Month: August 2024

Our 2024 holiday: Warkworth Castle

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A photo of the entrance gate to Warkworth Castle

This is the fifth blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Previously, I wrote about The Farne Islands, and today is about our visit to Warkworth Castle.

One of the things that Northumberland is known for is its castles. We’d already been to Bamburgh Castle, and passed near to Alnwick Castle. Warkworth Castle is further south, and to the east of Alnwick and near Alnmouth. It’s an English Heritage property.

Unlike Bamburgh, Warkworth Castle hasn’t been extensively restored. Whilst the outer walls remain, most of the interior buildings have gone. The keep is still there but it’s not furnished inside – just a series of empty rooms. Although each room had a metal plaque labelling it, there was a real lack of information about what each room was used for. I’m sure Warkworth Castle had an interesting history, but I didn’t feel like I learned much whilst there.

Thankfully, there was a medieval falconry display by Raphael Historic Falconry taking place when we visited. Whilst I’ve seen plenty of falconry displays over the years, it was good to learn about how birds were used to hunt during the medieval period. They’re back again next week; if you are going to visit Warkworth Castle, maybe do so when there’s an event on, as otherwise you may struggle to fill even half a day there.

Accessibility

Wheelchair access is possible to ground floor, but not to the keep or any other indoor areas. Alnmouth is the nearest railway station, and from there you can catch a couple of bus services – there’s a 15% discount if you arrive by public transport. A car park is available on site. English Heritage members get in free.

Our 2024 holiday: The Farne Islands

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A photo of the Farne Islands.

This is the fourth blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Previously, I wrote about The Alnwick Garden, and today is about our visit to The Farne Islands.

I’ve mentioned the Farne Islands in my previous posts about Seahouses and Bamburgh Castle. They’re a collection of 15-20 islands just off the Northumberland coast – the number of visible islands depends on the tides. People have lived on the islands in the past, but nowadays there’s no year-round human residents. They’re now looked after by the National Trust.

Whilst humans may no longer live there, plenty of birds and seals make it their home instead, and so there are plenty of boat tours from Seahouses to go and see them. We went on a two hour tour with Billy Shiels; ours was a ‘non-landing’ tour that visited several of the islands but didn’t dock at any of them. Other tours do land at one or two of the islands; if you’re a National Trust member then you can land for free but non-members have to pay a landing charge.

A photo of an Atlantic Puffin sat on a rock on the Farne Islands

Bird life on the Farne Islands

Probably the biggest draw for people visiting the Farne Islands is the opportunity to see Atlantic Puffins. They’re not there all year round – indeed, when we visited a couple of weeks ago, they were grouping up to get ready to fly out to sea. They’ll stay out at sea until the spring, so we were lucky to see them. Indeed, we probably saw thousands of them – swimming, flying, eating or just lounging around on the rocks. Puffins are one of my favourite birds – I’ve seen a few at a distance at RSPB Bempton Cliffs in East Yorkshire, but I had never been this close to them before. I managed to get lots of photos of them, and it was amazing to see them flying overhead.

Besides the puffins, we saw shags, razorbills, cormorants, oyster catchers, eider ducks, terns and kittiwakes. Indeed the kittiwakes still had some quite fluffy chicks in their nests on the rocks when we visited.

A photo of a grey seal sat on a rock, on the Farne Islands

Grey seals

As well as the birds, there were hundreds of grey seals. Many of the females were pregnant, so there will hopefully be lots of pups in the autumn. Whilst we saw plenty lounging around on the rocks, there were a few out swimming as well. At other times of the year, it’s possible to see thousands of seals on the islands.

The boat trips are not cheap – expect to pay around £25 per person for a two hour trip. But it was absolutely worth it – I keep using the word ‘amazing’ but I can’t think of any other words to describe what an experience it was. We got really lucky with the weather too – nice and sunny with not too much wind. It was definitely one of my top life experiences.

Creating a Bluetooth proxy with ESPHome

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A photo of an m5stack Atom Lite which has been flashed with ESPHome firmware to act as a Bluetooth Proxy for Home Assistant

My latest Home Assistant project has been creating a Bluetooth Proxy – a device that essentially extends the range of my Raspberry Pi’s Bluetooth signal. To do this, I’ve purchased a small device with a ESP32 chip on, and flashed it with firmware from ESPHome.

Okay, so that introduction has a lot of jargon. Allow me to break it down a little.

What is a Bluetooth proxy?

Because Bluetooth connections are point-to-point, you can’t use range extenders like you can with Wifi, Zigbee and Thread networks. That means that any Bluetooth devices that you want to connect to Home Assistant need to be in range of the device that you’re running Home Assistant on. I recently moved my Raspberry Pi to a different location, which meant that it was out of range of one of my Bluetooth thermometers.

A Bluetooth proxy acts as a kind-of bridge between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. You place the proxy device within range of the Bluetooth devices that you want to connect to Home Assistant, and connect it to your home Wi-Fi network. Once set up, Home Assistant should see your Bluetooth devices as if they were in range.

If you’re running Home Assistant Container, then a Bluetooth proxy may also be easier to set up than a USB Bluetooth dongle. Passing USB devices into a Docker image doesn’t always work well.

It’s worth noting here that Bluetooth proxies are just a Home Assistant ‘thing’. They won’t help you connect a Bluetooth speaker to, say, a smartphone that’s out of range. Also, you can’t buy a device that works as a Bluetooth proxy out of the box. Seriously, if you go onto Amazon and search for ‘Bluetooth proxy’ (sponsored link), all you will get is results for Bluetooth adaptors and development boards with ESP32 chips.

The M5Stack Atom Lite

Whilst there are lots of boards that you can buy, a good option is the M5Stack Atom Lite (also available from AliExpress, where I got mine). This is because it comes with a plastic case, and connects easily using a USB-C cable. You could buy a different board and make your own case for it, but I don’t have a lot of time right now and don’t own a 3D printer. Besides, it costs less than £10 delivered.

The device is tiny – about the size of a 50p piece, and less than a centimetre thick. Because it’s a development board, it also comes with several pins to connect to other devices, but these aren’t necessary if you’re just using it as a Bluetooth proxy. Inside, is the Espressif ESP32 chip.

There are other ESP32-based products in the M5Stack Atom range, that add (for example) a microphone or GPS chip, but again, we don’t need these for a simple Bluetooth proxy.

Installing ESPHome

ESPHome is a sister project to Home Assistant, as they’re both managed by the Open Home Foundation. It’s similar to Tasmota, which I’ve blogged about before, in that they’re both custom firmware packages that you can flash onto ESP devices. Whilst Tasmota and ESPHome can do many of the same things, if you want a Bluetooth proxy then you’ll need to use ESPHome as Tasmota doesn’t support it.

Probably the easiest way to install ESPHome is using one of the ready-made projects. These can be flashed directly from your web browser, as long as you’re using Chrome or Edge (Firefox doesn’t yet support WebSerial so won’t work). You’ll need to connect your Atom Lite to your computer using a USB-C cable that supports both data and charging. You may also need to install the USB drivers – on my Windows 10 machine, the ‘CH9102_VCP_SER_Windows’ download worked. You should then be able to install the firmware, which will take a couple of minutes. Once done, you’ll be prompted for your home Wi-Fi network name and password, and then you should be good to go. Home Assistant will hopefully detect your new Bluetooth proxy automatically.

Managing your Bluetooth proxy in ESPHome

I used ‘hopefully’ in the previous sentence, because this didn’t happen in my case. As I used Home Assistant Supervised, I was able to install the official ESPHome addon; if you use Docker, you can just run docker pull ghcr.io/esphome/esphome to install it. Once installed, the ESPHome addon/docker image should detect your Bluetooth proxy and allow you to ‘adopt’ it.

This will let you view the hostname of your Bluetooth proxy device, which will be something like ‘atom-bluetooth-proxy-wibble.local‘. You can then add the ESPHome integration to Home Assistant, specifying the hostname, and you’ll be good to go. As soon as the integration was working, Home Assistant was able to see a new Bluetooth device and allowed me to configure the integration.

Going forward, you should find that Home Assistant is able to automatically update your ESPHome devices whenever new firmware is available – this is a new feature from the 2024.07 release. But you can also use the ESPHome addon/docker image to add or change features on your device. You could, for example, allow your device to act as an iBeacon as well (I think).

One thing to bear in mind is that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi both use the same 2.4 GHz frequency band. So, if you’re comfortable building your own board with a wired Ethernet connection instead of Wi-Fi, then you may get better performance.

Our 2024 holiday: The Alnwick Garden

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A photo of the water cascade at the Alnwick Garden.

This is the third blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Yesterday was about Seahouses, and today is about our visit to The Alnwick Garden and Lilidorei.

Alnwick is probably best known for its castle, and the gardens are adjacent and on land that was owned by the dukes of Northumberland. Whilst there have been formal gardens here for many years, these were mostly in a state of disrepair for much of the 20th century. Work to renovate the gardens started in the 1990s with a public opening in 2001. Since then, further phases have seen the gardens expand.

The Poison Garden

My wife Christine is a pharmacist, and so there was no question about us visiting The Poison Garden within the Alnwick Garden. Opened in 2005, this locked garden is full of poisonous plants; as such, entry is only permitted as part of a guided tour in small groups. The tour is good, as it underlines how many of the plants have legitimate medicinal uses as well as being poisonous. There are also posters about famous murderers who poisoned their victims, and what they used. It’s an opportunity to see a cannabis plant, as the garden is also involved in drug education and so has a license to grow one legally.

Elsewhere within the Alnwick Garden there’s a willow maze, which makes for a dark, tranquil space as the willow has grown over it, and plenty of water features. There’s also a more traditional walled garden at the top of the site, and a cherry tree orchard that would be fantastic to see in the spring. The Treehouse restaurant is in a massive treehouse – but you need to book table in advance. Other places to eat are available.

A photo showing an overview of Lilidorei at the Alnwick Garden

Lilidorei

Adjacent to the Alnwick Garden, but with a separate entrance, is Lilidorei – a new attraction opened in 2023 as essentially a huge kids play area. It has probably the biggest climbing frame I’ve seen, as well as sandpits and a walk around a series of themed huts. Each hut is supposedly home to a tribe, such as goblins, dwarves, elves, sprites and others. It’s probably most suitable for kids aged 4-10, and our eight-year-old loved it. There was an Olympics themed activity whilst we were there too.

Taken together, the Alnwick Garden and Lilidorei are a full day out. You can view the rest of my photos on Flickr.

Accessibility

Being a newer attraction means that accessibility is really good – there’s wheelchair access everywhere and a changing places toilet is available. Extensive accessibility information is available on the Alnwick Garden web site. There’s a car park nearby shared with the castle, and you can buy combined tickets for the garden and Lilidorei (but not the castle). A discount is available for Max card holders.

Alnmouth no longer has a railway station – the building is now home to Barter Books, famous for re-popularising the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. The nearest railway station is Alnmouth, from which you can catch a bus to Alnwick, and then there’s a free Alnwick Attractions bus that runs around the town during the summer months and school holidays.

Our 2024 holiday: Bamburgh Castle

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A photo of Bamburgh Castle taken from the car park

This is the second blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Yesterday was about Seahouses, and today we’re going just a couple of miles up the coast to Bamburgh Castle.

Bamburgh Castle sits on a raised bit of rock by the sea, and there has been evidence of a castle on the site since around AD 547. The current castle is based on one built by the Normans in the 12th century, but much of the interior dates from the 19th century when it was used as a hospital. It then became a private residence for Lord William Armstrong, and it remains in the Armstrong family to this day.

As such, inside it is furnished as a stately home, although you can still go into the castle’s keep, and see some armour and weapons. Its long history means that plenty of archaeological digs have taken place, and some of the artefacts are on display. There’s also a separate museum focussing on Lord Armstrong’s inventions, in particular around aviation, although we didn’t go into it. There’s plenty of interactive things, which helps to keep it interesting for kids.

At present, there’s an exhibition about the Netflix series The Last Kingdom, for which the castle both serves as inspiration for the story, and a filming location. This is in the King’s Hall.

Outside the castle, there are the grounds, with a series of cannons and probably the best view of the Farne Islands from the mainland. The beach (which is publicly accessible) is also one of the best in the UK – we had a picnic there, although there is a café at the castle.

You can view the rest of my photos from our visit on Flickr.

Accessibility

Being such an ancient building, access to the upper floors is only via stairs. However, the downstairs area should be accessible to wheelchairs, and there’s a video to watch for those unable to access the rest of the castle. A discount is available to Max Card holders.

If you arrive by car, then you’ll need to pay £5 to park. However, your parking ticket is transferrable to other car parks in the village, including one by the beach. The same infrequent bus services (418 and X18) that call at Seahouses also serves the village of Bamburgh.

Welcome to August

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It’s the 1st August today. That means that it’s Yorkshire Day, and for once, I’m actually in Yorkshire as normal on Yorkshire Day for the first time since 2020.

But August is also my busiest month of the year at work. I work in university admissions, and the 15th August is the date when most 18-year-olds get their exam results, so there’s a lot of work to be done either side of this date. I’ll be working longer hours that day, as well as a couple of weekend days.

What this means is that most blog posts this month will have been written in advance. I still have the rest of our holiday to write up, which you’ll hopefully see over the next couple of weeks. And I’ll try to intersperse these posts with other topics. But there’s also a good chance that I may fall behind on my aim to publish a new blog post every other day, if I don’t manage to get enough posts written ahead of time.