Where there's a will...

It was decided to spend the legacy on a short break in north Northumberland - a Whitton weekend, as it were, and since the credit balance would be undisturbed, a bank holiday, too.

We stayed at the Dunstanburgh Castle Hotel in Embleton, said in the tradition of generations of Blackpool landladies to be five minutes walk from the sea. Time and tide, make it 15.

The family run hotel is very pleasant, would have been pleasanter yet had the coal fires been lit when we arrived at 5pm on a perishing cold evening, offered "early Spring" breaks at the usual B&B rate of £87 per person for two nights, with three course dinner free.

In one of the corridors was a splendid picture of an elderly Embleton quarry engine obligingly letting off steam for the photographer, on the opposite wall another of a record breaking racehorse called Le Garcon d'Or - which, appropriately translated, means The Golden Boy.

He was owned by Embleton farmer Robert Manners, trained at Hutton Magna near Richmond by Jack Ormston - former air race pilot, dirt track rider and farmer - and usually ridden by stable jockey Alec Russell.

Le Garcon d'Or won 35 races altogether - 34 and a disqualification, concedes the caption, though leaving no doubt that all Embleton considered the judges to be as bent as a filly's fetlock - with wins in 13 successive seasons between 1960-72, a 20th century record.

A thoroughly agreeable table d'hote dinner included wild mushroom soup, barbary duckling with balsamic orange sauce - best rethink the sauce, guys - and particularly tasty, simply grilled, trout. Friendly young service, too.

Good as it was, however, it wasn't the day's most enjoyable meal. At lunchtime, we'd looked into the Booze 'n' Cues beer festival at Darlington Snooker Club, helped Peter Everett mark his 300th different real ale and tucked into one of Mr Carter's wonderful pork pies with mushy peas and vinegar. Why need pub food be any more elaborate?

Back in Embleton, we toasted the blessed memory of Harry Whitton, and by no means for the last time that weekend.

FREEZING as forecast, Saturday proved surprisingly, almost sensationally, sunny. We walked down to Dunstanburgh Castle Golf Club - open to non-members both for golf and food - through the dunes, past some better-days beach huts and to the Ship Inn at Low Newton By-the-Sea.

The whitewashed village is tiny, visitors' parking 200 yards up the hill, little rows like Coastguards' Cottages and Boatman's Place. The cosy, coal fired, hugely convivial pub is half-hidden in the corner of a little square.

Sunken rocks nearby have been exposed for the first time in 40 years, old lovers discovering their initials still indelibly intertwined.

The pub's in both Good Beer and Good Pub guides - "rather special" says the GPG - and as Low Newton is also the name of one of Durham's penal institutions, they should not be confused. Unless the prison service really has gone soft, this is altogether more congenial.

Real ales included a delicious Bede's Gold from the Durham Brewery, a simple lunchtime menu embraced a wonderfully flavoured spicy parsnip and apple soup, stotties like "hand picked crab", Craster kippers with brown bread and butter (£4.50) and, perhaps inevitably, ciabatta, the stotties of the age.

The food was perfect, the conversation revolving around the old problem of how much locals really want this part of the coast - "the Secret Kingdom" the tourist board calls it - to be discovered. A no-less intense debate may revolve around the wisdom of selling kippers, even four miles from Craster.

Though many love them, they don't half pen and ink. For the nasally sensitive, it is the kippery slope.

FROM the Ship, we retraced our steps to the golf club and then southwards along the white sands, past the remains of the 650-year-old-castle - now run by the National Trust - and for a slowish quick one at the Jolly Fisherman in Craster. There can be few finer coastal walks.

The boards still proclaim it to be a Vaux pub, but it sells Black Sheep, the fire was the most handsome encountered this side of Dorman Long's blast furnace. The crab soup's been recommended before. We were back at the hotel in time for the football results.

THOUGH dinner remained inclusive of the weekend rate, we headed instead to Pinnacle's fish and chip place in Seahouses, the night as cold as an Icelandic trawlerman.

In the window, an enlarged cutting from The Independent loftily extolled the place's virtues. "Fish and chips for less than £1.50," it said. Not a recent testimonial, then.

We sat alone in the caf, waiting for Spring. Haddock and chips, tea bread and butter was £5. Pretty good, but as an Independent observer may never have supposed, not yet at the zenith.

SUNDAY morning dawned colder yet, snow falling with the Frosties. "Horrible," said a chap in the paper shop, rolling middle consonants retrieved from somewhere near his lower abdomen. No matter how treacherous outside, he'd never fall flat on his r's.

Bill and breakfast, we were off to church on Holy Island - more of that next Saturday - and thereafter to Sunday lunch. St Mary's proved a great deal fuller than either pub, a baby's head wetting in the Crown and Anchor the day previously apparently having left everyone still drying out.

Out of season, neither place offered a proper Sunday lunch menu, nor indeed anything which couldn't have been fished from the freezer.

The Ship had a facsimile copy of the ten course dinner menu on the last night of The Titanic - oysters for first course, beef, lamb or duck for fifth, punch romain seventh, Waldorf pudding tenth - but nothing as remotely interesting to flesh out its own winter's tale.

The Boss started with jalapenos, we with broth. The fish and chips were limp and lifeless, the "keema curry" curious, the ethos spiritual but the food distinctly secular - pretty raw material.

Just four others had gathered, gloomily smoking around the fire, a Ship of an entirely different jib from its namesake at Low Newton. To help pass the time, the landlord swept snow from out the front.

There was still change from the Whitton windfall, but across the causeway we blew a tyre and punctured the purple patch. The friendly AA man said it was irreparable, a replacement about £100. It would take what remained of Harry's money but couldn't spoil a lovely weekend. Where there's a will, there's a way.

...so finally, the bairns wondered if we knew the difference between a thief and a church bell.

One steals from the people, the other peals from the steeple.