An Easter break on the other side of England.
Hearing that Storm Dave was on its way wreak havoc across the northwest, we did the only sensible and drive away from it.
An Easter weekend around beautiful Tynemouth was on the cards.
The last time I was in the Tyne & Wear area was November 2013, over 12-years ago. Crazy. Back then we largely just walked around and photographed Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This time, we stayed in the beautiful town of Tynemouth, right near the coast, for some gorgeous coastal scenes.
Tynemouth has seen settlements since the Iron Age, but written history records a monastery on the headland over the River Tyne in the 7th century. Eventually a port and fishing settlement was established near Priory, which grew into an important centre for fishing and trading and the town that we see today.
On our arrival at Tynemouth the weather was thankfully dry although winds battered us. The tail of Storm Dave eventually reached us with passing squalls, but thankfully nothing like the level of rain the northwest saw.
All photos taken on my iPhone 17 Pro Max. RAWs developed in Lightroom, then edited and finalised in Photoshop.
Tynemouth, Tyne & Wear, Spring © 2026 by Ian Cylkowski is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Tynemouth Priory and Castle, which sits on a high crag known as Pen Bal Crag above the sea and river. Nowadays it’s in the care of English Heritage.
From the walls of the Priory, looking straight down the crag’s cliffs to King Edward’s Bay.
Beneath the priory lots of Smyrnium olusatrum grows, giving a pleasing foreground composition.
We immediately made our way onto the beach of King Edward’s Bay, with the imposing cliffs and Priory above us. The tide was out but it was due to come back in, which promptly caught me out was I got my shoes soaked not long after nabbing this photo.
I wanted to explore the rockfall beneath the cliffs to see what fascinating geology there was. Plenty of seaweed and moss-covered boulders with wave-cut shapes made for lovely photos.
A riot of colours and shapes amongst the boulders and cliff face.
The clouds raced overhead as Storm Dave made its presence known. Beautifully sculpted boulders beneath the cliffs made for a pleasing arrangement of elements.
I gingerly navigated the rockfall of boulders, seeking more intimate compositions. Here, a golden rock in undisturbed sand is sheltered from the waves by the dark wave cut rocks around it.
Another gap in the rockfall revealed this scene, showing that the boulders were sitting on top of a wave-cut sandstone bed.
A fantastic find of an intimiate, more abstract scene. Those swirling purple and ochre bands are ancient soft-sediment, folded by long-gone storms before the rock had even set. Iron oxides have locked the colours in place, seaweed-draped Carboniferous boulders framing the scene above.
Smoothed sandstone boulders covered in seaweed line the bottom of the cliffs towards the Priory and Tynemouth town beyond.
Away from the cliff, more seaweed-draped boulders were more haphazardly arranged on top of each other, making for some nice compositions if you didn’t mind getting down low.
It’s crazy what the elements and lots of time can do to rocks. Here, layered Carboniferous sandstones, cross-bedded by ancient currents and fractured by millennia of stress, blaze green with algae. A haematite-rich seam bleeds purple near the top.
A sandwich of millions of years of history. Red beds bleached to cream, ochre, and gold by shifting groundwater chemistry, these Carboniferous cliff strata are 300 million years of delta cycles laid bare by the sea’s relentless undermining of the softer beds below.
A real kaleidoscope of colour, angles, and shapes. Haematite blooms like spilled ink across ochre sandstone, beneath contorted beds liquefied by ancient seismic shock and dark carbonaceous seams. Three hundred million years of delta, swamp, and chemistry squeezed into one small nook.
Fallen pieces of reddish sandstone, marked by ancient river patterns from around 300 million years ago, rest at the bottom of the same cliff that medieval builders of Tynemouth Priory instinctively chose as a stable and lasting foundation.
Moving north from King Eddy’s Bay, we arrived at Long Sands Beach to people-bashing winds and passing squalls from the tail of Storm Dave.
Despite conditions, there were still plenty of people about, swimming and surfing in the North Sea. That’s northeastern folk for ya.
Planed smooth by millennia of tidal patience, this solitary outcrop of iron-stained Carboniferous sandstone holds its ground on the beach while the North Sea, patient and indifferent, works steadily to finish the job.
As the worst of Storm Dave cleared, we returned to Tynemouth proper later in the evening. This is Tynemouth’s North Pier, which I zoomed into to isolate the lighthouse against the warm clouds above.
