard,” she says.

The rock has routes with names like Stairway to Heaven, Idiots’ Delight and, honest, Dennis. The sandstone is described as hard, some of the climbs as difficult. Difficult is a climbers’ euphemism, meaning damn-near impossible.

In Alnwick there’s a publishing company called Wilds of Wanney, there’s a Northumbrian pipes LP called Looking for the Wilds of Wanney and a town in West Lothian had an art exhibition similarly entitled.

Another website discusses its etymology in the same breath as that of “Yer-bugger-a-Hexham, but that need not concern us.

Beyond Wannie, reputedly yet wilder, lies Redesdale. Newcastle merchants in the Middle Ages were ordered not to employ apprentices from Redesdale, lest their unruliness infect their fellows.

The only problem is that Wannie seems about as wild as an elderly tomcat with dentures and a zimmer frame. Compared to parts of the upper dales – or the lonely roads between them – it’s positively pastoral. It’s a fiction: Wannie the Pooh.

THE road from Kirkwhelpington to Bellingham intersects the A68. “It doesn’t come any more remote than that,” someone else has written, fatuously. What none has said is that, right in the middle of the Wilds of Wannie, stands a very real surprise.

A large and presently rare ash tree is hung with dozens of pairs of shoes, trainers and work boots, some at a very considerable height.

The lady of the house recalls something similar in a Julia Darling novel; the nice woman in the post office says it’s the Tree of Soles, or possibly souls, and seems not to appreciate the pun.

“When people die, their shoes are hung there,” she says. “There was a chap came off his bike at Knowesgate, heart attack, his trainers are up there.”

It’s bizarre, almost macabre. The internet records something similar in Louisiana and also that a folk/jazz group called Landermason has recorded a song about the tree amid the Wilds. There’s nothing else. Soles concessionary, can any shed more light?

KIRKWHELPINGTON’S on the edge of the Wilds, semi-domesticated you might say. How many other wildernesses have public toilets, or a bus shelter – admittedly without buses – a visiting pantomime or a fish and chip van once a month?

How many wildernesses are bounded by A-roads just six miles apart? It is not the sort of place where you’d expect to find Mr Bear Grylls, leading a party of intrepid adventurers or to find a lion escaped from Billy Smart’s.

St Bartholomew’s church is originally 13th Century and is the burial place of Sir Charles Parsons, who invented the steam turbine and who lived in nearby Knowesgate.

Stephen Pedley, a former Durham diocesan director of education who became Bishop of Lancaster, now also lives nearby and takes St Bartholomew’s Christmas Day service. I once heard him at St James the Less at Langdon Beck, top end of Teesdale. Now that’s what you call wild.

Sir Charles also had a private platform on the Wansbeck Railway, itself known as the Wannie, which steamed for 100 years from 1862 from Morpeth to Redesmouth – three trains a day before the war, twice daily thereafter.

Sir John Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner, is now Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, that being his birthplace. If he talks of the Wilds of Wannie, he should be arrested for misrepresentation.

SO we head back through the Wilds. The sun’s shining, the sheep safely graze, fir trees quietly rejoice that they’ve survived another Christmas. Admittedly there’s a bit of a breeze, but hardly enough to blow the froth off a pint at the Gun Inn in Ridsdale (as now the village is spelt.)

Rebellious Ridsdale is now so emasculated that there’s even a defibrillator in the village street, lest anyone come to harm. The wildest thing about Wannie is the mouse which scurries furtively down the lane.

Homewards, we take a late lunch at the Errington Arms on Stagshaw Bank, near Corbridge – what’s that phrase about Stagshaw Bank Fair? – and return, whence we came, via Tow Law, where it’s blowing up a storm. The Wilds of Wannie seem sub-tropical by comparison.

Back of beyond? Simply beyond imagination. You’ve been tamed.