I'm going to let you into one of the country's best kept secrets.

It's less than two hours from here and it's a place that has everything.

I have not been offered free holidays for life, nor am I in the pay of any tourist board, but I reckon Northumberland is the greatest.

If anything would tempt me to move out of North Yorkshire, that's where I would settle.

Thankfully, it has not yet been properly discovered by the tourist hordes, so it remains unspoiled and dirt cheap.

I promised last week, after getting exhausted watching the London Marathon, to embark on a new fitness regime.

So we escaped to Northumberland for the weekend and hiked our little legs off among some of Britain's finest scenery and most spectacular history.

There's wit and a welcome around every corner, especially in some of the signs.

We passed a remote farm with a sign at the gate saying: "We shoot every third visitor. The second has just left."

There was a sign on a cottage gate proclaiming "To wor hoose".

And there was a field full of sheep with a note on the gate warning: "This field off limits to Army personnel."

Mind ewe, some of those woollybacks looked damned attractive, especially the sexy black numbers.

We made a mistake walking into one village pub with blaring music and shaven-headed local lads who looked hard enough to bite babies' heads off for breakfast.

But then Nat King Cole's Unforgettable came on the juke box and two of the young pool players stopped their game to waltz around with their cues; while three tough-looking characters left the one-armed bandit for a group hug and a smooch, heads on each other's shoulders.

And they included me!

We found our accommodation on t'internet, always a calculated risk, but we opted for a pub in Wylam, a village in the Tyne Valley close to George Stephenson's birthplace and an ideal base for hiking, cycling or motoring.

The Black Bull turned out to be a gem of a discovery. Forty quid for the room a night, en-suite comfort with TV and even a fridge. Where can you get value for money like that?

The pub's intimate restaurant dished up gourmet meals with a good red wine at £7 a bottle. No wonder it has just been named North East Pub of 2005 by the national newspaper of the licensing trade.

Just a short drive from Wylam and you can be on Britain's loveliest beach at Bamburgh, nip across the causeway to Holy Island when the tide's out, or take in the sight of Kielder reservoir or forest.

We decided to trek a length of Hadrian's Wall after poking around in the excavations of the Vindolanda Roman fort and settlement. The Roman emperor's defensive wall is more than 1,800 years old and looks in better condition than much of our 1960s architecture.

Now there's just one thing about Northumberland. You can't move a hundred yards without going up or down a hill, which is quite a contrast with our part of the world where the only incline for 20 miles around is a molehill.

So it's quite a shock when you hike alongside Hadrian's Wall, up and down slopes that are almost vertical. It's bad enough walking it, but how on earth did they build it with hundreds of thousands of perfect brick-shaped rocks that were carved with primitive tools?

Where did they get all that stone from and then cart it up those hills for mile after mile? We saw more people on that track than we did in the rest of the county, and of course we passed each one with the traditional hiker's greeting: "Morning, hello, hi, good arfternoon." Passing a school party wore me out.

Enough of this travelogue. Next week we're going to dust off the bikes, pump up the tyres, oil the chains and pedal the uncharted flatlands of deepest Selby. Boy, this is really living.

Updated: 09:53 Tuesday, April 26, 2005